The Proud Survivors : Members of Local Chapter Say the Japanese Won’t Be on Their Anniversary Guest List

From a distance, the amazing thing about the 50 or so cars in the parking lots and streets surrounding the meeting hall is that almost every one is American: Cadillacs, Chevrolets, Fords, Chryslers.

Up close, it’s easy to see why. On the license plates, below and to the left of the word “California,” are stamped the words: “Pearl Harbor Survivor.”

Inside, the men who were at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, wear campaign hats studded with souvenir pins, aloha shirts and white trousers. With their wives, about 150 people fill the American Legion hall for their monthly meeting.

The men are in their late 60s or early 70s. If they’ve forgiven anyone for the surprise attack--”sneak attack” is the preferred term here--they haven’t forgotten. They say they’re not inviting any Japanese to the 50th anniversary ceremonies at Pearl Harbor this December because “we didn’t invite them the first time.”

Most members of Orange County Chapter 14 of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn. profess no bad feeling for the Japanese--though they may think the government of Japan is unfair--and don’t seem bitter.

“We are dedicated to the memory of Pearl Harbor and to those gallant Americans who gave their lives for their country on Dec. 7, 1941,” the group proclaims on its magazine, which displays a picture of the stark white memorial above the sunken remains of the battleship Arizona.

The group claims a membership of about 10,000. California has the most of any state, more than 2,000. Chapter 14 numbers about 250, not all of them active, according to its president, Tony Iantorno.

“Today everybody’s got Japanese cars,” Iantorno says. “I don’t.”

“I like to keep the American workers working,” he says. “I made my money and a good pension from the Americans; I belong to the local union. . . . The Japanese do have good cars, but I don’t know, I just don’t feel . . .”

Warren Hutchens of Westminster, like Iantorno, was in the 251st Coast Artillery at Camp Malakole, a few miles from Pearl Harbor, on the morning of the attack. “I was a bugler,” says Hutchens, a man who was hated when he blew reveille but loved when he sounded the notes for payday.

Hutchens says the Japanese people are “all right, but I just don’t particularly care for their government, the way they’re selling us all these Japanese goods.

“A lot of people say: ‘Well, who won the war?’ You see all the Japanese products around, and figure, well, maybe they won it economically.”

Iantorno makes it back to Pearl Harbor for the association’s every-fifth-year ceremonies at the Arizona. Hutchens says he’s skipping this year’s and hasn’t visited the Arizona since 1966, the 25th anniversary of the attack. The memorial is “kind of sad when you think about it, all those who lost their lives,” he says.

Joe Garrison of Huntington Beach hasn’t seen the Arizona since 1946, long before the memorial was built. Although he belongs to the association, he says he seldom attends the meetings.

Garrison was called as a potential juror last year in the trial of three people accused of attacking a Japanese-American couple in Anaheim, killing the woman and crippling her husband.

“I told the judge . . . I was at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese tore hell out of that place and killed 2,400 people. I don’t think too kindly about that. I resented the Japanese government quite a bit. . . . In fact I still resent the Japanese government and the Japanese businessmen because of what they’re doing in world commerce. You’re not dealing with a level playing field. . . .

“I don’t personally know any Japanese people. I hold no ill will against any Japanese people. But I do resent the Japanese government and what their businessmen are doing. Never in my life have I bought a Japanese car and in all probability I never will.”

Still, Garrison says he’s amused that the survivors’ group had to face the fact that “the only place big enough to hold a reunion in Hawaii is in a hotel that’s owned by Japanese.”

Lenore Rickert was a nurse in the 1930s at what was then called the Orange County General Hospital and is now UCI Medical Center. At the time of the attack, she was a U.S. Navy nurse at the Naval Hospital at Pearl Harbor. Now retired in Laguna Hills, she has a different view.

Rickert, who does drive a Japanese car, said she joined the group only recently but doesn’t expect to attend another meeting because she thinks her fellow members are too bitter.

It would seem if anyone would have cause for bitterness, it would be the 77-year-old Rickert. After all, the man who later became her husband was captured on Wake Island at the start of World War II and was a prisoner of the Japanese for the next 3 1/2 years.

Albert Rickert “looked like the devil” when he was released at war’s end, a 6-footer who weighed only 117 pounds after years of a terrible diet. But he “said the Japanese weren’t eating any better in their homes. He wasn’t bitter.”

After the war, “we just got on with our lives,” Rickert said. One legacy of the Tokyo prison camp, in which there was constant talk by prisoners about their favorite meals, their mothers’ recipes and what they wanted to eat when they were finally freed, was her husband’s choice of a postwar profession.

He decided that if he couldn’t get his old job back with an Indianapolis newspaper, he would have something to do with food. So it was that Rickert, who died eight years ago, wound up working for a salmon fishery in the state of Washington.