WORKING FOR THE JAPANESE : Japanese-Americans Working for Japanese Companies Chart Path Between Cultures : THE NIKKEI

Like any good businessman, Douglas G. Nomiyama often builds rapport with clients by telling them a little about himself. Only in his case, the most innocent revelations sometimes leave everyone bewildered.

“They’re not used to someone being so independent, who cooks for himself, lives on his own,” said Nomiyama, 26. “They don’t understand why I don’t live with my parents to save money.”

Nomiyama is a Japanese-American, Stanford-educated, raised in Seattle. And in his job as a U.S. export representative for Mitsui & Co., a Tokyo-based trading company, he often deals with Japanese citizens. They quickly learn that--despite appearances--he is from another world. “Whenever we tell Japanese that we’re Japanese-American, they say ‘No--you are American-Japanese,’ ” he said.

As Nomiyama has found, to be a Japanese-American with a Japanese employer can mean navigating a tortuous path between cultures. The Japanese may rely on their American cousins to explain such diverse aspects of U.S. life as how to scold an errant employee or arrange for a car rental. At the same time, they may be confused when the Japanese-Americans don’t act Japanese--even though some, such as Nomiyama, are third-generation Americans.

Japanese supervisors may even expect their Japanese-Americans--or nikkei --employees to make personal sacrifices that they would not demand of other Americans. Yet for all the insights that Japanese-Americans have to offer Tokyo-based employers in the United States, they rarely are granted real power within such companies.

“You’re expected to behave like the inside group, but you don’t get the perks,” maintained Harry H. Kitano, a Japanese-American who is a professor of social work and sociology at UCLA. “It’s a very difficult position. I don’t think I’d want to work for a Japanese company because of all these expectations.”

It was not always so. Such companies stood out as havens in an earlier era when Japanese immigrants met with flagrant prejudice in this country; when the educated often toiled in gardens, factories and fruit stands. As recently as the 1950s, many Japanese-Americans felt shut out of corporate America--and saw Tokyo-based firms as the alternative.

Older Japanese-Americans in particular may feel a special relationship with such companies. “When you look around at other banks, how many minorities do you see as senior vice presidents?” asked Mas Miyakoda, who is one of 10 Japanese-American senior vice presidents at Sumitomo Bank of California.

The Santa Monica native, 61, declared with obvious pride: “The name of Sumitomo in a Japanese household always had prestige.”

Yet if Japanese-Americans in this country have made great economic progress, the Japanese employers here have done even better. The soft-spoken Miyakoda, who started out as a bank teller in the 1950s, recalled that the Japanese-Americans at Sumitomo used to crack jokes about their supervisors’ poorly made footwear. “If you heard the shoes squeak, you’d say, ‘He must be from Japan.’ ”

Today, with Japan’s emergence as a financial superpower, such jokes seem quaint. “Now I guess they all wear European shoes,” said Miyakoda, who oversees Sumitomo’s personnel department from the San Francisco headquarters. “They don’t squeak anymore.”

The Japanese and the nikkei long have viewed each other through a curious cultural lens. Most Japanese-Americans are descended from farmers who fled to this country in quest of a better life, starting at the end of the 19th Century. According to scholars, many Japanese back home blamed the nikkei for the hostile reception they received here and looked upon them as the dregs of Japanese society.

Even today, noted Yuji Ichioka, a UCLA history professor and author of “The Issei, “ a new book named for the early immigrants, Japanese who are in this country on business see their American cousins almost as “kinds of freaks.”

One obvious source of puzzlement to the Japanese is the decidedly non-Japanese behavior of the Japanese-Americans. “Those from the outside tend to be more outspoken than someone in Japan,” explained Kathleen Kumagai, 34, a former assistant vice president with the Industrial Bank of Japan in Los Angeles. “I’m not as humble or deferential.”

She added: “There was a lot more bowing between Japan-born local employees and the Tokyo staff than between me and the Tokyo staff.”

At Mitsui, Nomiyama said he has to resist the attempts of his supervisors to get him to spend time on weekends cultivating potential customers--an unpaid work contribution that Japanese employees make routinely. “I tell them most (Americans) don’t work on weekends,” said Nomiyama, who works at the company’s Seattle office. “It’s for friends and family.”

Diverse Requests

Despite their numerous differences, the Japanese may feel close enough to the nikkei to seek guidance that they would be embarrassed to ask of other Americans. Steven Ikemura, a former officer with the Industrial Bank of Japan in Los Angeles, said that, in addition to his financial duties, he fielded such a diverse array of requests from the Japanese that he sometimes felt like a handyman.

