Research log: week 4
While gathering articles for my Annotated Bibliography, I think I accomplished some narrowing in regards to my own topic. I read a really great article about the Japanese-American population on the North Side of Chicago by Katherine Nagasawa entitled “What Happened to Chicago’s Japanese Neighborhood?”. This article discusses the short lived unofficial “Japantown” that the North Side had for years, before Japanese-Americans were assimilated into the dominant culture and flocked to the suburbs over time. I wanted to connect this back to the film I watched last week by Chicago native Renee Tajima-Péna, and how she brought up how invisible an Asian American person is in Chicago (and the greater Midwest, really). I also wanted to tie this information back into my personal account by talking about my trips to the North Side as a kid (a sense of escapism from where I lived in Indiana) and how I had gotten there right after the Japanese population largely disappeared.
I also did some research on the first Japanese player for the Chicago Cubs, Kosuke Fukudome, and how he was built up to be a huge deal in Chicago. I wanted to include this because I remember this time vividly from being a fan of the team then, which was and still is a big thing in my family. I found an interview where he stated that aside from wanting to be the first Japanese player to play for the Cubs (this was 2008 by the way), he wanted to come to Chicago because he believed it to have a great Japanese community. I thought this was an interesting perspective that I want to tie into the information given by Nagasawa’s article as well.
I also included an interview with a Japanese American musician from Chicago named Tatsu Aoki, who mixes together traditional Japanese music with Jazz. In this interview he discusses how the cross between these two genres express his identity as an Asian American. I thought I could tie this in if I wanted to talk about my involvement in playing music as a sub-home, or as a form of escapism for me that defined me at certain points of my life while living in the Midwest. All of the pop culture references I could find have to do with Chicago, where I didn’t live, but mostly because I could find little information about Asian Americans (especially tied into pop culture) with Indianapolis. I think that regardless this will still represent my home as the Midwest in general terms.