COLUMN ONE : Uneasy Ties That Bind Across the Pacific : Time has not erased the tensions between Japanese Americans and Japanese. But each needed the other to rebuild after World War II.

The occasion was an intimate gathering at Tokyo’s historic Imperial Hotel, where Akio Morita, then chairman of Sony Corp. and vice chairman of Keidanren, Japan’s most powerful economic organization, gave his guests from California a little history lesson.

Japanese companies owed their postwar success in the United States, Morita told Gov. Pete Wilson and his wife, to those who preceded them there--the thousands of emigres who became Japanese Americans, then served as linguistic and cultural translators during the companies’ early forays across the Pacific.

When Morita finished his remarks, Wilson turned to Jon Kaji, the state’s trade representative, and said, “Well, Jon, I never knew any of this.”

For Kaji, whose father helped Toyota establish its first office in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, Morita’s remarks were an unexpected and moving acknowledgment of a little-known piece of the transpacific relationship that has reshaped the U.S. economy from the auto factories of the Midwest to the farmlands of California’s fertile Salinas Valley.

But except for Morita and a handful of other Japanese, this awareness is shared by few in Japan--even those whose economic successes were made possible in part by the immigrants who eked out livings in railroad camps, mines and ethnic enclaves like Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo.

Even in California, gateway to and from Asia for more than a century, the pivotal role played by immigrants in Japan’s overseas expansion remains an almost invisible part of the past.

Indeed, time has not erased the tensions that remain between the communities--the Japanese who left their homeland for the United States and those who were left behind--that are linked by a common heritage yet are frequently at odds because of their divergent experiences.

But the emergence of the United States and Japan as leaders of the Pacific Century, so named because of Asia’s key role in the global trading arena, calls for a closer examination of the relationships that were the foundation for Japan’s postwar economic rebirth.

Although five decades have passed since the countries signed the peace treaty that ended World War II, this summer’s bitter auto dispute reminded people of Japanese descent on both sides of the Pacific that $175 billion worth of bilateral trade is no guarantee of harmonious relations.

And Japanese American leaders in California, many of whose families were sent to internment camps after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, fear that they could suffer once again if relations between the countries deteriorate.

Morita’s fund-raising efforts on behalf of Los Angeles’ unique Japanese American National Museum represented the most significant step by corporate Japan to ensure that this history will not be forgotten. But hours after that dinner with Wilson in 1993, Morita suffered a stroke and disappeared from the public eye.

Since then, despite Japan’s severe economic woes, Keidanren members have fulfilled a pledge to Morita by contributing nearly $7 million toward the museum’s expansion. And the 642-member Japanese Business Assn. of Southern California has donated thousands of dollars to Japanese American groups throughout the region.

Seeking to Preserve Immigrants’ Story

But as the war recedes in memory and the two economies and cultures gain uneasy familiarity with each other, the newest wave of immigrants--the affluent representatives of corporate Japan--have less need than ever to use Japanese Americans as a bridge.

And tensions remain.

Younger Japanese Americans sometimes resent being identified with Japan, fearing--with some justification--that anti-Japanese sentiments arising from U.S.-Japan economic competition will be directed against them.

Particularly in places such as Little Tokyo, old-timers resent the patronizing attitudes they sometimes sense from Japanese businessmen and tourists who show little interest in the hardships endured by them.

To try to keep the story alive, the Japanese American National Museum is co-sponsoring an exhibition that opened last month in Japan including paintings by some of the 120,000 Japanese Americans interned in the war.

“Over the past three years, we have placed a great deal of emphasis on trying to build a better awareness and understanding about Japanese Americans in Japan,” said Irene Hirano, the museum’s president and executive director.

Kaji, who has lived in Japan for more than a year promoting California trade, says that job will become even more critical as a new generation of Japanese with no memory of the war come to power.

“If Kristi Yamaguchi wins a gold medal, then there is recognition that there are Japanese Americans,” he said. “But you don’t find the same level of recognition in business that you did in the ‘50s and ‘60s. [The Japanese] don’t need to use Japanese Americans like they did back then.”

