Category: Obituaries

Duncan Sheik, an introspective singer-songwriter whose alt-pop hit “Barely Breathing” became a Generation X touchstone, but who squirmed under the label of MTV heartthrob and eventually decamped to Broadway, winning two Tonys for composing the smash musical Spring Awakening, died Thursday in Manhattan. He was 56.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his mother, Suzanne Sheik, who said that the cause was organ failure.

Soft-spoken and cerebral — complete with a degree in semiotics from Brown University — Mr. Sheik seemed like a long shot for fame when he arrived in Los Angeles in 1992 with a demo tape and a deep unease with the spotlight.

Though he had played guitar in a band with future hitmaker Lisa Loeb in college, he “could barely sing in public to save my life at that point,” he recalled in a 2011 interview with the site Pop Dose.

Yet in just a few years, he was a rising star. In 1996, Rolling Stone called his first album, Duncan Sheik, a “defiant debut — beautiful and benevolent of spirit” and praised his “raw and articulate singing.”

The single “Barely Breathing,” an unvarnished sketch of a dying relationship that was propelled by candy-sweet hooks, saturated the radio airwaves. It earned a Grammy nomination and rose to No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, remaining on the chart for 55 weeks — at the time, the fourth-longest run ever.

In the decade of Nirvana and Soundgarden, Mr. Sheik intended his artfully crafted record “as a reaction against the existing alternative music,” he said in a 1997 interview with the Palm Beach Post, complaining that alt rock had become “this kind of monolithic distorted guitar chord.”

With a grounding in classical composition, and influences as diverse as Joni Mitchell, the Cocteau Twins, and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, Mr. Sheik mixed heart-rending melodies with lyrics that mined Buddhist philosophy and brimmed with existential angst.

In a review of his second album, Humming (1998), in the New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that Mr. Sheik’s “beautifully orchestrated meditations suggest that pop can still aspire to a lofty, searching classicism.”

Fans embraced him as a tortured troubadour, like Jeff Buckley or Elliott Smith. Critics often noted his musical similarities to Nick Drake, the haunting and haunted British singer-songwriter of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

But Mr. Sheik — with looks that called to mind the Gen X dreamboat John Cusack and a female-tilting fan base — was also cast in the news media as a sensitive, soulful sex symbol. The Palm Beach Post noted his “name straight out of a romance novel and the face of a GQ model.”

“Don’t hate Duncan Sheik because he’s beautiful,” critic Ann Powers wrote in a review of a 1998 concert in the New York Times. “He is trying very hard to distance himself from that fact.”

Duncan Scott Sheik was born Nov. 18, 1969, in Glen Ridge, N.J., to Jack and Suzanne (Tracy) Sheik. By the time he was 6, he was learning piano from his grandmother, who had studied at Juilliard. After his parents divorced, his mother moved to Hilton Head Island, S.C., where Duncan got his first electric guitar and played in a band that performed Def Leppard and Van Halen covers.

After graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., in 1988, he enrolled at Brown, where he holed up in the campus recording studio working on his own material, when he wasn’t playing with Loeb, a fellow student who in 1994 would hit No. 1 with “Stay (I Missed You).”

It took a few years of living in Los Angeles after college for his career to take off — but once it did, he found fame to be at times overwhelming.

“I was put in situations that I didn’t have the experience to handle,” he recalled in a 2003 interview with University Wire, adding that he had performed on David Letterman’s and Jay Leno’s late-night shows when he had “just made one album and I had played maybe 30 or 40 shows in my life. And I’m sure I sucked.”

An adherent of Nichiren Buddhism, rooted in 13th century Japan, since he was 19, he found that daily chanting helped him to be “just a bit more positive about life in general,” he told the Palm Beach Post.

Despite critical plaudits, Humming sold modestly. Sheik’s somber third album, Phantom Moon (2001) — a collaboration with the poet and playwright and his fellow Buddhist Steven Sater — was, according to Holden’s Times review, “the most entrancing collection of pop dream songs since Nick Drake’s 1969 album, Five Leaves Left.”

