Coach H : At Cal State Dominguez Hills, Eiichi Furusawa is a <i> gaijin</i> in a strange land. His superiors in Japan have told him to learn all he can about the most American of games. Despite a change in plans, an uncertain role and the language barrier, he’s trying.

Your name is Eiichi Furusawa. At Cal State Dominguez Hills, where you are a coaching observer from Japan, they simply call you “Coach H.”

In your hometown of Matsumoto, you are an associate professor on the faculty of Shinshu University. This is your first visit to the United States.

“U.S. very nice,” you say.

Despite your best efforts, you find it difficult to communicate in English. But you insist: I have common ground with the athletes that my country has sent me to observe.

“Basketball language is the same,” you explain.

The players here are wary of you, but as the American season begins, you blend in. You become more than just the little guy in white tennis shoes.

“Coach H (the nickname stems from the pronunciation of Furusawa’s first name) says some things that make me think he knows what he is talking about,” senior guard Derrick Clark said at practice.

In the 10 months you will spend here, your country’s Ministry of Education tells you, see all the basketball you can. Cable TV here offers many basketball games, and that makes you happy.

Your superiors at home say you must learn much so that you can return and teach them. Japan wants to perfect the most American of games, and it has a long way to go.

At Dominguez Hills, you play in pick-up games, and the extra step you take each time you move with the ball is typical of international misunderstanding of the traveling rule.

In reality, you are just an extension of Japanese expansion in the United States, which has seen trillions of yen invested here. As you watch the practices at Dominguez Hills day in and day out, you sometimes feel that, at least in basketball know-how, you are what your countrymen call a gaijin , an outsider .

Cal State Dominguez Hills is a long way from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where you were originally supposed to visit. A snag developed in housing for you there, and when it appeared that you would not come at all, well-known former UC Berkeley Coach Pete Newell recommended that you study under Coach Dave Yanai, although Dominguez Hills is only a Division II school.

Yanai is well regarded in coaching circles, you are told.

“Coach H couldn’t learn from a better teacher than Yanai,” senior center Anthony Blackmon said.

An added bonus, you learn, is that Yanai is of Japanese descent, as is his assistant, Bart Yamachika. Gardena, where you take an apartment, has a large Japanese population, and Asian foods are plentiful there.

In addition, Yanai tells you later, there is a fried chicken restaurant nearby that will please your wife, who will join you later.

“She loves Kentucky Colonel,” Yanai explains.

Yanai goes out of his way to help you. He rents your apartment with his own money and moves a used refrigerator from the garage in his home to your unit, which you say is larger that many homes in metropolitan sections of Japan.

Yanai picks you up at Los Angeles International Airport when you arrive and offers in broken Japanese to buy you dinner.

You choose a hamburger over sushi.

“He is really enjoying it here,” Yanai says later.

For the next few weeks you are a burden, but Yanai calmly involves you

in practice sessions. Key words like “get back, see the ball” and “spacing” become part of a new English vocabulary.

The players, meanwhile, “have become attached to you,” Yanai said. You discover now that you are “like one of us.”

You become more self-sufficient as the start of basketball practice approaches in mid-October, and soon the players grow accustomed to the sight of you videotaping every practice.

When the taping is over, you return to your apartment and review the tapes on a videotape player late into the evening.

Explains Yamachika: “H is very thorough.”

Enrollment in English classes is next. When the season begins a month later, you grow more confident. The book that you constantly fill with basketball notes becomes a hodgepodge of English letters and Japanese symbols.

Writing the language is not that difficult, you tell a reporter. (The 26 letters of the Western alphabet are a breeze compared to the two versions of phonetic script and the thousands of Chinese-derived characters used in Japan.) Speaking is different.

“I think in Japanese and must transfer into English. I take too long,” you lament.

But somehow you get your point across. Yanai asks you to run practice drills.

On game nights you sit on the Toro bench, much as you do at home. It is difficult not to get involved in coaching. Sometimes you raise your arms and offer advice. You can be heard shouting instructions at the players.

Yanai and Yamachika accept your enthusiasm. Nevertheless, Yanai confides: “I have to keep from being distracted.”

When the season is over at Dominguez Hills, you will continue to study basketball. You will see how athletes are recruited. You have made many notes, and they will return with you to Japan along with your videotapes and your first child, who is expected to be born here in March.

In June, once the National Basketball Assn. playoffs come to an end, you will return the refrigerator and go home.

After a year of such immersion, basketball will never appear the same to you again.

Nor will it be quite the same without you at Dominguez Hills.