The world looked much different right after World War II, when Japanese companies began to look abroad for new markets for the inexpensive textiles and consumer goods that fueled the reconstruction of their war-torn economy.

In California, Japanese Americans returning from internment camps were greeted by signs saying “No Japs Allowed.” Many, including some of the state’s largest farmers, had lost everything when they were sent to live behind barbed wire while America’s leaders debated their trustworthiness.

It was not an easy time to start selling Japanese products, as Kazuma Sugioka discovered.

In 1954, he landed a job in San Francisco with the Japanese government organizing trade exhibitions for Japanese companies in the United States. Sales were slow, both because of hostility toward Japan and because most Americans believed “Made in Japan” meant cheap, poorly constructed goods.

But over the years, the quality started improving and Sugioka’s job got easier.

“Right after the war [the American attitude] was kind of like pity,” said Sugioka, 71, who still works in the San Francisco office of the Japan External Trade Office, known as JETRO.

About the same time, Bruce Kaji, Jon’s father, was setting up his business in Los Angeles. The elder Kaji, a veteran who had studied accounting on the GI bill, could not get a job with the Big Eight firms because they refused to hire Asians. So he, like many other Japanese Americans, was forced to strike out on his own.

Kaji opened an office in Little Tokyo and was approached by Toyota, then a little-known auto manufacturer.

Many Japanese Americans were not interested in doing business with the former enemy. But Kaji, who was later the founding president of the Japanese American National Museum, believed that it was good for the two countries to develop business ties.

He helped Toyota set up its first U.S. office. He also supported his new client by buying one of its early exports, the Toyopet, as the family’s second car.

Jon Kaji, who was a small child at the time, recalls his embarrassment at riding in a funny-looking red car that could not accelerate fast enough to keep up with the California freeway traffic.

“I couldn’t believe my father paid money for it,” he said.

Not many others would. In its first 14 months of operation in the United States, Toyota sold only 288 Toyopets. In 1961, Toyota withdrew from the U.S. passenger car market, returning several years later with the revamped Tiara and Corona models that would eventually take the U.S. market by storm.

Toyota was just the beginning. Over the next two decades, transpacific ties multiplied as the Japanese American community and aggressive companies from Japan helped each other gain a foothold in the U.S. economy.

Japanese Firms Open the Door

Sumitomo Bank and the Bank of Tokyo, whose assets had been seized by the U.S. government during the war, returned to California, where they became a major source of financing for Japanese American farmers and small-business owners. The major Japanese trading companies opened up offices to buy U.S. steel, oil, logs and farm products to feed their growing industries back home.

Prominent Japanese American professionals, whose knowledge of the Japanese language gave them a leg up over competitors, offered everything from legal advice to cultural support.

The Japanese banks referred companies such as Bridgestone, Suzuki Motors and Nissan to Sho Iino, the first Japanese American accountant to be certified in California. He helped them establish small offices to study the U.S. market and culture.

Iino and other second-generation Japanese Americans, known as Nisei , introduced the Japanese to golf and barbecues. When homesickness hit, they provided sushi and sukiyaki.

For years, Iino did little more than file payroll tax information, because his Japanese clients weren’t making any money. A few gave up and returned home. But most stuck it out and, in the 1960s and ‘70s, began opening sales and distribution offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.

Other Japanese Americans became key contacts for American companies who were eager to work with the Japanese. Minoru Tonai, a second-generation Japanese American, worked for TRW, a Cleveland-based industrial firm with aerospace operations in Los Angeles, when it established a joint venture with a Japanese company.

He ran into Japanese managers who made it clear that they did not respect the immigrants they believed had gone overseas because they couldn’t succeed at home.

On one occasion, Tonai made a point of discreetly letting his Japanese colleague see a copy of his mother’s elementary school graduation certificate from Japan, which showed that her family was descended from samurai stock.

“That particular guy’s reaction to me changed immediately,” said Tonai, now president of the board of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. “He assumed I was from a poor farm family.”