That, Holden added, was “not to suggest that this hauntingly melancholy suite is poised to hurtle up the charts anytime soon.”

By that point, Mr. Sheik said in a 2015 interview with HuffPost, “the ‘authenticity’ of the alt-rock era of the early and mid-90s was over and the music business took a hard right turn back toward artifice and the more overtly pop sound of Britney, Christina, ’N Sync, and Backstreet Boys.”

He scored an unlikely dance hit in 2002 with the percolating “On a High,” from the album Daylight, but he was growing ever more weary of the industry hustle.

“I thought, I’m not going to win in this game of trying to be Justin Timberlake,” he recalled in a 2022 interview with the Houston Chronicle. “Maybe I should try and do something different.”

Mr. Sheik met Sater through the Buddhist association Soka Gakkai, and in 1999, Sater broached the idea of working together on a musical based on Spring Awakening, Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play exploring the tormented inner lives and flowering sexuality of a group of teenagers.

After initial doubts, Mr. Sheik ended up feeling a kinship with the material. “Being a recording artist who tours and performs and who has never had a normal job or anything, I have never really evolved past my 17-year-old self,” he said in a 2014 interview with Broadway World.

In development for years, the rock-meets-folk-meets-emo musical — striking for its raw treatment of topics such as abortion, abuse, and suicide — ran off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company starting in spring 2006, before opening on Broadway that December.

“It was really about ‘Can we make a musical score that sounds as cool as the music that any alternative rock kid is listening to on their iPod?’” Mr. Sheik recalled in a 2020 interview.

Before the show premiered, he coached the cast — which included future stars like Lea Michele, Jonathan Groff, and John Gallagher Jr. — to steer clear of traditional Broadway bombast.

“Imagine that you’re Thom Yorke,” he said he told them. “Imagine that you’re a young David Bowie. Imagine that you are Fiona Apple. And please forget about all the vocal training you’ve ever had.”

In a rave review in the Times, critic Charles Isherwood praised Mr. Sheik’s “ravishing rock score,” calling the show a “brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns.”

Spring Awakening won eight Tony Awards, including best musical, with Mr. Sheik taking home two, for the score — an honor he shared with Sater, who wrote the book and lyrics — and for his orchestrations. The show ran for over two years on Broadway, where it was revived in 2015; a new production opens off-Broadway in November.

Mr. Sheik wrote the scores for several other musicals, including Alice by Heart, a version of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” set in London during World War II, and American Psycho, an adaptation of the blood-soaked Bret Easton Ellis novel, which flopped on Broadway in 2016.

He is survived by his parents; his wife, Nora Ariffin; their daughter, Ines Sheik; and his half siblings, Peter and Kacie.

Along the way, Mr. Sheik continued to release nontheater albums, including a 2011 collection of covers of songs by British acts of the 1980s like Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears. His final album, Claptrap (2022), wove his trademark delicate melodies into an ambient electronic soundscape.

In interviews over the years, his Buddhist outlook came through as he described fame, critical success, and even life itself as capricious and beyond anyone’s control.

“I subscribe to the death-of-the-author theory,” he said in a 1997 interview with the Orange County Register, “that once a cultural product has been created and sent out into the world, it no longer has any attachment to its author.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Bob Mackie, the exuberant costume and fashion designer whose glittering, beaded, sequined, rhinestoned, feathered, and often winged creations bedecked, bedazzled and elevated performers like Carol Burnett, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Bernadette Peters, Bette Midler, Mitzi Gaynor, Liza Minnelli, Elton John, RuPaul, and, most memorably and enduringly, Cher — as well as an 11.5-inch model named Barbie — died Monday in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 87.

The death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Joe McFate, Mackie’s longtime design director.

