Japanese Advertisers Lie Low for Pearl Harbor Day : Marketing: One firm explains that it would be disrespectful to place ads in U.S. media that are marking 50th anniversary of attack on American fleet.

“Day of Infamy” is the cover story of the new issue of Time magazine, but the usual glossy advertisements for Toyotas and Nissans won’t be found inside.

With few exceptions, Japanese companies are lying low as America’s media mount a massive retrospective of the 50th anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

Most Japanese advertisers have shunned the television specials planned by ABC, NBC and CBS next week, and many wrote Time and Newsweek asking that their ads be rescheduled so as not to coincide with news coverage of the Pearl Harbor anniversary, according to advertising sources and spokesmen for the networks and magazines.

“My understanding is that there are no Japanese sponsors,” said CBS spokeswoman Catherine Upin. The network will air a two-hour special Dec. 7, featuring retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Charles Kurault and an interview from Pearl Harbor with World War II airman George Bush, whose plane was shot down by Japanese fighters over the Pacific. The main sponsor will be the National Pork Producer’s Council.

The Japanese “made it clear they didn’t want to be a part of it,” Upin said.

At U.S. News & World Report, the Nov. 25 issue carried ads from Minolta, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Isuzu, Panasonic and Canon. The Dec. 2 issue, with the cover story “Pearl Harbor: America Fights Back,” has no ads for Japanese products, magazine officials said.

Likewise, only two Japanese-owned corporations, Canon and Mazda, bought ads in recent issues of Newsweek and National Geographic that carried articles about the Pearl Harbor attack, representatives of the two magazines said.

“This is really the only time when most of us can remember anything quite like this,” said Newsweek spokeswoman Diane Pearson.

Spokesmen for Toyota and Sony denied Tuesday having any type of advertising blackout policy. Calls to Canon and Mazda were not returned. But a spokesman for Minolta said the company’s decision not to advertise was routine.

“We think it would be disrespectful to place ads urging people to buy Japanese products on a day when Pearl Harbor is being commemorated,” said Gary Holmes, a spokesman for Minolta. “We’re trying to be sensitive to American feelings.”

Japan’s surprise attack on the Hawaiian port Dec. 7, 1941, killed 2,403 Americans and brought the United States into World War II. Some Japanese fear the anniversary of the attack could incite more “Japan-bashing” in America.

Minolta’s ad agency, Bozell Inc. of New York, had sent a letter to media outlets in August saying, “It is imperative for Minolta not to advertise in any issue containing editorial content related to this event,” Holmes confirmed.

ABC received similar letters from ad agencies asking for “sensitivity” in scheduling spots for Japanese products during the entire Pearl Harbor commemoration week, network spokesman Jeff De Rome confirmed. Its Pearl Harbor documentary, which airs Dec. 5, was made in collaboration with the Japanese network NHK, De Rome said, and though the advertising slots sold out, none of the buyers were Japanese. “Common sense would dictate and sensitivity would suggest that you not place spots where they might be in a bad environment for the product,” De Rome said. “That goes on all the time. You wouldn’t put an ad for ‘Fly United’ after scenes of a plane coming down or an auto ad after a calamitous car crash.”

Though it is common practice for a single advertiser, or group of airlines, to yank ill-timed ads, the size of the de facto Pearl Harbor boycott is unusual, said Fred Danzig, editor of Advertising Age, a weekly industry newspaper.

“You’d have to look pretty hard, I think, to find something comparable,” Danzig said. ‘It would be fair to say that it is unprecedented that that much revenue is withheld. I suppose for the weekly magazines, we’re talking well into the millions of dollars. And it comes, of course, at a terrible time, because magazines are not doing that well to begin with.”

Not so, said Fred Drasner, president and chief executive officer of U.S. News & World Report, who called the Pearl Harbor retreat a “non-story.”

“Earlier in the year, these advertisers, as far as we were concerned, knew this was going to happen and they bought other issues. . . , “ Drasner said. “I know for a fact we lost no money. They just rescheduled.”

Similarly, Holmes said Minolta’s ads for fax machines and copiers will simply run on other dates. “The advertising dollars will be spent as they’ve been allocated, but they’re just being shifted around,” he said.

But not all publishers were as sanguine, especially about the loss of ads for Japanese cars. Fall is the season when car makers traditionally unveil their new models, and auto ad revenues are a staple of the media diet.

When National Geographic informed Japanese advertisers, as a business courtesy, that the December magazine would carry an article about Pearl Harbor, “We had $1.8 million worth of advertising that did not run in that issue,” said Robert B. Sims, senior vice president for the National Geographic Society.

“It’s pretty hard to recoup from that until next October, November, or December,” he added. “And we hope that our business relationship (with Japanese advertisers) is good enough from the way we’ve handled this that they’ll be with us again.”

Mindy Geller, a spokeswoman for Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. in Torrance, insisted that the auto maker had neither yanked nor rescheduled any of its ads, and will be paying for plugs on TV entertainment shows as usual during Pearl Harbor week.

“It’s 1991 now, and not 1941,” Geller said.