Man of Few Words Has His Language Skills Down Pat

When they feted Akira Suzuki at the All Peoples Christian Center and Church this year for his decades of devoted service to the South-Central L.A. community, the retired engineer--not a very verbal person, claim his wife and friends--brushed aside all the accolades and announced: “Well, let’s party.”

He may not say much, but when Suzuki moves his lips it’s to get what he wants.

“Where’s my usual greeting?” he asks, then puckers up. Saundra Bryant, the pretty executive director of the All Peoples Center, plants a kiss on his mouth.

A striking woman with gray hair, a slender figure and beckoning eyes walks over to Suzuki. “Give me a kiss,” Gertrude Land demands.

Suzuki, 67, eyes her boyishly. His manner matches his youthful physique--trim, muscular, forearms and shoulders that bespeak his ritual swims several days a week. He feigns reluctance then submits to her kiss. She’s offended by the lack of enthusiasm.

“He thinks I’m a flake,” she says. “ He’ s the flake,” the coquettish senior citizen says. She saunters away.

All this seems standard play at the East 20th Street center, where Suzuki teaches English and Spanish to Latino and black senior citizens twice a week as part of the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, a national organization that supports and provides services for people 60 years or older. The Disciples of Christ Church-sponsored facility houses this and other social-service programs as part of its mission of Christian service and multiracial unity.

Mellow jazz is playing on the radio. The talk, in a space that houses Suzuki’s open classroom, a lounge and tables being set for lunch, is of cabbages, sex and a king--of sorts.

“Is this vegetable day?” asks a woman with a knitted cap on her head to no one in particular.

“I like the cabbage,” another woman says.

A few feet away Suzuki, having weathered the kisses, is instructing his bilingual class. He points to the blackboard and reads: “What do you think of the predicament that President Reagan found himself?”

“No opinion,” the class responds in Spanish, reading from the blackboard, “but we feel compassion for the President.”

“Did you have a dream last night?” Suzuki asks.

“Yes, I dreamed of making love with my boyfriend,” the whole class responds.

“With my boyfriend,” a lone voice repeats emphatically.

“Are you tired?” Suzuki asks. The class smiles. Excerpts from the senior citizens bilingual primer, Suzuki method, risque-rated.

“Aki’s class”--that’s what everybody calls Suzuki--”started as an English as a Second Language class for Hispanic-speaking seniors,” center director Bryant says. “The black seniors were interested in learning Spanish so they sat in the class. It became good for race relations and evolved in a way that fit into All Peoples philosophy.”

‘Very Loving’

Says one of Suzuki’s student’s, Besserman Kimbell, a former teacher herself: “His attitude is great. He’s interested and anxious to help. He has patience. He’s so kind, very loving. He likes to hug and kiss.”

So how does such a man get tagged a bad communicator? His friend Joe Ide, former director of the center and still a volunteer, explains:

“He’s not a very good communicator but it does depend on the situation. If you draw him out he’ll talk, but he can make you very uncomfortable with his (silence) or you can just say ‘that’s the way he is’ and ignore him.” Ide shrugs.

But Suzuki is clearly a man who wants to reach people. That’s one of the reasons he tutors. All his life, as an engineer for the L.A. Department of Water and Power, he was used to “working with material things. I don’t get this--” he stops, reaching for the “this” with hands that grab the air in search of the right words. “It doesn’t talk back to me or ask questions.”

When the questions are asked, Suzuki has a story to tell.

For two decades he lived in this neighborhood that embraces All Peoples Center and Church--and it is a neighborhood, despite the commercial grime and noise pollution of San Pedro Street that borders it. Outsiders who only see the light industrial and commercial strip around it don’t think so, but “people really do live here,” says Bryant, who grew up here.

Today, the area is a low-income enclave of Latino, black, white and Asian working people, sometimes troubled by drug peddlers and gangs. The worn frame houses often sport neat front yards. Clothes hang on front and back fences; a crimson shirt on one is the brightest spot in a flowerless front yard. Here and there artless graffiti scar stone walls.