“He dressed every spangly woman in show business,” said Frank DeCaro, author of Unmistakably Mackie: The Fashion and Fantasy of Bob Mackie (1999). “You can mention some of the greatest names in fashion, and the average person won’t be able to conjure up, for example, a Giorgio Armani suit. But if you say to an American of a certain age, ‘What is a Bob Mackie?,’ they know exactly what you’re talking about.”

Mr. Mackie got his start in Hollywood, dropping out of college to sketch for costume designers Jean Louis and Edith Head, but it was television that made his name. When Carol Burnett put together her variety show in 1967, she picked Mr. Mackie to design the costumes. At the time, he was in his late 20s — though he looked about 12, Burnett often said. Over the show’s 11 seasons, he created an average of 60 costumes a week for Burnett, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Tim Conway, and Lyle Waggoner, as well as the show’s guest stars and supporting performers.

The skits, of course, were comedic gold, and Burnett said that she frequently found her characters through Mr. Mackie’s designs. For Mrs. Wiggins — the dim and indifferent secretary whom “the IQ fairy never visited,” in Burnett’s words — he assembled a frosty blond wig, a pushup bra, and a tight black skirt that wasn’t quite tight enough for Burnett’s lanky frame. “Stick your behind back into it,” he instructed her, and the character’s mincing walk was born.

The show was known for its zany movie parodies, and when it took on a scene from Gone With the Wind (renamed Went With the Wind) in which the main character, fallen on hard times, has a dress made out of her curtains, Mr. Mackie asked the prop department for a curtain rod so he could fashion his own version for Burnett as “Starlet O’Hara.” It was such an instant, irresistible sight gag that Burnett made sure to warn Korman, playing “Ratt Butler,” beforehand so he wouldn’t lose his composure onstage.

“That gown is gorgeous,” Ratt exclaimed in the skit.

“Thank you,” Starlet replied. “I saw it in the window, and I just couldn’t resist it.”

Mr. Mackie’s curtain dress is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington.

Television variety shows were the closest thing to movie musicals, as Mr. Mackie liked to say, particularly in the 1970s; they were nightly extravaganzas that delivered high-wattage stars and over-the-top, glamorous fashion to America’s living rooms.

Sonny Bono and Cher had veered from their folk roots and were playing Las Vegas when CBS hired them to do a weekly show. Mr. Mackie had seen photos of them, and as he told Vogue, which put together an oral history of the designer in 2019, “They were kind of like New Age cave people. There they were in their fur vests and funny pants and belts and just a whole look that nobody had had up until that time.”

The producers, he added, didn’t know what to do with Cher, but Mr. Mackie did. (He noted that she was built just like Burnett, a perfect size 6 with no cleavage: a human clothes hanger.) Their collaboration, first on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, which ran from 1971 to 1974, delighted television audiences and confounded the network’s censors, as Mr. Mackie bared more and more of Cher’s extraordinary physique in ever more outlandish getups.

Mr. Mackie recalled a censor complaining of one outfit that revealed the undersides of Cher’s breasts. (The industry term was “underboob.”)

“Well, if we stand her on her head,” he retorted, “it will just be cleavage.”

Later, Cher became the first person allowed to show her belly button on television.

“People can watch a show and see people stealing hubcaps, and then they can go out and steal hubcaps,” she told TV Guide, “but I don’t think my show will provoke anybody into stealing a belly button.”

Reviewing Cher, her postdivorce variety show that ran for 11 months in 1975-76, Newsweek declared that the performer “played second banana to the show’s real star — a cool, hip, certifiably freaky costume designer named Bob Mackie. Television hasn’t shown so much glitter and flash since NBC did a special on Liberace’s closet.”

As DeCaro observed, “He brought glamour to a sequin-starved America.”

In the process, Mr. Mackie’s name became a gay touchstone. “For gay kids sitting at home like me or RuPaul, looking for a way out of our drab surroundings, Bob Mackie was the portal,” DeCaro said. “He made women look like drag queens, but in the best possible sense. He was a window into a glamorous, funny, inclusive glitter world. For me, the ultimate Mackie moment was when the first Cher special ended in a sea of white balloons, and it’s Bette Midler, Elton John, Flip Wilson, and Cher, all dripping with mirror tiles and looking like glamorous disco balls come to life.”

