Hisako Ozaki, a longtime missionary and on-air personality with HCJB World Radio's Japanese Language Service, died Sunday, Sept. 17, in Wheaton, Ill., after a lengthy bout with cancer. She was 81.

Hisako Kawashima was born in Ebina, Japan, on Jan. 1, 1925. She married Kazuo Ozaki in Japan on March 21, 1961.

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 had already sent programs 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 program tape played backwards.

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

Thirty-six years later, the last regular Japanese language broadcasts from Radio Station HCJB in Quito ended on Dec. 31, 2000, with a one-hour special live broadcast. Guests in the studio (and listeners via email) 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, programs 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 May 1, 2003, program 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 programs that she and her husband hosted. When in mid-1969 Kazuo was hospitalized 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 recognizable 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 mom 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.

Memorial gifts remembering Hisako will go toward the creation of a home studio to record Kazuo's Japanese radio programs that air twice weekly from HCJB World Radio-Australia's shortwave station in Kununurra. Gifts sent to the mission's international headquarters in Colorado Springs should be payable to HCJB World Radio and marked, "Japan Project - 782008."

Sources: HCJB World Radio, DX Listening Digest, Asia Focus