I'm a 'Baller

Footballer. I'm a footballer. Or at least that's the dream I'm pursuing in signing up with an intramural indoor soccer team here at Duke. I responded to a mass e-mail calling for people who'd like to join a squad that needed players. Even though I haven't played soccer regularly for years, I knew this league was just for fun and recreation and so had nothing to lose in taking the plunge.

Our captain, Michael Albert, is a guy from the Business School. Our team consists of men and women from all over the graduate and professional schools and even includes a few undergrads. Because we were sort of thrown together at the last minute, Michael gave us a team name befitting our ragtag grouping: Identity Crisis.

I've written before about my abiding love for the game, especially as its played in the English Premier League. Even without cable since coming back from Peru, I continue to follow all the fixtures online and to obsessively track players' progress through my online Fantasy Football game. Well, the rec league at Duke has given me my first real opportunity to combine my fandom and vicarious knowledge of the game with sustained physical activity -- actually getting out there on the pitch and playing some football.

Not a very physical player the last time I put on the cleats and shinguards, I was a flatfooted defender in the years I played soccer as a kid. Since then, I spent several years as a competitive swimmer and water polo player, struggled through surgery in high school and college, took up tennis and racquetball, and, most recently, turned to long-distance running. Overall, I became more of a physical presence in my sporting pursuits, strengthening leg muscles through individual activities (swimming, running) and developing a sense of movement, strategy, and team-play in the other sports. While most of my footballing tactics will be derived less from experience and more from electronic observation (Fox Soccer Channel, 4thegame.com, YouTube footballing highlights, the aforementioned Fantasy game), I'm ready for the challenge of indoor soccer.

As I prepare to take to the field (or the IM gym's floor, as it were), I hope to mold my play in the style of my footballing hero, the Basque Spaniard and Liverpool midfielder Xabi Alonso. Known as a "deep-lying midfielder," Alonso is not a holding or purely defensive midfielder per se (such as Chelsea's Claude Makelele or Milan's Gennaro Gattuso) but a playmaker who creates space for himself -- and thus his passes and long-range shots -- just behind the attacking midfielder (in Alonso's club, this would be the legendary Steven Gerrard). Milan's World Cup champion Andrea Pirlo is perhaps the world's best-known deep-lying playmaker. Other notables include Barcelona's Xavi and Roma's Daniele De Rossi.

The deep-lying midfielder is not a standout defender. He's an offensive threat who distributes passes from the defense up to the attacking midfielder and, of course, the striker(s). In addition to being an amazing passer, he'll try his luck with long-range shots and will, on occasion, venture into the penalty area to follow up on scoring plays (or, alternately, defensive mistakes by the opposition). You can see the range of Alonso's skills, typical of the deep-lying midfielder, in this video:



Having said that, I'm probably overstating my case when I say I think I can play this position in our rec league. For one, I lack the basic, day-in-day-out skills of a regular football player. And there's no doubt the deep-lying midfielder must possess a high degree of technical skill in order to be effective at his position. Furthermore, though I consider myself to be a decent passer of the ball, I'll have absolutely zero experience playing with my team before our first match. This is a bad omen, I know, but what can you do when the league starts during finals week? Finally, it's worth noting that indoor soccer takes place in a relatively small, enclosed space (where side walls are inbounds); the deep-lying midfielder works best when there's more space available and when his vision can open up defenses and pick out the free player. Indoor soccer simply doesn't allow for that degree of open play.

Enough fantasy strategizing for now. But on to a related topic about fandom and identification. It has occurred to me that even though Alonso is my idol, when I do take to the gym floor in my blue Target-bought kit, I'll bear a resemblance not to him but to some other Premier League footballers with whom I share certain features. Phenotypically, I may have more in common with Eintracht Frankfurt's Naohiro Takahara or Tottenham Hotspurs' Lee Young-Pyo. I don't recognize myself in them, however. Something about my mixed ethnic heritage makes me look more like:


Arsenal's talented left back, Frenchman Gael Clichy


Manchester United's sidelined defender Mikael Silvestre, another Frenchman


Former Villain and current Bolton sub Gavin McCann (a holding midfielder)


Theo Walcott, Arsenal's young forward and one player on whom England is hinging its hopes of national football revival (after crashing out of Euro 2008)


Bolton's substitute goalkeeper, Ali Al Habsi, from Oman


Liverpool's stalwart shot-stopper Jose Reina


And yet another goalie, and perhaps the closest thing I have to a doppelgänger in the Premier League, Everton's and the US national team's Tim Howard

Vote for your favorite candidate for my lookalike, or tell me I'm crazy with all of my choices. I'm an aging athlete, I know, and some of these lads are in the prime of their careers. But I figure it's never too late to start.

