Daily Archives: April 20, 2008

Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival

Today is the Grand Parade for the Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival in San Francisco. This will be the 41st year that the event is held. Each year, over 200,000 people attend this event showcasing the Japanese culture and the diversity of the Japanese American Community.

The parade begins at the Civic Center at 1:00p.m., proceeding up Polk to Post Street, and ending in Japantown at Post and Fillmore streets. A number of performers from Japan will also grace us with their presence. Japanese classical (Buyo) and folk dance (Minyo) groups representing the Bay Area will perform throughout the parade route like a myriad of floating butterflies.

World renowned San Francisco Taiko Dojo will keep the parade upbeat with the thundering sound of the taiko, and this year’s Queen and her Court will cascade their way to Japantown. Anchoring the parade is the exciting Taru Mikoshi, that will be hoisted by over one hundred strong individuals from throughout the Bay Area. It is a spectacle not to be missed.

See the video from last year’s parade

Dark Matter

Dark Matter, the feature film debut of renowned opera and theater director Chen Shi-Zheng, delves into the world of Liu Xing (Chinese for “Shooting Star”), a Chinese science student pursuing a Ph.D. in the United States in the early 1990s. Driven by ambition, yet unable to navigate academic politics, Liu Xing is inexorably pushed to the margins of American life, until he loses his way. The cast includes Liu Ye, Meryl Streep, and Aidan Quinn.

Dark Matter is loosely based on the 1991 University of Iowa school shootings. With the Virginia Tech shootings a year ago, the film’s release was delayed. Controversy has surround the timing of the new release date, which was around the 1 year anniversary of the VA Tech shooting.

Despite the controversy, we need to find better ways to communicate. Both International and American students need to bridge the cultural divide and encourage mutual respect. With the rise in school campus violence in recent years, we need to foster better communication among students, parents, teachers, and administrators.

See the trailer for “Dark Matter” here:

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The film won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize when screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. The award is given each year to a feature film that either focuses on science or technology or depicts a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as the main character.