The magazine of The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan

July 2018 · Volume 50 · No. 7

World Class Waste ofTime and Money?
The Journey of an FCCJ Member to theSingapore Summit

Election Results:
Meet the 2018-2019
Board of Directors
Memoirs:
Mr. Smith Goes toTokyo (Part 4)
An Appreciation:
Susumu Awanohara
1945-2018

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JULY 2018 | FCCJ | 03

In This Issue
July 2018 · Volume 50 · No. 7

Publisher FCCJ
Editor Albert Siegel
Fuku Nabe Bugyo Geoffrey Tudor
Art Director Kohji Shiiki
Editorial Assistant Naomichi Iwamura
Photo Coordinator Akiko Miyake
Publications Committee Members
Albert Siegel
Geoffrey Tudor
Martin Koelling
Ayako Mie
Emiko Jozuka
Johann Fleuri
Tomomi Yokomura

FCCJ BOARD OF DIRECTORS

President Peter Langan, Freelance
1st Vice President Abigail Leonard, Freelance
2nd Vice President Robert Whiting, Freelance
Secretary Daniel Hurst, Freelance
Treasurer, Willem Kortekaas, Associate Member
Directors-at-Large Khaldon Azhari, PanOrient News
Daniel Sloan, Nissan Motor/Freelance
Mary Corbett, Professional Associate Member
Milton Isa, Associate Member
Kanji Kazuo Abiko, Freelance
Associate Kanji Makoto Honjo, Associate Member

FCCJ COMMITTEE CHAIRSAssociate Members Liaison Milton Isa
Compliance Kunio Hamada
DeRoy Memorial Scholarship Abby Leonard,
David SatterwhiteEntertainment Sandra Mori
Exhibition Bruce Osborn
Film Karen Severns
Finance Willem Kortekaas
Food & Beverage Robert Kirschenbaum,
Mehdi Bassiri
Freedom of Press Abby Leonard
House & Property Khaldon Azhari
Human Resources Khaldon Azhari
Information Technology Albert Siegel
Library, Archives & Workroom Koichi Ishiyama,
Suvendrini Kakuchi
Membership Andrew Horvat, Peter O’Connor
Membership Marketing Anthony Rowley
Professional Activities Fred Varcoe, Ayako Mie
Public Relations Dan Sloan
Publications Albert Siegel
Special Projects Haruko Watanabe
Membership Andrew Horvat, Peter O'Connor
Foreign Press in Japan Robin Harding

Front Page
• From the President by Peter Langan• Letter to the Editor

From the Archives
Dick Hughes—Doyen of Correspondents in Asia
by Charles Pomeroy

Published by the FCCJ All opinions contained within
Number 1 Shimbun are those of the authors. As such,these opinions do not constitute an official positionof Number 1 Shimbun, the editor or theForeign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.
Please pitch and send articles and photographs,
or address comments to no.1shimbun@fccj.or.jp
Read the Number 1 Shimbun online:
fccj.or.jp/number-1-shimbun
Cover Photo: Photo by Kevin Lim/The Strait Times

05

Club News
Meet the 2018-2019 Board of Directors

06

Features
World Class Waste of Time and Money?
by Anthony Rowley

08

Don’t Forget: Bookstores Have Souls, Too
by Eiichiro Tokumoto

10

Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo (Part 4)
by Charles Smith

12

Coming Attraction: Kim Jong-un on Wall Street
by Anthony Rowley

14

Marcus Fishenden—The FCCJ’s New General Manager
by Haruko Watanabe

16

In Memoriam
An Appreciation: Susumu Awanohara, 1945-2018
by Tracy Dahlby

17Club News
Land of Clouds—Photo Exhibition
by Stirling Elmendorf• New in the Library• New Members

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan
Yurakucho Denki Building, North Tower 20F,
1-7-1 Yurakucho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-0006.
Tel: (03) 3211-3161 · Fax: (03) 3211-3168 · fccj.or.jp

04

18
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PITCH US YOUR STORY
Please send your story ideas tono.1shimbun@fccj.or.jp,
and be sure to note whether you have (or have accessto) visuals. Our rates are ¥20 per published word,¥20,000 for a front cover photo. Photo essays: ¥15,000
for full-page photos and ¥5,000 for smaller shots.
All payments will be made in credit
to your member account.

04 | FCCJ | JULY 2018

Front Page

From thePresident
Dear FCCJ Members,We have just completed another
Board election at your Club and as
you will see from the message sentout from the office, we have some new officers
on the Board.
It’s an especially warm welcome to Abigail
Leonard as first vice president and Daniel
Hurst as secretary. Both will be bringing theirsignificant journalistic talents and experience to ensuring the FCCJ remains relevant
to newsmakers and the journalist of today
and the future.
We also have a returnee to the Board in
Director-at-Large Dan Sloan, who brings bothnews and corporate experience to the role.
Thankfully for the FCCJ, our numbers man
Willem Kortekaas will continue as treasurer.
Willem is working on a comprehensive fiveyear business plan for your Club. (It’s so
impressive I borrowed sections of it for thismessage.) Everyone’s favorite author Bob

Letter to theeditorT

he FCCJ is no longer a real “correspondents” club. Correspondents
are largely a thing of the past, unfortunately. The club has become, instead, ajournalists’ club, but a critical review of theregular members’ qualifications is likely
to show that many no longer even qualify
as journalists as defined in our Articles of
Association or Bylaws, taking work in otherfields of business. Many others have retired.
This raises the question whether the rolewith regard to governance of a club with a

Whiting rounds up the officer positions as
second vice president.
Space restraints prevent me from going
into the roles of all Board members, for which
I hope they will forgive the oversight.
The old adage is “crisis brings opportunity” so one could argue the FCCJ has plenty ofboth – though I would contend that “crisis” isa generally overused word.
My reading is we have four priorities facing
us: The Move, F&B, PAC and Membership, notnecessarily in that order. As far as I’m concerned, all roads in the FCCJ lead to PAC. Our
newsmaker events distinguish this Club andmake it what it is. So that priority is one I haveparticular interest in.
For The Move in October to new premises,
the hunt for a new F&B provider, and Membership initiatives we are most ably assistedby the Club’s new General Manager Marcus
Fishenden. Marcus has a wealth of experience in these fields and the FCCJ is especially
fortunate to have him at this particular stageof its evolution. (An example of crisis meets
opportunity?)At the risk of boring some readers, it’s perhaps worthwhile to reflect on what the FCCJ is.
With its PAC program as its core, and supporting social activities and services, theClub aims to provide a professional working
environment for journalists and to be a valuable location for information gathering andprofessional exchange for all its members.
The Club aims to provide foreign correspondents in Japan and other journalists,

