RACE RELATIONS : Cultures Clash in Denver as 6 Students Are Mugged : The victims feel shame, not outrage, as they and fellow Japanese try to understand savagery. The city responds with sympathy.

In a circle on the autumn grass, the six of them sat, Japanese college freshmen singing to the chords of a $400 second-hand guitar.

Their English was new and hesitant, and they apologized for it to the four young men who came at them suddenly, out of the dark, demanding money.

The students may not have understood the insults the four began screaming at them. But they understood very well the baseball bats and the sticks. The young men lifted the weapons high, like “golf swings,” like “home run swings,” one suspect later told police. The blows cut open the students’ heads, bruised their ribs. The guitar was smashed.

Afterward, police said, one suspect had mentioned the incident to a girl he knew, had told her: “It’s too bad (we) ruined a good guitar.”

What happened to six Japanese college students here in a public park on an October night is giving this city a sharp lesson in tolerances and frictions in a diminished world.

It is the most public and most serious test, said Assistant Dist. Atty. Chuck Lepley, of Colorado’s relatively new anti-ethnic intimidation law for those offenses that, under the rubric of “hate crimes,” are being noted throughout the country with heightened frequency and intensity.

For 340 Japanese students, the first enrolled at Teikyo Loretto Heights University in Denver, the fourth and newest of the U.S. campuses operated by the Japanese university, the assault on six friends has been a shove beyond the classroom out into the streets of America.

And, for the university itself, whose credo stresses the “inherent value of each person” and the “capacity to respect such value in all other persons,” there is the labor of knitting this small piece of savagery into a larger quilt of American culture.

To that end, within a week of the arrests of four young American men last month, the university invited about 30 American students from other schools onto campus, giving them free quarters if they would room with Japanese students, help with their English and answer their questions.

They had planned to integrate the campus one day, but the attack in Dartmouth Park hurried it along. The Japanese students “want to be as typically American as possible,” said James Burge, Teikyo Loretto Heights’ residence hall life coordinator. And here, he said, would be Americans to show them how, to talk to and ask questions of, “and not think, ‘Is he going to swing a baseball bat at me?’ ”

An American student, eager to join the program, told a staff member: “I wanted to come here because I wanted them to know we’re not all this way.”

The attack “showed us something about our students,” assistant residence life coordinator Vickie Anderson said.

American victims would have been righteously outraged; these six were ashamed to see their names in the newspapers here and in Japan. Americans would be eager for justice; police officers had to follow trails of blood from the park to the dorms to find the victims.

Americans would be demanding action; some Japanese students--although acknowledging that they too had sometimes been insulted by strangers--faulted their classmates as rude or imprudent in celebrating a birthday and making music--making noise--in a park at 1:30 in the morning.

The paradox is captured by Tsuyoshi Kikuchi, a freshman business student. He likes Denver but is not altogether sure Denver likes him: “Some are cold to us. They hate Japanese.” He has heard obscene insults from strangers on the street. But, as for those six in the park, “I think Japanese students were wrong to do that.”

So they were astonished by the city’s response: Strangers phoned to apologize, to invite them to Thanksgiving dinner, to plays, to speak at high school classes.

“Good does come out of bad sometimes,” Anderson said, “and this may be one of those times.”

Four young white men, two of them brothers, have been charged under the 1988 ethnic intimidation law.

In the brothers’ home, police found, besides bats and sticks, a copy of “Clockwork Orange,” about a pack of futuristic street toughs, an address book with Ku Klux Klan notations and a KKK card belonging to someone else.