COLUMN ONE : Japanese Roots Still Ignite Bias : Many Japanese-Americans say they continue to suffer from misconceptions that led to internment of their parents or grandparents.

The hate letter arrived via inter-office mail.

To Marvin Okumura, a third-generation American about to win his pilot’s wings at United Airlines, the 1990 tirade read like a World War II relic.

“Dear Jap Okamura,” the letter began. “All you Japs think you can buy or get anything you want. . . . Now a Jap pilot at United makes me puke. . . . Go fly at Nip Air where you belong.”

Fifty years after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, after the wartime propaganda that depicted Japanese as monkeys and monsters, and after the internment of about 120,000 people of Japanese descent, such overt hostility is rare.

Yet vestiges of anti-Japanese bias still linger in California. Many Japanese-Americans say they still suffer from the same misconceptions that led to the internment: Even now, some Americans fail to distinguish between citizens of Japan and American citizens of Japanese descent. They scapegoat Japanese-Americans when they are angry at Japan. And they persist in assuming that anyone with an Asian face must be an immigrant.

The message isn’t often as hateful as the Okumura letter. Nonetheless it rankles:

* Americans whose parents arrived in California near the turn of the century continue to receive infuriating “compliments” on how well they speak English. Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose) says he was congratulated at the opening of an auto plant in his district by a senior vice president for General Motors: “This guy’s making $800,000 a year and he says, ‘My, Mr. Congressman, you speak good English!’ ”

* A Japanese-American middle manager, dressed in a preppie-blue blazer, Oxford shirt and tie, walked up to a posh building in downtown Los Angeles about a year ago. Three Anglo men tried to hand him their car keys, apparently assuming he was the parking attendant.

* Third-generation Hawaiian Bruce Yamashita was dismissed from the U.S. Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Va., after his performance was found lacking by training officers he says hazed him with ethnic slurs. Among other things, the Georgetown Law School graduate charges that officers spoke to him in Japanese, apologized to him for not having tea and sushi in the mess hall, called him “Kawasaki Yamaha Yamashita” and other Japanese brand names, and told him to “go back to your country.”

After two investigations, the Marine Corps apologized, and in August invited Yamashita to return. “These innuendoes that you are not really an American, you are not really one of us--those are fighting words,” said Yamashita.

* In Norwalk last month, the walls of a Japanese-American community center were painted with such slogans as “Nip, go back to Asia.” It was the fourth vandalism or tire-slashing incident in recent years, said board member Hiroshi Ishii. Ironically, Ishii said, the center--which now serves a mixed ethnic clientele--was founded in the 1920s before Norwalk became a suburb. “We were there before they were,” he said.

Nevertheless, the center canceled its monthly fund-raiser after realizing that it would fall on Dec. 7--the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. “We were afraid something might happen,” Ishii said.

The Pearl Harbor anniversary, followed next spring by the 50th anniversary of the internment, gives new resonance to old questions about racism and xenophobia in California. It arrives as America grapples with a rising tide of hate crime, the emergence of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke as a political figure, renewed fights over affirmative action, a recession and a growing public resentment of Japan’s economic muscle.

Some see in the current Japan-bashing the echoes of the historical anti-Asian animus that came to be codified in federal and California law.

Chinese and Japanese immigrants were ineligible to become citizens under a series of federal laws dating to 1882, and they were forbidden to own land by a 1913 state law--a ban that was not lifted until after World War II, too late for many who lost their claim to homes and farms during the internment. Immigration from Japan was halted in 1924, and the ban on citizenship for the Japanese-born was not rescinded until 1952.

Immigrants from Japan first arrived in California in the late 1860s, fleeing poverty and political upheaval. The number of arrivals rose after Japan began to allow its citizens to emigrate in 1886 and peaked in the first decade of this century.

Agitation against the Chinese was in full swing by the time the Japanese arrived on the West Coast to be farm workers. They quickly became targets of the same “anti-Oriental” hostility the Chinese were facing, according to University of Cincinnati historian Roger Daniels. In 1905, San Francisco Chronicle headlines declared “The Japanese Invasion, the Problem of the Hour,” and warned that “the little brown men” undercut white labor and would never assimilate.

In a precursor of the “yellow peril” rhetoric that would reappear in World War II, William Randolph Hearst’s papers in 1906 announced: “Japan sounds our coasts; Brown men have maps and could land easily.” The paper also warned that Japanese immigrants were really spies in disguise.

Though the rhetoric died down, there remained a suspicion that Japanese immigrants and even their U.S.-born children did not have the ethnic right stuff to become “real Americans.” Then came Japan’s invasion of China, and Pearl Harbor.

