COLUMN ONE : Japan Sets Its Sails on New Goal : Its America’s Cup bid is audacious. Many crew members learned to sail only four years ago. They hired a top skipper, got access to wind tunnels and practiced like crazy.

A huge sail loft dominates the scene along the Quivera Marina on Mission Bay these days, brandishing a rising sun logo with blood-red cursive letters on a starch-white background that exclaim: Nippon .

This marks the base camp of Nippon Challenge, Japan’s long-shot bid for the America’s Cup, where strains of nationalism and corporate hucksterism mix with pure sportsmanship, sometimes rather awkwardly.

Coming at a time of festering political tension between Japan and the United States, Japan’s latest challenge on these shores is laden with potent symbolism. An American trophy is at stake, and Japan has marshaled its vast financial and technological resources to claim it.

At the same time, however, the challenge is for sport, not power, and the challengers complain they are misunderstood and often misquoted. Their true intentions, they say, have been distorted by the polemics of trade and investment friction. And they maintain that their quest for the Auld Mug has far more to do with changing social values at home than with the old pattern of material acquisitiveness abroad.

“Japan is reorienting itself to appreciate the non-material things and the spiritual values we’ve lost touch with over the past 140 years of intensive industrialization and modernization,” said Kaoru Ogimi, vice commodore of the Nippon Ocean Racing Club, Nippon’s sponsoring yacht club.

“This is a symbolic trophy that has nothing to do with business and market share,” Ogimi said. “It’s a sailor’s dream, it’s a challenge . . . a mountain to be climbed because it’s there.”

So it is that the Japanese came to Quivera Road a year ago. Activities inside the sail loft, a tent that covers 9,000 square feet and resembles a small airplane hangar, are top secret. Sail making is as strategic a science as the design of the racing hulls of Nippon’s three boats, which are concealed behind a fence draped with white canvas and topped with barbed wire.

The Nippon team is not the only America’s Cup contestant to veil its marine technology in secrecy. They all do, in keeping with the mystique of the de facto Olympics of sailboat racing.

But the contingent of sailors from Japan is perhaps the most audacious crew in town. Having started four years ago with practically zero experience in international ocean racing, the Nippon Challenge syndicate has climbed by sheer determination to rank among the top four challengers in the elimination rounds for the May 9-19 America’s Cup showdown.

On their way here they hired the world’s top-ranked skipper, New Zealand’s Chris Dickson, to teach them the kind of sailing skills necessary to compete at the America’s Cup level. They rounded up an initial $45 million in sponsorship from corporate Japan, got free access to supercomputers and wind tunnels, and arranged for government and national university laboratories to help them hone state-of-the-art boat-building technology.

Then they practiced. And they practiced. A dozen Japanese crew members, many of whom had never sailed before, each clocked more than 8,000 hours of training time before the preliminary competition began last month. With Dickson at the helm and three other veteran sailors from New Zealand in key positions on the boat, Nippon Challenge is still a dark horse, but it is proving itself a viable contender so far, winning 11 of its first 14 races.

“I’m supremely confident in my crew,” said Dickson, 30, who skippered New Zealand’s challenge boat five years ago at the last America’s Cup race in Perth, Australia. “We’ve done a lot of racing and a lot of winning together. Our crew is standing up in every situation we’ve thrown at them.”

The fact that Japan’s best yachtsman isn’t qualified to command the Nippon Challenge doesn’t seem to bother anybody. Dickson falls into a time-honored Japanese tradition of hiring foreigners for their expertise, until such time as a native son can master the necessary skills to replace him. Foreign mercenaries taught the Japanese everything from modern warfare to steel- and beer-making in the 19th Century, after a nation of eager students emerged from 250 years of feudal isolationism.

Tatsumitsu Yamasaki, Nippon Challenge’s syndicate chairman, likens Dickson to gaijin senshu , or the handful of foreign players who are more or less assimilated into Japanese professional baseball teams. He also notes that Hawaiian wrestlers have risen to the top ranks of the sumo world.

