Unkind Cut : Japanese-Americans Angered at Name of W. Hollywood Hair Salon

Ellen Endo-Dizon could hardly believe her eyes when she first saw the sign for a West Hollywood hair salon that calls itself “j.a.p.s.s.”

“You look up at the sky and you see a cuss word in neon lights,” Endo-Dizon, a columnist for the Los Angeles-based Japanese-American newspaper Rafu Shimpo, said in an interview. “I couldn’t imagine someone in 1985 being insensitive enough to do something like that.”

Endo-Dizon, who has written several critical columns on the subject, is not alone in her outrage at the hair salon’s name. For many Japanese-Americans, the word Jap awakens memories of a bitter history of discrimination and World War II internment, as well as fears of a new upsurge of sentiment against anyone with an Asian face.

The Japanese American Citizens League has complained to the hair salon’s owners, and a coalition of Japanese-American organizations is pressing a petition drive urging a name change. The issue is expected to go before the West Hollywood City Council.

The five owners of the store--two of them from Japan--have in turn been surprised by the furor, which has gradually escalated since the store opened last year.

“We didn’t realize that many people would start making so much noise,” said Shuji Kida, one of the owners, who immigrated from Japan 11 years ago. “We all felt it was a pretty good name, and we didn’t realize it was hurting Japanese-American people that much.”

Kida said that the owners chose the name as an acronym of the initials of their first names but that they knew it also played on the word Japs.

Kida sees nothing wrong with the word.

“It sounds strong,” he said, “and to me it’s nice.”

The National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, formed to press for compensation to Japanese-Americans imprisoned in camps during World War II and the leader of the petition drive, described the term as “the one word that is capable of bringing to the surface all the repressed and accumulated anger that has collected within us through the generations of our people subjected to racism and injustice in America.”

“It is more than just a racist term. It has become a symbolic term associated with all the degrading experiences Japanese and Japanese-Americans have endured. One only needs to imagine what the black community, Chicano community (or) Jewish people’s response would be if an equally derogatory term describing them were publicly displayed.”

The coalition’s concern over the salon’s name has been heightened because several other businesses registered in Los Angeles County also use names incorporating the term.

Six other companies incorporating JAP or JAPS in their names are registered in Los Angeles County, but several list residences as addresses and have apparently gone out of business. Four of the six used the initials of owners to create the name.

David Monkawa, the coalition’s Southern California regional co-chairman, said the organization opposes use of the term by any companies but that, rather than “lash out in all directions at one time,” it is focusing its efforts on getting the hair salon’s name changed. The petition drive has collected more than 2,000 signatures, he said.

Gene Mornell, executive director of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, said he has written to Kida to urge him to change the salon’s name.

“It’s an offensive racial term,” Mornell said. “It would be preferable for people not to use terms like that.”

Mornell said some Jewish people also find the name objectionable. His letter to Kida, he said, was on behalf of the commission, the Japanese American Citizens League and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

Simon Elcabas, a Jewish partner in the salon who immigrated from France eight years ago, said that after he first heard complaints about the salon’s name, he “thought Jewish-Americans might be offended, because there is this expression ‘Jewish-American princess.’ ”

“But they took it very well,” Elcabas said.

West Hollywood Mayor John Heilman said the city is watching the situation at the request of the coalition.

“I think at some point, if the issue is not resolved, it will come before the council,” he said.

Kida said he believes that the critics are not fair.

“We are willing to change the name, but it costs too much,” he said. “We figure out about $14,000 or $15,000 for the new sign, design of a new business card, printing of announcements, hiring people to write addresses and the stamps.”

Kida and Elcabas said they would change the salon’s name immediately if those seeking the change would pay their expenses.

Monkawa called that suggestion “ridiculous.”

“There’s an old phrase, but a good one--’Your individual rights end where my nose begins,’ ” Monkawa said. “To the point it does no psychological, emotional or physical damage to the public at large, (someone) has the right to do whatever they want to. But the sign that all five of them have consciously chosen . . . is doing noticeable emotional and psychological and inflammatory damage to the community, and many people are upset and hurt by it.”

Businessmen visiting the United States from Japan “often don’t recognize that the word is pejorative and sometimes use it as an abbreviation in some of their corporate names,” said Ron Wakabayashi, the San Francisco-based national director of the Japanese American Citizens League.

Japanese-American activists fear that use of the term by Japanese businessmen who do not understand its connotations in American society could eventually lend legitimacy to its use by non-Japanese.

To meet this threat, the Japanese American Citizens League is taking the battle against the term to Japan. Its efforts were reflected in an April article in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun--Japan’s equivalent of the Wall Street Journal--that explained league officials’ objections to the word and urged Japanese to avoid its use. According to the article, many English-Japanese dictionaries published in Japan innocuously identify the term simply as an abbreviation for Japan or Japanese.

The article quotes Kaname Saruya, a professor at Tokyo Woman’s Christian College, who commented: “During the war, Japanese-Americans did such things as join the American armed forces, thus proving that they are Americans. Jap is now a dead word in America, and in the world of sports the abbreviation JPN is always used.

“But young Japanese and Japanese businessmen in the United States, unaware of this historical background, use the word Jap and are thus resurrecting it. Because Jap is a discriminatory term, of course, English-Japanese dictionaries should eliminate its use, and Japanese should be careful not to use this word,” Saruya said.

Wakabayashi said the league plans to launch a project to contact book publishers in Japan to request that dictionaries “clearly indicate that’s a pejorative word.”

Kida argued that elimination of the word is impossible.

In the decades since World War II, Japanese have won the confidence and trust of Americans, Kida said. This can be reflected by infusing new meaning into the term, just as black Americans put new pride into the word black during the 1960s, he said.

It is an argument that carries little weight with Kida’s critics.

The coalition, in a May 30 statement announcing its petition drive, expressed concern that “the gradual ‘acceptability’ of this term would allow for an atmosphere of disrespect--conscious or unconscious--and insensitivity to Nikkei (ethnic Japanese) people as a whole. This would in turn contribute to the already soaring incidents of anti-Asian violence and acts of bigotry in the U.S.”

There is “anxiety in the community” that trade tensions with Japan will be “reflected in increased use of that word,” Wakabayashi said.

“I think the environment is really ripe, unfortunately, for a lot of backlash at Asians,” he said.