Nishikawas in History

My friend Exequiel "Che" Lopresti recently e-mailed me with this "fun fact": "Did you know that the biggest Japanese 'Ace' of WW2 (you know, top-gun fighter pilot) last name was Nishikawa?" I had not known this -- in fact, I know very little of my Japanese ancestry. I'm a sansei, or third-generation Japanese American. Though most sansei are close enough in age to their grandparents (issei) to retrieve knowledge about Japan and their family from them, mine passed away long before I was born (my father, a nisei, was born, in Honolulu, in 1927). So, I was left asking, Who was this pilot Nishikawa? Where was he from? Did he, in a fateful moment of irony, participate in the Pearl Harbor attack? Where does his body lie now? And how did my Argentine friend Exequiel hear about him?

I of course sought answers to all these questions on Wikipedia.com -- my first source of all information, broad and obscure. Without any first name to go by, I simply typed "Nishikawa" into the Search panel. I came up with the following "hits," the great Nishikawas in history:

Takanori Nishikawa (b. 1970), Japanese singer and actor. He performs as T.M.Revolution, or TMR, which is supposed to stand for "Takanori Makes Revolution." Takanori is a major figure in J-pop, or electronic-syrupy-teenage-love-style Japanese pop. Here's what he looks like:



Are those hints of Liberace I see on his poofed-out shirt? Maybe it's more Maxwell Demon from Velvet Goldmine. At any rate, there's Takanori for you, in all his glittering glory.

Heren Nishikawa (b. 1946), Japanese actress and TV celebrity. I can't make heads or tails of the English-language Wikipedia entry on Heren, so I'll quote liberally from the entry, as of today's date:

"Though the American runs in her blood, Heren has no native English."

"She is well-known as the wife of Kiyoshi Nishikawa, one of the splendid entertainer of owarai and manzai." [Oddly, there's no English-language entry on Kiyoshi.]

"Heren was born in Kyoto on the 6th October, 1946. She hasn't revealed her father yet, and after the marriage, she is referring her first name was derived from Helen Keller, her father admired."

"In 1963, Heren's stage debut as a dancer in Yoshimoto Kogyo was held. Her purity and eagerness was beloved and immediately became one of the leading actresses in Yoshimoto New Comedy with the stage name "Heren Sugimoto.'"

"In Japan we have the tendency to regard women with her child and without her child as different social status. Heren still has the actorship or presentership on the TV program mainly oriented to housewives or aged girls." [In these last two quotations, "purity" and "oriented" were actually hyperlinked in the original.]

Given the pluck and circumstance narrative of her rise to fame, her unusual namesake backstory, and her current appeal to "housewives or aged girls," I'm thinking Heren is Japan's answer to Oprah Winfrey. Any help here?

Lane Nishikawa (b. ?), American actor, filmmaker, playwright, performance artist -- and fellow native of O'ahu, Hawaii, to boot. Here's a still of Lane from his most recent, award-winning independent film, Only the Brave:



Most of Lane's work focuses on Asian American history, culture, and identity. Only the Brave is the third movie in a trilogy about "the unparalleled courage of the Nisei soldiers who voluntarily fought in World War II while many of their families were imprisoned in internment camps back in the States."

This guy seems really interesting. He grew up in San Francisco, attended at San Francisco State, and created his own degree in interdisciplinary studies to reflect his interests in theater, Asian American history, and political activism. He's even an accomplished poet who once performed in front of 3,000 inmates in San Quentin. A distant uncle, perhaps? I should look him up the next time I'm in the Bay Area.

