PROFILE : Gerald Yoshitomi’s Quiet Revolution : The director of the Japanese American Cultural Center has a low-key style, but he has become an influential and powerful figure in L.A., Sacramento and Washington. Critics ask: Is he too careful?

Gerald Yoshitomi is like the Isamu Noguchi sculpture that rises in the sprawling plaza outside his office window: quiet, regal and he commands one heck of a lot of territory.

As the executive director of the $14-million Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, Yoshitomi heads the largest ethnic cultural center in California.

But Yoshitomi’s domain extends far beyond Little Tokyo. He is an influential figure on both the local and statewide arts scene and is frequently called to testify on Capitol Hill--often about the ubiquitous force of multiculturalism.

As such, he has much to say about L.A.’s role in perhaps the most significant trend of late 20th Century American art.

“The Los Angeles Festival did not do enough ground work in the ethnic communities--talking about it in advance, having meetings and discussions,” says Yoshitomi. “One of the issues of the ‘90s is not just multicultural programming, but property rights and control.”

As part of Yoshitomi’s grand design, the cultural center’s “Celebrate California” summer series set its own multicultural programming precedent. For the first time, the center presented, rather than just renting the stage to, artists of a variety of cultural/ethnic backgrounds: performance artist Nobuko Miyamoto (one night), African-American dancer/choreographers Donald Byrd and Lula Washington (one night) and Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino (12 nights).

“Many groups have come to us needing more than a rental situation,” says Yoshitomi. “We have a responsibility to them because of this stage and facility.

“We encourage people to perform here, bringing with them their own aesthetic values and perspectives. Japanese Americans would be the last to step in and say, ‘This is how a Josefina Lopez should write something.’ We’re not ones to try and control someone. Elsewhere (artists) may not have had the freedom or the license.”

That openness and Yoshitomi’s shrewd assessment of the need for cooperation between communities have been key to the center’s success in its first decade.

“One of the things that happens when one grows up as a small minority is that one needs the help of other people,” Yoshitomi explains. “You cannot exist without relationships.

“From the time this center opened, it had relationships with other communities. One of the first exhibitions here was a Day of the Dead Exhibition with Self-Help Graphics. When the theater opened, we opened with Kabuki from the National Theatre of Japan, but soon after that we had the Explorations performance art series (in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art and CalArts).

“It’s that understanding that we need to have relationships that leads us logically into this next part of what we’re doing.”

It’s an understanding that the cultural center’s board of directors shares. “At one time, I was thinking, ‘OK, I think this is a good idea, but why does my board think it’s a good idea?’ I recognized that most Japanese Americans grew up and have lived in minority communities in Los Angeles. We grew up in places that were segregated, because other places we either couldn’t afford to live or weren’t allowed to live.

“Coming from that kind of experience--where the art that was on my walls was not considered art and the singing that my neighbor’s uncle down the street did was in Spanish and that wasn’t considered art either--(you have) one goal that says, ‘I want to make sure there is Japanese culture for me and my children and grandchildren.’ But you also accept the fact that there is something else.”

Appointed in 1987 by Gov. George Deukmejian to the California Arts Council, the 42-year-old Yoshitomi also co-chairs Mayor Tom Bradley’s task force on the future of the Los Angeles Theatre Center--a key post that confirms his influence in the local power infrastructure.

Yoshitomi also chaired the arts committee of the L.A. 2000 task force, a committee of civic leaders who came up with proposals for the city’s future. He is also a founding member of the Assn. of American Cultures--a Washington-based network for multicultural organizations--and chair of the National Task Force on Presenting and Touring the Performing Arts. He recently testified before a congressional oversight committee studying the operations of various federal cultural agencies.

All this makes the L.A.-raised and Stanford-educated Yoshitomi one of the most powerful men calling the shots for L.A.’s--and California’s--arts scene. Indeed, as a member of an ethnic community currently being courted by both political parties and the head of an organization with significant ties to Japanese wealth, Yoshitomi has been virtually anointed as point man for ‘90s Los Angeles.

