Skin Deep

Going for diverse coverage based on looks alone may leave you with an incomplete story

by Aki Soga

I was talking to veteran San Francisco Bay Area journalist Vic Lee recently, and got a lesson about how preconceived notions, or prejudice to use a less savory term, creep into our daily interaction with others.

Lee, a long-time reporter for KRON-TV in San Francisco, is of Chinese heritage. This I knew. He grew up, however, in Japan, not far from the Tokyo neighborhood where I spent parts of my early childhood. He speaks more than enough Japanese to get himself into trouble.

In today's world, it should come as no surprise to find that a Chinese American grew up in Tokyo and speaks Japanese. It just doesn't fit the stereotype of a West Coast Asian.

In his 2000 book, "The Global Soul," essayist Pico Iyer advances the idea that there's a growing class in the world for whom political and cultural borders are meaningless.

In the world as defined by Iyer, the terms "country," "nation" and "state" either regain their distinct meanings or lose meaning all together. Cultures are commodities that can be exported and imported as easily as the latest fashions.

Seeing Iyer on the streets of, say, New York, there's no way of telling that he is a South Asian from California with a British education living in rural Japan and writing for a U.S. magazine.

To grossly oversimplify what the book says, increasingly, what someone looks like tells us less and less about who they are. All this adds new meaning to the adage, "You can't judge a book by its cover."

It's a useful lesson for those of us who are looking to add a little diversity to our news coverage. It's a reminder to look beyond the obvious, both in who you go to and what you ask them.

Here's an example from my own backyard.

Although it sounds unlikely, Burlington, Vt., has a first-rate taiko troupe, a group that performs on Japanese festival drums. The troupe has one Japanese member, but she's not the one to turn to if you want to find out about taiko.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, the Japanese member is my wife. Kimiko, born and raised in Japan, is having a true "global soul" experience of her own, learning a traditional Japanese art in Vermont, a place not usually associated with ethnic diversity.)

The founder and leader of Burlington Taiko is a lanky white guy with a ponytail running down his back. Stuart Payton grew up in Tokyo (again, near my childhood neighborhood) and is fluent in Japanese.

He has some great stories about growing up in Japan, his experiences as a foreigner in a school system not used to dealing with outsiders, pop culture memories that puts him in a time and place that seems incongruous with his outward appearance.

You wouldn't know any of this just by looking at him, and you might miss some good stories if you went by his looks alone.

Aki Soga is chairman of AAJA's Media Watch committee, which seeks to promote fair and accurate reporting of Asian Americans. He is business editor at the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press. He has worked as a correspondent for Knight Ridder Financial News in Tokyo, and as a reporter and copy editor at The Asahi Evening News, an English-language daily in Japan. He can be reached at