LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Pearl Harbor is 4,000 miles away and its day of infamy nearly 60 years past. But this year's festive buildup to the Kentucky Derby will include, amid the traditional steamboat races and free concerts, a fiery re-enactment of that American military disaster.

That has rankled some locals, who find the event out of place in a day set aside for family fun.

Especially perplexed are representatives of a flourishing Asian population lured here as part of the state's decade-old strategy to attract Japanese investment.

Today's kickoff of the Kentucky Derby Festival, a much-anticipated bash that draws a half-million revelers to this city's waterfront, will include a dozen surplus warplanes painted to resemble Japanese Zeros and torpedo bombers.

They will swoop in low over the muddy Ohio River and conduct mock dogfights and strafing runs, punctuated by fireworks launched from barges.

It's a popular show, and one performed with minimal controversy about a dozen times a year by the volunteer Confederate Air Force at county fairs and air shows around the country.

But here, the re-creation of a Japanese sneak attack that killed 2,400 American service members and dragged the country into World War II has touched off a bitter debate.

Veterans groups applauded the inclusion of "living history" in the show, arguing that it is a good way to pay tribute to those who died Dec. 7, 1941, at the U.S. naval outpost in Hawaii.

But state economic development officials, the people largely responsible for luring $6.9 billion in Japanese investment, accounting for 35,500 jobs, called festival organizers to complain.

So did Toyota, which has its biggest U.S. investment in a factory in Georgetown, about an hour's drive east of Louisville.

"Our concerns were never about a re-enactment of history, but rather the misunderstandings such a performance might create," Toyota spokesman Jim Wiseman said.

All 12 members of the city's Board of Aldermen signed a letter begging festival organizers to reconsider. The "racial and nationalistic overtones of the Pearl Harbor bombing hardly represents what the Kentucky Derby Festival stands for," the board wrote.

Tina Ward-Pugh, a community activist and freshman member of the Board of Aldermen, was the first to sign. She said she wouldn't mind the Pearl Harbor re-enactment if it were part of a military air show. But not during a community-wide celebration, she said.

"Every day, people in this world live with bombs and destruction as a part of their daily life, and for us to re-create that for our entertainment is unthinkable," Ward-Pugh said.

Surprised by opposition

Michael E. Berry, president of the Kentucky Derby Festival Inc., a politically well-connected nonprofit that operates independently of the horse race and its track, Churchill Downs, said he was shocked by the reaction.

The air show, called "Tora! Tora! Tora!" for the radio attack signal used by the Japanese pilots, has been performed twice in recent years in Indiana, just over the Ohio River, without a problem.

Besides, he said, the Derby Festival's opening day "Thunder Over Louisville" production -- for which Tora! is scheduled -- has almost always featured a military-themed air show. Stealth bombers, B-17s, even a replica of the Red Baron's triplane have flown with only scattered complaints.

It's hard to put on an air show without fighters and bombers, Berry said.

"Until we can get UPS, Delta and American Airlines to do rollovers over the Ohio River, there will always be a military component," he said.

The Pearl Harbor re-enactment represents only 15 minutes of the seven-hour day of events, which ends with what organizers say is the largest annual fireworks show in the country.

Berry said he read the script the announcers read during the show and is convinced it is both tasteful and educational.

"It is a tribute to those who lost their lives: Americans, Japanese and Polynesians," he said.

He said he felt blindsided by the Board of Aldermen's letter, which was drafted and sent before he had a chance to explain. He was even more angered by Ward-Pugh's offhand suggestion, in a television interview, that the event's permits could be revoked.

But the festival's response made matters worse: It asked the public to phone the festival offices, where callers reported being given a choice of whether to cancel the whole day's events or go ahead with the show. Berry said 85 percent backed the show.

Ward-Pugh said the Board of Aldermen merely wanted the Tora! element excised, not the whole day scuttled.

"The perception was the festival people were acting like children, threatening to take their ball and go home," she said.

