Ambassador Magma, Sulu, and a Damn Good Bowl of Ramen

Figurines from various Japanese Tokusatsu serials, as displayed at
the San Francisco International Airport in December, 2014

Like many who qualify for the description, "Asian-American" has always been a little been problematic for me. Firstly and mainly, Asia is a huge and diverse continent, covering 48 countries and 17+ million square miles. And in the larger and/or more geographically spread out countries (for example, China and India for the former, the Philippines and Indonesia the latter), the cultural differences can be quite distinct.  However, this categorization, whether wanted or not, led me to dive into other Asian cultures, especially when my family moved to San Francisco.

Our time in this city brought us two initial "Asian-American" centers of activity - one was Daly City, which still may be the most Filipino-centric city in the Bay Area, and San Francisco's Chinatown, which was frequently visited whenever my grandparents would take us into the city. Although I knew of San Francisco's Japantown, I never ventured there until well after my college years.

My experience with things Japanese in life came throughout life in bits and morsels of food, pop-culture and sports. Early examples include the 1976 Summer Olympics, where I marveled that Shun Fujimoto finished two routines with a broken knee (including the rings) to clinch the gold medal for the Japanese Men's Gymnastics Team.

One of my favorite diversions lay in Tokusatsu TV serial productions like Godzilla, Ultraman, and Ambassador Magma (released in the states as Space Giants), and later anime series like Star Blazers and Battle of The Planets. The original Star Trek, with Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu played by Japanese-American George Takei. Also, the Yellow Magic Orchestra's debut album, whose "Computer Games/Firecracker" was played heavily on the local R&B/Soul station and earned them an appearance on Don Cornelius' "Soul Train"(!) TV Show.

For The Sake of Sake: The Takara Sake Museum and Tasting Room (Berkeley, CA)

Berkeley, California: where free speech monuments and
sake museums can reside next to each other in peace

My first experience with sake, the Japanese beverage fermented from rice that dates back to roughly 300 BC, was an indirect one, Back in high school at a party hosted by a mutual friend, we found a fairly ornate bottle containing this truly exotic beverage (for us at that time, Corona qualified as exotic.)  One of my friends particularly found the sake to his liking...too much so, as it turned out. That was the first time I had seen anyone so stinking drunk in my presence, and it still ranks well in the top 5 examples of this unofficial and ignominious personal category.

Flash forward to today, where my spouse and I have made craft breweries one of our top targets during our travels. If nothing else, this has led to a pursuit of other forms of adult beverages on a lesser scale, including wines, cocktails and spirits, and mead. When it came to sake, our experience pretty much amounted to combination of nil, nada and zilch. Combine that status with a willingness to try new things and some free time to kill before the holiday family gathering, and we found ourselves in, of all places, Berkeley, California.