Japanese-Americans Fear Rise of Hate Crimes : Prejudice: Local community is feeling the effects of furor over the trade imbalance and commemoration of attack on Pearl Harbor.

To an upscale Japanese-American family in Claremont, the harassment involved broken eggs, human feces slung on a front porch and a vulgar missive painted on an outside wall. “You Rice Ball,” the overnight vandal wrote.

To a program director at a well-known Asian-American center in Los Angeles, the hate mail is a regularly arriving nuisance: large envelopes containing slogans such as “Japs Go Home” and crude hand-drawn cartoons of people with yellow faces and devil’s horns. “It’s unsettling,” the director said.

To employees of the Japanese American Community and Cultural Center in downtown Los Angeles, the newest concern is even more unnerving--a bomb threat left on an answering machine. “You dirty Japs,” the anonymous voice intoned, vowing to destroy the center later this month. “We’ll get you.”

The cases represent a few of the more flagrant examples of Japan-bashing, a swelling tide of anti-Japanese activism that is causing widespread fear and anxiety in Los Angeles’ sizable Japanese-American community.

“We’ve been seeing quite a bit of it since October,” said Jimmy Tokeshi, regional director of the Japanese American Citizens League, which logs hate crimes and other acts of ethnic bias against people of Japanese ancestry. “And we’re anticipating more, unfortunately.”

Triggered by mounting U.S.-Japan trade tensions and 50th anniversary commemorations of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the anti-Japanese climate in Los Angeles has, if anything, grown worse, according to some concerned members of the Japanese-American community.

Issues on a global and local scale have been blamed--from Japanese House Speaker Yoshio Sakurauchi decrying American workers as “lazy” to the furor over whether a new Los Angeles Metro Rail construction project should go to the Japanese-owned Sumitomo Corp.

A lingering recession and the growing frustration of laid-off American workers have added to the difficulty, Tokeshi said.

In Los Angeles--home to 129,000 Japanese-Americans--the backlash has been felt in large and small ways. Hate crimes against Asian-Americans, including Japanese, numbered 49 in 1990, the last year for which the county has statistics. This year, about 15 incidents--most involving graffiti--have been logged by organizations such as Tokeshi’s.

Some of the hostility reflects inner-city tensions between Koreans and blacks, but some is directed at Japanese-Americans, said Ron Wakabayashi, 47, a third-generation Japanese-American who is executive director of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission.

“There has been a recent flurry of incidents, including hate mail, that’s raising people’s anxieties,” Wakabayashi said. “It’s not a large number, but it’s a shift . . . that represents obvious targeting of Japanese-Americans.”

The October incident at the home in Claremont and vandalism a month later at a Japanese center in Norwalk are two glaring cases, Wakabayashi said. In the past, he said, “you didn’t see any of that.”

Like many in the community, he considers himself caught in the middle--born and raised American, proud of his Japanese ancestry, and embarrassed by the political bickering between the two countries.

“If you ask me if I am Japanese, I would say no,” Wakabayashi said. “I’m Japanese-American. I’m emphatic about that. But if people are mad at Japan, rightly or wrongly, I’m going to (be harassed) because I’m here.”

Tokeshi, whose office is in the Japanese American Community and Cultural Center building, said the recent bomb threat there was directed at a ceremony scheduled Feb. 19 commemorating the 50th anniversary of Japanese-American interment during World War II. Additional security is planned, he said.

Marcia Choo, a very visible program director for the Los Angeles-based Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center, said she cannot recall when tensions have been higher. Immigrants of all nationalities are competing for a scarce number of jobs in Los Angeles, and Asians are easily identifiable targets of working-class anger, she said.

“What’s happening, really, is that people are not making the distinctions between Japanese government officials, or Japanese-Americans, or Koreans, or Thais,” Choo said.

When the public becomes inflamed over the comments of top-ranking Japanese government officials, all Asians tend to feel the backlash, she said.

In an election year, the political rhetoric about trade imbalances and the need to “buy American” is adding to the problem, she said. Hence, perhaps, the hate mail she has gotten--the large envelopes with their disturbing cartoons, which seem to be drawn by the same “nut case,” Choo said.

Yet, for many members of the Japanese-American community, the specter of bias is less personal, more subtly woven into the city’s fabric. “Park foreign cars here at your own risk,” warned a sign at one Los Angeles parking lot.

In Pasadena, homeowner Harley Cobb, 60, created a stir in January by planting a sign in his front yard that read: “Recession, It’s Your Fault. Don’t Buy Jap Products. Buy American. We’re Mad as Hell.”

Cobb said he regrets his use of the derogatory term Jap. “In a moment of anger I did that,” he said in an interview. Yet many neighbors seemed to support his sentiments; they would drive by during the two weeks the sign was up and say: “Way to go--we wish we had the guts to do that,” Cobb said.

Meanwhile, Cobb said, he was interviewed by a Japanese television station that has promised to broadcast his views to 50 million people overseas. “We also got some hate calls,” he added. One anonymous voice claimed membership in a group called the “Sons of the Rising Sun.”

“He said: ‘I’m going to murder your family (and) burn your house down just like we did at Pearl Harbor,’ ” Cobb said.

To many Japanese-Americans, such nationalistic jousting is not only disturbing, it is a sign of latent racism.

In mid-January, just before a crucial Los Angeles County Transportation Commission vote on the Metro Green Line contract, a sixth-grade class from a school in South-Central Los Angeles sent a packet of drawings to County Supervisor Gloria Molina. Most addressed the possible loss of American jobs if the commission were to stand firm in awarding the contract to the Sumitomo Corp.--which it did not.

One drawing showed a figure--apparently an American--kicking another person with slanted eyes. Two other drawings bore the motto: “Down with Japan.” Still another featured musical notes accompanied by the disquieting refrain, “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb.”

“Very disturbing” is how Jerry Hertzberg, Molina’s representative on the transportation commission, described the renderings. Last week, Hertzberg said, Molina visited the school to speak to the class about their attitudes.

“She talked to them about competition and fairness--how if you lose, you don’t call people names,” Hertzberg said.

Mas Fukai, a commission alternate, who initially voted in favor of the Sumitomo contract only to join the vote to rescind it, said it is ironic that Japanese-Americans seem to be bearing the brunt of the controversy. Fukai, a former World War II internee who spent three years at a camp in Arizona, said Japanese-Americans are sometimes their homeland’s harshest critics.

“If there’s any (group) that should be angry with Japan, it should be the Japanese-Americans,” he said, noting that Japan’s destruction of Pearl Harbor sparked most of the problems for Japanese-Americans during the war. “Now, 50 years later, we’re being harassed because of the success of what Japan is doing.

“Do I have to have a white face to be American?” he asked.

Kats Kunitsugu, 66, an executive secretary at the Japanese American Community and Cultural Center, expressed similar frustration.

“We expect to be treated like Americans . . . because we are,” she said. “We get just as uptight when (Japanese officials) criticize American workers as lazy, or whatever, because they’re talking about us.”

Kunitsugu, who spent two years as an internee during World War II, much of it enduring the cold and dust storms of Wyoming, talked of feeling “that same kind of anxiety all over again. It just seems so familiar--the same sort of building up of a black cloud. . . . You sort of feel helpless.”