Are Japanese Firms Importing Prejudice? : Workplace: Employees tell a House panel that their foreign bosses discriminate against Americans in hiring and promotions.

Do we Americans really dislike the Japanese? What cause do we have for malice? Who among us has been truly threatened, wronged or otherwise hurt as a consequence of Japan’s formidable economic power?

These questions have been haunting the rarefied debate over U.S.-Japan relations for years, and now a congressional panel is offering a new high-resolution focus for the quandary: racial bias in the workplace. The issue--a potentially explosive one--is that American citizens are allegedly being discriminated against, not just at their own capable hands, but by foreigners , namely Japanese corporate employers.

Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), chairman of the House Government Operations subcommittee on employment and housing, sees an “institutional pattern” of discrimination against women, minorities and even white males in the managerial ranks of Japanese operations in the United States. He believes that there is sufficient anecdotal evidence of this to warrant a full-scale investigation by the General Accounting Office, which he says he will request.

“They’re crying out in anguish as Americans being discriminated against in their own country,” Lantos said last Thursday at the subcommittee’s second public hearing on the matter.

Lantos had ominously declared at the first hearing in Washington last month: “I think we are opening an ugly chapter in U.S.-Japan relations.”

Indeed, the timing is critical in this 50th anniversary year of the attack on Pearl Harbor, when latent tension looms on both sides of the Pacific. Job discrimination is an issue that strikes at the core of conflicting societal values--and legal practices--separating the two countries. And the Japanese may well be importing a corporate culture that quashes individualism and belittles women back home, and bringing with them ingrained attitudes of racial intolerance.

The inquiry runs a high risk of being associated with the emotional “Japan-bashing” syndrome that harsh critics of Japan are often accused of by the Japanese side, as well as by American sympathizers and hired guns.

“This is the worst McCarthyism I’ve ever seen at a congressional hearing,” said Keith B. Bardellini, a lawyer for NEC Electronics, which was one of the companies accused of discrimination in testimony.

“The question we have to ask is why aren’t they doing this to non-Japanese companies?” Bardellini said. “Why single out the Japanese? It’s basically racist.”

Whether French multinationals draw as many discrimination complaints as Japanese ones is impossible to know, because the Labor Department does not break down such statistics by foreign ownership. But Lantos said he decided to probe the Japanese business community after detecting a unique pattern of problems.

“This is not scapegoating,” Lantos said in an interview.

Witnesses, meanwhile, spoke for themselves. Pearl McCoy, a former middle manager at Sanwa Bank in San Francisco and a black woman, testified that she had been told by Japanese superiors that “blacks can’t get ahead because they are lazy.”

Caught up in the workaholic aura of the Japanese bank, McCoy said she blamed herself when she was laid off on economic grounds.

“I worked 12 to 14 hours a day, three weekends a month,” McCoy told the subcommittee, fighting back tears. “When I finally took my vacation, I was told I was lazy.”

The banking industry is of particular interest in California because a steady stream of Japanese acquisitions has placed about 25% of the state’s banks under Japanese ownership.

Consider the case of Karl J. Biniarz. He was vice president and general manager of the San Diego branch of Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank of California until he was fired last year--in what appears to have been partly a standard personnel dispute and partly a simmering conflict over the bank’s unwritten personnel policies.

Biniarz testified that he was denied bonuses given Japanese counterparts in parallel positions, and deprived of real managerial authority, shut out of the loop of decision-making that admitted only expatriate managers from Japan.

A senior executive from DKB of California, a subsidiary of the world’s largest bank, told him explicitly not to hire women or blacks as loan officers, he said.

Biniarz claims that he was “physically attacked” by a Japanese superior at the time he was fired last year, and is suing the bank.

In subsequent testimony, Ryusaburo Wada, the bank’s president, defended DKB’s policies on hiring minorities and localizing management.

“We are an American bank whose goal is to have American men and women of all races and national origins in all positions at the bank,” Wada said.

