Anxiety and Shock Grip Little Tokyo : Reaction: Visitors and residents are distressed at inability to contact relatives in quake-ravaged area of Japan.

In Little Tokyo, traditional heart of Los Angeles’ Japanese community, anxious shopkeepers and visitors closely examined copies of Japanese newspapers filled with graphic accounts of destruction.

Shop windows displayed bulletins bearing the latest word from back home, while residents monitored television and radio accounts of calamity in a nation known for its sense of order.

Anxiety, even shock, were etched in the faces of shoppers, business people and others who sought the comforting rigor of routine on the unroutine day, less than 24 hours after an earthquake devastated the Japanese city of Kobe and environs.

Both U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry and Japanese visitors experienced a collective trauma Tuesday as many endeavored to learn the fates of friends and relatives. The Los Angeles area has one of the largest concentrations of people of Japanese descent outside of Japan.

With telephone communications difficult, particularly to the hard-hit cities of Kobe and Osaka, a doleful sense of uncertainty numbed those desperate for information.

“I’m very worried,” said Yuji Ishizaki, a sound engineer from Osaka who arrived in Los Angeles early Monday on the first leg of a planned two-month tour of the United States.

News of the disaster had shattered Ishizaki’s itinerary. On Tuesday, he sat, red-eyed and disconsolate, on a Little Tokyo bench, explaining that he had been unable to contact his mother in Osaka.

Stymied in efforts to reach Japan, many turned to the Japanese Consulate, Japanese-owned hotels and businesses and other potential intermediaries. Others set up makeshift networks to pool what little word trickled through. More often than not, those grasping for reliable information were frustrated.

“They call us, but what can we do?” asked Genichi Kadono, president of the Japanese Assistance Network, a Hollywood firm that specializes in providing translators for visiting Japanese tourists.

On Tuesday, the network’s operators were busily fielding calls from U.S. residents seeking word on relatives and others in Japan. A year ago, the situation was reversed: People filled the lines from Japan with worries about loved ones here in the wake of the Northridge earthquake.

“There’s a great void of information,” concluded Naomi Hirahara, editor of the English section of Rafu Shimpo, a bilingual Los Angeles-based newspaper.

The images of ruin, she said, recalled the grainy footage of another Japan, the nation devastated a generation ago by World War II. “I can’t imagine how all these people are getting by,” Hirahara said.

At the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles, besieged by inquiries, officials posted and were updating lists of the dead throughout the day. There has been a rush of visa and passport applications from anxious U.S. residents of Japanese descent, Seiichiro Noboru, Japanese consul general, told reporters.

U.S. and Japanese corporations--both major donors to relief efforts after the Northridge quake--have again been quick to offer assistance.

“The people of Japan reached out to help us in our time of need and now we are honored to do the same for them,” declared Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan, who will serve as honorary chairman of the just created Osaka/Kobe Earthquake Recovery Fund.

In Little Tokyo, people gathered outside a shop where the owners posted the latest Japanese newspapers, featuring stark black-and-white images of buckled freeways, derailed trains and toppled buildings. The photographs prompted more than one onlooker to contemplate the consequences if such a quake--about twice as strong as the Northridge temblor--were to strike Southern California.

“In Los Angeles, maybe I could be saved because the damage would be scattered,” hypothesized Yoko Ano, a travel agency worker and native of Japan who has lived in the United States for 16 years. “But in Tokyo, once it happens, there will be fires and no place to go.”

While glued to news accounts, many enduring the uncertainty also sought spiritual succor. Switchboards lit up at churches and temples serving the Japanese and Japanese American communities.

“I’m just waiting for news and praying to God,” said the Rev. Shiro Cato, an associate minister at Centenary United Methodist Church in Little Tokyo. In particular, he worried about his 102-year-old aunt and other relatives in Kobe. “I have faith in God,” Cato said. “That’s what I need now.”

Times staff writer Patrick J. McDonnell contributed to this story.