And yet Mr. Mackie — preternaturally boyish, always soberly dressed in his uniform of button-down shirts and khaki pants, like he had stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad — looked as if he would be allergic to sequins.

Robert Gordon Mackie was born in Monterey Park, Calif., a bit east of downtown Los Angeles, on March 24, 1939. That was the year, he liked to say, that Gone With the Wind, The Women, and The Wizard of Oz came out.

His father, Charles Robert Mackie, who worked at Bank of America, and his mother, Mildred Agnes (Smith) Mackie, a homemaker, divorced when he was young, and he was raised by his paternal grandmother, Bessie Ida Mackie, in Alhambra, Calif. Her house, he recalled, was on a busy highway with not much neighborhood, and he was often alone and lonely. He drew to entertain himself.

“I was a weird kid,” he told Vogue in 1990. “But I was always pretty good with crayons.”

His mother and his older sister would visit on weekends and take Bob to the movies — Technicolor musicals, mostly, that entranced him. “It didn’t look like that at my house, and I wanted to be part of that,” he said. He remembered being dazzled by the dance numbers in An American in Paris. When the credits rolled at the end, he discovered that costume design was a job.

Mr. Mackie attended Pasadena City College and then the Chouinard Art Institute, now part of the California Institute of the Arts, before dropping out to work on movies, first with Fred Thompson, then Louis and Head. (Mr. Mackie sketched the skintight gown that Louis made for Marilyn Monroe when she sang “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy in 1962.)

In 1963, he was hired by Ray Aghayan, an Iraqi-born designer who was working on Judy Garland’s television variety show. The two became business and romantic partners, sharing the first Emmy ever awarded for costume design, in 1967, for their work on Alice Through the Looking Glass, an eye-popping confection of a television movie.

The pair received Oscar nominations for Lady Sings the Blues, the 1972 biopic of Billie Holiday starring Ross, and for Funny Lady, the 1975 sequel to Funny Girl. Mr. Mackie was nominated on his own for Pennies From Heaven, the 1981 film musical starring Steve Martin and Peters.

He won an Emmy in 1999 for Cher’s costumes in Cher: Live in Concert From Los Angeles and again in 2003, for Cher: The Farewell Tour.

A brief marriage to Marianne Nicholson, an actor whose stage name is Lulu Porter, ended in divorce in the early 1960s. Their son, Robert Gordon Mackie Jr., who was known as Robin and worked as a makeup artist, died of AIDS in 1993. Aghayan died in 2011. Mr. Mackie’s survivors include a granddaughter and two great-granddaughters.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Mackie began designing ready-to-wear. A decade later, he created a line of clothing and home furnishings for QVC, the shopping channel. While critics enjoyed the high camp factor of his cinema-siren clothes and the theatricality of his fashion shows, he was often derided for being not an authentic fashion designer, although his clothes were meticulously made, like couture garments.

“Subjecting Mr. Mackie to serious fashion criticism is a little like asking Ada Louise Huxtable to meditate on Malibu Barbie’s dream house,” Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times wrote, reviewing his 2002 fashion show.

Yet Mr. Mackie was proud to design for that diminutive doll, which he began doing in 1982, creating outfits as exotic and outrageous as those he made for his human muse, Cher. Goddess of the Sun Barbie, out in 1995, has 11,000 sequins on her hand-sewn gown.

“They called him Barnum Bob, the Raja of Rhinestones and the Sequined Sheik,” McFate said. “They thought of him as a Hollywood guy. It was hard for him to get a footing on Seventh Avenue.”

In 2001, the Council of Fashion Designers of America gave Mr. Mackie an award for “fashion exuberance.” In 2019, he earned the organization’s lifetime achievement award. That same year, he won a Tony for the costumes in the Broadway musical The Cher Show, a dizzying, giddy paean to the performer and her style.