“We were put in camps because people do not differentiate between Americans of Japanese ancestry and Japanese,” said Alan Nishio, an administrator at Cal State Long Beach. “It’s been getting better . . . but with the cold war no longer on the horizon and the Soviet Union and communism on the decline, the focus is going to be on economic competition. And that means a focus on Japan. And there’s a lot of racism that emerges out of that--and we become the brunt of it.”

During and immediately after the war, to be Japanese-American meant to try as hard as possible to distance oneself from Japan. Scarred by the accusations of disloyalty, parents who returned from internment camp did not teach Japanese to their children. Many lost their houses and never moved back to their old neighborhoods, shattering a historic pattern of segregated housing but also weakening community ties.

Playwright Philip Kan Gotanda, 41, remembers moving into white neighborhoods in Stockton when he was 13 and trying to be just like the other American kids on the block.

He watched Donna Reed and followed the careers of short baseball players. “It was a sense of wanting very much to have heroes like me,” he said. “You look in the mirror and your face doesn’t fit the American Dream.”

The sense of unease was reinforced by his mother, who warned him, “Now Philip, it’s OK to have white friends, but if anything bad ever happens, they can turn on you.”

But by the 1960s, the Asian enemy was North Vietnam, Tokyo was a non-threatening ally, and discrimination against Japanese-Americans lessened. The generation born after the war began to take interest in Japan, prompted by the civil rights movement, the nascent Japanese economic miracle and later, the “Roots” phenomenon.

Some who visited Japan were left with no illusions about their own identities.

“I never realized how American I was until I went to Japan,” said UCLA professor Harry Kitano, a Nisei, or second-generation American.

But Gotanda, who is of the third generation, describes a joyful epiphany walking down the street in Tokyo in 1970 and realizing that, for the first time in his life, everyone looked just like him.

“I suddenly felt this tremendous freedom, as though some weight had lifted off my shoulders,” Gotanda said. “I realized that it was the mantle of racism.”

He came home, got involved in the Asian-American movement, and is now the author of two plays about the Japanese-American experience. The first, titled “The Wash,” opens with a Nisei man eating a hot dog with rice, soy sauce and mustard.

As their political awareness has increased, so has the frustration of many Japanese-Americans when they are assumed to have deep loyalties to Japan--a notion not imposed on the children or grandchildren of European immigrants.

Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento), who sits on the House subcommittee on trade, said his race makes it more dicey to be an advocate of free trade while economic friction with Japan is rising. “I’m aware that my free-trade position could be interpreted as ‘He’s with Japan,’ ” Matsui said. “It annoys me that I have to be a little more careful.”

Los Angeles Board of Education member Warren Furutani sees a similar phenomenon in his own district, which spans African-American communities in Watts, old Japanese-American neighborhoods in Carson, a big contingent of Japanese corporate offices--and plenty of cross-cultural misunderstandings.

“There’s an assumption that because I’m (ethnic) Japanese, I have a strong backing from the Japanese corporations, which is just so far from the truth,” he said. “When someone in the Diet in Japan made a comment about African-Americans . . . I had to go out there and do damage control.”

Furutani added: “What happens between the U.S. and Japan has an impact on the Japanese-American community--whether we like it or not.”

Identified for so long with Japan, Japanese-Americans now worry that if relations between the two nations deteriorate, they could be caught in the cross-fire. Some express a deepening ambivalence about Japan: admiration mixed with irritation, ethnic pride tempered by exasperation at perceived Japanese misdeeds.

Nishio said he appreciates Japan’s rich culture, but is appalled by how it discriminates against its native Ainu people, Koreans and social outcasts known as “burakumins,” and by derogatory remarks by Japanese politicians about American blacks and Latinos. Yet he sees racist overtones in much of the current “Japan-bashing” in the United States.

“On the one hand, I feel the need to defend Japan from racist attacks,” Nishio said. “On the other hand, I’m very critical of many of Japan’s policies--but I do not want to be aligned with the Japan-bashers.”

The ambivalence can run deep.

Catherine Miyake Robinson, a 58-year-old teacher at Norwalk High School, complains that the media make banner headlines of Japanese “invading” and “buying up” California, while all but ignoring larger holdings by Europeans and Canadians.

At the same time, Robinson says the Japanese have been insensitive and inflammatory in buying American landmarks such as the Rockefeller Center, Universal Studios and the Pebble Beach golf course.

“They are making things very difficult for Japanese-Americans,” Robinson said. “But they live in Japan, and they don’t see it, and they don’t realize how much animosity they are causing.”

Okumura, the 33-year-old pilot, is married to a Japanese woman. Yet he says he is embarrassed by what he calls “the Japanese-Japanese.”

“I try to dissociate myself with Japanese-Japanese,” he said. They have yen to burn and an attitude of superiority--especially youngsters who “think they own the world,” he said.

