Seiji Ozawa's love for America

When Japan surrendered to the United States in 1945, Seiji Ozawa liked to recall, his father's reaction was: "Now, let's play baseball!" During World War II, baseball had been scorned by pro-government forces as an enemy import, and in 1944 the games were halted. But with the American victory, yakyÅ« — Japanese for baseball — returned to the ballparks. So did 10-year-old Seiji, wearing homemade gloves sewn by his mother.

Ozawa's passion for the sport never faded. The musician destined to lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a record 29 years saw his first Major League Baseball game at Fenway Park in 1960. For the next 64 years, he was an avid Red Sox fan. When Boston went to the World Series in 2013, Ozawa — by then retired and struggling with cancer — insisted on flying to Boston for what would turn out to be the team's eighth world championship. He also conducted the Boston side of the pre-Series "brass-off" between members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. In the delightful YouTube video, he exclaims "Bring it on!" while wearing a jersey bearing David Ortiz's No. 34.

Ozawa's passion for American baseball was a subset of his affection for the United States. He was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in 1935, but his family returned to Japan a few years later and he lived through the cataclysmic Japanese defeat in World War II. Far from resenting the American victors, however, he idolized them.

"We had to hide our happiness because the emperor had declared this a national tragedy," Ozawa told the Globe in 1994. "But in our homes we were happy because we knew that now we would be able to live. And when the American soldiers came, everything changed." His teachers had told him and his classmates that "the Americans were animals and murderers. [Yet] here they came in their Jeeps, singing and playing guitars and giving chewing gum to all the children. I never had Juicy Fruit before. In one day, everyone was happy on the street."

What a madeleine dipped in tea was for Marcel Proust's narrator, Juicy Fruit would be for Ozawa. "I never go past the chewing gum displays in the supermarket and smell it without thinking about that day," he said in 1994.

Ozawa got his first glimpse of an American when a US Army Air Corps pilot flew low over his hometown of Tachikawa. Ozawa and some friends, swimming naked in the river, quickly tried to hide when the air-raid siren sounded. "I could actually see the face of the pilot who was coming at me — it was the very first American face I ever saw," he later reminisced. "I was only 7 and he was maybe only 10 or 12 years older. … I wonder where he is now, and what his life is like. Now I feel like an American myself."

Ozawa, who passed away in Tokyo on Feb. 6 at 88, was "Japanese through and through," as a Washington Post profile put it. But he was also, like so many immigrants, filled with appreciation and affection for his adopted homeland.

At Boston's Symphony Hall on Oct. 3, 2001, just a few weeks after the horror of 9/11, Ozawa began his farewell season as conductor of the BSO.

"Ozawa made a signal," the Globe reported the next day, "and Elijah Magee of Ladder Company 15 of the Boston Fire Department — the Symphony Hall fire station — solemnly bore the spotlit flag up the center aisle to the front as the audience again rose to its feet and applauded.

The brass of the BSO nobly intoned the opening of ‘America the Beautiful' and soloists, members of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and the audience joined in singing two verses as tears streamed down the faces of many."

Among the eyes seen to well with tears that evening were those of Maestro Ozawa, a great musician and a great American.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."