including visiting correspondents, with various forms of access to news sources in Japanand overseas. The Club is committed todefend the freedom of the press and the freeexchange of information. Further, the Club
promotes friendship, harmony, and mutual
welfare in both professional and social relations among Japanese and non-Japanesejournalists.
The Board you have most recently elected
has plenty on its plate to help achieve thesegoals and every FCCJ board, of course, nevercompletes the task. It’s passed on for others
to carry on.
Journalism is not by any measure a “dying”
profession but its means of practice and execution has changed, though that is always
the case, it’s just that some disruptions arebigger than others – like the invention of theprinting press and the Internet.
(Note: Journalism schools in the US arereporting a surge in applications. Thank you,
Mr. Trump.)
The Internet has changed the model of journalism. Traditional print media have gone into
decline. Many legacy jobs have been eliminated as a result. The number of overseas correspondents and bureaus has fallen. Print media
rely increasingly on outsourced news fromthe large wire services. A number of active
free-lance journalists exist but the increasing
commoditization of news make it difficult forthem to sustain themselves. Hence, many takeon other work to make a living.
The major wire services, especially Reuters

total membership of 2,000 by less than 300
regular members, who may or may not be
involved in journalism can still be justified.
The quorum for decisions at General
Membership Meetings is 50% of members
entitled to vote (i.e. regular members). This
percentage represents no more than 7.5%of total membership. This position of control– undemocratic as it may be – comes withresponsibilities. If the recent General Membership Meeting is any indication, the regularmembers seem to take this responsibility
rather lightly. Only a handful of members
showed up in person at the GMM and it took
a massive phone-call effort by the alreadybeleaguered office staff to finally reach thenumber of votes necessary for a quorum.
This in turn delayed the start of the GMM

by two and a half hours and necessitated aone-week extension of that meeting and acorresponding delay in the selection of BoD
officers for the 2018-2019 term. It is the thirdtime this has happened in the past two years.
Participation by the associate membership in the preliminary round of voting for
associate candidates for the board was also
problematical. Probably only a little over 100
out of a total of 1700 associate members voted(around 6%).
Why is there so little interest in club affairs
on the part of the associates? Is it a sense of
disenfranchisement? If this is the case, why
not give the associate membership a larger
say in club matters? It is not necessary to
restrict voting rights to journalists to maintain the journalistic character of the club.

JULY 2018 | FCCJ | 05

From the Archives
and Bloomberg, have little need for the Clubas a source for news. (Though note that the
FCCJ still has significant drawing power forsome newsmakers and it’s not beholden to
the whims of billionaire owners. The latter
qualification alone is priceless.)
A whole new group of online publications
has emerged in the form of websites, newsletters, blogs, etc. This has had consequences
for standards of journalism and for the technical needs on the part of journalists working
for this type of publication. In fact, a new typeof specialist journalist has emerged, capableof providing news not only in print but married with the photography, video and audio
that online publications demand.
These changes are likely irreversible andwill continue to evolve. For this reason, we
need to continue asking ourselves the question how does the Club remain relevant andaccessible for journalists and what the Club
can do to support them?
As we chew over and respond to thatquestion, Japan will play host to some of theworld’s biggest sporting events in the coming
years, as well as the G20 next year. It’s located in one of the most dynamic regions on theplanet and tourism numbers keep breaking
records. (Significantly, many are repeat visitors — in other words, once people discover
Japan, many keep coming back.) I could alsomention what’s unfolding on the Korean Peninsula. Sounds like opportunity to me.
● Peter Langan● Willem Kortekaas
Board member (associate).

by CHARLES POMEROYH

ong Kong-based Richard “Dick”
Hughes, known as “Your Grace,”
was roasted* at a Club dinner
in his honor on May 8, 1981. In
addition to his work as a war correspondent
in WWII and his later coverage of Asia for
major news organizations, Hughes had also
served from 1947 as the general manager
for 18 months of the Tokyo Press Club, as
the now-FCCJ was known at the beginning.
Seated left to right are John Roderick (AP),Al Cullison (New York Journal of Commerce), Allen Raymond (former New York
Herald Tribune correspondent for whom
our library is named), Dick Hughes, Jack
Russell (NBC), and Kei Kawana, a former
manager who served under Hughes. The
Hughes-masked figures suggest his various
roles, including his alleged work as a spy,and behind them is an enlarged photo of thefirst club premises.
An Australian born in Melbourne on
March 5, 1904, Hughes was enticed into
journalism at a young age through his workon the house magazine of the Victorian Railways. He became a newspaper reporter in
Melbourne in 1934, but the next year moved
on to the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. From
1940 he reported from Tokyo and Shanghai,then covered the war in North Africa in 194243 before illness returned him to Sydney foreditorial work. He was assigned as a foreign
correspondent to Tokyo in 1945 to cover the
Occupation, but resigned in 1947 and transitioned into Club management. Returning
to journalism and based in Hong Kong, hewrote for The Times, The Economist, The Far
Eastern Economic Review and various otherpublications over the next 30 years, covering
the Korean and Vietnam wars among otherstories.
Congenial and highly regarded, Hughes had
a reputation as a flamboyant raconteur with adry sense of humor. He inspired the creation offictional characters by authors John le Carréand Ian Fleming. Reportedly a double agent
for MI6 during the Cold War, he was among
the first to interview British spies Burgess
and Maclean in 1956 (see page 38 of the FCCJ
history book). He also authored four books, ofwhich the best known are Foreign Devil andHong Kong: Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time.
He was honored in 1980 by Queen Elizabeth II,
who named him a Commander of the British
Empire (CBE).
Richard Hughes died in Hong Kong at theage of 77 in 1984.
*A roast is the honoring of a colleague in a humorous
way with jokes at their expense as well as genuine
praise, often with the roastee responding in kind.

● Charles Pomeroy is editor of Foreign
Correspondents in Japan, a history of the clubthat is available at the front desk.

PHOTOS FCCJ

There are other and probably better ways to
do so.
Why this fear of giving associate membersa larger say in club affairs? Do journalists notrecognize that it is as much in the interest of
associates as in their own interest to maintainthe club as a genuine journalists’ club? If associates want to join a social or a dining club,
there are better options. They join precisely
because it is a journalists’ club and becauseof its professional activities. So -- in sum -- it istime to think seriously about the roles of regular and associate members and come up witha more workable system of governance.

Dick Hughes—Doyen of
Correspondents in Asia

Left to right: John Roderick (former president: July 1, 1965 - June 30, 1966), Alvin (Al) E. Cullison (former
president: July 1, 1975 - June 30, 1976), Allen Raymond, Richard (Dick) Hughes, John (Jack) R. Russell (former
president: July 1, 1980 - June 30, 1981) former General Manager, Kuwajiro Kawana (Kei Kawana)

06 | FCCJ | JULY 2018Club News

Meet the2018-2019
Board ofDirectors

PresidentPeter Langan, Freelance

1st V ice President
Abigail Leonard, Freelance

PETER LANGAN has been in the news
business in Asia for almost 30 years, withpostings in Japan and Singapore, coveringstories on the ground from Sydney to Ulaanbaatar and Beijing, Mumbai to Jakarta andmany points in between. He was the Tokyo
Bureau Chief of Bloomberg News from 2005
to 2009, and later led the bureau’s news
team that won two SOPA awards for coverage of Fukushima. He is from the U.K., more
precisely the City of Liverpool – well known
for producing lousy music and useless football teams, with the exception of Everton FC.
He’s now the Northeast Asia Editor for Hong
Kong-based Asia Times.

