Quake’s Toll in Japan Shakes L.A. : Tragedy: Van Nuys couple receive word that daughter is among the dead. In Little Tokyo, shock and anxiety grip residents and visitors.

A mother and father in Van Nuys on Tuesday mourned the death of their child half a world away. Meanwhile, in Little Tokyo, traditional heart of Los Angeles’ Japanese community, anxious shopkeepers and visitors studied Japanese newspapers filled with graphic accounts of destruction.

As western Japan struggled in the wake of its calamitous quake, so too did Los Angeles--home to one of the largest concentrations of people of Japanese ancestry outside Japan. About 24 hours after the massive temblor, news of the casualties was only beginning to emerge.

Among them, authorities confirmed, was an American, believed to be Bonnie Wong, 24, a UCLA graduate working as a private tutor near the devastated city of Kobe. Relatives said she had gone to Asia in search of her roots.

She had been living there, they said, for the past year--an irony that had enabled her to miss last year’s Northridge quake, but that put her directly in the path of the Kobe catastrophe.

“The second story of her apartment collapsed,” said Wong’s father, Henry K. Wong of Van Nuys. “Her roommate called us and told us that . . . she did not survive.”

The State Department has not confirmed his daughter as the dead woman, but Wong said he was convinced it was her. “I have to take reality as it is,” he said.

Suzanne Ross of Los Feliz, a friend of Bonnie Wong, said she had recently received a card from Wong. In it, Wong described a trip she had just finished to Shanghai and southern China, Ross said.

“She wanted to have an adventure and teach in Japan,” Ross said. “She decided to go to Asia, for her Asian roots, instead of Europe.”

Although officials at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo listed only one American among the thousands of casualties, many in Los Angeles spent Tuesday anxiously awaiting the latest news from Japan. In Little Tokyo, shop windows displayed bulletins bearing the latest word from Kobe, while worried residents monitored television and radio reports.

Anxiety, even shock, were etched in the faces of shoppers, business people and others who sought the comforting rigor of routine on the far-from-routine day.

With telephone communications difficult, particularly to the hard-hit cities of Kobe and Osaka, a doleful sense of uncertainty numbed those desperate for information.

“I’m very worried,” said Yuji Ishizaki, a sound engineer from Osaka who arrived in Los Angeles early Monday on the first leg of a planned two-month tour of the United States.

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News of the disaster had shattered Ishizaki’s itinerary. On Tuesday, he sat, red-eyed and disconsolate, on a Little Tokyo bench, explaining that he had been unable to contact his mother in Osaka.

Stymied in efforts to reach Japan, many turned to the Japanese Consulate, Japanese-owned hotels and businesses and other potential intermediaries. Others set up makeshift networks to pool what little word trickled through. More often than not, those grasping for reliable information were frustrated.

“They call us, but what can we do?” asked Genichi Kadono, president of the Japanese Assistance Network, a Hollywood firm that specializes in providing translators for visiting Japanese tourists.

On Tuesday, the network’s operators were busily fielding calls from U.S. residents seeking word on relatives and others in Japan. A year ago, the situation was reversed: People filled the lines from Japan with worries about loved ones here in the wake of the Northridge earthquake.

“There’s a great void of information,” said Naomi Hirahara, editor of the English section of Rafu Shimpo, a bilingual Los Angeles-based newspaper.

At the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles, besieged by inquiries, officials posted and were updating lists of the dead throughout the day. There has been a rush of visa and passport applications from anxious U.S. residents of Japanese descent, Seiichiro Noboru, Japanese consul general, told reporters.

U.S. and Japanese corporations--both major donors to relief efforts after the Northridge quake--have again been quick to offer assistance.

“The people of Japan reached out to help us in our time of need and now we are honored to do the same for them,” said Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan, who will serve as honorary chairman of the just created Osaka/Kobe Earthquake Recovery Fund.

In Little Tokyo, people gathered outside a shop where the owners posted the latest Japanese newspapers, featuring stark black-and-white images of buckled freeways, derailed trains and toppled buildings. The photographs prompted more than one onlooker to contemplate the consequences if such a quake--about twice as strong as the Northridge temblor--were to strike Southern California.

While glued to news accounts, many enduring the uncertainty also sought spiritual succor. Switchboards lit up at churches and temples serving the Japanese and Japanese American communities.

“I’m just waiting for news and praying to God,” said the Rev. Shiro Cato, an associate minister at Centenary United Methodist Church in Little Tokyo. In particular, he worried about his 102-year-old aunt and other relatives in Kobe. “I have faith in God,” Cato said. “That’s what I need now.”

Times staff writers Lisa Respers, Nieson Himmel and Patrick J. McDonnell contributed to this story.