2011 Lexus winner Karen Nakawatase with Tammie Kanda of Toyota

2011 Lexus Opportunity Drawing Winner!

Congratulations to Karen Nakawatase of Fountain Valley, CA, winner of the 2011 Lexus Opportunity Drawing! Nakawatase was the recipient of a new Lexus RX450h hybrid, courtesy of Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. Her winning ticket was drawn on April 16, 2011, at the Japanese American National Museum’s annual Gala Dinner & Silent Auction in Los Angeles. Nakawatase (left) is pictured here with Tammie Kanda of Toyota (right).
2011 Lexus winner Karen Nakawatase with Tammie Kanda of Toyota
Photo by Nobuyuki Okada
Thank you to everyone who supported the drawing, which raised more than $120,000 in donations to support diversity education programs at the Japanese American National Museum.

Baseball survey–earn a chance to win tickets to a game!

A grad student needs help with her research. She’s seeking Dodger fans to participate in an online survey and paid focus group. She’s been having problems getting enough Asian American representation in her study, so if you qualify, please help her out!

Hello. My name is Jen and I am looking for hometown Dodger fans (22 and up) who are willing to share their thoughts in a paid focus group. The goals of the focus group are to find out what qualities you think make professional athletes successful or unsuccessful in different roles within the sport of baseball and to find out how you describe and tell stories about these baseball players. You don’t need to be a superfan and know every single detail about the Dodgers, but you should be someone who follows the team more or less throughout most parts of the season.  (It is okay if you have more than one favorite team, as long as you also follow the Dodgers). You also need to be living in Los Angeles OR the L.A. metropolitan area.

If you are interested, fill out the form on the attached link. If you are eligible, you will be contacted to participate in one focus group sometime in August. The group will last 1-2 hours. You will compensated $20 cash for time/travel. Furthermore, each participant will be entered into a raffle to win their choice of $200 cash or Field Level seats to a home game in September.  This is a great chance to earn a little cash talking baseball!

LINK TO REGISTER: http://www.tinyurl.com/dodgerfansurvey

Please email jennifer.mcgovern@temple.edu if you have any questions.

**I am an independent researcher interested in sports, sports media, and fan narratives. This research is not affiliated with Major League Baseball or the Dodgers**  This information is approved by Temple University for public display and is associate with project #13468

 

New Labbit Auction!

Kip Fulbeck’s Labbit piece just went up for auction today. You have ten days to bid on this clever piece of functional art!

Kip came in and made some alterations to the original version by replacing the florist’s foam with traditional ikebana kenzan, thereby insuring permanence and flexibilty in creating your flower arrangements.

BTW—the stones that look so randomly and artistically placed are epoxied in so what you see is what you will get!

Here’s a link to the auction >>

All the proceeds from this auction will ge to the Museum as a donation from the artist. Thanks Kip!

Help us with a survey!

This fall, the Japanese American National Museum is participating in Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, a project initiated from grants from the Getty Foundation. Pacific Standard Time is a collaboration of more than fifty cultural institutions across Southern California, which are coming together for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world. Each institution will make its own contribution to this grand-scale story of artistic innovation and social change, told through a multitude of simultaneous exhibitions and programs.

The Museum will open its new exhibition, Drawing the Line: Japanese American Art, Design & Activism in Pos-War L.A., with an opening event on Saturday, October 15, 2011 (more details to come!). Drawing the Line will feature works of art and design that give a sense of the complex role of cultural production in the creation of community in Japanese American Los Angeles.

All of the partners in this ground-breaking collaboration have been asked to issue a survey to its members and supporters in preparation for this project. The survey will collect general responses on attitudes about arts and culture in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California.

The questionnaire will take about 10-15 minutes to complete and your responses are confidential. The survey closes September 1st. Thank you!

Take the survey online >>

Summer for JANM Volunteers

During the summer when we have fewer school visitors, the Education Unit runs summer sessions for the volunteers. Here are some quick, recent highlights…

7/22/11 (Last Friday) – Clement led a special tour of his artwork featured in ROUND TRIP: Eight East Los Angeles College Alumni Artists at the newly opened Vincent Price Art Museum at East LA College. Standing in front of his low-rider rickshaw with “Yo No Soy Chino” written on it, we thought about Clement’s experiences growing up Japanese American in East LA.

7/29/11 (Today) – Frank Kawana was interviewed by his grandson, Cole, about being a second generation maker of kamaboko. Frank, possibly the only person on the mainland who can do it by hand, showed us HOW TO MAKE KAMABOKO. (Haven’t you always wondered how this is done?) Cole conducted an interview that was absolutely fascinating, even to a vegetarian like me.

It was eaten up so quickly that Clement’s picture of the last slice is the only photographic evidence we have. Those who were lucky enough to taste it said Frank’s fresh kamaboko was even better than what you buy in the store. So when you have Yamasa kamaboko, think of the Kawanas. More info about the interview—as well as tips on how to do an interview of your own—will be available shortly on our Discover Nikkei Web site.

7/29/11 (Today) – While Lynn was leading the volunteers on a tour of JANM’s current exhibition Year of the Rabbit: Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, Stan Sakai, the artist himself, stopped by. He gave us even more insight into the making of Usagi Yojimbo.

As Richard M. (who gets most of the photo credits on this post) said, “We really hit the jackpot today.”

Ever thought about volunteering for the Museum and joining in on the fun???

Today’s Groupon: Discount on our Tea Fest!

