Veteran HCJB World Radio Programme Producer Dies Aged 81

Hisako Ozaki, a longtime missionary and on-air personality with HCJB World Radio's Japanese Language Service, has died in Wheaton, Illinois, USA after a lengthy fight with cancer. She was 81.

The Ozakis were accepted as missionaries with HCJB World Radio in Quito, Ecuador, in 1963 to produce and air programs for Japanese immigrants in South America.

Kazuo Ozaki, her husband, had already sent programmes to Quito from Japan as directed by Dr. Akira Hatori, a radio pastor and director of the Pacific Broadcasting Association which sponsored the Ozakis' work for many years. But the plea for Japanese personnel in Quito came after the station's broadcast director heard a programme tape played backwards.

Arriving in Quito on 6 January 1964, the Ozakis' first task was learning the Spanish language. Their programmes in Japanese began airing on 1 May 1964.

Thirty-six years later, the last regular Japanese language broadcasts from Radio Station HCJB in Quito ended on 31 December 2000, with a one-hour special live broadcast. Guests in the studio (and listeners via e-mail) shared words of appreciation for the Ozakis' untiring service to audiences in South America, Japan and the world.

While that ended Japanese programming on HCJB by shortwave, programmess resumed four months later via the internet and a local satellite digital station in Japan, according to DX Listening Digest.

The Ozakis also made annual appearances on the station via special programming. For the 1 May 2003,programme a special concert was held in Quito to celebrate 39 years of Japanese ministry. Among those attending the event was Hiroyuki Hiramatsu, the Japanese ambassador to Ecuador who gave the opening remarks.

During her ministry years in Quito, Hisako corresponded with listeners to the programmes that she and her husband hosted. When in mid-1969 Kazuo was hospitalised with a gastric ulcer, he left the radio work in the hands of Hisako and a visitor-both with experience in the office but not in the studio.

After subsequent decades of on-air experience with her husband, Hisako wrote to a shortwave hobbyists' publication that although radio is mass media, each time she entered the studio she conversed with one listener at a time. "The voice is most important," she wrote. "It tells whether you're revealing your soul."

As a radio team, Kazuo and Hisako developed a style of their own easily recognisable by their listeners. Their on-air presence was jovial and happy, taking listeners into their family relationships and their daily life in the Ecuadorian Andes. Kazuo reinitiated Japanese shortwave programming on June 3, 2006, this time from HCJB World Radio-Australia's station in Kununurra.

When the shortwave listening boom hit Japan in the 1970s, Hisako managed replies to the ever-higher mountains of mail arriving at the Ozakis' office. The Japanese Language Service's letter count skyrocketed from 5,572 in 1971 to 63,416 in 1976. Yet the Ozakis showed an uncanny ability to remember names of listeners and specifics they'd written about in letters.

Days before Hisako's death, her son, Michio, talked briefly of her at the mission's annual meeting in Quito. Leading worship, he'd arranged for a picture of his mother to appear on the screen between songs. A collective sigh escaped the crowd as they viewed Hisako in her hospice bed in Wheaton with her grandchild and Michio kneeling beside.

"My mom never felt qualified to be a missionary," Michio said. "She never graduated from high school; she didn't have training in radio production. And yet God used her." What followed was the song, "When It's All Been Said and Done," by Jim Cowan. The lyrics of the first verse state, "When it's all been said and done. There is just one thing that matters. Did I do my best to live for truth? Did I live my life for you?"

Hisako is survived by her husband, Kazuo; two sons, Michio and wife, Anne Marie, in Quito and Yuji and his wife, Michiho, in Tokyo; and a daughter, Joyce, and her husband, Dave Kerns, in Wheaton; as well as six grandchildren.


[Source: HCJB Radio]