An industrious worker with an M.O. that one local presenter discretely described as “discrete,” Yoshitomi has quietly moved into the driver’s seat of downtown culture.

Talk to L.A.’s presenters, producers and artists and you hear almost unanimous praise for Yoshitomi’s professionalism and breadth of knowledge. Nearly as often, these same professionals speak off the record, not willing to risk appearing critical of such an influential man.

They speak of his “savvy” and “conservatism,” the careful way he navigates a board room and selects what and what not to put on the agenda at any given time. Yoshitomi will push, they say, but never far enough to alienate his base of support.

In a decade in which numerous downtown arts venues have failed, floundered or been forced out by the vicissitudes of the box office, the Japanese American center has thrived. It is the only large-capacity downtown venue that regularly presents both visual and performing ethnic-based arts and is one of L.A.’s key dance stages.

Now, Yoshitomi is bent on raising the stakes, steering the center into position as L.A.’s prepotent multicultural arts venue. With its central location, multidisciplinary scope and access to financial resources, certainly no other ethnic arts group is as equipped for the effort.

“(Other presenters) are ahead in terms of point of view, but they lack resources,” says Al Nodal, general manager of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department. “Jerry has built an organization and now he’s folding in the programming. Others have kept the torch alive--albeit at a lower level financially--and that can’t be discounted. It’s not just money.”

The Inner City Cultural Center fits Nodal’s description. They pioneered cultural diversity in the performing arts 25 years ago, especially with respected, non-traditionally cast productions of Shakespeare and Greek plays during the ‘70s.

Born out of the Watts riots, Inner City’s projects have often confronted the status quo. However, critics charge that Yoshitomi’s approach may be too cautious to effectively challenge the longstanding cultural apartheid.

“ ‘Celebrate California’ is an acknowledgement--at the same time it has to be carefully scrutinized,” says African-American playwright-performer Keith Antar Mason. “I feel a lot of resentment from local artists who belong to this first Third World city and who are getting ignored by institutions who are (ostensibly) opening up to multiculturalism.

“ ‘Multiculturalism’ is this token phrase. It’s not celebrating our differences, it’s exploiting them--a case of one step of progress and two steps back.”

Referring to the center’s presentation of Teatro Campesino’s 1970 work “Soldado Razo,” but also to other institutions’ quest for safe works, Mason said: “I think they’re blowing it when they go out and get a 20-year-old piece and put it in another community’s face.”

Performance artist Dan Kwong, whose “Boy Story” was recently presented as part of the “Fresh Tracks” series in the JACCC’s Doizaki Gallery, says the center is cautious about what it presents and takes measures to ensure that work isn’t controversial.

“It was important that the upper administration see a video of my piece so that they would not have any great surprises,” he says. “They have a rather conservative board and constituency. I would definitely say that they tend to be mainstream.”

Mason is more blunt about it.

“You’re not going to see Meri Danquah’s ‘Star Spangled Nigger,’ you are just not going to see it.”

Highways co-director Linda Burnham, where Danquah’s work was performed earlier this year, says there’s likely to remain a difference between the kind of work the Japanese American center presents and her organization’s programming.

“A lot of the people we’re presenting are emerging,” she explains. “I would imagine (the center) would sit back until they’ve seen a lot of work from a person. I would guess they’re looking at people with a greater track record.”

An economics major in college, Yoshitomi has a history with cross-cultural exchanges. He got his start as a Vista volunteer in Arizona, working with the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) programs, teaching crafts at a community college and running arts programs for migrant families sponsored by the Arizona Commission on the Arts.

Eventually, these pursuits lead him to the Santa Fe-based Western States Arts Foundation, a nonprofit umbrella organization of 10 state arts agencies. No sooner had Yoshitomi worked his way up to vice president and director of operations there, then the cultural and community center hired him away in 1981, at age 33.

Built in phases from 1980-1983, the decade-old center on San Pedro between 2nd and 3rd streets includes the six-story Center Building, the George J. Doizaki Gallery within the center, the 8,000-square-foot James Irvine Garden, the one-acre Noguchi-designed plaza and the 880-seat Japan America Theatre.

