Royal Visit Gives Show of Respect : Communities: Tours reflect the strides Los Angeles immigrants have made in building cultural institutions. Many see it as a coming-of-age party.

When Japanese Emperor Hirohito visited here in 1975, he dined with 500 notables at the Music Center, but he did not travel down 1st Street to visit Little Tokyo. This week, however, his son, Akihito, has gone out of his way to pay his respects to the Japanese American community.

Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko have called on the many institutions the community has built in the two decades since Hirohito visited--a massive cultural center and theater complex, a nationally prominent history museum, and a retirement home complete with an elaborate Japanese garden.

At each stop, they have expressed understanding of the hardships and appreciation of the achievements of immigrants from Japan.

Many Japanese Americans say they consider this visit a kind of coming-of-age party for a community that has struggled for more than a century for acceptance in America--and for respect from Japan.

“It’s like a stamp of approval . . . a total acceptance and recognition of what we’ve achieved up to now,” said Bruce Kaji, a real estate developer and founding president of the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. “It’s a tremendous opportunity for Japanese to see what Japanese Americans have had to suffer, how we’ve overcome and how we’ve succeeded.”

Japanese Americans say they have often felt that Japanese nationals looked down on them for their peasant origins and for their relative ignorance of Japanese culture. They watched their mom-and-pop stores squeezed out of Little Tokyo by big Japanese corporations.

But in recent years, they have learned to work with Japanese companies to raise money for community institutions. And the success of Japanese Americans in mainstream American institutions, from universities to law firms to Congress, has helped gain the respect of Japanese nationals.

The visit of the royal couple to the community before departing Wednesday for San Francisco meant different things to different generations.

Ninety-two-year-old Fujie Goto, who grew up in Hawaii and worked as a maid and laundress much of her life, was moved to tears when she shook the hands of the royal couple at her retirement home in Boyle Heights. “Aren’t they sweet? . . . To think that people like that can talk so nice to you,” Goto said.

But most young Japanese Americans have little interest in Japan and simply consider the emperor and empress foreign dignitaries, said Michael Okamura, a fourth-generation Californian. Nonetheless, Okamura, a 32-year-old banker, said he appreciated the chance to meet them at the history museum: “It was great to have that connection again after so many generations.”

At the museum, the emperor and empress viewed the wicker baskets in which emigrants from Japan packed their clothes at the turn of the century. They saw the bullwhips and short-handled hoes that marked the harsh lives of the plantation workers, and photos of “picture brides” sent to meet husbands in America.

They viewed a model of the U.S. internment camp at Manzanar where thousands of Japanese Americans were incarcerated without due process during World War II, and the computers with which families can look up the internment history of their relatives.

They lingered at each exhibit, seeming reluctant to be led away by their guide. Afterward, they talked with museum trustees, including Francis Sogi, a partner with the law firm Kelley Drye & Warren, and with Henry Ota, a lawyer and partner in Pillsbury Madison & Sutro.

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For first- and second-generation Japanese Americans, most of them older than the emperor, his visit brought back memories of the values of their parents. Asked about those values, some issei and nisei began murmuring in Japanese the Imperial Rescript on Education--a list of moral imperatives issued by Akihito’s grandfather, Emperor Meiji, in 1890 and memorized by Japanese children on both sides of the Pacific for decades afterward.

To Americans, this pledge of allegiance to Confucian values--and the emperor--was seen as a prescription for emperor worship and imperialist fanaticism, and it was abolished by the occupying forces after Japan’s defeat.

But to older Japanese Americans, most of its exhortations seem exemplary: Be dutiful to your parents, true to your friends, study hard, cultivate the arts and work for the public good.

“We’ve lost that,” said Yoshiko Sakurai, 76, a second-generation Japanese American. “Countries don’t have moral education anymore.”

Hitoshi Sameshima, 73, said the visit of the emperor has reminded him that it was only recently that he has come to understand what his parents were trying to teach him about the essential Japanese values of gaman, giri and on-- perseverance, duty and obligation.

The younger generation seems to have rejected these values in favor of outspoken demands for their rights, he said. It all came home to him recently when his daughter was pulled over by police while he was riding with her in her car. To his amazement, she argued with the police officer, refused to sign the ticket, and later fought the citation in court--successfully.

“I thought, oh my God, in my generation you’d sign the ticket right away,” Sameshima said.

He said it is a good thing the younger generation is more assertive, but he is still a bit nostalgic for some of the old values.

“Our parents brought all that over and tried to instill it in us,” he said. “But as the generations move on it fades away.”