Hayden Goes to Japan to Protest Soka Expansion : Development: The assemblyman says he is making the trip as a private citizen to lobby against the proposed project in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) flew to Japan on Friday to press his opposition to Soka University’s plans to expand its Calabasas campus.

Hayden said that if the university “can lobby people here for their project, I see no reason we shouldn’t go there and lobby against it.” Hayden said he sees Soka’s plans as damaging to U.S.-Japanese relations, which he would like to see strengthened.

Soka University, affiliated with the Japan-based Buddhist lay organization Soka Gakkai, has fought efforts by state and federal park officials to acquire land it owns in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Earlier this year, Hayden, chairman of the Assembly Higher Education Committee, introduced legislation intended to make it difficult for Soka University to bill itself as a university and asked state and federal tax officials to consider revoking the school’s tax-exempt status.

Hayden said he expects to raise these and other issues in interviews with Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, and the magazine Shukan Bunshun. Hayden said he also plans to meet with a former leader of the group and others who have followed its activities in Japan.

Bernetta Reade, a Soka University spokeswoman, encouraged Hayden to visit the Soka campus in Japan.

“I think it would be an eye-opener for him,” she said. “It’s a fully accredited, viable university.”

Moreover, she said that Hayden should focus on such local problems as the growing number of homeless people in his Santa Monica-based district instead of heading “to Japan to stir up opposition to something that’s not even in his district.”

In 1986, the American branch of Soka Gakkai began buying land near Mulholland Highway and Las Virgenes Road for the university. The school provides English language classes to about 100 students from Soka’s Tokyo campus. Soka University wants to convert the school, now occupying a former Catholic seminary, into a 4,400-student liberal arts college.

About 248 acres of land Soka University owns has long been coveted by state and federal park officials as the ideal site for a Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area headquarters.

In an interview before his departure, Hayden described the trip, expected to last about four days, as “purely private” and said he is paying for it himself. Hayden said he hopes to learn more about Soka Gakkai’s activities in Japan, especially a recent financial scandal and splits within the organization.

In Japan, Soka Gakkai recently paid $4.5 million in back taxes in a bizarre tax evasion case involving unreported income from the sale of grave sites to its members. Soka Gakkai also has been implicated in the continuing Japanese securities scandal, which involves huge payments by brokerage firms to prominent clients to make up for investment losses.

Soka University officials maintain that those problems have nothing to do with them because the school is a separate nonprofit organization.

In light of the scandals in Japan, Hayden said, Japanese publications “want to report to readers there what is happening in California and Washington.”

Last week, the U.S. Senate voted to permit Santa Monica Mountains park agencies to try to acquire Soka University’s mountain campus through condemnation proceedings, but only if the school fails to obtain a zoning change that would allow it to build a major college.

In Sacramento this month, final consideration was postponed until next year on a bill by Sen. Nicholas C. Petris (D-Oakland), which appeared likely to boost the cost of the Soka land by up to $10 million.

Citing these developments, Hayden said Soka University opponents have made some progress in recent weeks, and he hopes his trip “will build opposition in Japan.”