Japanese American Newspaper’s Layoffs Anger Community

Before they were laid off this year, 53-year-old David Kubo and 33-year-old Jose Valdez expected to finish their careers at Rafu Shimpo.

The Japanese American newspaper had been a Little Tokyo fixture since 1903, and the focus of their working lives.

Valdez was 8 when Kubo hired him to deliver the English- and Japanese-language daily. That was three years short of the minimum age for delivery boys, but Kubo knew that Jose had to help his mother and five siblings, so he made an exception.

Kubo, who had worked at the paper 35 years, and Valdez believed that loyalty was a simple proposition: “I felt the Rafu needed me as much as I needed it,” Valdez said.

Then came April 24, when they and seven other Rafu Shimpo printing department staffers were put out of work.

Publisher Michael Komai called them into his office and told them that he had decided to have the printing department’s work done by an outside firm. They were given two weeks’ pay in lieu of notice, and up to three months’ pay as severance. Kubo, who drove a company truck to work, was offered a cab ride home.

The layoffs did more than stun the workers. They triggered a protest that interpreted an all-too-common business move as an act of community betrayal.

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In June, more than 100 people showed up to discuss the layoffs at a community forum organized by a “support committee” formed for the laid-off workers.

Next month, the committee will stage a concert and dance to raise money for the workers. Lawyers from the group are representing the workers at no cost in ongoing discussions with the paper’s attorney over severance and benefits issues.

The committee is demanding, among other things, that the workers be given a more generous severance and health benefits package.

Alan Nishio, the board president of the Little Tokyo Service Center and a member of the support committee, said the layoffs of men who had devoted most of their lives to a community paper “is not tolerable in the Little Tokyo and Japanese American community.”

Nishio said Rafu Shimpo is seen by its subscribers as “the glue that holds the community together,” not just a business. Readers feel a personal attachment to the staff, Nishio said, and expect the family-owned paper to treat its workers as family.

Those feelings and expectations have been strengthened over decades.

In 1946, three employees loaned $1,500 to Akira Komai, the current publisher’s late father, to get the paper running after a three-year closure due to the wartime incarceration of H.T. Komai, the paper’s president.

Alan Kubo, David’s younger brother, who followed him to the paper and worked 28 years before he too was laid off, said it was Akira Komai who “gave David a place where he belonged” for the first time. Before working at the paper, David was “basically a street kid who liked to fight” in their Boyle Heights neighborhood, his brother said.

Akira Komai inflated David’s income on a mortgage application so he could buy a house in Gardena. Akira then told David that as a young father he shouldn’t put all his money into a house. He made David a loan and deducted 10 cents a week from his paycheck.

Valdez first saw the devotion of the paper’s readers as a delivery boy: When he got jumped on his route and had his bicycle stolen--which happened several times--customers gave him their children’s bikes.

Of the nine Rafu workers laid off, four were full-time employees: the Kubo brothers and Valdez and Eddie Gaspar, an eight-year employee.

None has found work. Valdez is in a job-training program. Alan Kubo waxes senior citizens’ cars for cash while he looks for prospects. David Kubo worked briefly unloading cargo from planes at Los Angeles International Airport next to men half his age. He quit after his back gave out from bending in a half-crouched position under the belly of the planes.

David said he doesn’t expect to ever find a job that will match the $50,000 he was making in his last position as the paper’s production manager. “I’m not even looking at the pay; I just need the benefits,” he said. Kubo’s wife recently received a transplanted kidney from their daughter. The couple say their savings are dwindling with their $755 monthly medical insurance payments.

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As the former Rafu staffers try to rebuild their lives, publisher Komai is trying to keep his family’s paper afloat. He bristles at allegations that he was heartless in letting the employees go, and at suggestions that his father wouldn’t have done so. The layoffs were the first since he became publisher in 1983, Komai said, adding that he once talked his father out of firing two employees.

The Rafu’s circulation of 19,000 is down about 4,000 from its late 1980s peak, and the paper has lost money every year since 1994, he said.

Three other Japanese American papers--in New York, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles--have died this decade. Japanese American businesses and civic groups are battling demographics. Unlike other Asian American groups, Japanese Americans are mostly U.S.-born, and thus less dependent on ethnic support systems.

The Rafu’s core readers are older, mainly second-generation nisei. Many in that generation taught America a lesson in commitment when they fought in World War II for a government that impugned their loyalty by sending them to remote internment camps.

As the nisei and their institutions die, one wonders if the loyalty they exemplify will also pass. To some, the battle at Rafu Shimpo suggests that it already has.