JAZZ : Here’s One Export With No Trade Deficit : Japan’s 50-year fascination with jazz has aided the careers of many American musicians while providing inspiration for countless Japanese players.

The bombs were still echoing across Japan when Sadao Watanabe heard his first strains of jazz music. The year was 1945 and American occupation troops had moved into his native town of Utsunomiya. Frightened but fascinated by the soldiers, the 12-year-old schoolboy made a habit of surreptitiously stopping to listen to the enticing rhythmic sounds issuing from the American canteens.

“It was a very big shock to me,” recalled Watanabe in a recent interview in Los Angeles.A short, balding, amiable-looking man in his early-60s, he has been, for decades, one of Japan’s best-known jazz musicians, playing everything from straight-ahead be-bop to contemporary fusion. “I ran there from school every day to listen to the music.”

After he saw Bing Crosby as a clarinet player in the film “Birth of the Blues,” Watanabe asked his father for a clarinet. “And soon,” he continued, “I was copying Benny Goodman, mostly from the radio, because we had almost no recordings. Then, when I heard Charlie Parker, I bought my first alto saxophone--I don’t think anybody in my hometown knew what a saxophone was. And that was it. Jazz became my life.”

As it did for a startlingly large number of Japanese musicians and fans during the next five decades. Watanabe was not at all alone in responding to the music brought in first by the occupying GIs and later by the commercial importation of American recordings and films.

From the be-bop sounds that arrived within days of the surrender, to the fusion jazz of the ‘70s and the mainstream revisited of the ‘90s, Japan has loved jazz with the same dedicated passion it brings to its affection for that other American export--baseball.

The Japanese-American jazz connection--an informal, two-way artistic and financial exchange--has been linking the two countries for nearly five decades without threats of tariffs or government intervention.

This connection works because, as in all successful relationships, it satisfies the needs of both sides. And it doesn’t hurt that Japan is at least as fascinated with American jazz as Americans are with Japanese cars.

“To me,” says pianist-composer Toshiko Akiyoshi, who appears with her trio at Catalina Bar & Grill this week, “jazz always has been and still is an American art form. When I was in Japan they used to say that my playing ‘smelled of butter.’ And that was a very big compliment to me, because butter is Western--American.”

The U.S. contribution to the jazz connection provides two vital elements: a constant flow of inspiration from the music’s creative fountainhead--jazz that is both new and classic, on records and via live performance--and a wide range of opportunities for the education and apprenticeship of Japanese students, as well as, ultimately, an authentication of jazz credentials that allows them to establish credibility as performers in their native land.

The Japanese contribution supplies American artists with something even more tangible: an expanding market, widespread opportunities for live performance and recording, and a knowledgeable, dedicated jazz audience.

For American artists, the existence of an avid, knowledgeable base of fans, willing to spend as much as $30 for CDs, has presented burgeoning financial opportunities. Some performers have almost literally built careers in Japan. Veteran singer Helen Merrill, for example--a critically respected but not very well-known artist in this country--became a major name in Japan in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Los Angeles-based singer Kathy Segal-Garcia, who makes at least two performance trips to Japan annually, notes that “I have almost never met a person there who didn’t know [the music of] Helen Merrill.”

The corporate affiliations of the record business--Sony/Columbia, Verve/PolyGram, JVC/JVC--have also made it possible for many jazz artists to record albums directly for Japan, often in advance of U.S. release.

Herbie Hancock’s recent “Dis Is Da Drum,” for example, was released last year in Tokyo and became a bestseller there (while arousing critical commentary over its mix of jazz and pop elements) long before it was available in this country.

The market for international music on CDs and vinyl in Japan, says Hitoshi Namakata, Toshiba/Blue Note’s general manager for artists and repertoire in charge of American music, “is maybe 110 billion yen per year. Jazz represents, we could say, 6% or 7% of that, which means 8 or 9 billion yen, or approximately $100 million, in annual sales.”

Domestic Japanese performers such as Watanabe, pianist Junko Onishi and trumpeter Terumasa Hino are the biggest-selling individual jazz artists in Japan.

Watanabe, for example, has released more than 50 albums in Japan. Although his latest effort, “In Tempo,” has just been issued by Verve, a substantial portion of his work remains unreleased in the United States. In Japan, however, Watanabe’s recordings have sold across all categories. “He’s more like a pop artist,” Namakata says, “in terms of how he impacts in the market.”

