Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
Koji Sakai, Clement Hanami, Greg Kimura, myself.
Money Mark and Clement Hanami
David Choe and Money Mark
Deth P Sun art.
Here’s photo set 1. I’ll get to writing later on. This set is by Dean Gojobori who helped throughout the exhibition. People enter Albert Reyes “maze” downstairs.
That’s my introducing Rob Sato and Ako Castuera.
The Queens Court. Thanks for coming through.
The 71st Annual Nisei Week Japanese Festival – a summer-long series of cultural, artistic, athletic and aesthetic events – lined the streets of Little Tokyo on Sunday night for its annual parade running up and down the historic Downtown Los Angeles neighborhood. Like the Tournament of Roses and its Rose Parade, every year the Nisei Week Foundation selects a Grand Marshall and holds a competition for the Nisei Week Queen and Court. This year, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, one of the seminal figures in the Japanese American community’s fight for redress was honored as the Grand Marshall and a new group of young women took their place as the 2011 Nisei Week Court. They also rode on a float with THE Angeleno of Angelenos, former Dodger skipper, Tommy Lasorda.
With obon dancers, taiko drummers, Stan Sakai and other community leaders riding on top of classic cars and Ken Miyoshi leading a half dozen import cars, the most dramatic sight during this year’s parade had to be all the military jeeps and trucks navigating through Little Tokyo. The last time anyone of us could remember witnessing something similar was during the LA Riots when the streets around the old LAPD Headquarters at Parker Center were heavily protected just up the street from Little Tokyo. The only other time we could remember was following Executive Order 9066.
However, not to be missed this year was the inclusion of the Harajuku-Girl / Anime-Manga fan-base into the parade. The Ajuku Girls rode on a car like other community leaders, and the legion of Anime fans paraded in costume behind traditional Japanese dancers. If anything the Nisei Week Parade pieced together all the different slices of Japanese America in Los Angeles for a great evening of celebration.
84 photos below! All by Thomas Nakanishi.
I’m writing the extended version of my two minute pecha-kucha presentation at the Little Tokyo Design Week. My job was to formulate a few images into something presentable with the topic of Future City. Earlier that day, I walked through a display featuring Apollo 11 moon landing imagery from the Expo ’70. Both events were monumental and it brought me to the realization that a Future City is based on dreams.
One can only imagine what it was like to live though the space race. Technology was just getting interesting. Room sized computers did nothing that we could comprehend. By placing a man on the moon, a new generation of imagination began. My mother and father watched the live broadcast of the moon walk like almost everyone else. Two weeks later, I was born.