ABIGAIL LEONARD is a Tokyo-based journalist
who covers Japanese politics and culture forprint and broadcast news outlets in the U.S. andEurope. She has written stories for the Washington Post, Newsweek and Vox; produced video pieces for the New York Times and radio stories for NPR, BBC and Deutsche Welle. Before
she moved to Japan, she wrote and produced
long-form news documentary stories as a staff
producer for PBS, ABC and Al Jazeera America
and was also a lead writer for two news analysis
programs: Countdown with Keith Olbermann
and The War Room with Jennifer Granholm.
Stories she's reported from Japan have earneda National Headliner Award and a James Beard
Foundation Media Award Nomination. She wasa 2011 East-West Center Japan Fellow and a2010 UN Foundation Journalism Fellow.

Director-at-L arge
Khaldon Azhari, PanOrient News

Director-at-L arge
Daniel Sloan, Nissan Motor/
Freelance

Director-at-L arge
Mary Corbett, Professional
Associate Member

DAN SLOAN has over 25 years in global media
and corporate communications experience,leading teams at Nissan Motor and Reuters.
Dan founded the Nissan Global Media Center,
which yoked traditional and social media withcorporate public relations, while earlier working as senior correspondent and bureau chieffor Reuters. He is an author, frequent public
speaker, and former adjunct professor of Journalism at Komazawa University. He served
as president of the Foreign Correspondents’
Club of Japan, and is a graduate of Columbia
Graduate School of Journalism and Universityof Virginia.

MARY CORBETT’s career as writer and documentary producer dates back to her student
years in Japan and the US working first as
intern, then location coordinator, writer andproducer for local and international media
organizations including BBC, Nikkei, Discovery
Channel, NHK, Asahi and NPR. She hopes her
passion for research and project management
will contribute towards optimizing this historic
year of transition for FCCJ.

KHALDON AZHARI is president of PanOrient
News, which produces TV News Packages
and articles for wires and print publications
mainly in Arabic with a focus on Japan andEast Asia. Azhari has been the bureau chiefof WAM (UAE-based news agency) and a correspondent for PETRA (Jordan News) since
the mid-nineties. Additionally, as a former
correspondent for various Arabic media suchas MBC, CNBC Arabia, Dubai TV, he has beena regular contributor to BBC Arabic Radio andTV, since the mid-nineties. Azhari has been thevoice of Japan and East Asia to West Asia andthe Arabic world for a quarter of a century andis a recipient of an award from the Japan-Arab
Association for his contributions to media
relations and for strengthening ties between
Japan and the Arab countries.

JULY 2018 | FCCJ | 07

Club News

2nd V ice President
Robert Whiting, Freelance

Secretary
Daniel Hurst, Freelance

Treasurer
Willem Kortekaas,
Associate Member

ROBERT WHITING is the author of several
successful books on contemporary Japaneseculture, including Tokyo Underworld, The
Meaning of Ichiro, The Chrysanthemum andthe Bat and the best-selling You Gotta Have
Wa. He has published 20 other books in Japanese. He has written for Sports Illustrated,
Time, the New York Times, the Wall Street
Journal and the Japan Times as well as forJapanese publications, including Shukan Asahi and Bungei Shunju. He authored a manga
series for Kodansha that sold 750,000 copies
in graphic novel form. At present he writes aweekly column for Yukan Fuji. He has lived inJapan on and off for the past 50 years, and isa graduate of Sophia University. Tokyo Underworld is under option to Amazon Studios.

DANIEL HURST is a freelance journalist
based in Tokyo. He writes news and featurearticles about Japan for a range of international publications. Prior to moving to Japan
in 2016 he specialized in political reportingin his home country of Australia. Previous
positions included political correspondentfor Guardian Australia, education correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald
and The Age, and state political reporter for
the Brisbane Times.

Director-at-L arge
Milton Isa, Associate Member

K anjiKazuo Abiko, Freelance

A ssociate K anji
Makoto Honjo, Associate Member

MILTON ISA is a consultant and serves in anadvisory capacity with several organizations,
including NPOs. He has lived in Tokyo since1972 and has been a member of the FCCJ
since the eighties. He worked in the financial
field for over 40 years: he spent 20 years with
Merrill Lynch, set up the representative officein Tokyo for Permal Asset Management andwas the president and CEO of State Street
Japan. He has an MA in Diplomacy from Norwich University and a BA in Business Administration from Seattle University. Isa has
lectured at Keio and Hitotsubashi universities
and the National Defense Medical College.
He retired as a Colonel from the U.S. Army
Reserves after 30 years.

KAZUO ABIKO is former AP general manager
for Northeast Asia. He served as FCCJ president in 2001-2002. Following his retirementfrom the international news agency in 2010,
he taught at universities on subjects related
to journalism as a part-time lecturer andvisiting professor until March 2017. In themeantime, he also translated the AP’s history
book “Breaking News” into Japanese, andco-authored several books on international
reporting, journalism standards, and news
agencies. In addition to occasional writingfor various publications, he has been contributing a monthly column on the state of U.S.
media to the Japan Newspaper Publishers
and Editors Association’s weekly publication
since April 2013.

MAKOTO HONJO is a native of Tokyo, who
graduated from Keio University in 1973 andjoined Sumitomo Corporation. For the last
15 years at Sumitomo he was working on
acquisitions and disposals, something thathe continues to advise on as an independent
consultant. He is the author of the first Japanese language academic paper on European
foreign labor, which appeared in the March
1973 issue of Gekkan Rodo Mondai. He is married to Ann Sado who runs her own businessadvising nonprofit organizations on diversity
and inclusion issues, and has a son Akira froma previous marriage who is a practitioner ofOriental medicine.

WILLEM KORTEKAAS has been an Associate
member since 1983. Following a 25 years’
career in banking with ABN Bank and postings to Africa, Canada, the USA and Japan,
he set up a Japan based consulting firm that
focused on Japanese M&A in Europe. At present, he manages a foreign-owned company
on behalf of a client and concurrently is adirector of several foreign owned companies
in Japan. Past honorary functions include
Chairman of the Netherlands Chamber ofCommerce in Japan, Vice-chairman of theJapan-Netherlands Society, Vice-chairmanof the European Business Community (EBC)and Member of the Expert Committee of theJapan Investment Council.

