NAGANO, Japan -- Awash in color and song, the 20th century's final Winter Olympics opened Saturday with images of Japan's past and the world's future: a kimono-clad skating hero lighting the flame for her nation, a parade of half-naked sumo wrestlers casting away evil spirits, and choirs on five continents performing Beethoven in stunning synchronicity.

It

Sumo wrestlers were just one aspect of Japanese culture on display at the Nagano Opening Ceremony. (AP)

was, as the Olympics are designed to be, a meeting -- of nation and nation, tradition and technology, history and modernity.

Against the backdrop of the magnificent Japanese Alps, athletes from 72 nations and regions marched into a cherry-blossom-shaped stadium built especially for these games. Children sang of hope and peace. Jets zoomed across the afternoon sky, leaving colored streamers of smoke in their wake, ending the festivities and beginning the competition.

"THE OLYMPICS ARE FINALLY here," said Yukio Nakamura, 57, of Nagano, who rode his bicycle to the opening ceremonies. "We've waited so long for this."

Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, her hands covered in white mittens, applauded heartily as more than 2,400 athletes -- the most ever for a Winter Olympics -- paraded past their box. The athletes will compete during the next two weeks in 14 sports in Nagano and the mountains that encircle it. Some nations, like the United States, have dozens of athletes; others like Iran and Belgium have only one.

They strode into the Minami Nagano Sports park triumphantly, each group led by an athlete carrying its national flag, each nation escorted by a Japanese sumo champion and a child from the Nagano area. Greece, the birthplace of the games, marched first; host country Japan was last. The 50,000-strong crowd's applause rose when the U.S. team marched in, wearing long slate-blue parkas and dark brimmed hats -- a good buffer for the 34-degree weather. Some of them wore tiny American flags in buttonholes and hatbands.

"It's just so exciting," figure skater Tara Lipinski said, smiling. ``I hope I can remember it forever."

THE OLYMPIC FLAME, RISING from a cauldron designed to resemble a traditional Japanese bonfire, was kindled by Japanese figure skater Midori Ito to the strains of Un bel di from Puccini's Madame Butterfly. Relay runners carried the torch into the stadium and up the steps to Ito before an automatic platform lifted her to ignite the cauldron.

Technology's legacy to the 20th century shone as it showcased a work composed before electricity was harnessed -- Ode to Joy from the Ninth Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, who couldn't hear the music he wrote. On Saturday, 171 years after he died, hundreds of millions of people across the world heard it all at once.

A system tailored to eliminate the moments-long delay typical of conventional satellite transmissions allowed Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Seiji Ozawa to lead, from Nagano, a real-time, cross-continental performance of choirs.

They sang from Berlin's Brandenburg Gate to Sydney's famed opera house, from the U.N. General Assembly Hall in New York to the gates of the Forbidden City in Beijing and the shores near Cape Town, South Africa.

Appropriately, much of the opening of these 18th Winter Games was like this -- blending the Asian classical with the global modern in a choreographed wish for peace and a flourish of tradition and technology. A 17th-century bell tolled at Nagano's Zenkoji Temple. Traditional Japanese music melted into an Andrew Lloyd Webber composition performed by Nagano's children.

IT WAS A MIX THAT NEVER could have happened when the century began, when the vaunted concept of a "global village" connected continuously by wire, computer and radio wave was barely a vision.

Yet if the Olympics are an insulated bubble, a reflection of how the world sees itself as the century wanes, events elsewhere hinted at a harsher reality. Amid Saturday's spectacle of celebration and unity lurked trepidation -- about terrorism at home and the threat of war a continent away.

Security was tightened around Nagano earlier this week after a terrorist attack on Tokyo's international airport. And in Washington, President Clinton mulled whether to use military force on Iraq -- an option Olympic organizers have implored him to avoid while the games are in session.

Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, called on the nations participating to "observe the Olympic truce" and "foster international dialogue and diplomatic solutions to all conflicts, in an effort to bring human tragedies to an end."

Eishiro Saito, president of the Nagano Olympic Organizing Committee, said: "I sincerely hope that these games from the heart will achieve such splendid heights that they will ... be talked of for generations to come."

THE EMPEROR, THE SON OF a man who for many symbolized Japan's 20th-century war machine, joined the call for an end to global conflict and pronounced the games open from his imperial box. Smiling, he gave the crowd a slight bow.

The

Suwa locals straddle two eight-ton pillars raised during the Opening Ceremonies at the Minami Nagano Sports Park to purify the Games. (AP)

opening ceremony's mix of nationalism and culture, ritual and faith, unfolded in an arena shaped like a cherry blossom, Japan's national flower. It came 102 years after the first modern games, held in the Olympic cradle of Athens, drew just 245 athletes from 14 nations. The first Winter Games came 28 years later.

Japanese music wailed as eight two-ton wooden pillars brought down from the mountainous Suwa region of Nagano province rose, straddled by some Suwa locals and hoisted by others, to point skyward and purify the games. They formed gates for each arena entrance.

The parade of sumo wrestlers marched quietly onto the dais, chests bare in the winter air. Leading them: Akebono, Japan's grand sumo champion, or "yokozuna," who -- in his loincloth, without even a shiver -- performed a painstaking ritual designed to cast away evil spirits.

Children swarmed the stage, dancing in brown straw costumes to mystical music before casting off outer layers for white tunics and becoming "yukinoko," or snow children. They sang Lloyd Webber's song, When Children Rule the World.

THESE GAMES OFFERED SEVERAL other themes -- banning land mines, showcasing technology and espousing environmental responsibility, a notion that made some skeptical when, for example, a protected butterfly's grassy feeding ground was transplanted to make way for a ski run.

At ceremony's end, just before five jets streaked crisply across the sky, dove-shaped balloons soared into the winter air, each carrying a message from a Nagano child.

Even the doves were tooled to fit not one, but two themes of this year's games. Foremost, of course, they signified peace.

They were also fully biodegradable.