Launched in 1969 and incorporated as a nonprofit organization in September, 1971, the Japanese American center project is credited largely to the late George J. Doizaki, founder and CEO of American Fish Co. and center president from 1973 until his death. Yoshitomi, hired the year before Doizaki died, is the center’s first executive director.

With the completion of the theater in 1983, the center has fulfilled its original mission by programming traditional and contemporary Japanese and Japanese-American arts on the main stage, with an annual operating budget of about $2 million. They have also rented the stage to a variety of contemporary artists and performing groups.

The 1983-1986 “Explorations” series featured avant-garde dance, music, performance and theater from such artists as John O’Keefe, Molissa Fenley, Meredith Monk, Eric Bogosian, Tim Miller, Paul Dresher, Nancy Buchanan, Squat Theatre and others, the majority of whom were non-Asian.

“Celebrate California” isn’t the first time Yoshitomi has attempted to forge ties with other ethnic communities. In 1986, he helped form the Arts Consortium, an alliance inspired by ideas voiced at a 1984 meeting of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Founders of the consortium were the JACCC, the California Afro-American Museum in Exposition Park, the Craft and Folk Art Museum and Plaza de la Raza.

Hailed as the first such collaboration in the country between ethnic arts organizations, the consortium, funded by the W. M. Keck Foundation, published a bi-monthly calendar and sought to bolster the audience base and operations of the groups involved.

Housed since 1988 at Arts Inc., the current incarnation of the consortium now directs, among other projects, a multicultural internship program for young people.

Yet while Yoshitomi and current consortium chairman Patrick Ela both call the consortium a success, its current low profile suggests that it has succeeded as something other than what Yoshitomi had originally envisioned. In fact, Yoshitomi left the steering committee a few years ago when he no longer felt he had the time to devote to the venture.

Ela, director of the Craft and Folk Art Museum, says the group’s initial mandate has evolved. “Early on, one of our identity crisis points was the question of whether we should be self-serving or altruistic,” says Ela. “We came down on the side of wanting to serve the broader community.”

Yoshitomi tactfully remembered the debate, saying, “The question was that if we are a consortium, then what are we going to get--more members, more grants, those kinds of things? That was one of the obvious tensions. The other part of it was, groups are very different.”

Or it might have been that the consortium’s purpose was initially too ambiguous. “We’d been in consortiums before--with Cal Arts and MOCA for the Explorations series--and that made sense, all functioning as presenters,” Yoshitomi continues. “We knew what that was. This was different--with a community center, a gallery and us as a presenter.”

So, perhaps because of lessons learned from both the “Explorations” and consortium experiences, “Celebrate California,” remains under the control of one man and one organization.

Which may be why this program--as opposed to the consortium--was relatively easy to launch. “We took the need and went to foundations we thought would accept the concept--Hitachi, Wells Fargo and Rockefeller--and they were each supportive of the project,” says Yoshitomi.

“The corporations in L.A. are responsive,” he continued, when asked to respond to statements made by L.A. Festival director Peter Sellars criticizing corporate attitudes toward the multicultural arts. “Some have better track records than others, but they are recognizing the importance of multicultural programming.”

However, one local arts administrator remains skeptical, saying corporations have yet to prove their willingness to move beyond token allocations to ethnic arts organizations.

There have also been pragmatic motives for the JACCC’s long-standing willingness to make the facilities available to non-Japanese-American artists. “We needed the rentals. We needed to keep our crew working,” says Yoshitomi. “We have a small (fluctuating between 300-500) subscription base.”

Still, whatever the incentives, these catholic policies and methods have worked.

“The JACCC is one of the rare places in Los Angeles where there are mixed audiences,” says Yoshitomi. “Audiences that come here are willing to see new work. They’re not that typical, traditional arts-going audience that wants to hear or see the same thing they’ve seen 10 times before.”

It is, says Yoshitomi, a diversity of interest consistent with the cultural center’s ethos. “This center exists for many reasons,” he explains. “One of the reasons is so that Japanese-Americans can see work by other Japanese-Americans.