Onishi, with four albums in release (two in the States), shows similar promise. “Right now,” Namakata says, “she is the biggest-selling jazz artist--domestic or international--in Japan, with total sales of more than 200,000 units.”

But jazz sales overall are dominated by imports, reissues and domestic releases featuring American artists. Toshiba/Blue Note, for example, is in the process of reissuing the entire American Blue Note catalogue.

Because of the devaluing of the dollar in relation to the yen, imported American albums are considerably cheaper in Japan than Japanese versions of the same album. Tower Records sells a U.S. jazz album in Tokyo for $17-$18; a Japanese release of the same album costs $25-$30.

Interestingly, Japanese buyers often favor the higher-priced domestic versions, which commonly are issued with bonus tracks and colorful new cover art.

“We have to make our releases as attractive as possible,” Namakata says, “with excellent sound on high-quality CDs. Take the reissues, for example. Sometimes the reissue material we receive has very dirty covers--just copies from the originals. So for our reissues we have to make new art, because the covers have to be beautiful for our market.

With only a handful of FM radio stations in Tokyo, and little cable TV penetration, jazz is merchandised via full page ads in Swing Journal, a phone book-thick jazz magazine, via posters and via high-concept productions.

“There are maybe 100,000 jazz-crazy people in Japan,” explains Namakata, “and to them, the important thing is American jazz classics or American big names. But there is a big gray zone of listeners too that we try to bring to jazz. Which is why we often have to do albums with high concepts. A few years ago, for example, we invented a new series, ‘Jazz for Women,’ and this made a big door opening to a new market.”

Although the young Japanese audience tends to be extremely fickle, often expressing little interest in “last year’s thing,” the affection for jazz appears to be unrestricted to any particular generation. Most recently, as in the United States, the attraction to the fusion and pop-jazz sounds of the ‘70s is being superseded by an interest in new young lions such as Joshua Redman, Christian McBride, James Carter and Roy Hargrove.

Remarkably, given the recurrent problems in other areas of Japan-American trade, there seem be few downsides at the Japanese end of the jazz connection. Increasing numbers of Japanese producers in the studio, as well as albums made specifically for the Japanese market, have not resulted in trendy, superficial music.

Often, projects are recorded that might have had difficulty finding a receptive company in the United States (Lee Konitz’s free-jazz-oriented album “Rhapsody,” recorded in 1993 for Japan’s King Records and released this summer in the United States on Evidence, is a good example). And the yen-dollar disparity, if anything, has enhanced the opportunities for American players to make extended tours of Japan.

The American contribution to the Japanese-American jazz connection traces its roots to the close of World War II.

Swing Journal, still Japan’s most important jazz periodical, first went to press in 1946. Benny Goodman performed in concert in Tokyo a year later, and by the late 1940s tenor saxophonist Hidehiko (Sleepy) Matsumoto began to lead a series of groups influenced by the be-bop sounds then emerging in the United States. Eiji Kitamura was doing a credible simulation of Goodman’s clarinet playing in the early ‘50s, and the Sharps and Flats, Japan’s premiere big jazz band both then and now, was established in 1952.

Oscar Pettiford, Gene Krupa, Hampton Hawes, Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden and a touring Jazz at the Philharmonic company, among dozens of others, performed in Japan in the ‘50s. By the end of the decade, Japan had become a major destination for touring musicians and a growing portion of the overseas market for jazz recordings.

Like Watanabe, Akiyoshi discovered jazz soon after the war. She was born in Dairen, China, in 1929, and moved with her family to Japan in 1947. Quickly switching from her classical music studies, Akiyoshi, now one of the most respected artists in jazz, set off for the Berklee School of Music in Boston--a prime destination for young players from around the world--at a time when, as a female Japanese jazz musician, she was the object of considerable curiosity.

“I was stared at quite a bit,” she recalls in a telephone interview from New York,”but I felt I had to come to the U.S. to reach my potential. So in 1956 I went to Berklee, because I knew it was where I needed to be if I was going to continue to get better.”

Other young Japanese players had similar reactions, if not always with Akiyoshi’s strong sense of authenticity. Throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, a generation of youngmusicians grew up devoted to American jazz and capable of producing note-perfect simulations of Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Bud Powell and Charlie Parker.

But until very recently originality was often in short supply.