As he told Vogue, “For a long time, everyone just thought all I knew how to do were Cher’s dresses, you know, with her tummy out and showing half her whatever.”

He added, “I always just sort of pray in my life somebody will give me a nice 19th-century movie or a good 1930s Depression film.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Jay Maisel, a masterly photographer whose dark and moody portrait of jazz great Miles Davis performing at the Apollo Theater appeared on the cover of his landmark 1959 album, Kind of Blue — Mr. Maisel’s best-known work in a long and varied career — died on Aug. 20 at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 95.

His daughter, Amanda Maisel, said the cause was cancer.

While not necessarily his best photograph — he wished it had been sharper — the Davis picture became part of a portfolio of remarkable depth that included coal miners silhouetted in an eerie glow a mile beneath the earth, the Statue of Liberty surrounded in a mist, and Sports Illustrated swimsuit models.

Mr. Maisel was impossible to ignore: He was 6-foot-1, barrel-chested, charismatic, and profane, with a Brooklyn accent. He smoked cigars and collected stuff to the point of hoarding.

And he spoke passionately — and practically — about his art. “The drama in light exists not only in what is in the light, but also in what is left dark,” he wrote in Light Gesture & Color, his 2015 book. “If the light is everywhere, the drama is gone. When I see light that moves me, that I cannot explain, I won’t leave until I figure it out.”

More simply, he said, in a documentary: “I think that my entire motivation and execution and philosophy can be two words: ‘Hey, look.’”

Mr. Maisel’s picture of Davis reveals him in a splash of light and shows his fingers moving in a blur on his trumpet. Mr. Maisel had taken it for himself; months later, Columbia Records asked if he had any photos of Davis that could be used for Kind of Blue, which music historian Ashley Kahn, writing in the New York Times in 1999, said “floats above jazz history in an ether all its own.”

The Davis photo came early in Mr. Maisel’s color photography career, but he would go on to produce many memorable shots, like a man in a blue uniform, his face unseen, dragging a heavy white and purple rope, against a red wall in Singapore; and a shirtless New York City cabdriver, sunbathing from the open driver’s side door, as if he’d just let out a fare and stripped down.

His many other shots included two men silhouetted against a red wall near the World Trade Center while a street sign says, “Don’t Walk,” and two doves, one white, one black, perched in different sections of a window frame, surrounded by a bright blue wall in Portugal.

“I think of him as being extraordinarily versatile and visually restless,” said John Paul Caponigro, a visual artist and writer who taught in the same workshop programs with Mr. Maisel. “His work was a constellation of ideas,” he said, adding, “His books aren’t exactly how-to manuals. They’re about seeing.”

Mr. Maisel was a freelancer who worked for magazines, advertising agencies, and corporations. He photographed the covers of New York magazine’s first two issues in 1968, including its inaugural skyline image, and five covers of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue.

He collected his photos in several books, including Bearing Witness (2011), pictures taken at ground zero two weeks after the World Trade Center was destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001. At the time, he lived and worked in a 19th-century, six-story, former bank building on the Bowery, not far from the towers.

For American Barrick Resources (now Barrick Mining), a corporate client, Mr. Maisel descended a mile into a coal mine. Believing that the strobe lights he had in the mine would not produce quality photos, he found an alternative in the natural lighting of the miners’ headlamps. But first, he asked his client to fire up machines that raised as much dust as possible.

The final image is of two silhouetted miners — backlit by two others behind them — surrounded by an aura of golden dust. The headlamps of the two miners in front emit crisscrossing beams of light. It appeared on the cover of the company’s 1987 annual report.

“It took all of two minutes, we coughed our way out and that was the shot they used,” Mr. Maisel wrote in his 2014 book, It’s Not About the F-Stop.

Mr. Maisel’s honors include the 1987 Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography and induction into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame (now the Creative Hall of Fame) in 1995.

