Ozawa
Ozawa was born in Japan in 1907. He came of age during the expansion of Japan's modern diplomatic and administrative institutions and entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1936, beginning a career that connected prewar service, the postwar occupation period, and Japan's renewed international diplomacy.
Ozawa studied at Tokyo University of Commerce, completing his studies in 1932. The institution was founded in 1920 as Japan's first national higher commercial school and later became Hitotsubashi University, one of Japan's principal centers for commerce, economics, and social-science education.
His education in a commercial university preceded work in the foreign service, where knowledge of international affairs, administration, and economic relations formed part of the institutional environment of Japanese diplomacy. His later assignments included both regional policy work in Tokyo and overseas representation.
Ozawa entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1936. In 1938 he served as an assistant to the Japanese consul in Shanghai, an important international port and a major center of Japanese diplomatic, commercial, and military activity in East Asia during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He subsequently held several positions in the ministry in Japan.
After the Second World War, Ozawa was assigned to the Japanese diplomatic mission in Lima. He served as acting chargé d'affaires during the reestablishment of Japan's overseas representation in Peru and was appointed first secretary of the Japanese diplomatic office there in 1952. The Lima mission formed part of Japan's postwar effort to restore diplomatic relations and overseas administration after the wartime interruption.
Back in Tokyo, Ozawa became chief of the First Section of the Asia Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The bureau dealt with Japan's relations with Asian countries during the early Cold War, when the San Francisco peace settlement and the normalization of regional relations were reshaping Japanese diplomacy. In 1955 he was assigned to the ministry's Provisional Reparations Office, which handled issues connected with Japan's postwar reparations and related negotiations.
Ozawa later served as consul general of Japan in Chicago from 1959 to 1962. Chicago was a major commercial and industrial center and an important location for Japanese consular work in the United States. In 1968 he became Japan's ambassador to Czechoslovakia, serving in Prague during the period of the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968, when the embassy operated amid a major crisis in Czechoslovak political life.
Ozawa helped reestablish Japan's diplomatic representation in Peru after the postwar restoration of overseas missions, serving in Lima as acting chargé d'affaires and later as first secretary.
As chief of the First Section of the Asia Bureau, Ozawa held a senior policy position in Japan's foreign ministry during the early Cold War, when the country was rebuilding relations across Asia.
Ozawa represented Japan as ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1968 to 1971, including the diplomatic crisis surrounding the Prague Spring and the August 1968 invasion.
(A Japanese-language publication in the Europe-Asia Associ...)
1971
