No Longer Living on an Island : Japanese: The 40,000 nationals in the Southland have kept apart, even from Japanese Americans. Now, economic woes have thinned their numbers and recent San Pedro murders have increased their fear of crime.

When parents came to the orientation in Little Tokyo for their children’s Japanese-language school last week, they were welcomed by a familiar sight--a vertical, seven-foot-tall banner with Japanese calligraphy announcing the event, just like the ones in Japan.

But the speech by Principal Atsushi Yoshioka included topics they could not have imagined in Tokyo: Do not let your children wear gang-style clothing to school--it could attract real gang members. And please volunteer to help patrol school grounds to keep the children safe from crime.

The speech was the same one Yoshioka gives each year, but with the shooting deaths of two Japanese students on everyone’s mind, the parents listened more gravely than ever. That tragedy made these parents, like the other 40,000 Japanese nationals living in Southern California, realize how much a part of Los Angeles they have become.

“Always I have to watch (my children) and hold their hands tight. If I’m shopping and they disappear, I’m so scared,” Akiko Kenmatsu said at the orientation.

The community of expatriate Japanese citizens includes artists, scientists, musicians, journalists, entrepreneurs and dishwashers. Some are here for just a few months, others for decades.

For students like those slain, time here is a rite of passage, an interlude of beach-going and leisure before joining corporate life. Southern California is, for Japanese, the No. 1 choice for study abroad.

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But for the large contingent of business people sent by their companies, living in the Los Angeles area is not a choice, but a duty. The area is Japan’s corporate capital in the United States, with more Japan-based businesses than any other metropolitan area. Although the faces of these businesspeople from Japan change every three to five years, their community has become a permanent part of Southern California, changing the landscape with gleaming corporate headquarters, supermarkets and mini-malls catering to their needs--and, most important to Californians, offices and factories that provide jobs to 60,000 Americans.

The numbers grew rapidly in the 1980s along with Japan’s worldwide economic expansion, but have dwindled in the last several years with the Japanese economic downturn. They are a largely self-contained community, separate from the students and artists. They also rarely mingle with and are occasionally in conflict with the community of Americans of Japanese ancestry that has been here since the turn of the century.

As the Japanese expatriate community mushroomed in the 1980s along with Japan’s wealth, it became more insular, creating a nearly self-sufficient world of its own.

Ken Amano, president of Nippondenso of Los Angeles, notes that when a Japanese family arrives in Los Angeles, its members can step into a miniature Japan right in Torrance and Palos Verdes, the center of the expatriate community. Without speaking a word of English, they can get medical care, travel services, auto repairs and just about any Japanese product they could find back home.

Even when Japanese nationals intend to assimilate into American life, it is very easy to give in to the temptation to shop only at Japanese stores, said Amano, whose firm manufactures auto parts.

The Torrance outpost of the Japanese Yaohan supermarket chain is the local PX for the community, featuring pickled plums, sea urchin, burdock root and other food staples. An attached mall features Japanese toys, appliances, medicines, books, videos, greeting cards and cosmetics.

There are 650 member companies in the Japanese Business Assn. of Southern California, 240 in Torrance alone. In the South Bay plain surrounding the local headquarters of Toyota, Honda and Nissan, a rich infrastructure has grown to meet the needs of their Japanese executives and families.

The men enjoy karaoke clubs and hostess bars staffed by Japanese. They spend their weekends playing golf with other Japanese, taking advantage of daily greens fees that run about $50 here as compared to $500 in Japan. The women join Japanese-speaking tennis leagues and choral groups. There are Japanese-language schools for the kids.

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If this self-contained community sounds typical of many immigrant groups in Los Angeles, it’s not. These Japanese citizens are not immigrants, and because they plan to return home soon, have less incentive to integrate into American society. They are more like the tight-knit community of American businessmen stationed in Tokyo than the Asian immigrants in Chinatown and Koreatown.

The community of businessmen and students from Japan is also distinct from the long-established Japanese American community, which numbers about 120,000 in Southern California. Most working-age Japanese Americans cannot speak Japanese and know little about Japanese culture. Their grandparents generally immigrated as farm and railroad laborers at the turn of the century from the impoverished Japanese countryside.

Today, by contrast, Japanese businessmen sent over by their corporations are well-educated urbanites, and some Japanese Americans feel they are looked down on by the expatriates.

“Some Japanese nationals see Japanese Americans as below themselves, as the offspring of those who couldn’t make it in Japan,” said George Nakano, a Torrance city councilman.

Another problem for Japanese Americans is that many people do not distinguish between them and Japanese nationals. So when Japanese corporations or politicians create frictions with Americans, Japanese Americans find themselves taking heat for something they have nothing to do with.

Still, some Japanese Americans welcome the chance to learn about their grandparents’ culture from the Japanese visitors, taking lessons in flower arranging or calligraphy. And some Japanese nationals say they appreciate that the earlier immigrants helped pave the way for their own acceptance.