Jay Nathan Maisel was born on Jan. 18, 1931, in Brooklyn. His father, Lester, was a clothing salesperson, and his mother, Eva (Levine) Maisel, managed the home.

In high school he focused on graphic design and painting; during three years at Cooper Union in Manhattan, he also studied drawing and architectural design while pursuing photography on the side.

At Yale, he studied color theory under painter Josef Albers and continued to pursue photography, which provided him with the immediate gratification that painting did not. He also worked with other students on geodesic structures with engineer and philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller.

Although he graduated in 1953 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting, he decided that he wanted to be a photographer. He started shooting in black and white, mostly street scenes in New York City. He also captured a distant-looking Marilyn Monroe in close-up at the after-party for the film East of Eden, and evangelist Billy Graham preaching at night in Times Square in 1957 lit by a cluster of neon signs for Budweiser, Canadian Club whisky, and the Capitol Theater.

In addition to the cover of Kind of Blue, Mr. Maisel shot the covers of albums by Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, and Count Basie. But he was most enthralled by an assignment to photograph Indian sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar.

“He asked what I wanted him to do,” Mr. Maisel told the interviewer Dave Dye in 2018 for the advertising blog Stuff From the Loft. “I said, ‘Play.’ He played for two or three hours. I shot to my tapping feet’s delight.”

For a dozen years, Mr. Maisel worked out of a studio at 122 Second Ave. Then his rent went up, prompting him to buy the abandoned Germania Bank building at 190 Bowery for $102,000 in 1966. Forty-nine years later, he sold it to a developer for $55 million.

The 35,000-square foot building with 72 rooms was more than Mr. Maisel’s studio and home: It contained his gallery, his basketball court, his archives (he took about 4 million photos over the course of his career), his workshop, and a hoarder’s bounty that included gadgets, antique tools, rocks, mannequin body parts, bells, gears, screws, rocks, table legs, and pieces of wood.

“He did a lot of dumpster diving,” Amanda Maisel said in an interview. “I didn’t want to walk home with him while he was pulling out pieces of wood and metal.”

The ephemera — not much of which found its way into his photos — were part of her father’s “obsession with how things worked/the beauty of functional things and arranging them,” she added, in a text.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Maisel is survived by his wife, Linda (Adam) Maisel, whom he married in 1989. His marriages to Sarah Linder and Suzanne Housman ended in divorce.

Mr. Maisel stopped commercial work in 1995 — when “the whole thing turned to crap,” he told Stuff From the Loft — and focused on teaching, personal photography, and his books.

After he sold his building, he moved to a town house in Brooklyn he bought for $15.5 million. At the time, it was the highest price ever paid for a residence in the borough. Nearly all his stuff is now in a storage facility near his home.

The move formed the narrative spine of Jay Myself, a 2018 documentary directed by photographer Stephen Wilkes, one of Mr. Maisel’s former associates.

Near the end of the film, Mr. Maisel said: “There’s a quiz I give people. Do you like photographing or do you like photographs? Choose one. And you learn a lot about yourself by choosing one or the other. Some people like photographs. I like photographing.”

He added: “The act of photographing is what it’s all about.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Isao Harimoto, who survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing as a child and went on to have more hits than anyone else in the history of Japanese baseball, died Wednesday in Tokyo. He was 86.

His death, in a hospital, was announced by the Meikyukai, or the Golden Players Club, one of Japan’s baseball halls of fame. No cause was given.

Mr. Harimoto earned the nickname Hit Machine for collecting a record 3,085 of them in a long career than stretched from the late 1950s to the early ’80s. He won seven league batting titles.

He was the only player to collect 3,000 hits in Japan. (Ichiro Suzuki had 4,367, but more than 3,000 came after he moved to the American major leagues.)

But Mr. Harimoto was far from a slap hitter; 504 of those hits were home runs, putting him seventh on the all-time list for Japan. He also stole 319 bases, won an MVP award, and was an 18-time All Star.

After his time as a player, he became an outspoken commentator on the game.