But Lantos chastised Wada and executives representing two other Japanese employers for making upbeat statements that contradicted their track records. Visibly frustrated and raising his voice as he attempted to ferret out figures on the number of Americans in top management ranks, Lantos exploded at one point.

“A 5-year-old child of average intelligence would not believe these statements,” he said. “This subcommittee doesn’t believe these statements. And the American people won’t believe these statements.”

Lantos’ hyperbole echoes a growing sense of suspicion and frustration among the public toward Japan.

Pollsters have been telling us for several years now that as the Cold War subsides, more Americans perceive the Japanese economic challenge as a threat to our national security than the Soviet nuclear strike force.

A Times Mirror poll conducted last year found a conspicuous rise in unfavorable opinion toward Japan, compared to a similar survey taken three years earlier.

Although the majority still had positive attitudes about Japan, those with negative views rose from 27% in 1987 to 39% in 1990. Moreover, analysts found disillusionment toward Japan had spread into symbolic groups that had previously been friendly.

“Dislike for Japan has become more mainstream; it is no longer primarily concentrated among the kinds of people who have been hit especially hard by Japanese competition,” researchers reported. “We see a link between the rise in economic pessimism and growing dislike of Japan.”

A recent Yankelovich Clancy Shulman study, conducted for Saatchi & Saatchi advertising, found an alarming 72% of respondents “believe that Japanese industry and government are committed to dominating the world economy.” As many as 81% expressed “concern” about the increased presence of Japanese products and investment in the United States, with 41% saying they are “very concerned.”

The ad company followed with its own “emotional and cultural research” and concluded that “ambivalence” toward Japan expressed in interviews--statements such as “They make high-quality products . . . but they ruined our auto industry”--reflected a “wounded national pride.”

Americans’ “psychological needs” demand a “scapegoat,” Saatchi & Saatchi tells its Japanese clients, and that scapegoat is Japan.

The mood of the man on the street surfaces again among America’s pundits. Take, for instance, “The Coming War With Japan,” a provocatively titled book by two little-known academics in Pennsylvania. It postulates that the long-simmering trade war between the two countries could lead to military confrontation in the future.

A study purportedly commissioned by the CIA, “Japan: 2000,” concludes that Tokyo is bent on world economic domination and makes other controversial recommendations on U.S. industrial policy. An unofficial draft of discussions at a two-day closed seminar by Japan scholars and CIA analysts at Rochester Institute of Technology, it was leaked earlier this year to a storm of denial. Participants said the draft inaccurately recorded their views.

The positive side to the rising anxiety is that it appears to stem from a better base of understanding of Japan than the knee-jerk reactions of a decade ago, when claims were made that Japan was taking away American jobs. Now, Japanese companies operating in the United States provide employment to about 300,000 American workers, even if the vast majority are blue-collar manufacturing jobs.

“Negative perceptions of Japan in the United States are getting more informed,” said Steven Clemons, executive director of the Japan-America Society of Southern California. “I see more sophistication these past several years, with criticism more focused on specific issues.”

Even Chet Mackentire is somewhat philosophical about a bitter experience with his former Japanese employer, San Jose-based Ricoh Corp.

He claims he helped Ricoh successfully launch its optical disk division before being terminated for economic reasons. Mackentire won a favorable finding on his discrimination complaint by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and is now fighting his case in court.

“My experience is that we’re just now beginning to enter the classroom in terms of learning about Japan,” Mackentire said in an interview. “I’ve done a lot of reading on Japanese business practices and I’ve always had the greatest respect for the people. But not enough Americans understand what’s going on here. They figure that’s it, we’re defeated and there’s nothing we can do.”

Mackentire testified that he felt “professionally raped” by Ricoh. His fiancee, he added, left him because he was working too hard under heavy pressure from Ricoh.

“American-born Caucasians are becoming a minority,” Mackentire lamented before the Lantos subcommittee. “I feel like a foreigner in my own land.”