When in Japan, American Does as the Japanese Do

California trade with Asia involves more than goods. Asian art, music and dance also are making their way here, accompanied by cultural mavens who, like their counterparts in the business world, are frequently living their lives on both sides of the Pacific.

Within that group is Robert E. Singer, 40, curator of the newly opened Pavilion for Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

When Singer moved back to Los Angeles from Kyoto, Japan, after 14 years, he intended to maintain his simple Japanese style of living. That hasn’t exactly happened.

“Before I came here I thought I would do Japanese--spare and lean, a futon to sleep on, that’s it,” explained Singer, who lives in the Carthay Circle area of Los Angeles. “But I have an Art Deco 1930s duplex with mohair-covered furniture and Art Deco light fixtures. If I’m American, I might as well live American. I’m sort of becoming an Art Deco freak,” he exclaimed, describing his new Art Deco waffle iron that looks like a space ship.

Singer, who grew up in Los Angeles, continues to pay a monthly rent of $200 on a 19th Century row house in Kyoto, where he was associate professor of art at Kyoto University. He stays there when visiting Japan on museum business. His next-door neighbors, with whom he communicates by facsimile machine when he’s in the United States, take care of the wood, paper and tatami floor house, which “has to be aired a lot or mold develops.”

“When I’m in Japan, I live totally Japanese,” he said. He only has one piece of furniture, a table. He sleeps on the floor and uses a space gas heater in the winter. “A lot of my Japanese friends say, ‘My grandparents lived like this,’ ” said Singer. The friends, he added, think he is a “crazy foreigner.”

He likes to keep his countries separate. “I tend to avoid Japanese food here (in Los Angeles). It is part of the idea of forgetting the country I’m not in. In Japan, when I have a craving for Western food, it’s time to return to the States.”

Singer misses the local merchants and services of his old neighborhood in Japan. “If you’re sick, the noodle man will bring you dinner. The coffee shop is around the corner.”

“I like the friendliness of America. The Japanese are friendly if they know you, but it takes 100 years for them to get to know you. On the other side of America’s friendliness is casualness, verging on sloppiness,” observed Singer.

But he admits that the whole idea of partying is more fun in the United States. “Japanese weddings are horrific affairs--speeches, everyone is afraid of making mistakes. I would have parties in Kyoto with as many as 70 people; we would turn up the music and invite the whole neighborhood.”

Sometimes he catches himself in a culture warp. “When I speak Japanese here I start to bow and adopt the Japanese manner--I’m more bent, more modest. My American manners emerge when I’m home.”