Violent Acts Against U.S. Asians Climb : Prejudice: California leads the nation. In Orange County, however, number of reported incidents declined last year.

Anti-immigrant sentiment has increased acts of racially motivated violence against Asian Americans, with the number of reported incidents nationwide swelling by 35% last year, according to a study released Monday by a Washington-based advocacy group.

Asian Americans have had swastikas painted on their houses, been attacked with baseball bats and been beaten to taunts of “Go back to your country!” and “Go away, gooks,” according to the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.

Nationally, 452 cases of racially motivated assaults, vandalism, and verbal intimidation against Asian Americans were reported in 1994, up from 335 the previous year, according to the group’s second annual report on the subject. All but a handful of the incidents reported included physical attacks.

Kathryn Imahara, principal author of the report, blamed anti-immigrant rhetoric for fanning the flames of violence. “It’s been our experience that hateful words do lead at some point to violence,” said Imahara, an attorney with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles.

A study released earlier this year by the Orange County Human Relations Commission revealed that cases of reported hate crimes against local Asians in 1994 in the county decreased from the previous year.

According to the county study, Asian Americans were the targets of 11 incidents of hate crimes in 1994, down from 15 in 1993. There were 41 attacks on Asian Americans in 1992, according to the commission.

Kenneth Inouye, who chairs the Orange County commission, said he believes the county’s numbers are deceptively low because many Asians simply do not report hate crimes against them.

“We still have a long way to go in Orange County,” Inouye said. “This latest [national study] emphasizes the fact that people need to do everything they can to help each other, to remind each other we are in this together.”

Inouye said he was disturbed by the revelation about the increase in hate crimes against Asians.

“It’s unfortunate to see that at a time when all Americans should be working together, it appears there is increasing tension among us,” Inouye said. “It shows we have to keep educating our children, keep working in the schools, keep [preaching] tolerance.”

Peter Liu, principal of Irvine Chinese School, a language institute, said he was also dismayed by the report of an increase in hate crimes against Asians.

“We need to get everyone to understand other people’s culture,” Liu said. “Our hope is that the young people will help to teach society how to get along.”

In Southern California, there were 63 cases of racially motivated incidents reported against Asian Americans last year, including 17 assaults, up from 45 incidents in 1993, according to the study.

The study described a number of the racial incidents:

* On a flight from Los Angeles to Oakland, two Chinese American women and their four children were subjected to 30 minutes of racial slurs and threats by about 20 whites who had been drinking.

* In the months leading up to the passage of Proposition 187, there was “an unprecedented number of hate flyers stuffed into grocery bags, home mailboxes, and student lockers” in Southern California.

* In Alhambra, an Asian man was beaten by a white man yelling racial epithets.

* In Queens, N.Y., three teen-agers attacked a man from India, punching him and burning his face with a cigarette, while verbally insulting his ethnicity.

* A Chinese American family was assaulted by several people at an amusement park in Vallejo, north of San Francisco, telling them to go back to China.

* A Vietnamese family in Allston, Mass., was attacked three times in one day by white neighbors wielding a baseball bat, hockey sticks and tear gas.

Times staff writer Davan Maharaj contributed to this story