Japanese nationals admit they tend to be insular. “Almost all Japanese wives like to stay in the Japanese community, not speaking English, and eating Japanese food,” said Ryuko Sakai, who has lived here two years and has help spearhead efforts to reach out to Americans.

But she says that most families are drawn into American society because their children are in public schools, and some make a real effort to contribute to American society. Last year, the women’s committee of the Japanese Business Assn. raised $64,000 for Los Angeles schools, hospitals, disabled groups and Japanese American causes. Japanese women perform choral music at nursing homes, volunteer at public schools and participate in Neighborhood Watch groups.

Similarly, Japanese corporations are making an effort to be good corporate citizens. Members of the Japanese Business Assn. donated $3 million to the Red Cross and other organizations after the Northridge quake and $175,000 to schools. After the Los Angeles riots, Toyota set up an auto repair training program in the Crenshaw district, and Pioneer Electronics began a job-training center for high school students in Watts. In Torrance, Councilman Nakano said, Japanese companies provided major funding for a new city cultural center.

But despite such efforts, the families of most business people from Japan remain largely ensconced in their own world. To some extent, they are insulated from the harsher side of life in Los Angeles by their relatively affluent lifestyle in places such as San Marino, Irvine and Palos Verdes. While many Japanese business people live a middle-class existence in Torrance or Pasadena, senior executives enjoy the same posh neighborhoods as their American counterparts.

Sakai lives in a spacious house in Palos Verdes Estates overlooking the Pacific, provided by Toyota Motor Sales of America--her husband is its president. Guests are welcomed, Japanese-style, with an invitation to switch their shoes for slippers in the marble foyer. The home is decorated with elegant contemporary furniture and modern woodblock prints of Henry Thoreau and Walden Pond.

Yet Sakai and her friends, chatting in the sunny living room, know that living in Palos Verdes does not protect them from the problems of Los Angeles. It was just a few miles away in San Pedro that two Japanese students were slain in a carjacking. Masako Yoshida’s son was offered drugs at Peninsula High School. And Iyoko Kawamura says that her son’s Honda was stolen from Hermosa Beach and stripped.

“In Japan, even if the opera is over at midnight, teen-agers can come home on the subway,” Sakai said. Here in Los Angeles, she and her husband never stay for curtain calls at the Music Center in Downtown Los Angeles because they do not like being on the freeway late at night. Many Japanese nationals even avoid Little Tokyo because they consider it dangerous.

After the student slayings, Yoshida’s husband bought her a cellular phone. “In Japan safety is free,” Yoshida said. “Here we spend a lot of money to keep safe.”

Many families turn inward, toward their own community, because they believe that succeeding in the Japanese educational system--which requires remaining Japanese in behavior--is the key to the future security of their children. So while most children attend American public schools, they also attend one of five Southern California branches of the Japanese-government-funded Asahi Gakuen school on Saturdays.

The textbooks are identical to those used in Japan, and in any week the pupils will be on exactly the same chapter as students in Japan.

Before children enter sixth grade, many mothers take them back to Japan so they can begin to prepare for crucial exams to enter good high schools, the first step toward getting into a good college. The fathers stay in Los Angeles. Such separations are common in Japanese corporate life, where employees do not generally have the right to choose or refuse assignments.

But despite the hardships of adjusting to life in a strange and sometimes dangerous country, many families from Japan come to love America.

The women enjoy the greater chance to speak their minds, and the freedom from the burdensome web of social obligations in Japan. Many children prefer American schools to the “examination hell” of the Japanese educational system. And many fathers enjoy the chance to spend more time with their families here than in work-centered Japan.

“The feeling here is very comfortable for me,” said Yoshida, whose daughter is studying to be a veterinarian in Missouri. “I would like to stay.”

Some women and children stay behind in the United States when their husbands are called back to Japan. Other families even immigrate to the United States when they get the chance.

In the end, though, whether Japanese business people and their families feel safe and happy here has more than just anthropological interest--it could have a serious impact on the Southern California economy. Many Japanese companies have reduced their presence in Southern California because of the economic downturn in Japan. The Japan Business Assn.’s roster dropped 10% last year. Crime problems are just one more reason to leave.

Amano, the head of Nippondenso, said security problems have made many Japanese companies move from Los Angeles County to the Irvine area. Amano points to a seven-foot iron fence he had to install around the parking lot in his Long Beach industrial park because of car thefts. He said he was deeply shaken by the death of an American employee’s 14-year-old daughter in a drive-by shooting nearby.

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Amano said he would like to purchase the lot next door and expand his business, which employs 350 people here, because the price of the land has dropped sharply with the slumping real estate market. But he is not going to, not yet. “I’d like to stay here,” he said, but may move the whole operation if the crime situation continues to deteriorate.

Amano said he was discouraged by the pessimism of many Americans when he served on a committee of Rebuild L.A. “If this were Japan, we could not abandon somewhere that goes bad (because the country is small and must use every inch of space),” he says. “We have to rebuild.

“But it seems that rebuilding activities lose momentum quickly (in America) because you have the freedom to find a safer place to live by moving farther away. It’s a sad story.”