I was excited to see today’s Groupon discounts for our very own Chado Tea Room! There are three options:

  • For $10, you get two tickets to the first annual Los Angeles Tea Festival on August 13 and 14 (a $20 value).
  • For $30, you get afternoon tea for two people and $25 worth of loose-leaf tea (a $61 value).
  • For $48, you get afternoon tea for four people and $25 worth of loose-leaf tea (a $97 value).

Have you been to our Chado Tea Room? It is a wonderfully civilized place to have Afternoon Tea. A hidden gem. I love it!

Well, I just wanted to point out these fabulous deals, especially the discounted tickets to the Tea Fest in conjunction with our Saturday, Aug 13 Summer Festival — our most popular event of the year! — just in case there are a few rare JANM blog readers out there who do not get the Groupon alerts. The Chado Groupon is available until the end of day Saturday July 30th!

Chado Groupon Deal >>

Speaking of Labbits…

I was reminded of a similar story to my Frank Kozik blog entry when I saw this photo on Facebook. I ordered “shikata ga nai” rocks for the Museum Store once and this is what I got.

It wasn’t the first time ordering, and my order was printed in 14 pt type with the correct spelling. Someone at the factory decided I had misspelled my copy.

Ordinarily I like it when someone proofs my copy, but once I had someone change the spelling of my last name to “Quon” because they were sure that I had misspelled it. It was for an art show mailer.

Mike Shinoda’s Labbit Auction is over!

After many check-ins last night where the bid was stuck at $510, I finally decided to call it quits and go to bed.

I woke up in the middle of the night and was plagued by work thoughts, but didn’t sneak in to check the computer and risk waking the household with whoops of excitement. It was like waiting for Christmas morning and it was worth it to see that the final bid was $721.00!

Again, thanks to Mike Shinoda, proceeds benefit JANM & Music for Relief/Japan Relief.

 

Next auction starts August 1, with Kip Fulbeck’s ingenious ikebana Labbit entitled, “More than the Sum of Our Parts.”

I have been enjoying the opportunity to create flower arrangements every few days. It’s a nice way to start your day…contemplating art and beauty.

Check the janm.org page for a schedule of the upcoming auctions >>

Check janmstore.com to view all of the Labbits >> 

It’s a Small World After All?

Meeting a ton of new people every day is commonplace here at the museum.  So when Vicky came walking into the Media Arts Center yesterday with about a dozen visitors in tow, no one was very fazed.  She explained to me that her company consisted of the NCI interns; today they were getting a behind the scenes tour of the JANM.  Then she began to tell our guests why I was here at the Museum: what my duties were, that I had come as a Getty Intern, and the types of projects the Media Arts Center put out.  She paused, then said,

“What’s really interesting about this summer’s interns…”

Now, I was sitting at my computer, editing a video on the new Year of the Labbit display.  As I listened, a number of sentence endings ran through my mind.  This summer, there are a half dozen of them running around.  This summer, they’re all girls.  This summer…

Instead, Vicky finished by saying, “This summer we have two interns with famous grandmas.”

One of those interns, of course, is NCI intern Maya Kochiyama, granddaughter of famous activist Yuri Kochiyama.  The other intern is me.

My grandmother is Wakako Yamauchi.  She’s an accomplished writer, playwright, and painter.  But she’s also a wonderful, loving, absolutely amazing person.

But there is more than a little bit of pressure with such high achievements in your blood line.  With any accomplishments I have, I still worry that I don’t measure up to her, or sometimes worry recognition earned comes from her and not me.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are some perks to having a famous grandmother.  As an Asian American Studies student, I’ve had the added bonus of being personally connected to my studies.  I’ve gotten a first hand account of history.  I’ve seen professors go from “teaching professional” to “autograph-asking fan” as one once said.

Thanks to my Grammy, I’ve spent New Year’s Eves with Garrett Hongo and his family, eaten apple pie and ice cream with Hisaye Yamamoto.  I have memories of seeing my grandmother on to her plane from LAX to Japan where she saw her plays performed in foreign countries and languages.  I’ve gone to readings and book launches, heard my grandma talk casually of knowing Yuji Ichioka, or tell anecdotes about how Karen Tei Yamashita lived for a period of time in my grandmother’s back house.  I’ve studied her plays, and her life, in my classes at school.

So I wasn’t completely surprised when, as Vicky informed the other interns who my grandmother is, I saw a sudden jolt and eye widening of one girl. Was she, too, an Asian American Literature student, and recognized the name?  Had she read some of my grandmother’s plays?  Or had she simply been goosed by her neighbor, and was momentarily caught off guard.

“I know her!” she said.  “She plays cards at the JCI!”

She’d met my grandma in her current, other life.  As a retired writer, my grandma spends her mornings playing Blackjack, placing nickel and dime bets at the JCI in Gardena with other Nisei.  Few of her friends there know her as a famous name, a ground breaker in the Asian American Literature world.  There, instead, she’s just another one of them, playing cards, and of course, always “breaking even.”

But seeing this girl who knew my grandmother made me smile.  She saw her, not through the eyes of an academic fawning over her accomplishments, but as a normal person, happy in the company of her peers.  I realized then, how lucky I am, to be able to know my grandmother in both her worlds.

Year of Labbit soundbyte on KFWB

You have to listen to the piece on the Warhol soup cans at MOCA, but my golden tones are second. Good thing I wore my radio clothes that day (the reporter caught me in a pair of sweaty, paint-stained overalls.)

Here’s a link to the interview:

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/07/22/kfwb-on-your-corner-downtown-la-museums/

"My Fair Labbit" by Emil Dora

 

See more Labbits from the Year of the Labbit Custom Show >>