Nishikawa Sukenobu (1671-1750), "often called simply 'Sukenobu,' was a Japanese printmaker from Kyoto. He was unusual for a ukiyo-e in being based in the imperial capital of Kyoto. He did prints of actors, but gained note for his works concerning women. His Hyakunin joro shinasadame (Appreciating 100 women), in two volumes published in 1723, depicted women of all classes, from the empress to prostitutes, and received favorable results." Here's one of Sukenobu's beautiful prints, titled The Doll Ceremony:



I have to say I'm drawn to Sukenobu's decision to represent women of all classes in his print series. What lies behind his fascination with the courtly and the "base"? Styles of dress and spaces of intimacy? The differential hierarchy of social strata, on the one hand, and the gestural equivalence of feminine form on the other?

*****

After all was said and done, I didn't end up finding the elusive fighter pilot "Nishikawa" on Wikipedia. Perhaps he hasn't made it onto the English-language site yet. Maybe Exequiel encountered a typo in a historical footnote.

Whatever the case may be, I'd like to think Exequiel had it wrong -- that Nishikawas tend to be lovers, not fighters; artists and dreamers rather than kamikaze pilots. That's the genealogy I'm hoping to inhabit myself.

[For the late Itsuko "Sue" Nishikawa, benefactor, church leader, and infinitely generous soul. She was my aunt by marriage and is fondly remembered.]

Cameron Got Served, or, Sendero Luminoso Revisited

On her recent trip to Peru, Hollywood starlet Cameron Diaz was called out for committing a fashion faux pas that left the actress grasping for humanitarian words of apology.



While touring the famed Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, Diaz sported an olive-green bag that featured a red star and the phrase, "Serve the People," in Chinese characters. This phrase is known to be one of the hallmark slogans of Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party.



The problem? News sources say that Peruvians are especially sensitive to such symbology because it is reminiscent of the bloody guerrilla war that the Maoist group Shining Path, or Sendero Luminoso, waged in the country throughout the 1980s and up to the early '90s. Close to 70,000 people are thought to have perished as a result of the war, but news agencies have omitted the fact that Sendero Luminoso is said to be responsible for 31,331 of those casualties. According to Human Rights Watch, government security forces were responsible for a third of the killings; the remaining deaths are mostly unattributed.

Without condoning the actions of Sendero Luminoso, I think it's important to properly frame the statistics people are citing with regard to the war. It's clear that both the group's actions and the Peruvian government's response to those actions were reckless and drastic -- together they had the effect of making paranoia and violence a part of everyday life. Indeed the war created the social conditions for what the anthropologist Michael Taussig calls "terror as usual."

Diaz, we know, was unaware of this significant aspect of Peruvian history. A Peruvian civil rights activist (on whom news agencies rely to voice the collective opinion of Peruvians who are or would be or have been offended by Diaz's bag), Pablo Rojas, is quoted as saying: "[The bag] alludes to a concept that did so much damage to Peru, that brought about so many victims... I don't think she should have used that bag where the followers of that ideology did so much damage."

Rojas is entirely justified in making this statement, but it seems to me the lack of world-historical knowledge Diaz displayed is hardly unusual for the privileged tourist who travels abroad. I dare say that most American travelers to Peru know next to nothing of the country's history, recent or otherwise. Diaz (who grew up in Australia) is your average tourist; it's her celebrity (cameras focused on her) and pseudo-political chic (where political symbology and slogans are now marketed for fashionable consumption) that led to this cultural misunderstanding.

Rojas's actual target of criticism, then, is not Cameron Diaz the "person" but Cameron Diaz the star-image. The blame for this episode of cultural insensitivity might be equally shared among Diaz's entourage: her publicist, her fashion consultant, her image-makers. Note how the olive-green bag is meant to complement Diaz's "backpacker look": loose clothing, a hat to shield her face from the sun, and what appears to be a hemp bracelet (or one made of a similarly organic material). The only flourish I can detect in these photos is a purple scarf (or two?) rolled around Diaz's neck. At any rate, the bag's political sloganeering is but one fashionable element in a complete celebrity package.

Perhaps blame should also be attributed to the brichero, or "native" tour guide, who appears next to Diaz on Machu Picchu. Note the designer sweater and unsullied jeans -- this guy really came prepared.



The brichero's beaming gaze and I'm-all-ears stance say it all: entranced by Diaz's beauty, that inimitable smile, that aura of Hollywood celebrity, our guide likely didn't even notice the remnant of Maoist symbology that emblazons the bag in question.