Summit Yields Low Interest Rate : Reaction: A lot of Japanese-Americans didn’t follow the Bush-Kaifu meeting, and some of those who did aren’t optimistic about the outcome.

Many Japanese-Americans were paying little notice Thursday as Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu sat down for trade and fence-mending talks with President Bush.

“There wasn’t even a buzz around here,” said Moritaka Uchimura, manager of the Little Tokyo Towers senior citizens’ home in the old Japanese center of Los Angeles. Though 90% of the elderly residents still speak Japanese, Uchimura said, “Nobody seems to be interested in it.”

Those Japanese-Americans who were following the talks were hoping that Kaifu would avoid any gaffes that would worsen relations between the United States and Japan, possibly intensifying what they see as growing anti-Japanese sentiment in this country.

The community would like to see smoother relations between the two nations but won’t pay much attention to Kaifu “unless he says something awful and gets us all in trouble,” said Ron Wakabayashi, executive director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission.

The vast majority of Southern California’s 200,000 Japanese-Americans have been here for two, three and four generations, and are irritated by what they see as the failure of many Americans to distinguish them from Japanese nationals.

Most have little interest in the domestic politics of their ancestral homeland, but they say they feel the backlash in California when Japanese politicians have made inflammatory remarks.

“What happens between the U.S. and Japan has an impact on the Japanese-American community--whether we like it or not,” said Los Angeles school board member Warren Furutani.

“I represent Watts,” Furutani said. “When someone in the Diet in Japan made a comment about African-Americans . . . I had to go out there and do damage control.”

Not only was he required to inform constituents that he does not share the views of elected officials in Japan, Furutani said, but he also has had to counter “an assumption that because I have Japanese features, I have a strong backing from the Japanese corporations, which is just so far from the truth.”

Furutani said he will be watching the Kaifu talks with interest, and hopes to see an easing of tensions between the two nations. Locally, he said, he would like to see the Japanese-owned corporations, which have moved into old Japanese-American neighborhoods in Carson, Torrance and Gardena, lend a hand in improving the much-criticized educational system.

Not far from the summit, rice politics and financing the Persian Gulf War were on the minds of some native Japanese shoppers at the Yaohan Supermarket and Food Court in Costa Mesa. One, George Oshita, a computer analyst, said he was not optimistic that the summit would resolve the issues.

“Japan and the United States have so many problems,” said Oshita, who has lived here 16 years and is now a citizen. Kaifu, he said, is “doing OK” in a very difficult job.

Mary Katayama, 23, a UCLA graduate student, said that few of her friends are interested in the Bush-Kaifu talks. But she feels the meeting will be “very important,” not just to the world economy but to race relations in California.

“The frustration about the imbalance of trade is coming out as racism or prejudice against Asian-Americans,” Katayama said.

“Especially given the prior remarks by Japanese officials, it’s very important that we monitor” the talks, she said. “Not only should Japanese-Americans be watching, but all Americans concerned about civil rights should be watching.”

Katayama said she was once pelted with eggs in a parking lot by a carload of young men yelling racial epithets and she feels that “Asian-bashing” is getting worse. She said she hopes the talks will promote economic cooperation but also more sensitivity on both sides of the Pacific.

Wakabayashi said the lack of interest in the Japanese-American community to Kaifu’s visit is not surprising. Faced with fierce discrimination against the early immigrants, and then the wartime internment, many Japanese-Americans have tried mightily to distance themselves from things Japanese, he said.

“Being Japanese was a negative,” Wakabayashi said. “The strategy was much more one of assimilation. . . . There isn’t the same psychological attachment to our grandparents’ homeland.”

But Chet Yamaguchi, publisher of the Tozai Times monthly cultural magazine, said he isn’t interested in the summit because he thinks nothing will be resolved there.

“I don’t think Americans care much about it, nor do I think the Japanese care much about it,” Yamaguchi said. “Ask white America--do they care?”

He added: “Things get done by the trained bureaucrats, and Kaifu is the Charlie McCarthy of the Japanese government.”

But others said Kaifu is politically weak at home and needs the prestige of an international summit to boost his party’s performance in the elections to be held in Tokyo this weekend. The desired public-relations splash may not materialize, they said, because Kaifu lacks the personal magnetism and the English fluency of former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone.

“Kaifu-san doesn’t have it. No charisma,” moaned an executive at one of Southern California’s major Japanese-owed corporations. The man, who spoke on condition he not be identified, said Kaifu is amiable, hard-working and a brilliant speaker in Japanese, but he tends to come across as lackluster on American television.

At Gardena’s Tozai Plaza shopping center, where many recent arrivals from Japan have settled, Teiko Matsumoto said she worried that Kaifu would be too politically weak to stand up to Bush.

“Kaifu-san should say ‘no’ more,” said Matsumoto, who arrived here three months ago.

“From the American point of view, they are angry at Japan for not paying more for the war and giving more on trade relations,” she said. “I want America to understand the Japanese position.”