“It was anything from renting a car to arranging for a plane,” recalled the executive, 41, who grew up in San Diego. “The president was going to San Diego, and they would come to me and ask, ‘What is a good restaurant in San Diego?’ ”

Cedrick M. Shimo, a vice president with Honda International Trading Corp. in Torrance, recalled how on one occasion a Japanese citizen asked him to help a status-conscious group of Japanese executives line up correctly for a picture at a golf tournament. The Japanese man feared a loss of face if he made a mistake in judgment. But if Shimo did it wrong, it wouldn’t matter as much. “I am American, I don’t know any better,” Shimo explained.

Other Americans may feel that the nikkei know better in a lot of ways and turn to them for various clues about dealing with Japanese supervisors. Americans would ask Ikemura, for example, whether it was proper to invite certain Japanese staff members to picnics and parties. “I ended up somewhat of middle man,” said the executive, who is vice president in charge of money markets at Union Bank in Los Angeles.

The nikkei sometimes try to exploit their perch in the middle as a way to enhance understanding between the two cultures.

Shimo, 68, confesses to an obsession about relations between the United States and Japan. As is typical for the older nikkei, the subject has deep personal meaning. During World War II, when Japanese-Americans--including Shimo’s parents--were being forced into internment camps, he served in the Army in Rockford, Ill.

Not that getting into the military was easy. On the day he sought to take his Army physical, he recalled, fearful Americans refused to let him on a train. So he hitchhiked the 400-mile trip from Berkeley to Los Angeles.

Today, the energetic Japanese-American crusades before business groups on the need for Japan and the United States to get along with each other. “To the Japanese I try to explain the ‘whys’ of America’s frustrations with Japan,” he recently told a group of economists in Los Angeles--before launching into a speech on America’s trade problems--from the Japanese perspective.

Kumagai, who is from Tacoma, Wash., also acknowledges a desire to serve as a bridge between cultures. She recalled that despite some classroom training, she could not understand a word of Japanese spoken by her colleagues when she started out with the Tokyo-based bank, where she worked for 12 years. “I was surprised how hard it was. I couldn’t understand the language at all. It was bewildering.”

As time went on--and she got more familiar with the difficult language--she became more adept at handling the questions Americans and Japanese had about each other. The Japanese, for example, wanted to know if they were expected to present American clients with gifts. She would tell them no. “We had weird conversations where sometimes someone was speaking Japanese, and I’d answer in English,” she said.

Yet if they are emissaries between very different worlds, the Japanese-Americans say they can be lonely ones, not fully accepted by either culture.

In his job with the Industrial Bank of Japan, for example, Ikemura said a Japanese employee “checked up” on him for years, subjecting his work to scrutiny that would not be applied to a Japanese citizen.

“The chance of becoming an executive vice president with a Japanese company is one-tenth of one percent,” he declared. Not that he considered the chances for a Japanese-American to reach the top of an American company much better. “You never belong to either side,” he declared. “It’s a double-edged sword.”

UCLA’s Kitano agreed that in Japanese-owned firms, the Japanese-Americans’ ancestry is of no advantage. Success, he said, “is based on going out and proving that we’re as good as anyone else. It’s certainly not based on a feeling that we’re fellow Japanese.”

Despite lingering prejudice, however, the Japanese have shown a new awareness of their American cousins. In recent years, both a popular Japanese television series and a best-selling book have chronicled the struggles of the nikkei to Japanese audiences. “People don’t think of us as stupid farmers who left,” said Kumagai. “The general consciousness about the nikkei has changed.”

In little ways, that learning process goes on every day as more Japanese are exposed to Japanese-Americans in the business world. Nomiyama, the export representative, said older Japanese are startled when he offers his candid opinions about a product’s quality, rather than listening passively in the manner of a typical Japanese worker his age.

“They are a little bit shocked,” he said. “I can tell by their faces that maybe they weren’t expecting an answer. Eventually that works to my benefit. In a few months, they treat me as a young business person, not as a young Japanese who doesn’t know what they are talking about.”

Similarly, Honda’s Shimo said he does certain things in the U.S. style--no matter what his Japanese associates may think of him. One of those things is escaping the office at 5:30 p.m. whenever the workload permits, rather than feeling obligated to work long into the evening. “They (the Japanese) probably say, ‘There he goes,’ ” said Shimo, who graduated from UCLA as an economics major in 1941. “I say, ‘I don’t care. I’m an American.’ ”