08 | FCCJ | JULY 2018

FeatureWorld Class Waste ofTime and Money?
by DONALD KIRKTCOURTESY ANDREW SALMON

Ready for action in
the press center - withbranded summit goodies
on full display

PHOTO BY KEVIN LIM/THE STRAIT TIMEShe “Singapore Summit” on June
12 may have been the most overhyped event that I have ever madea pretense, at least, of “covering.”
In post-summit analysis, journalism scholars
should do a count of how many times theadjective “historic” showed up in stories
before, during and/or after the event. Judging
from the blitzkrieg of media coverage, the tetea-tete between U.S. President Donald Trump
and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un was about themost important happening in modern Korean history since the Korean War. Excitementin the run-up to the summit was infectious.
For many of us the critical issue was getting
accreditation for a media center in Singaporethat some said would accommodate 5,000 or
so correspondents from around the world.
A day or two before the deadline for applying for accreditation, CBS Radio, for which I’ve
been filing intermittently from Korea for years,
wrote the needed letter. Not only that, but CBS
mentioned my name in the sixth paragraph ofa press release, the subject line of which was“JEFF GLOR WILL LEAD CBS NEWS’ COVERAGE
OF THE U.S.-NORTH KOREA SUMMIT FROMSINGAPORE.” Here’s what the release had tosay about CBS’s stellar radio team: “On CBS
News Radio, Glor will co-anchor CBS NEWS ON
THE HOUR WITH JEFF GLOR (5:00 PM, ET) on
Monday. CBS News Radio will have also special
coverage from Steven Portnoy and Don Kirk

in Singapore; Lucy Craft in Tokyo; and Jason
Strother in Soul (sic).”
This event promised to be big time indeed.
After having waited rather nervously for the
response from Singapore, the email arrived the
day before my departure. “We are pleased to
inform you that you are now accredited for the
DPRK-USA Singapore Summit,” said the supposedly crucial message. “Singapore’s Ministryof Communications and Information (MCI) is
setting up an International Media Centre (IMC)for the Summit. Only accredited media personnel will have access to the IMC” – yes, that
sentence was underlined, in bold.
Yay! I was in! At Incheon airport in Korea,
waiting for the flight to Manila, I discovered

a number of colleagues also about to makethe trip – a few of the journalistic hordes
descending on Singapore. The taxi driver on
the way in from Singapore’s Changi airport
knew where to take me. The media center, as
the accreditation message told me, was in F1
Pit Building, surely one of the most extraordinary places in which to corral the journalistic mob. F1 Pit, for the benefit of those who
had no idea what on earth was F1, much lessthe allusion to “pit,” was a reference to the
Formula 1 races held on the track in front of
the drab, elongated concrete structure thatserves all the needs of anyone and anything
having to do with the races, including carsand drivers, officials and journalists. Thereare even stands on top for spectators.
Huge rooms on the third floor would beequipped “with about 2000 workstations
available for use on a first-come-first-served
basis,” said the accreditation message. Big
screens would show “’live’ footage of themedia events,” it promised. “Free high speed
wireless Internet access and refreshments
will be provided.” Oh, and the IMC would “alsohouse a Broadcast Centre operated by Mediacorp, the Host Broadcaster, including “Livefeed distribution system; Live stand-up locations at various locations with connectivity;
Media booths (4m by 3m) within the IMC; andUplink and fibre delivery services.”

JULY 2018 | FCCJ | 09

Featureor said a word when I murmured, “Ahn Yong
Haseo,” Korean for “hello.”
I knew Kim was up there, around the twentieth floor. Maybe rehearsing what he would say
to Trump the next day. After hanging around in
the lobby for an hour or so, I walked up a charming tree-shaded street to the Shangri-La, ten
minutes away, where Trump & Co. were booked.
Nothing whatsoever was going on there, either.
Maybe Trump also was rehearsing his lines. Next
stop was back to F1 Pit, but an immense traffic
jam was blocking the way. My driver finallyfigured out what was going on. Kim and his
bodyguards were going out for their night on
the town, on the way to Marina Bay where thecameras caught him smiling jovially, posing fora few shots – an hour or two that I got to see on
TV once the traffic had cleared and I got inside
the media center.
Those excursions outside my hotel were
not a total waste of time. Next morning, on
TV in my room, I saw the running coverage of
Trump and Kim getting inside their vehicles,
getting out, greeting one another, walking
past the alternating US and DPRK flags inside
the Capella, sitting down. At least I had gotten
a first-hand glimpse of the route to Sentosa
Island and thus had a sense of the scene. It
was all a show that reached a climax when
the two of them signed their “joint statement.”
As I surfed the channels, talking heads wereeverywhere, flown in at the expense of the
networks. Universally, they were shocked by
the statement – shocked, as was I, by how little it said about anything. Had we all come to
Singapore to watch on TV as these two bozos,
defined by their distinct hairstyles, “committed to cooperate for the development of new
US-DPRK relations and for the promotion ofpeace, prosperity, and the security of the Korean Peninsula and of the world”?
Not to worry. The reading and listening audience was mesmerized. The superstars flownout by CBS had more than they could handle.
My job was to respond to calls from CBS stations
asking for my view of the whole thing. Yakking
on and on, I was the original “motor mouth,”
not really knowing what the hell I was saying as
the words rolled off my tongue into my Koreancell phone. Oh, and the day was far from over.
The main outlet for my ruminations was the
Daily Beast, whose foreign editor, Chris Dickey,
a world traveler with years of experience working for Newsweek and writing books, had been
taking my stuff since before the Pyeongchang
Olympics. He had me filing every day while I
was there, providing a much needed platform
for whatever I was seeing, hearing, thinking.
The biggest challenge, on that summit day,

COURTESY ANDREW SALMON

There was no doubt about it. The Singapore
authorities had it all figured out. Polite men
and women, mostly from the communications
ministry, were on hand to greet and assist us,
give us media cards to drape around our necks
and make sure we got every conceivable service the center had to offer. Never mind thatthe media card they issued me identified mewith “Christian Broadcasting System” despite
the letter that the manager of CBS Radio in
New York had written on my behalf on CBS
News letterhead and the application form I
had filled out. There is indeed another CBS
in Seoul – Christian Broadcasting System –for which some people keep thinking I work.
Details, details. Nobody ever squinted at thefine print on my media card during my fourdays in Singapore.
Once I got the precious credential, however,the challenge was actually to “cover” the summit. The answer was, you don’t really. From theperspective of my room on the 44th floor ofa hotel in the heart of Singapore, I could see
F1 Pit, about a 20-minute walk away, and themonumental buildings soaring above whatjournalists liked to call “the small island city
state.” The closest I got to covering anything,really, was a lengthy taxi ride across the bridgeover the harbor to Sentosa Island the afternoon before Trump and Kim were to meet.
Guards swarming around the entrance to thedrive leading to the Capella Hotel, the venue
for the summit, not in the least impressed by
my “media” badge, waved us away. The Capella, my driver helpfully explained, is well hidden
behind trees and shrubbery. I might even liketo see it someday. The day before the summit
was definitely not the time.
Now let’s see, what else was there for a correspondent to do – aside from watching all thetalking heads showing up on BBC, CNN, Fox,
MSNBC, Channel News Asia and a few others on
my hotel TV? OK, boldly I ventured out again,
this time to the St. Regis Hotel, where Kim andhis entourage were lodged. Camera people
were staked out as close as they could get tothe lobby, blocked from getting inside. One of
the guards made a pro forma effort at keeping
me away but didn’t object too much when,pointing in the general direction of a small knotof people inside the lobby, I said I was meetinga friend and slipped inside. Not a total waste oftime. Black-suited, grim-faced young men wereseen getting on and off the elevators. There
was no doubt where their loyalties lay. Every
one of them had a North Korean pin on his lapel
bearing the image of Kim Jong Un or his father
Kim Jong Il or his grandfather, dynasty founder
Kim Il Sung. None of them changed expression

One reason the US chose Singapore as the summit loc
was to impress KJU with the vision of a successful andprosperous Asian city. Singapore delivered.