The stereotypes and suspicions flowed both ways. In Los Angeles and other West Coast cities, the Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans established separate social and business groups. As the years passed, and the Japanese immigrants assimilated into American society, the cultural and language gap expanded.

The tensions reached a peak in the early 1970s when Japanese developers announced plans to turn the heart of Little Tokyo into a high-priced hotel and shopping mall complex aimed at Japanese business people and tourists.

Japanese American activists accused the East-West Development Corp., a consortium of 30 leading Japanese companies, of turning its back on the elderly immigrants who would be displaced by the multimillion-dollar project. The developers eventually built the New Otani Hotel and Garden. Bad feelings remained.

It would be the first of several skirmishes between the Japanese American community and Japanese business interests, including protests several years ago when the Japanese Consulate moved its offices from Little Tokyo to the financial district.

During the 1980s, when the sharp appreciation of the yen brought a rush of Japanese investment into the United States, some Japanese Americans joined in the prosperity. Iino expanded nationally to serve his Japanese clients, who were now among the world’s largest multinationals.

Japanese Americans also benefited in other ways from Japan’s clout. An avid golfer, Iino gained admission to the Riviera Country Club, the Pacific Palisades club that historically excluded minorities. Ironically, the club was bought by Japanese owners in 1989 for $108 million, one of many trophy purchases that triggered a bout of insecurity over Japan’s ascendance.

It was a far cry from three decades earlier, when Iino was forced to buy his home through a white friend because the south Los Angeles neighborhood he wanted to live in was closed to “Orientals.”

“If it wasn’t for these Japanese companies, the local Japanese would not have been able to get into these country clubs,” said Iino, now retired. “It took economics to do that.”

But others in the Japanese American community did not drink from the well of Japanese prosperity. As the Japanese companies developed sophisticated global operations, many shifted their business away from their longtime Japanese American partners to the high-powered American law firms or consultants that came courting.

Mark Masaoka, a Japanese American labor activist and critic of corporate Japan, acknowledges that Japanese companies have supported many Japanese American businesses and nonprofit groups. But he says Little Tokyo businesses have also borne a large share of the cutbacks made by Japanese companies seeking to survive the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy in the 1980s.

Masaoka once worked as an electrician at the now-closed General Motors auto plant in Panorama City, a victim of tough Japanese competition. He argues that Japanese corporations operating in the United States provide lower wages, poorer working conditions and fewer opportunities for women and minorities than their American counterparts.

There is no question that Japanese immigrants, old and new, share a pride in things Japanese, such as Dodger pitching star Hideo Nomo. But Masaoka fears that Japanese Americans mistakenly assume that a common heritage translates into similar economic interests.

“The idea that [this shared heritage] makes us uncritical of Japan is what concerns me,” he said.

Kazunori (Ken) Amano, president of Nippondenso of Los Angeles, the U.S. subsidiary of Japan’s largest auto parts maker, walks this tightrope regularly as a prominent figure in the city’s Japanese business community and Japanese American circles.

Amano admitted that it has been hard to identify common interests beyond an occasional social gathering. Japanese executives posted in the United States are economic migrants whose job is to improve their company’s bottom line before returning to Japan. Japanese Americans, on the other hand, are focused on improving the quality of life at home.

Amano’s motivations for reaching beyond the Japanese business world are personal.

“My son married an American and decided to live in the United States,” he said. “I’ve had to accept Americans into my family.”

But the recent escalation of trade tensions has reminded both Japanese and Japanese Americans that whatever their feelings, their fate in the United States is inextricably intertwined. When relations between the nations go bad, the repercussions have extended far beyond the Japanese, with the emergence of hate crimes and other hostile acts against Japanese Americans and others of Asian descent.

That is why retired Los Angeles businessman Mits Usui--a World War II veteran whose family was interned in Colorado--says he volunteers at the Japanese American National Museum, sharing his story with visitors from Japan and elsewhere:

“We must be watchful for these kind of things.”