Asked specifically about Tora!, respondents to a call-in poll conducted by the Louisville Courier-Journal were evenly divided.

It has been one of the ugliest controversies in the 44 years of Derby Festivals. Created to expand the impact of the city's famous horse race, the festival has gained worldwide acclaim and grown to a staff of 21 with an annual budget of $4.8 million of donated funds.

Among those who have borrowed its ideas are Maryland tourism officials, looking to enhance the Preakness Stakes.

Charles Hutchins, coordinator of the Houston-based Tora! re-enactors, said they've been doing the show since 1972, using, in part, planes donated from the studio that filmed the movie "Tora! Tora! Tora!" Although they receive an occasional complaint, they've never faced flak like Louisville's before, he said.

"It's a great show and great history," he said. The nonprofit group is charging $25,000, which includes, at the festival's request, a few more planes and special effects than the standard performance, said Hutchins, who carries the Confederate Air Force rank of colonel.

Worried about a backlash

Helen L. Lang, as chairwoman of the Louisville-based Asia Institute Inc., has spent decades trying to bridge racial divides. She fears the Tora! show will unleash a backlash against all Asians, not just Japanese. This, even though other Asians suffered at the hands of Japan during World War II as well.

Normally nonpolitical, her organization issued a statement in opposition to the show.

"People who do this sort of thing don't realize how hurtful it can be to other people," said Lang, who was born in Seattle to Chinese immigrant parents. "It will make the Americans boil inside again. This does not help our community."

At the height of the furor last month, her offices received a few calls from people asking, "Why don't you people go home?" At about the same time, she attracted vicious stares while dining with friends at a restaurant -- the first time that has happened in many years.

She said she knows of one Asian-American who was so unnerved by harassing phone calls he has had his number changed to an unlisted one.

The dispute comes as the local Asian community is growing in both numbers and profile.

Kentucky beat out several other states for a coveted Toyota plant that opened in 1987 and now employs 7,000, building Camrys, Avalons and Sienna minivans. Toyota then built its North American manufacturing headquarters in Erlanger, employing about 700 people, and is constructing a $15 million parts warehouse in nearby Hebron that will hire another 350.

Thousands of more jobs were created at scores of Japanese parts suppliers that followed Toyota, opening factories throughout the state.

Lang said the assimilation of Asian executives has been mostly smooth in Louisville, a southern city that prides itself on exhibiting "northern" sensibilities of tolerance (the Board of Aldermen recently added sexual orientation and gender identity to a long-standing anti-discrimination ordinance).

Assignment is temporary

Following Japanese tradition, most plant executives work for a few years in America and then are transferred back home.

Local schools have added programs to teach English to the visiting executives' children and to keep their native language skills sharp.

Tensions have mostly been limited to the city's southwestern end, where Vietnamese immigrants have congregated, encouraged by a Catholic Social Services relocation program after the Vietnam War.

Here, complaints occasionally arise from neighbors about crime or cultural differences.

Asians still make up less than 1 percent of the region's population, but their numbers are growing, according to the Asia Institute.

Japanese steakhouses and sushi bars have proliferated, as have requests from area schools for the Asia Institute to conduct its cross-cultural training classes.

A Korean group now sponsors a tae kwon do martial arts demonstration in the annual pre-Derby Pegasus Parade.

Down on the city's waterfront, where the Tora! show will be conducted, reactions to Tora! were mixed.

"I think it's much ado about nothing," said Brooke Bell, a University of Louisville graduate student studying on a blanket spread out on a grassy park along the river bank.

"I don't see a big difference between this show and the bombers and jets they always have," Bell said. "To me, it's just historic."

But Deborah Mathis, a black professional with a health insurance firm, who was power-walking the park's perimeter, saw a darker, racial element to the debate.

She said festival planners were being insensitive, just like the people who display statues of miniature black jockeys on their lawns without realizing the insult it conveys.

"I don't think a lot of thought was put into this," Mathis said.

Pub Date: 4/17/99