Keiji Ōsawa

Keiji Ohsawa was, more than anything, a voice. Born in Fujisawa, Kanagawa, in 1932, he came out of Rikkyo University to play outfield for the Nankai Hawks and the Tokyo Orions, then went on to manage both the Lotte Orions and the Nippon-Ham Fighters. Written out like that it reads as a solid, unremarkable postwar baseball life. It undersells him badly. What people who followed Japanese baseball in his era actually remember is how bluntly he spoke — to his own players, and about the state of the game itself, at a time when deference was the default register. It is easy to file that under intimidating, but bluntness only earns respect when the speaker is willing to carry the consequences of what he said, and he was. Viewed from a present where every public sentence gets weighed for offense, that directness looks almost enviable. He died in October 2010, aged 78, and the type he represented has largely gone with him.

Name (English)

Keiji Ōsawa

Name (Japanese)

大沢啓二

Reading

おおさわ けいじ

Born

March 14, 1932 – October 7, 2010

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Pisces / Monkey

Origin

Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan

Height

173 cm

Occupation

baseball player

University

Rikkyo University

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiji%20Ohsawa
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A7%E6%B2%A2%E5%95%93%E4%BA%8C
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11436943

Tags

• Kanagawa Prefecture
• baseball player

Last updated

2026-08-07

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.