“On the other hand, the average non-Japanese American person is not going to buy 12 events at the JACCC every year for the rest of their lives.

“I wouldn’t be disappointed if every seat was sold out to a Hispanic or to a Japanese American. But in order to do our job right, we have to bring in non-Japanese and non-Japanese-American audiences to see work by Japanese Americans. We also don’t want to get in a situation where we end up with no Japanese Americans. Who knows what the mix should be?”

The fact of a mix at all--and the lack of other competing presenters--makes it that much easier, according to Yoshitomi. “I would love it if there were 10 other people doing these things,” says Yoshitomi, referring both to multicultural programming and the support of California artists.

Michael Alexander, artistic director of the nearby California Plaza, does present multicultural artists such as the dance group Great Leap (which has also been at the center) and the musical group Chatuye, although not subject to the demands of box-office faced by a venue such as the Japanese American center.

He sees the constraints facing Yoshitomi. “The struggle that we’re all facing is to reach beyond an inner circle of fans and open up what we’re doing to other people, to people who are not conditioned to seeing live entertainment and, more important, home-grown performance,” says Alexander.

“For a variety of reasons, media coverage being one of them, it’s hard to let people know L.A. is home to some phenomenal performing artists.

“It has to be a particular struggle for the JACCC to broaden what they’re doing,” Alexander continues. “I imagine people make an assumption that the JACCC presents Asian-American art and are not expecting to find multicultural artists there.”

While nearby Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Museum of Contemporary Art and The Womens’ Building also present both visual and performing arts, and Los Angeles Theatre Center and California Plaza present multicultural dance, music and performance, none of these other downtown venues come near the center’s means and capabilities.

Yet even with the newly oriented activity at the center, in a town such as L.A. that has experienced a dramatic reduction in the last half a dozen years of the number of available venues, there remains a need for more spaces for dance and performance art.

Which is why Yoshitomi has resisted the lure of long-term rentals, saying it would only exacerbate the imbalance between available venues and artists seeking stages. “The most creative work doesn’t fit into the houses (institutions) operate or into the administrative structures of those places,” he says.

“Large amounts of public funds are going into facilities that are not presenters,” Yoshitomi continues. “So the interesting places--LACE or Highways or other places--are not viewed as ‘legitimate’ organizations, but the more interesting art is being done there. That’s a mismatch of resources.

“We’re at the stage where obviously everyone recognizes that there should be greater diversity in terms of the work. What we’re having now is a discussion about who should control that work and whether or not there are singular centers of work.

Yet, ironically, Yoshitomi seems to be consolidating his control over L.A.’s multicultural landscape. What remains to be seen is how quickly or to what extent he will succeed.

“I think there will be a primary multicultural presenter, I don’t know if it will be (the center),” says the city’s Nodal.

“The question becomes: ‘Can we do more?’ says Yoshitomi. “We’re hoping to do more and we’ll just have to see.

“I don’t know long term what this means, whether it’s five events a year or three,” he says of the “Celebrate California” program.

“It went well overall. We broke even,” he continues. “80% of the people that came for Teatro (Campesino) came to the (Japanese American center) for the first time. We’re going to try and seek further funding for the ‘Celebrate California’ concept--maybe $50,000-$100,000 in contributed support for next year.”

Offering an anecdote to illustrate the mandate for multicultural programming at the center, Yoshitomi remembers a reception at the JACCC some years back after a screening of Luis Valdez’s “Corridos” on PBS.

“We scrounged what we could find for the food and we had some sushi and the Campesino folks had salsa and chips,” he said. “People started dipping the sushi into the salsa. Some people on our staff say it put Japanese culture back a hundred years, but apparently it was pretty good.”

It’s a gastronomic detente that provides the metaphor for the cultural scene at large, and the center’s role in the coming decade.

“What we’re really having now is an American culture. Campesino is not Mexican, it’s Chicano. It comes from that,” says Yoshitomi. “We do a lot of work from Japan here, but we also do work that is Japanese American. What we’re talking about is a new sense of what American work is, what art is.”