was to figure out how to do everything at once.
Not a member of the White House press corps
or one of the privileged reps of the Korean andSingapore media, I missed a first-hand view of
Trump in his rambling afternoon press conference but saw it all in the media center alongwith hundreds of others staring at the TV
screens. But how could I file for Dickey while
fielding all those calls from radio stations. At
one stage, he messaged, “We are sliding from
ETA to MIA, would really love to have your file,”
to which I responded, in between calls, “writing madly….” It was a long day of TV-watching,yakking on air and, yes, writing and writing. (Iwas also filing for two or three others.)
Post-summit, the occasion was a tremendous let-down, but the media center
was great. I learned how great it was when I
discovered what everyone else had known– that the staff had an absolutely marvelous,gourmet-style buffet going every day down on
the first floor. Sorry to say, I didn’t know about
it until the day after the summit. I am basing
my judgment on one terrific lunch, after which
I repaired to the third floor, fed a last story to
the Beast and retreated to my hotel for one
final night. If I didn’t see much of Singapore I
at least treated myself to one excursion to thehotel’s seventieth story bar, where a go-go
dancer, swathed in tight-fitting swimsuit-likeattire, could be seen swaying rhythmically ona stage overhead. The next day I was off, backto Seoul, exchanging war stories with the journalists who hadn’t gone there but had seen thesame damn stuff on TV. Well, at least I had had
the Singapore dateline.

● Donald Kirk, a member of the FCCJ in the
1970s and 1980s, has been reporting from Asia
since the Vietnam War. He’s currently basedin Seoul and Washington, reporting mainly for
CBS Radio, the Daily Beast and Forbes Asia,
among others.

10 | FCCJ | JULY 2018

FeatureDon’t Forget: Bookstores
Have Souls, Too
by EIICHIRO TOKUMOTOAt the time I started elementary
school, I was completely unableto swim. On a summer day in1970 my mother went to observea physical education class at an elementary
school in Kashima City, Saga Prefecture.
There she found her first-grade son clinging
to the side of the pool and wearing a frightened expression.
After talking things over with her father-inlaw, she arranged for me to attend a swimming class. The class had been organizedfor elementary school students during theirsummer vacation. On the first day, the middle-aged male instructor looked down at mewith a stern expression and asked, “You’re
the grandson of Lieutenant Tokumoto, aren’tyou?” Completely intimidated, I nodded affirmatively without speaking.
I was to learn afterward that the instructor

was a former sailor of the Imperial JapaneseNavy. Thanks to his strict – some might say militaristic – training, I completed the course without
mishaps and learned to swim. Was that sternfaced instructor one of those diehard militarists,or perhaps a follower of right-wing politics, nostalgic for the days of prewar nationalism?
Quite the contrary: Fujio Iwanaga was theoperator of a small, family-owned bookstore
called Kashima Shobo. At the front of his store,
he had posted a sign proclaiming that “Thebeauty of knowledge is refined through reading.” The store and the sign are still there – but
faded, hard to see, like the rest of the surviving
bricks-and-mortar bookstore industry in ourwired world.
My grandfather, Eijiro Tokumoto, hadbeen a career officer in the Japanese Navy
whose posting when the war ended was
Shanghai. After demobilization he settled

in Kashima, a quiet northern Kyushu city ofaround 30,000 people situated in the midstof rice fields and beside the Ariake Sea.
There he started a rice mill.
Soon after the war’s end, Iwanaga, mygrandfather’s subordinate in the Navy, openeda bookstore in the same town and, besides thatday job, threw himself into civic betterment.
Thus the swimming classes. As Iwanaga's
son Fujifusa recalls, “During the war my father
had been a seaman on the Japanese battleship
Kongo, which was torpedoed by an American
submarine. After treading water franticallyfor twenty-four hours he was miraculously
rescued by a friendly destroyer. He organizedthose swimming classes for the children of
Kashima in the hope that it might help themsurvive any similar experience.”
The Kongo was a large battleship displacing thirty thousand tons. It took part in suchJULY 2018 | FCCJ | 11

Featurecampaigns as the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Before
dawn on November 21, 1944, while it was off
the coast of Taiwan en route to Japan, twotorpedoes from the American submarine USS
Sealion struck it, causing it to explode andsink, with a loss of some 1,300 lives. Only 237
of its crew, including Iwanaga, survived.
Iwanaga-san’s concerns notwithstanding,up until now I have been fortunate enough not
to have experienced a torpedo attack.
Meanwhile, for decades, he and his business were important in the lives of myself, myfamily and our fellow townspeople.
Fujifusa Iwanaga emphasizes the differences between his father’s shop and those
operated by large bookstore chains such as
Kinokuniya and Sanseido. The founder ofKashima Shobo, he says, was more interested
in public service than the bottom line. And
part of what the store was about was spreading lore about Saga’s history and illustrious
people, via the bookshelves in a dedicatedcorner. “It attracted the interest of visitorsfrom Tokyo,” the younger Iwanaga says.
From the 1950s, at the time of the autumn
festival at the Kinro Shrine in Kashima, the seniorIwanaga organized the town’s children to carryan omikoshi – portable shrine. At one time healso served at a city councilman. Thus Kashima
Shobo did not merely sell books but looked after
the local community on a volunteer basis.
One recipient of Iwanaga's benevolence
was my grandfather Eijiro. Around the time hestarted his rice mill, periodic food shortages
were common. He was detained by the police
and investigated on suspicion of illegallydealing in black-market rice. According to my
grandmother, at that time Iwanaga sen Grandfather books to read while confined in a holding cell at the local police station. Pleased to be
the object of Iwanaga's generosity my grandfather laconically remarked, “It was good to beable to enjoy some leisurely reading.”
Fujio Iwanaga passed away in May 1972, but
son Fujifusa continued to operate the store.
From the latter part of the 1970s, I would hangout at Kashima Shobo on my way home fromhigh school, occasionally purchasing the latest
issues of Playboy and Penthouse magazines.
“High school boys, fascinated by the sight ofundraped female breasts, were surreptitiously
buying magazines with nude photos,” recalls
Fujifusa with a chuckle. “I never gave it a second thought – figured it was an important partof children’s education.”
Eventually I was admitted to university andmoved to Tokyo, where I stayed to pursue myjournalistic career. In the years that followed,
the environment affecting Kashima Shobo

was to change radically. According to the
Saga branch of the Book Retailers Association,
the number of supporting members in Saga
Prefecture declined from a hundred and one
shops in 2000 to just forty-four last year, andthe number of towns with no book outlets
at all has been increasing. Kashima Shobo,
where customers once thronged, has become
a quiet place.
The reason, in a nutshell, is the diversification of book sales channels. Large bookstore
chains have opened outlets in newly opened
shopping malls, and people can buy books
and magazines any time of the day or nightat convenience stores such as 7-Eleven andLawson. Amazon has also been grabbing away
customers, a phenomenon seen not only in
Saga but throughout Japan, not to mention
the entire world. To Iwanaga, Amazon’s presence can be likened to yet another awesome“The existence of theseshops is analogous
to capillaries. They
contribute significantly
to sales of our paperbackbooks, which cannot bemade up for by Amazon or
major bookstore chains.
If these bookstores wereto vanish, the publishingindustry would be
adversely affected.”