Composer Frank Becker, who lived and taught in Japan for 14 years before returning to the United States in 1982 to provide the music for such shows as HBO’s “Tales From the Crypt” and the syndicated series “The Desperate Passage,” describes the manner in which young Japanese players approached jazz:

“I had students come to me who wanted to study jazz. I’d give them an assignment to transcribe some well-known jazz solo, and they would do it so exactly that I’d think, ‘Wow, even the guy who originally played the solo couldn’t do it that well.’ Then the students would learn to play the solo--literally, note for note. And when they began to improvise on their own, it all came out technically perfect, but it sounded like wood. I would tell them to simply play and loosen up and forget about making mistakes. But it was very hard for them to do that. They had an unbelievably thorough understanding of the technical aspects of jazz but no connection at all with its soul.”

Making such a connection, many young players began to realize, meant going to the source. And, despite difficulties in obtaining visas, Japanese students began to trickle into the U.S. during the mid-50s.

Watanabe followed Akiyoshi to Berklee, as did dozens of other Japanese players. The school’s current enrollment includes 250 Japanese--about 10% of the entire student body.

Pianist Junko Onishi, three decades younger than Akiyoshi and Watanabe, also discovered jazz at an early age but in a dramatically different cultural milieu. Growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, she was continually exposed to the wide variety of jazz that had become, by that time, an everyday part of Japanese life. Like Akiyoshi, she set aside her classical piano studies as soon as she heard her first Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane recordings.

“I knew right away,” Onishi says in a telephone conversation from Tokyo,”that I wanted to come to the United States to study jazz. My parents thought I was crazy, and we argued about it over and over. But soon they gave in, and I won.”

Dark-haired and actress-pretty, Onishi, whose second album, “Live at the Village Vanguard” (Blue Note), was released in May, plays the piano with fierce aggressiveness, long tresses flying, slamming out massive chord clusters and firing finger-busting runs across the keyboard. At the youthful age of 27, she has rapidly ascended to the very peak of the Japanese jazz charts.

Onishi lived in New York for a few years before returning to Japan, but a surprisingly large number of players have elected to stay and compete in the thorny New York jazz scene.

Akiyoshi notes that “there are 70 or so Japanese jazz players in New York City, and it’s not easy for them. New York has always been a tough place for any young musician, with maybe 150 musicians for every three jobs. It’s very hard for Japanese players to break into that. But if you’re serious about playing jazz, the only way to really learn is to be around the best players, and this is where they are.”

The result of all the study and dues-paying has been a remarkable proliferation of Japanese jazz players, both here and in Japan. A few, especially in the last 10 or 15 years, have begun to search for musical identities that reach beyond the American simulations of the first postwar generation of Japanese artists.

Beyond Watanabe, Akiyoshi and Onishi, trumpeters Terumasa Hino and Tiger Okoshi have used the ‘70s and ‘80s electric jazz-rock style of Miles Davis as the starting point for explorations of their own; guitarist Kazumi Watanabe dips freely into fusion, jazz, rock and electronics; George Kawaguchi has been described as the Japanese Art Blakey; and saxophonist Akira Sakata is one of an emerging group of Japanese avant-gardists.

But it is on keyboards that Japanese jazz talent has flourished.

The list of visible Japanese key boardists presents a spectrum of styles ranging from the pop-jazz, fusion and funk of Hiroko Kokubu, Chizuko Hoshihiro and Keiko Matsui to the straight-ahead playing of Makoto Ozone, Kuni Mikami and Masabumi Kikuchi (whose works were performed by Gil Evans). Kei Akagi, born in Japan and raised in the United States and Japan, has emerged from an early apprenticeship with Miles Davis into a strong personal style. Yosuke Yamashita has explored everything from bop to turbulent contemporary sounds and crossover connections with traditional Japanese music. And Aki Takase blends European classical avant-garde techniques with her own rich lyricism.

A few of the players who have come to the States and developed advanced skills have become prominent enough to either live here or to spend a considerable portion of their time in this country. Akiyoshi elected to stay in the United States, in part because of her marriage to saxophonist Lew Tabackin, in part because of her desire to be where she believes the musical challenges are the greatest. Other players have also elected to remain, but rarely with Akiyoshi’s level of success.

Most, like Watanabe and Onishi, have found that, for Japanese jazz players, the greatest value at the American end of the jazz connection is the cachet of having studied and worked at the music’s source with teachers and players who set the world standards for jazz excellence.

“Jazz is universal music,” according to Watanabe. “Japanese players need experience with American musicians. Now American jazz musicians sell lots of records in Japan. So that’s good--something for everybody.”