On June 7, 2020, NHK aired a TV program to explain racial divisions in the United States, following protests after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. However, a computer graphic aired during the program and posted on NHK's official Twitter account drew widespread criticism for distorting the image of black people and the reasons for their anger. NHK quickly retracted the graphic but a group of American Studies' scholars in Japan and the US found flaws in the entire program and sent a letter to NHK. This article explains the problems of the program, and considers why NHK aired it, while looking at the wider issue of racism in Japanese society.

Textbooks are the most important pedagogical tools in higher education and they should convey sufficient and accurate information on minority groups and women in the United States. Yet textbooks tend to marginalize these groups in their depictions. This article examines the coverage of Asian Pacific Americans in twenty-eight American Government or Politics textbooks. Asian Pacific Americans have faced a unique history of exclusion, discrimination, and stereotyping. The content analysis of the textbooks reveals that textbooks do not fully cover their history and contributions to US politics, either measured by page numbers or by historical events and figures important to Asian Pacific Americans. To rectify this lack of coverage, this article concludes with five constructive recommendations, including an option to invite scholars on Asian Pacific American politics to serve as textbook reviewers and textbook coauthors.

Asian Americans have received relatively little attention frompolitical scientists. Although a rapidly growing segment of thepopulation, their political behaviors, impacts on politicalinstitutions, and the policies affecting them have been rarelystudied in our discipline.

Introduction: The Emerging Political Status of Asian-American Elected Officials

Research on Asian-American elected officials is scarce, but Asian-American officeholders are not. The National Asian Pacific American Political Almanac (Lai and Nakanishi 2001) lists hundreds of Asian Americans who hold elected offices in national, state, and local governments, in addition to a number of appointed officials and judges. Furthermore, increasing numbers of Asian-American, political candidates run for national and state-level offices (Cho 2000a; Lien forthcoming), and there have been periodic Asian-American political movements (Wei 1993). Nevertheless, Asian-America political leadership and Asian-Americans' roles in campaigns have often been overlooked in the discussion of minority politics, in part due to the community's relatively young and largely foreign-born population (Brackman and Erie 1995).