Okumura said he recently asked a young Japanese man to stop smoking in a nonsmoking area of the airport.

“He flicks the cigarette on the rug!” Okumura said. “I couldn’t believe it. The Caucasians see this, and they say, ‘Look at those Japanese.’ Then they see a Japanese-American, and they ask, ‘How come you people are like that? And I say, ‘I’m not Japanese. I’m Japanese-American.’ ”

And though United Airlines was “very decent” about the hate letter, Okumura said he still finds himself having to explain to other pilots why the word Jap is derogatory.

“It’s getting better, but we’ve got a long, long way to go,” Okumura said.

These issues are likely to get a new airing next year when the community commemorates the exodus set in motion Feb. 19, 1942. That was the date President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the mass evacuation from the West Coast of all people of Japanese ancestry.

In a more private and poignant legacy, hundreds of white-haired Japanese-American couples will be celebrating their golden wedding anniversaries this winter.

“If you were going with someone in ’41 or ‘42, you had to decide: Were you going to get married, or risk never seeing the person again?” said J. D. Hokoyama, the product of one such wartime union.

Hokoyama’s father, now suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease, recently received his $20,000 reparations check and formal government apology.

“We told him about it but we don’t know if it registered or not,” Hokoyama said.

Though the apology helped ease the humiliation and bitterness, the internment remains the seminal experience of an entire generation of Japanese-Americans. Many still divide their lives into epochs they call simply “before camp” and “after camp.”

The campaign for redress persuaded Congress that the United States had violated the civil rights of its own citizens. But it also enraged some World War II veterans, survivors of Japanese military atrocities and those who thought the internment was justified, and fueled a small but tenacious revisionist movement with anti-Japanese overtones.

The most vocal defender of the internment is Lillian Baker, a Gardena writer who has argued that there was no barbed wire at Manzanar, that the relocated citizens were free to leave the camps as soon as they proved their loyalty and that the mass evacuation was not based on race.

“There were 25,000 people of Japanese descent who were residing in other states who were never touched. So how can we say this was racism?” said Baker, whose writings have earned her a small following.

“This is total and utter garbage,” countered UC San Diego historian Peter Irons. “It’s the same kind of stuff that’s put out by people who deny the Holocaust happened.”

A California Poll conducted in October found that 66% believe the internment of U.S. citizens was wrong. But 30% think it was justified. Although the percentage of those supporting the internment has been been steadily dropping since the war, polls reveal a residue of distrust of Japanese-Americans.

Polls taken throughout the last decade found that between 14% and 18% of the population held negative attitudes toward Japanese-Americans, believing for example that they have not made good citizens. About the same percentage consistently expressed negative feelings toward Japan in other polls. No polls have measured whether the two sentiments are related.

In the latest California Poll, 19% of those who were alive at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack said they still consider Japan an enemy, as did 12% of those 30 to 49.

This is also roughly the same fraction of Japanese-Americans who reported experiencing recent discrimination. In a rare poll of third-generation Japanese-Americans, taken in three California cities in 1980, 13% said they had experienced some act of discrimination as an adult, said Stephen S. Fugita, director of ethnic studies at the University of Santa Clara who conducted the poll. However, three-quarters said they thought there was social bias against them.

Now, however, a new group of fourth-, fifth- and even sixth-generation Americans seems to be having a very different American experience. Although some of their parents were born behind barbed wire, up to 95% of the students in Asian studies classes at UCLA say they have never experienced discrimination, said Kitano.

Moreover, at least 55% now marry non-Japanese, raising questions about whether Japanese-Americans will be a distinct ethnic group in 50 years.

Because of low birth and immigration rates, Japanese-Americans now number less than 850,000 nationwide, the 1990 census found. Though that is a 21% increase over 1980, the Japanese-American population is now only half the size of the much faster-growing Chinese-American community. There are fewer than 313,000 Japanese-Americans in California and not even 130,000 in Los Angeles County, the census found.

Moreover, in interviews, young people tend to express a new level of comfort with their ethnic identity.

Tony Osumi, the 24-year-old son of a Japanese-American father and a Jewish-American mother, calls himself “a scrambled egg” and likes to spice his conversation with both Japanese and Yiddish words. Being multicultural in the 1990s, especially in Los Angeles, is a social advantage, says Osumi, adding, “I have combinations of each but I’m not a hard-core anything.”

And young people are much more likely than their elders to brush off--or tell off--those who would tar them with old stereotypes. Christine Yoshioka, 24, of San Diego, is a sixth-generation American whose ancestor came to America with Commodore Perry in the 1850s.

“Recently some one told me, ‘Oh, you speak English very well,’ ” said Yoshioka, who dismissed the incident with a laugh. “I just thought, ‘What a stupid thing to say.’ ”