When Suzuki lived here from 1924 to 1942, it was a mostly Japanese-American community. The site of what is now All Peoples was the Japanese Christian Institute and Church.

Then World War II came and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Suzuki’s life, along with thousands of other Japanese-Americans, was disrupted.

“I thought it was one of those Orson Welles things,” he says of Pearl Harbor. A hoax. He was away at UC Berkeley studying engineering and living with nine other Japanese-Americans when the news came on the radio.

It was no joke when the National Guard, which had an armory on the same block as his boardinghouse, barricaded the street and fingerprinted everybody on it.

Suzuki had to leave school with only one year to go. For a few months he worked in his father’s produce business back in his L.A. neighborhood. “But that didn’t last long,” he says.

‘A Nice Location’

In May, 1942, “they assembled us in the Pomona fairgrounds, it was like a temporary detention camp. And then they sent our family to a relocation camp in Wyoming, between Powell and Cody, near the west entrance to Yellowstone Park. A nice location,” he says dryly.

He, two brothers and his parents remained there until January, 1945, though Suzuki was intermittently released to work as a laborer harvesting crops around the country.

“It was hardest on my father,” he says. “He was not used to being hemmed in, reduced to idleness. But my mother, physically, it did her real good. She used to be asthmatic and when she went up in the open country there, it just cleared up.”

There are preferable ways to remedy asthma, he concedes mildly. Bespectacled, strands of silver- gray hair accentuating a center of nearly naked scalp, he leans forward in his chair and is silent for a moment. “I was bitter. I was--I’m trying to think of a word--downhearted. I wasn’t that depressed. Usually, I try to take things in stride. But I have these moods, you know. If I think about it, then maybe I get depressed. The only time I get real angry is when someone starts telling me about the ‘good’ side of this. Someone said ‘Just think, you wouldn’t have gotten to see the country otherwise,’ ” Suzuki says, vitriol in his tone.

After he and his family were released from the detention camp, Suzuki says he either couldn’t find work or was fired from the jobs he got because of anti-Japanese sentiment.

Then, after taking a civil service exam, he was hired as an engineering aide with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and rose through the ranks to engineer. “They hired me for $192.50 a month. Of course that was a long time ago.” He remembers the date he started clearly--Dec. 7, 1945, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

Suzuki retired in 1981, but all his working life and the years since have kept him involved with All Peoples, a church devoted to interracial Christian fellowship and service.

He knows firsthand the reality of social oppression in America.

“When the civil rights movement came I said ‘Well look how long these people have been under this crap. Blacks were promised 40 acres and a mule and still haven’t got it.’

“I can feel for the people, the Hispanics, the blacks, the Asian refugees that are coming. I can feel for them.”

In an office in the center above Suzuki’s bilingual class, his wife Martha works as the church secretary two days a week. Bryant, 30, who has known them since she was three, says “they’re an interesting couple. To an outsider watching them, it may seem like they’re always arguing. It may look like he picks on her, but you’d have to know Martha.” One immediately imagines “The Honeymooners” and Alice icing Ralph with a stare.

Petite Martha Suzuki with steel gray hair, glasses and a shy manner says, “We argue because he never tells me what he’s thinking. He’s not very verbal. He doesn’t communicate much--didn’t you notice?”

But they’ve been married for 40 years, they have two daughters. Somebody must be doing something right.

“I forgive him for anything,” she says. “I believe in staying together.”

Just minutes before on the floor below, Akira Suzuki has told an interviewer that his wife is probably the best thing that ever happened to him. Mrs. Suzuki looks incredulous, “Oh yeah?”

“The best thing in my life is being married to my wife, because if I hadn’t gotten married. . . . I’m thinking back,” Suzuki says suddenly, visualizing the past. “I was standing before the minister, my bride here (at my side) and I thought ‘What am I doing here anyway?’ But if I hadn’t married I wouldn’t have been influenced to be in the church. She is the reason for me being here now, and I’m grateful because I met all the beautiful people that are around here. I kind of found what God, through Jesus, is telling me to do.”