attack from the U.S., this time abetted not by
torpedoes from submarines but by the Microsoft Windows operating system.
In the spring of 2014, all of Saga’s publichigh school students became the first in
all of Japan’s forty-seven prefectures to berequired to use tablet computers running
the Windows 8 OS, as part of its informationand communication technology promotional
program. Because such reference materials
as Japanese-language and English-Japanesedictionaries were bundled with Windows,
sales of printed dictionaries at Kashima Shobo
plummeted.
“In the past, students would always drop inat the start of their new academic year to buy
dictionaries, but that suddenly came to a stop,”Fujifusa recalls.
As a survival strategy, the bookstores in
Saga have requested that public libraries
procure their books from stores in the prefecture rather than from Tokyo. Last autumn an
editorial in the local Saga Shimbun newspaper
made a reference to the so-called “Anti-Amazon Law” in France, which was passed in orderto help independent bookstores compete
against the large chains. Starting this academic year, dictionaries have been excluded fromthe table computers used in Saga.
Japan’s major publishers are acutely awareof the disappearance of these small local
bookshops. An editor at Shinchosha, one such
publisher, remarked to me, “The existence of
these shops is analogous to capillaries. They
contribute significantly to sales of our paperback books, which cannot be made up for by
Amazon or major bookstore chains. If thesebookstores were to vanish, the publishingindustry would be adversely affected.”
I don’t know if this situation spells doom
for book shops in rural areas or not. I suppose
some might see the concern I and others feelas irrational resistance to globalization andthe changing times; or it might just be nostalgia on my part. In any case, Kashima Shobo
stands out as one of the indelible memories of
my hometown.
Kashima Shobo is still in business at thesame location, and whenever I pay a visit I note
how its atmosphere and various scents areunchanged. Among its wares on display arebooks that I have written. Whenever my mother stops by to purchase a copy, she recalls her
young son’s swimming lessons and performs
a deferential bow to the current proprietor.
● Eiichiro Tokumoto, a former Reuterscorrespondent, is an author and investigative
journalist.

12 | FCCJ | JULY 2018

FeatureMr. SmithGoes to
Tokyo
PART

4

by CHARLES SMITH

KOHJI SHIIKI

When Charles Smith arrived inTokyo in 1973 as Financial Times
bureau chief, he had no idea hewould end up spending most of
the rest of his life here. Reaching
80 and having been diagnosed
with malignant lymphoma, he set
about writing his memoirs. Whenhe finished the project recently,
Charles – still an enthusiastic FCCJ
member after all those 45 years –consented to share with us somememories from the early years ofa long and interesting career. The
series began running in the April
issue. On May 18 Charles died, atage 82. We are continuing to run
installments. In this, the fourth,
he recalls prime ministers of the
1970s.

In my later years with the Financial
Times in Tokyo I became fascinated by
the nitty-gritty world of constituency
politics, but it took me time to penetrate
the grass roots to that extent. In the meantime
I focused mainly on the leaders – men with
distinctive talents and personalities who tookturns in what seemed to be a choreographed
power struggle.
Being a member of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan was especially importantin the 1970s because in those days every
actual or aspiring prime minister felt obliged
to address the Club. I never missed these meetings and was grateful for the first hand insight
into the personalities of Japan’s leaders that I
gained from them. But I failed to write one FCCJ
story that became a legend. This happened in
the dying days of Kakuei Tanaka’s premiership.
The prime minister had suffered a series ofreverses before he came to speak at the Club in
October of 1974. His weak point seemed to be
the touchingly simple belief that, at the upper
levels of factional politics, power equalled
money. There were other senior politicians
who agreed that ready cash was important
but who also cherished a sense of the boundary between patronage and corruption.
Tanaka’s creed saw him through his first two
years in office, but by 1974 I began to feel thatsomething was wrong. The trouble seemed tostart when he made a tour of Southeast Asia

without proposing any solutions to a massive
trade imbalance in Japan’s favor.
In mid-June Tanaka presided over whatbecame known as a “money election” to theupper house of parliament, which the Liberal
Democratic Party almost lost after the media
discovered that some of his faction members
were spending twenty to thirty times thelegal limits of their campaign budgets. Afterthe election debacle, Tanaka’s factional rivals
began quitting his cabinet one by one.
On October 9 a package – some sixty pages– of two minutely informed articles, one entitled “Tanaka, His Money and His Men,” and theother, about his long-time secretary, “Lonely
Queen of Etsuzankai: Aki Sato,” appeared ina November special issue of Bungei Shunju, areputable monthly magazine.
The mainstream Japanese media – the big
daily newspapers and broadcast networks –for several weeks paid little attention to themagazine’s revelations about Tanaka’s second
career as a real estate tycoon.
But when Tanaka visited the FCCJ on October 22 for what had become an almost obligatory appearance, the Bungei Shunju stories
were the main focus of questions.
I was present at the FCCJ lunch and heard
the PM being crudely insulted by an Eastern
European reporter who happened to be moderating. Then came reporters’ questions about
the Bungei Shunju articles. Tanaka wouldn’t,

JULY 2018 | FCCJ | 13

Featureor couldn’t, take it. He left the Club in obvious
anger and distress well before the meeting’sscheduled finishing time.
Japanese reporters overcame their hesitation after that day and began questioning
Tanaka. His retirement from office came shortly afterwards.
It wasn’t until much later that I came tobelieve that the FCCJ episode was part of a longrunning drama involving four bitterly divided
LDP leaders: Tanaka; Takeo Fukuda; Masayoshi
Ohira; and one regular side-changer, Yasuhiro
Nakasone. Among the four I may seem to havesingled out Tanaka for special criticism, but
I now believe that Tanaka was one who could
have changed the all-too-even course of Japanese politics.
Tanaka was not part of the Tokyo educational elite, and lacked the merit of belonging toa celebrated political family. But I believe thegraduate of an industrial training technologicalcollege in provincial Niigata may have had amore comprehensive view of Japan’s problems
and possibilities than a star pupil of Tokyo University’s law school.
It was Tanaka, not Fukuda, who saw thatJapan’s long term hopes of maintaining socialand economic health would require spreading
growth outside the world’s largest city. His
Archipelago Plan fell victim to the oil shock
and probably wasn’t helped by some carelesspresentation. But by the early decades of thetwenty-first century, the oppressive magnetismof Tokyo for rural Japan had begun to seem amajor problem.
Tanaka was indicted in 1976 for receiving
a payment of ¥500 million from Lockheed
Aircraft Corporation, allegedly in return for
influencing an aircraft purchase. A Tokyo court
in 1983 convicted him of violation of foreignexchange control laws and sentenced him to
imprisonment. He appealed and managed tostay free until his death in 1993.
He had been expelled from the LDP after theindictment, yet he was still the leader of theparty’s largest faction. The disaster seemed
to open a remarkable new phase in his career.
His wealth and his sensitivity to local economic
issues made him overwhelmingly the top votewinner in his own prefecture during two successive elections.
For several years a man whose support wasneeded to determine the leadership of the ruling political party was not a party member.
Tanaka wasn’t an expert solely on theclaims of Tokyo versus the rest of Japan. Partly
because he had not received a political inheritance, he seemed to be free of the war nostalgiathat tended to surface in the thoughts of rivals.

