Week 6: Governance & Advocacy

Our first interview for this week was over at City Hall with Councilmember Sam Liccardo. Sam is on council for District 3, the part of San Jose that includes Japantown. I was really impressed on how much that Sam knew about Japantown and the culture. Since coming into office, the two things that he had been working on were public improvements and redevelopments to increase foot traffic, as well as the Corp. yard project which is now a temporary parking lot. Another thing that is of concern is the challenge of preservation and being able to sustain Japantown, something that has remained prevalent throughout these past 6 weeks. In the long term, Sam believes strongly that we need the housing density in order to sustain the retail shops, and hopefully when the economy gets better we will be able to do something about it with the Corp. yard. Also, the marketing and signage could be improved to make outsiders more aware that there is a Japantown here in San Jose. Lastly, we need to new concepts to the generational changes that are occurring. We find that there is a conflict with trying to preserve the historical aspects as well as keep up with the changing wants and needs of the new generation. In all, I enjoyed meeting with Sam, he’s a very entertaining guy and hopefully we’ll get the chance to work with him again.

On Monday night we attended the monthly API Justice Coalition meeting where we had 3 major presentations. The first was on a new film produced by Andrew Byrnes called The Power of Two. This documentary is about half-Japanese twin sisters who have battled Cystic Fibrosis all their lives. It focuses on the miracle of their double lung transplants and their journey growing up. It seems especially touching for producer Byrnes whose wife is Isabel, one of the sisters. The next presentation was on the Mobilize the Immigrant Vote Campaign which works to help strengthen the immigrant community who have become citizens by helping them gain access to voter guides and getting them more active in the political sphere. The last presentation was by Glen Wong who is working for the Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs Association (APAPA) with the Education Equality UC Admissions Policy Project. The new freshman UC admissions policy starting in 2012 will eliminate the SAT II Subject Tests for students. Therefore, UC admissions will rely on the SAT reasoning test. After a series of three simulations, they have found that by removing the subject tests results in an overall reduction in guaranteed admissions, especially for ethnic minorities. In particular Asian American admissions would have dropped 12%. The API coalition took a stand against the elimination and will be working to do what they can to help rescind this new freshman policy. This is one issue that is relevant to our generation because without the SAT II subject tests, a lot of us probably wouldn’t have gotten into the schools we are at now.

On Tuesday we went over to AACI and had the chance to interview Anne Im, Director of Community Programs and Advocacy. Although she first started out in public policy, she now works with advocacy efforts and oversees the community programs and direct services at AACI. She is also very active in the API Justice Coalition, which just celebrated its fourth year in June. The coalition began with AACI, the Asian Pacific Bar Association, the Asian Law Alliance, and JACL and has now grown to 26 member organizations. Basically, what the Asian Pacific Islander Justice Coalition does is provide a rapid response network and a venue for outside groups to present to. They hope to also be able to work with other ethnic groups such as Latino and Black in the future. Working with both APIJC and AACI, Anne gets the chance to see both the immediate and wide scale needs of the community.

Tuesday night we also had our monthly JCCSJ Board of Directors meeting. San Jose Japantown’s Community Congress is full of character and entertaining individuals which makes these meetings fun. We presented what we had so far on our available space and community calendar projects. Everyone seemed really excited about finally having a calendar together so hopefully it will be a success!!