Rejected Rescuers : Relief: Eight Japanese students came to Los Angeles to help fire victims and found little call for their assistance. One man chased them off his lot.

They came to Los Angeles looking for disaster. And they found it.

Unfortunately for members of a Japanese relief team who came to help victims of the Malibu and Altadena wildfires, their visit is what turned out to be disastrous.

Once they got here, nobody seemed to need their assistance.

“We tried to help, but everybody said there was no work to be done,” Shota Yokete said. “We were disappointed very much.”

Yokete, 21, a college student from Chiba, Japan, belongs to a private disaster relief agency. He is one of eight group members who paid their own way to Los Angeles to help victims of blazes that destroyed 501 structures seven weeks ago.

Members of the Japan Emergency Team arrived in early November expecting to help property owners remove debris, sift through ashes for valuables and sandbag denuded hillsides to prevent mudslides and flooding.

Instead, they spent a few days sorting clothing for fire victims. They spent the rest of their time waiting for the phone to ring with a call for help.

Four of the team members have returned to Japan and two more will leave today. The last pair of volunteers will depart Sunday.

The 4-year-old Japanese relief agency consists of 500 volunteers from 25 colleges and universities who are prepared to drop what they are doing, buy airline tickets and fly to a disaster site on a few days’ notice.

The group was launched in 1989 by Chuo University students who organized a group of 38 workers who spent two weeks cleaning up debris after the Loma Prieta earthquake. Since then, the Japan Emergency Team has rushed to 26 floods, volcanic eruptions, cyclones and other calamities around the world.

They have worked at earthquake sites in the Philippines, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, northern Japan and India. Thirty-one worked in the Oakland hills after the 1991 firestorm. Eight volunteers came to Los Angeles after last year’s riots. Ten sandbagged and scrubbed mud from homes near St. Louis when the Mississippi River flooded this year.

“It is rare that those coming from so far can show such compassionate care of strangers who have suffered disasters,” said Oakland fire victim Trevor Hoy, who sent a letter of praise to the team after members helped him clear away the remains of his burned home.

The Japanese workers say it is rarer still for people from their country to become personally involved in international rescue work. But the do-it-yourself rescue team found it had little to do when the first four members arrived the first week of November.

When they went to the Eaton Canyon area to offer their help, they were greeted with “Freeze!” by an armed homeowner who ordered them away from the debris of his house.

“People are suspicious . . . it was hard to connect,” said Jann Hollingsworth, a Pasadena publisher who tried to find jobs for the Japanese.

Property owners’ liability is also a factor, according to Bryan Pelz, acting head of the Greater Malibu Disaster Recovery Project. Pelz managed to put Yokete and teammates Yukihiro Tsuchiya, 21, Yukari Ueda, 23, and Shigeru Tanaka, 22, to work sorting clothing at a fire relief center.

“We didn’t even see a burned house in Malibu,” Tsuchiya said.

The first four team members did the same thing at a Pasadena-area Salvation Army facility, where officials told them there was little cleanup work because fire victims were waiting for insurance.

“I suggested they get out and see Los Angeles,” said Marlene Jones, social services director for the Salvation Army. “But they made it clear they were here to work, not to sightsee.”

As they prepared Tuesday to return home, the last four volunteers promised to leave their mark.

They said they have collected seeds from native sage, buckwheat and other bushes from unburned areas of Angeles National Forest.

“We’re going to plant them in Eaton Canyon before we leave,” Tanaka said.