Conversely, the man from Niigata sometimes seemed to go off on a tangent. This
struck me in September 1974 when he spoke
to a small gathering of European reporters
about an approaching trip to Europe (his firstand only one as prime minister). The issues
then included a serious bilateral trade imbalance, disputed exchange rates, and how thetwo sides saw relations with the United States.
Tanaka’s theme, as I remember it, was that
visiting Europe would give him the chance to
see a number of famous structures – bridges,
viaducts, causeways – that he knew of from his
early civil engineering experience in Niigata.
It was one of several occasions in the 1970sand ‘80s when I felt that Japanese PMs had
personal interests that sometimes cut acrossor even overrode their concerns as politicians.
If Japanese politics was a tapestry of manycolors and weaves there were, of course, other threads that stood out. While Tanaka wasa self-made original, many LDP leaders owed
their reputations and their party leverage totheir descent from famous leaders of the past.
Sons often succeeded fathers in the same
constituencies; a great name was a sure way to
get somewhere in a faction. But money wasn’t
crucial. There were two important skills that
also helped: versatility and personality.
Masayoshi Ohira, prime minister from
December 1978 until his death from a heart
attack in June 1980, was the first Japanesehead of government to grasp that Japan’s
direct taxation system, inherited from theUnited States, suffered from overreliance on
personal and corporate income taxes. This
had become clear from 1975 onwards as slower economic growth had begun to reduce tax
yields. The direct/indirect imbalance eventually helped to create what came to seem an
open-ended rise in Japan’s public debt.
Ohira’s solution, probably inspired bypurse-conscious bureaucrats at the Ministryof Finance, was to introduce a European-stylevalue-added tax that would levy a small percentage charge on all sales transactions. It
was a good idea, but Ohira also became thefirst of a succession of prime ministers to show
how not to do it, politically.
A VAT proposal was included in the platform
for what had looked like a safe parliamentaryelection called by the PM in November 1979,
but the LDP managed only a bare victory andthe unpopular VAT idea had to be scrapped.
Ohira may have made the mistake of assuming that the best way to cross a political chasm
is to call a “can’t lose” general election.
His standing inside the LDP never quite
recovered from this setback. The Ohira whoheld on for six months as prime minister afterNovember 1979 was a shadow of the man who
had defeated Fukuda in a party leadership
vote in 1978. But he never lost the signaturesmile that may have helped him win the leadership. We discovered this one day at the Club
when Umar Kahn-Yousufzai (“Doctor” Kahn
to us, because he held an advanced degree
in chemistry), a Pakistani reporter known forhis slightly off-beat queries, asked the PM why
the LDP did not recruit more talented ladies tobecome members of parliament.
The question gave Ohira an opening.
“Actually it’s not just the ladies who have talents,” said the PM. “We all need them to stayin business, and mine is my smile.” The smilethat followed was apparently spontaneous yet
brilliantly professional. For me it was my lastopportunity to see one of Japan’s more attractive leaders scoring a friendly point from an
inquisitive foreign press.
Before I leave the subject of prime ministerial versatility I want to add a word about
Yasuhiro Nakasone. Before serving in theImperial Navy near the end of the World War II
he had been an official in the Naimusho (Ministry of Home Affairs), the pre-1945 intellectualand administrative headquarters of the Japanese militarist state.
That record might have raised worries
about his pacifist credentials, and Nakasone
was indeed a nationalist with a right wing bias.
But he was also one who knew how to sell himself. I saw him in action on three occasions,twice during interviews with editors and finally when he graced a farewell party for foreign
reporters just before he stepped down after
five years as prime minister.
During the second of these meetings, aninterview with an American editor, I thought
I saw the PM personifying Abraham Lincoln.
He was seated upright with his arms stretchedout on the wings of a presidential chair while
he gravely assured us that Japan would neveragain be involved in conflict outside its borders
and would never spend more than one percent
of its Gross Domestic Product on defense.
On the third and last time, I watched Nakasone fling an affectionate arm over the shoulders of Dr. Kahn in a gesture that seemed to say,
“We are comrades and we are all in this together.” If I had been asked which of those performances was the real Nakasone, I could not haveanswered. I was reminded of having watched afamous British actor giving brilliant renderingsof a number of Shakespearean characters in asolo act in London. Nakasone’s “Lincoln” andhis greeting to Dr. Kahn both seemed to me tobe the real, spontaneous, thing.

14 | FCCJ | JULY 2018

FeatureComing Attraction:
Kim Jong-un onWall Street
by ANTHONY ROWLEYSHUTTERSTOCKBREAKING NEWS(Pyongyong, August 1, 2020) Pyongyang stocks closed higher on news that North Korean“B” shares are to be listed on the Seoul Stock exchange and that a raft of recently issued
North Korea mutual funds are proving popular. Investors have been beating a path toPyongyang’s door lately.
Speaking on the trading floor of the Pyongyang Stock Exchange, Supreme Leader
Kim Jong-un recalled a sentiment often attributed to the late Chinese paramount leader
Deng Xiaoping: “To get rich is glorious.” Socialism “with North Korean characteristics,”
Kim boasted, “can give capitalism a run for its money any day.”