Isao Harimoto was born on June 19, 1940, in Hiroshima, Japan, to Korean parents who had emigrated the year before. His Korean name was Jang Hun. His mother, Pak Sun Bun, was a cook and his father, Jang Sang Jeong, sold scrap metal and various secondhand items from a cart.

Harimoto was 5 when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city, about a mile and a half from where he lived. “There was a flash and an enormous roar,” he told the Chugoku Shimbun newspaper in 2011. “The next thing I knew, my mother was shielding me and my sister, three years older, with her body, though her back was covered in blood due to flying shards of glass.”

The event was not frequently discussed in his home. “My mother wanted to forget; I think she wanted to completely erase her memories of that day,” he told the Mainichi, a Japanese English-language newspaper, in 2020. He lost a sister, Jang Jeom Ja, in the bombing, and his mother burned all photographs of her, he said. He himself did not discuss the cataclysm publicly until well after his baseball career.

He was proud of his Korean heritage despite being bullied for it as a child and facing prejudice during his career.

“A lot of ethnic Koreans in Japan assimilate into Japanese society,” said Robert Whiting, author of You Gotta Have Wa (1989), the definitive book in English about Japanese baseball. “Harimoto did not. He talked about the fact that his mother never spoke Japanese in the house, and he was very proud of that fact.”

Mr. Harimoto was also critical of other athletes in Japan with Korean backgrounds who hid their ethnicity. Only late in life did he become a Japanese citizen.

He burned his right hand in an accident as a young child, an event that contributed to his becoming a left-handed hitter when he took up baseball in fifth grade. Despite his talent, he lost a few chances at places on top high school teams because of a reputation as a troublemaker, deserved or not.

In 1958, he visited South Korea for the first time with a team of Korean Japanese high school students. He met his grandparents and later said he truly connected with his Korean roots for the first time.

His rigorous, disciplined approach to batting, and an ability to consistently hit up the middle, soon brought him to the top leagues. In 1959, playing with the Tokyo-based Toei Flyers, he hit .275, good enough to be named rookie of the year. He got much better over the next two seasons, hitting .302, and then .336. He played left field, and fielding was not his strong suit, but as a hitter, he performed strongly and consistently for two decades.

Many of the teams he played on were not among the elite in the Japan leagues. He was part of a Japan Series-winning team only once, in 1962, when his Flyers beat the Hanshin Tigers in seven games. That was also the year he was named the Pacific League’s most valuable player. (The Flyers adopted their current name, the Nippon Ham Fighters, during his time with the team.)

Mr. Harimoto’s most spectacular season was 1970, when he hit .383 with 34 home runs and 100 RBI, all career highs.

He was a large player by the Japan leagues’ standards at the time, listed at 5 foot 11 and 187 pounds. And he was not afraid of players, American or Japanese, who were bigger still. “If there was a brawl on the field, he was always in the middle of it,” Whiting said. “He was a scary guy; no one wanted to fight him. He wasn’t afraid to show his temper and challenge people on the field.”

Despite Mr. Harimoto’s batting success, he never could shake a reputation in Japan for being a bit of a bad boy. He enjoyed a drink and was involved in a few fights.

He moved on to the Yomiuri Giants in 1976 and the Lotte Orions in 1980. He retired after the 1981 season at 41.

After his playing days were over, Harimoto became a commentator on the game with a reputation for saying what he thought. “He didn’t seem to have a filter,” Whiting said. “He was very protective of the Japanese game and critical of players who went to the States to play, thinking they should be loyal to the Japan leagues.”

Harimoto worked for the Korea Baseball Organization and helped establish that country’s national league in 1982, though he later split with the group over slights he believed he received.

Speaking out against nuclear weapons was also a big part of his later life. “Which is more important: protecting human lives or holding on to nuclear weapons?” he asked in the Chugoku Shimbun in 2011. “These two things are poles apart. It’s inhuman to permit the existence of weapons that can annihilate people in an instant, when they’re just trying their best to live.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.