Riordan Trip Begins on Imperial Note

Mayor Richard Riordan kicked off potentially far-reaching trip to Asia on Monday with fanfare and decorum--hosting an upbeat news conference to promote Los Angeles tourism, then visiting the imperial palace for a rare meeting with the emperor and empress of Japan.

The audience with the Japanese imperial couple, also attended by Riordan’s new wife, Nancy Daly Riordan, was extraordinarily rare for an American mayor. Emperor Akihito, who ascended the throne nearly nine years ago, only rarely appears in public and, though he often greets foreign dignitaries, they almost invariably are heads of state, not local leaders.

The emperor, however, has taken an active interest in Los Angeles, which more than 750,000 Japanese visit every year and which is home to a sizable and growing Japanese American population. He and the empress have visited Los Angeles, and Monday’s meeting was the second time they have met with the mayor and Nancy Daly Riordan.

The Riordans, who spent 40 minutes with the imperial couple, were received in the couple’s residence rather than one of the palace’s public rooms. They had tea while seated on adjoining couches in a modestly appointed room overlooking a wooded garden. The conversation was in English, which the emperor and empress both speak fluently.

Neither the mayor nor the city’s first lady would discuss the conversation, which the emperor asked be a private one. But Riordan effusively praised his hosts’ hospitality. “They put us totally at ease,” he said later.

“They are such gracious people,” Nancy Daly Riordan added. “It was so lovely, so serene.”

The rest of the mayor’s day was anything but. After resting Sunday and trying to recover from a nagging bout with walking pneumonia, Riordan launched into a series of meetings, news conferences, briefings and ceremonial meals, strung back-to-back with barely a break.

The normally informal mayor chafed visibly at the security and protocol arrangements, as his staff tried to keep him to a minute-by-minute schedule. Time and again, Riordan would stop to chat with fellow delegates or local officials, only to be herded along to his car.

He also occasionally struggled with the complexities of culture and translation. When he roams from his prepared text, Riordan’s public speaking syntax can be hard to follow in English; he proved especially challenging to his Japanese translators.

A boast about Los Angeles as the home of the bikini, for instance, ran up against a puzzled interpreter. “Swimwear?” Riordan offered helpfully. When she still looked confused, the mayor simply moved on.

Then he added that the city also was the birthplace of the fortune cookie, an observation that drew blank stares from the Japanese audience. Fortune cookies, after all, generally accompany Chinese food, not Japanese.

Finally having had enough, the translator elbowed her way to the podium so that she could follow along with the mayor’s text. Undaunted, Riordan threw his arm around her in a grateful hug and continued with his address.

The unaccustomed pace notwithstanding, Riordan rarely let his sense of humor lag.

A meeting with the governor of Tokyo was cut short when Riordan aides were caught in traffic and showed up late. “I was just telling them about how efficient we are,” Riordan joked as his team walked into the governor’s office. Reciprocating, the governor wryly noted that he was responsible for traffic in the city.

On the business front, Riordan’s first stops were visits to longtime customers of the Port of Los Angeles, meetings that were intended to shore up business for years to come. As is often the case in Los Angeles, the opportunity to display his formidable business knowledge was when Riordan was at his best.

At one meeting, Riordan presented executives with a pair of ceramic turtles to symbolize the longevity of the business relationship they were forging. In Japan, the executive remarked, turtles symbolize lives of 10,000 years.

“You’ll notice we brought two,” Riordan countered. Business leaders and city officials laughed appreciatively.

The push for business and tourism comes at an awkward time. Along with much of Asia, Japan is lurching through its worst economic crisis in years, limiting the investment that Japanese companies can make in overseas trade and potentially threatening tourism as consumer confidence reels.

That raises questions about how effective Riordan can be on this trip to the troubled region. Local journalists, about 50 of whom turned out at a lunchtime news conference to see the mayor and other city delegation members, softly lobbed a few questions about the appropriateness of announcing a push for increased tourism in a country so racked with problems.

George Kirkland, president of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, responded that the Japanese crisis to date has not had much effect on tourism to Los Angeles. In fact, Kirkland said “the Los Angeles product” remains an attractive one to Japanese tourists, who actually paid more visits to the city last year than the year before.

Airport Executive Director Jack Driscoll made a similar point without the marketing language.

“Los Angeles has had its bad times,” he said. “Los Angeles is with you in good times and bad. That’s Los Angeles’ commitment to this community.”

At the American Embassy, trade and diplomatic representatives warned the Los Angeles delegation that the economic crisis in Japan was deep and troubling, with potential implications rippling far beyond Japan. But they tempered their concerns with a long view of history.

“Japan has been a great nation for millennia--or many centuries, certainly--and will continue to be for many years,” one senior embassy official told the Los Angeles group. “They will come out slugging.”

As the trip continues, airport business is expected to become an increasingly consistent theme. Riordan is pushing for a major expansion of Los Angeles International Airport, and has planned visits to a number of Asia’s major air carriers, in part to urge them to plan more flights to LAX.

Similarly, the mayor and delegation members hope to secure a few new major contracts for the city’s port. The expansion there already is underway, and local officials expect another bump in business once the Alameda Corridor, a railway linking the port to downtown, is completed.

The corridor is considered an especially crucial talking point now, because the Port of Los Angeles recently suffered through a major weeks-long tie-up created by the Union Pacific railroad’s inability to move goods out of the harbor as fast as they were arriving. Riordan, who was asked about that problem Monday, said the immediate crisis has passed and that construction of the corridor will prevent such congestion from reoccurring.

As Riordan’s Asian tour continues today, he is scheduled to meet with Japanese executives, and then fly to South Korea, where he will be part of the official American delegation observing the inauguration of President Kim Dae Jung. After a brief trip back to Japan, he will return to South Korea for a private meeting with Kim before traveling on to China.