Japanese-Americans Fear Backlash Over Pearl Harbor : Racism: Some warn that 50th anniversary may spark attacks against Asians. Leaders act to defuse impact.

With the 50th anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor just over a month away, many Americans of Japanese ancestry fear that commemorations planned around the nation could spark a backlash of anti-Asian animosity and hate attacks.

December 7 is an annual day of dread for many Japanese-Americans, who have come to associate the date with slurs and insults. This year, with racial tensions simmering, anti-immigrant sentiment on the rise, U.S.-Japanese relations strained and the American economy faltering, some say the timing could not be worse.

“Our feeling is that there may be a backlash,” said William M. Kaneko, vice-president of the Japanese American Citizens League, citing the media interest in 50th anniversary retrospectives and rising trade frictions with Japan.

“The more people like Lee Iacocca and Carla Hills and Dick Gephardt bash Japan, the more the emotion rises in the general community, and because there is a lack of distinction between Japanese-Americans and Japanese nationals, Japanese-Americans get it,” Kaneko said.

Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose), who at age 10 became one of the 112,000 people of Japanese heritage interned during World War II, has written letters to major news organizations asking them to use “knowledge and perspective . . . to explain all the tragedies and pain that ensued” from Pearl Harbor when doing their retrospectives.

“What I want people to understand is when the government of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, they attacked you and they attacked me,” Mineta said.

As a preemptive move, the Japanese American Citizens League has taken the unusual step of launching a public education campaign. It has sent a statement of concern and information about the internment and anti-Asian violence to public officials, media outlets and its 113 chapters nationwide.

“We must be mindful that some individuals and groups may use this occasion to exploit racial fears based on wartime animosities and the current economic frictions between the United States and Japan,” the league’s statement said.

Speaking with rare unanimity, Asian-American leaders also warned that hate crimes and anti-Asian violence are on the rise, spurred in part by resentment of Japan’s growing economic clout. Because those who hurl racial slurs or punches do not distinguish between Japanese nationals and Americans of Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese or other Asian heritage, the leaders said, anyone with an Asian face is a potential scapegoat.

Hoping to defuse the potential for backlash, Kaneko has written President Bush, urging him to acknowledge the American citizens who were interned during the war--and those of Japanese ancestry who died fighting for the United States--in the speech Bush will deliver at Pearl Harbor at 7:55 a.m. on Dec. 7.

“The message and the tone and the content of what the President says will have a bearing on the world,” said Kaneko, adding that he hopes Bush will articulate a message of peace and healing as well as honoring the 2,403 Americans killed in the attack.

Gerald Glaubitz, national president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn., said fears of a backlash are overblown. Nevertheless, Glaubitz said he has asked survivors who plan to attend the commemoration ceremonies in Honolulu to be on their best behavior--especially around Japanese tourists.

“They were concerned that our fellow rednecks would throw some Japanese in the water, but I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Glaubitz said.

The White House has not commented on the contents of Bush’s speech. However, when the TV cameras scan the dignitaries at the ceremony, they will see a Japanese-American war hero in U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), who lost part of his right arm but won many medals fighting with the all-Nisei 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team.

In a speech in Los Angeles last weekend, Inouye blamed “the voices of hatred, prejudice and fear” for forcing the exclusion of the Japanese government from the historic event, to which no foreign dignitaries are invited. But Inouye praised Bush’s political courage in scheduling a visit to Tokyo on the eve of Pearl Harbor Day.

Even if the President’s speech is embracing, some fear that Pearl Harbor Day may provoke street-level incivilities. They say that the slogan “Remember Pearl Harbor”--once a vow never again to be caught off guard militarily--has evolved into an epithet of racial and economic animus.

In Torrance two weeks ago, the anti-Japanese attitude flashed in a conflict over a parking space.

A Japanese-owned company, Shimadzu Precision Instruments, put a letter on cars that were parking illegally in slots reserved for its customers, asking the offenders to stop. According to police reports, one envelope was mailed back to the company with an obscenity-laced letter.

“We’ll never forget Pearl Harbor,” it said. “Go back to the land of the stinking sun.”

“People seem to want to fix blame for Pearl Harbor on either Japanese-Americans or the Japan of today,” said Bill Watanabe, executive director of the Little Tokyo Service Center. “The blame should be fixed on the policy-makers of the World War II era in Japan.”

A new poll released Friday found that 30% of Californians believe the United States was right to intern U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. Of the 998 adults surveyed by The California Poll, 66% said the internment was wrong and 4% had no opinion. The poll shows a dramatic opinion shift since 1955, when a similar survey found that a majority supported the internments, pollster Mervin Field said.

Twenty-two percent of those polled said they still held the bombing of Pearl Harbor against Japan, while 74% said the attack should not be a consideration in current U.S. relations with Japan.

The anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack has long been a source of dread for Japanese-Americans, especially those who were alive at the time of the attack or lived through its aftermath.

For more than a decade at Norwalk High School, every Dec. 7 some white teachers would send their pupils to launch paper airplanes into the classroom of a male Japanese-American teacher, said Kathryn Miyake Robinson.

Robinson, 58, a fellow teacher, was born in Hawaii and has terrifying memories of the bombing that killed a 6-year-old classmate. When she complained about the school ritual, she said she was told: “Don’t worry about it, it’s a tradition.”

Robinson said she continued to complain to no avail until five years ago, when she raised the issue with civil rights groups. After they protested, the paper airplane attacks ceased, but her relations with other teachers, who said she lacked a sense of humor, have remain strained.

“This year I don’t know what’s going to happen because there’s going to be a lot of media coverage on it,” she said. “I feel very apprehensive.”

Many Japanese-American schoolchildren also came to hate Pearl Harbor Day.

“When Dec. 7 came around, it was the day that I probably dreaded the most,” said Don Nakanishi, 41, director of the Asian-American Studies Center at UCLA. The teacher invariably would bring up the bombing, and he would squirm in his seat, Nakanishi said.

His discomfort did not end in childhood. In 1967, Nakanishi was studying in his room at Yale University when his classmates burst in chanting “Bomb Pearl Harbor!” and pelted him with water balloons.

“One guy came up to me, and I’m dripping with water, and he recited by memory President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘date of infamy’ speech,” Nakanishi said.

Asian-Americans point to the 1982 murder of Chinese-American Vincent Chin by two unemployed Detroit auto workers who mistook him for Japanese as an extreme example of what can go wrong. More likely, they say, are insults, harassment or attacks on anyone who looks Asian.

Last year in Los Angeles County, 49 of the 275 hate crimes reported to the Human Relations Commission were directed at Asians, up from 19 in 1989. The incidents included threats, graffiti, vandalism, assaults and one cross-burning.

Such hate crimes do not seem to occur more frequently around Pearl Harbor Day, said Bunny Nightwalker-Hatcher, senior consultant for the commission. But they often feature anti-Japanese slurs--even when the victim is not of Japanese origin, she said. Last year, a Korean church in Glendale was painted with anti-Japanese slogans.

“There is a very troublesome racial undercurrent in the city today, and now on top of that comes this commemoration of Pearl Harbor,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo, who is of Chinese ancestry. He suggested that Asian-Americans try to “defuse the potentially dangerous racial situation” by organizing joint ceremonies with World War II veterans of other ethnic groups.