“We have no problem with our national pride because our skipper is foreign,” said Yamasaki, a veteran sailor who is also president of a major Japanese food company, S & B Shokuhin. “The public feels Chris is part of the Nippon team--his popularity is very high.”

Dickson denies feeling like a mercenary, but he doesn’t necessarily say he’s racing for the glory of Japan, either. He’s racing for his Japanese mates.

“I feel very close to the team I’m with,” Dickson said. “When you work and share meals and sail with a group of people every day for 52 weeks a year, you get a very, very tight family. These are the people we do it for, our team. The pride is in our team . . . our allegiance is to our team.”

Makoto Namba, the most experienced Japanese crew member, yields the helm to Dickson because he recognizes his own limits.

“We just don’t have enough experience,” Namba said. “And we don’t think of Chris as a foreigner anyway. At first he was our coach, and gradually he became one of us.”

Dickson acquired Japanese residency status during the three years of training at Gamagori, a Pacific port near Nagoya in central Japan, and also picked up some rudimentary language skills. He barks out commands in a new dialect of sailing pidgin:

“ Weed wo chekku shite !” Dickson yells, for example, when he wants his crew to check whether the boat’s keel has been caught up in the kelp during a race. Other commands are interpreted and relayed through the various operating cells on the vessel.

“Communication is not really about language, it’s about understanding,” Dickson said. “We have a foredeck team that operates in Japanese, and what they’re talking about the skipper hasn’t the slightest idea--but it doesn’t matter because they’re working as a team, and they’re getting the job done.”

Well-coordinated teamwork is a cardinal virtue in Japan and has been one of the key ingredients to post-World War II economic success, but missing from the tale of the Nippon Challenge is the portrait of a rugged Japanese individual who fulfills the fantasy of one brave man against the sea.

Business tycoon Masakazu Kobayashi might have played that type of un-Japanese character. He went down to Perth in 1987 and purchased, for $7 million, two Australian yachts that had been eliminated as cup defenders, launching Japan’s first scheme to compete. But Kobayashi’s syndicate, Bengal Bay Challenge, later ran out of money and withdrew from the race.

Past America’s Cup competitions have been dominated by larger-than-life individuals--such as maverick broadcaster Ted Turner and Australian land magnate Alan Bond. High drama in this year’s race focuses on the potential for a grudge match between two individuals--U.S. defender Dennis Conner and New Zealander Michael Fay, Nippon skipper Dickson’s former boss and the runner-up among challengers in Perth. Fay battled Conner unsuccessfully in the courts to disqualify the American’s win in a twin-hulled catamaran.

But Nippon Challenge, as with most things from Japan, is the result of a corporate effort in which personalities are muted and individuals are blurred.

It all began when Yamaha Motor Co., the motorcycle company that is also Japan’s largest yacht builder, pondered an entry in the America’s Cup and found enthusiastic partners in Yamasaki, Ogimi and broadcast personality Taro Kimura.

This syndicate set out to recruit corporate sponsors, but ran into initial difficulty because Japanese companies didn’t see the value in advertising in a race that had little following in Japan. The promoters then changed their strategy to a bizarre patriotic pitch:

“The America’s Cup races . . . have been perceived as something belonging only to Western culture,” Nippon’s glossy color brochure says, explaining their successful fund-raising theme.

“Japan’s bid to win the America’s Cup would be meaningful not only as the first challenge from an Eastern culture,” the explanation goes, “but as an opportunity for (Japan), which is looked upon only as a major economic power giving rise to trade friction everywhere, to become part of a new aspect of international society.”

Thirty sponsoring companies, 18 official suppliers and 17 co-suppliers bought the idea that it might be good for business to plant Japan’s flag in San Diego.

The national quest was bolstered by another 7,000 “grass-roots sponsors” making small donations, and by the central government, which provided resources through the Transport Ministry’s Ship Research Institute and supercomputer time. In a pattern familiar to observers of long-simmering trade disputes, private industry and the state joined in singular national purpose.

