Japanese

Breaking down cultural barriers is a mission for 17-year-old Marquel Carter, asenior three-sport athlete at Culver City High who speaks fluent Japanese, stars at quarterback for the football team and counts Harvard and Stanford among the colleges he's interested in. He won a sports essay contest last school year that included this vision: "I have a dream: to be somebody special, to change lives and to make a difference in the world." He has tried fencing, snorkeling, snowboarding and lacrosse, traveled to Switzerland and Japan, and practiced Japanese taiko drumming.

For a generation, LAPD homicide investigators kept alive the case of 28-year-old Japanese tourist Kazumi Miura, shot in the head on a featureless side street in the shadow of a Los Angeles urban icon: downtown's four-level freeway interchange. For nearly three decades, they pursued her husband, Kazuyoshi, for the 1981 crime. But he remained beyond their reach, as Japanese authorities tried and convicted him of murder, only to see the case overturned.

Some cities advertise their cultural attractions to lure foreign tourists. Some advertise their foreigner. In Boston, it's Daisuke Matsuzaka, the pitching phenom from Japan who makes his first appearance at Fenway Park today. The Red Sox souvenir store is selling T-shirts and caps that say "Red Sox" or "Matsuzaka" in Japanese, the Old Town Trolley is hiring Japanese-speaking guides, and the Palm restaurant has translated its menu.

Atop an oak-shrouded hill near the Central California Mother Lode town of Coloma, a lonely grave holds the first Japanese woman known to have died on American soil. The 136-year-old granite headstone, inscribed in English and Japanese, reads: "In Memory of Okei, Died 1871. Aged 19 years. (A Japanese Girl)." It has been retired for safekeeping; a replica will take its place.

Shanghai, China's financial capital, is to launch an English- and Japanese-language television channel on Jan. 1 as part of an effort to become an "international and cultural metropolis," the New China News Agency reported. International Channel Shanghai will cover news, information, fashion, entertainment, foreign TV shows and movies. It will air in English and Japanese, with Chinese captions, for 19 hours a day.

THE twentysomething Japanese man on the tiny stage at Karaoke Bleu is proving that Friday night sounds good in any language, delivering a smooth version of Kyu Sakamoto's old-school Japanese hit "\o7Ue o Muite \f7\o7Aruko\f7" to an appreciative audience. Dressed in Hollywood casual -- dark pants, light blue shirt, short hair well-coiffed -- he rejoins his table to a round of backslapping, and even those who don't speak Japanese raise a toast from the bar.

On the night of Feb. 21, 1942, the FBI surrounded the Torrance home of Nikuma Tanouye. "They didn't even bother to knock, just kicked the door down," Tanouye's granddaughter, Diane Tanouye, said in an interview. He was arrested and imprisoned along with four other Japanese nationals. From days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor until the end of 1943, the U.S.

Veteran voters here have rarely witnessed a gloves-off election battle -- or political campaigning of any kind, for that matter. In this regional transportation hub of 350,000 residents, confident incumbents from the nation's ruling Liberal Democratic Party had only to list their names on the ballot to virtually guarantee a landslide victory. But all that has changed in this city 90 minutes north of Tokyo, the home district of four previous prime ministers. This year, former Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda faces the political battle of his life to win reelection to the lower house of the Diet, Japan's parliament.

Regarding "Toyota Rules Road in California," Aug. 16, and "Ford to Scale Back Dealership Network," Aug. 15: It's amazing to me that so many Californians complain about the outsourcing of jobs and love to rail against nonunion companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., but they seem to think nothing of spending tens of thousands of dollars on Japanese and other foreign cars that were built either in other countries or in nonunion U.S. factories....

RE Clint Eastwood's new movie "Letters From Iwo Jima" ("War Is Hell for the Enemy Too," by Bruce Wallace, Nov. 24): Clint Eastwood discovered that Japanese soldiers "loved their mothers and miss[ed] their children," that a Japanese general was "a caring father" and that the Japanese "fought to protect their loved ones." The Japanese military was a killing machine of aggressive war, torture, terror and mass murder. Totally irrelevant is a universal trait of family love. Will his next film be about how much Nazi and Communist killers and terrorists loved their families?