No sooner had Nippon Challenge put in a surprisingly strong performance in the initial round of challenger races--it is currently sailing in third place behind New Zealand and Italy--than the sponsors back home issued commercial banzais for their sailors.

“Mitsubishi (Rayon Co.) hopes a good performance by the Japanese yacht will boost the popularity of carbon textile products for the marine sport (industry) in the future,” Kyodo News Service reported in a dispatch from Tokyo. (Mitsubishi made the carbon fiber masts for the Nippon boats.)

A measure of healthy patriotism can be found in any international sporting competition, where countries vie against each other, but a close look at the Nippon Challenge data sheet suggests that one of Japan’s most notorious nationalists has a behind-the-scenes role.

Listed as Commodore of the Nippon Ocean Racing Club is Shintaro Ishihara, a right-wing member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and perhaps the most strident Japanese critic of the United States. It was Ishihara who derided U.S. dependence on superior Japanese technology and accused Americans of harboring white supremacist attitudes in a controversial book, “The Japan That Can Say No.”

Yet Ishihara is Japan’s best-known sailor. He rose to prominence in 1955 at the age of 23 by writing a prize-winning novel, “Season of the Sun,” which defined a new generation of spoiled, hedonistic, sailboat-sailing (meaning decadent ) and restless youth. In a steamy sex scene that most every reader remembers, Ishihara’s anti-hero yachtsman thrusts through a paper screen with an immodest part of his body.

The enfant terrible novelist helped pioneer competitive yachting in Japan and went on to become a member of Parliament who would later champion such neo-nationalist causes as asserting that the Rape of Nanking was Allied propaganda that never took place. But he remained a sailing and scuba enthusiast, one of the few successful Japanese who found time for genuine leisure activities during the postwar economic boom.

“Our challenge has nothing to do with Mr. Ishihara’s politics,” said Yamasaki, the syndicate chairman. “It just so happens he’s got a good sailing background, and he’s a nice guy. I can’t comment on his political beliefs.”

Vice Commodore Ogimi, who is the son of a Japanese diplomat and a British journalist, is somewhat more uncomfortable with Ishihara’s America-bashing reputation.

“It’s an embarrassment, I suppose,” Ogimi, 62, said in a recent telephone interview from Tokyo. “There are unfortunate comments made on both sides of the ocean. It’s an awkward period in relations.”

So awkward, indeed, that Nippon Challenge’s publicists attempted to assuage American fears in the team brochure:

“From Japan, formidable rivals have landed in San Diego,” it says. “This time, however, the rivals are neither new model passenger cars which might deal a blow to the U.S. auto industry nor real estate brokers planning to buy up Beverly Hills. . . . (But they) are challengers against whom proud Americans should keep a close watch--they are Japanese yachtsmen competing for the America’s Cup.”

The odds are stacked heavily against proud Nippon claiming victory over France, Italy and New Zealand in the challenger’s competition, then outracing the American defender in May. But winning the America’s Cup on its first try is not an impossible scenario for Nippon.

Japan, it should be recalled, shut itself off from the rest of the world for 2 1/2 centuries until American gunships under the command of Commodore Matthew C. Perry pried it open for trade in 1854--three years after the first America’s Cup race.

Isolation stilted the island country’s natural affinity with the sea, and in Japan’s drive to catch up to the West in defense and industry, plying the oceans remained a utilitarian task relegated to cargo ships, fishing boats and naval vessels. Pleasure boat marinas are still a rarity along Japan’s inward-looking seacoasts, which have been shored up with concrete to withstand hostile typhoons rather than conserved and developed to enjoy marine sports.

“Winning the America’s Cup would signify a kind of cultural revolution,” said a philosophical Ogimi, who believes that Japan missed out on true democracy and “respect for the individual” in its headlong rush to industrialize.

Nippon Challenge shouldn’t be construed as another manifestation of Japan’s “acquisitive instincts,” but seen as a reprioritization of values, Ogimi said. If Japan beats all the odds and wins the America’s Cup, the news, he suggests, should stay in the sports sections, and off the Op-Ed pages, of American newspapers.