JULY 2018 | FCCJ | 15

FeatureT

he news item on the left page is fiction,
for now, but the day when North Korea
opens its mineral-resource rich economy to an outside world that is eager
also to tap into the country’s cheap and well educated labor pool and its potential for joining global
supply chains may not be too distant given recent
developments.
Some see North Korea as the next big thing forinvestors now that the Donald Trump and Kim
Jong-un summit in Singapore has ended with awalkabout (rather than a walkout) by the two leaders. Denuclearization may be some way off yet but
outside interest in the economic potential of North
Korea is rising.
The general verdict on the extraordinary Singapore summit (from "war war” to “jaw jaw" within
the space of a few months) is that there is still a way
to go before it can be said that Trump’s art of thedeal has paid off. But the economic and financial
implications of the summit are more immediate.
Unless there is a reversal of the Singapore
agreement (not impossible, given the volatilenature of the two summiteers) the emphasis now
in Pyongyang and Seoul will be on economic aswell as military matters. Kim Jong-un has emphasized his desire to modernize North Korea’s economy but he cannot afford to do so alone.
Nor will South Korea be able to pick up the tab in
the same way that West Germany did for East Germany several decades ago when the two halvesof the divided nation were reunified. Outside aid
and investment – a great deal of it – will be neededfrom governments, multilateral agencies and private investors.
Providers of bilateral official aid, in addition to
South Korea, will include China, Japan and maybe
the United States and European countries. Multilateral aid, too, will flow in time. But the more intriguing question is how private investment — whetherof a business or portfolio nature – will flow into thehermit kingdom.
Fund managers, who usually like to be ahead of
the game, will likely approach investment in North
Korea initially via an indirect route – targeting stocksof outside companies that are likely to be doing
more business with North Korea as, presumably, thedenuclearization process begins to unwind.
South Korea’s Hyundai, already involved incross-border ventures with the North, along withother South Korean chaebol – industrial conglomerates – will very likely attract fund manager
interest in coming months, as will Japanese giants
like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries or construction
giant Komatsu, not to mention listed Chinese
enterprises.
It would not be surprising if, in addition, investment houses should start churning out Korea Funds– not of the kind that proliferated in the 1980s andearly 1990s to invest in South Korea’s export boom
but new ones designed to capitalize on the prospective opening up of the North Korean economy.
In the same way that North Korea's economic
development from here on is likely to reflect the
Chinese model of foreign company-invested special zones, so the evolution of portfolio investor
exposure to the North could mirror the Chinesemodel of “A’ and “B” shares – the latter being listed
in Seoul and elsewhere.
There are myriad potential opportunities inNorth Korea for outside investors. Apart from avast need for new infrastructure in the form of
highways railroads, energy and communication
networks, etc. – all of which suggest opportunities for foreign contractors and suppliers – North
Korea is rich in minerals.
The country’s mountain ranges conceal not only
nuclear testing sites but also, according to someestimates, 200 varieties of minerals, including
gold, iron, copper, zinc, magnesite, limestone,
tungsten, and graphite, Some of these stocks are
said to be among the largest in the world, with a
total value of perhaps up to US$10 trillion.
As it happens, that is perhaps around the same
sum of money that it will require to modernize
North Korea’s economy and bring it onto a par withthat of the much more highly developed economy
of South Korea. And, exploiting this vast mineral
wealth will obviously require foreign finance andtechnology.
As Jesper Koll, head of investment house Wisdom Tree, Japan, in Tokyo, has noted, “As North
Korea prepares to emerge slowly but surely fromdecades of isolation, an enormous potential
investment opportunity is about to unfold.” Japanfor one has the wherewithal to benefit from this, if
only its political relations with Pyongyang can bestrengthened.
The reason why North Koreans cannot turn totheir cousins in the South of the country to takecare of the cost of economic modernization, in thesame way that that the East Germans were able tofrom their West German counterparts is a matterof scale, as Koll has pointed out.
East Germany’s modernization required some$2 trillion of public sector support and $3 trillion ofprivate sector investment, mainly from West Germany. That was doable in terms of the relative sizeof the two economies. North Korea could require
up to $10 trillion of investment – way beyond theability of South Korea alone to provide.
It is by no means beyond the resources of China
and Japan, acting together with South Korea, however, not to mention potential US and European investment. Then there are the multilateral institutions– the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, AsianInfrastructure Investment Bank, etc. – once Pyongyang shows serious interest in joining those bodies.

There aremyriad potential
opportunities inNorth Korea foroutside investors.
Apart from avast need for new
infrastructurein the formof highways
railroads,
energy andcommunication
networks, etc. – allof which suggest
opportunities
for foreign
contractors andsuppliers – North
Korea is rich inminerals● Anthony Rowley is a former
Business Editor and International
Finance Editor of the Hong Kongbased Far Eastern Economic
Review and has spent some 40
years writing on Asian affairs
from Singapore, Hong Kong andTokyo. He currently writes for theSingapore Business Times, among
other publications.

16 | FCCJ | JULY 2018

ProfileMarcus Fishenden
The FCCJ’s New General Manager
by HARUKO WATANABEIn April, after half a year without top management, the Club hired as General Manager Marcus Fishenden, a 51-year-old
Canadian resort and hospitality industry
veteran. Marcus was formerly the director ofoperations in Asia for Troon, the world’s largest
golf course management, development andmarketing company. He later worked as secondin command at Acordia, Japan’s biggest golf
resort development and managing company.
Marcus has enjoyed a very versatile athleticand international life since his childhood in thesmall village of Revelstoke, British Columbia,
which is now considered a sanctuary of snow
sports in Canada. As a boy, he enthusiasticallychallenged rock and ice climbing and skiing. He
still wryly recalls watching ten inches of snow
accumulate on the edge of the window by
the couch where he rested while a broken leg
mended. But above all sports, fishing remains
Marcus’s life-long hobby and passion.
His relationship with Japan started during hishigh school days. In 1985 he won a Rotary Club
Student Exchange Scholarship and studied at
Mitsuda High School in Kure City, Hiroshima.
Upon graduating from the University of British
Columbia, he joined Troon. For that company
the young Marcus took part in projects ranging
from land reclamation to the establishment ofcountry clubs and commercial and residential
districts in Hong Kong, Vietnam, China and other Asian countries.
His job experience includes consultations
and negotiations with contractors and government agencies and with financial institutions
such as HSBC, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche
Bank. He learned the hard way in how to deal
with delinquent accounts.
In Hong Kong, his major commitment was
to develop 410 acres of an eighteen-hole golfcourse landscaped by Nicklaus design anda residential area. He brought an American
school to the project to meet the needs of prospective residents.
Fifteen years after his Hiroshima stay, in
2000, Marcus Fishenden returned to Japan.
He administered and managed more than ahundred golf courses, with hotels and restaurants, of Acordia Golf Company in Japan as
number two in the company’s management.
“Number two works harder than number
one,” he said. “People misunderstand me as akuromaku (wire-puller) because I do not seek
the number one position. But what I want isprivacy rather than unnecessary publicity.”
Press Club is scheduled to move from thepresent Yurakucho Denki Bldg. to the New Fuji
Building in Nakadori in mid October. Major furniture and interior designs have been completed already but Marcus’s decision to introduce
temperature controlled food carts and changesof floor layout leading from the bar to the dining room are the touch of a professional, which
no architects had suggested.
Khaldon Azhari, President of the FCCJ, said,“All the Board and the Human Resources Committee members agreed Marcus was the best
choice among ten candidates.”
A young journalist praised him, saying, “Hisfriendly smile is a complete presentation of
hospitality.”
Of course, the board may change with theannual election – and journalists often preferto criticize rather than to develop employees.
Besides, the salary levels of a public interestpress organization are much lower than thoseof golf course developers. Fishenden’s motivation to work for the Club is a mystery to manymembers.
When Marcus heard about the job opening
at the Press Club, he said, he thought about
renovation of management and infrastructuralchanges. “Let FCCJ shine again!” To achievethat goal, he wants to appeal to younger anddigital journalists in addition to traditional print,
television and radio groups.
Although he prefers not to talk about himself,some FCCJ members and employees observethat his welcoming facial expression and his
imposing figure (he’s 190 cm. tall) symbolize thesocial status and professionalism of the Press
Club. They are already impressed by him even
before completion of his three month probation.
As a fishing enthusiast, he boasted, his biggest catch was his Japanese wife, a 178 cm tallformer Waseda University volleyball player he
met in Hong Kong. They have a nine-year-old
girl and a six-year-old boy. “I hope she would
never change her spectacles – or else shewould find all my faults.” He whispered, with his
usual smile.
Marcus-san gambatte!
● Haruko Watanabe started working for
the Mainichi as a student contributor. Upon
receiving her master’s degree from the
University of Missouri in 1964, she joined theChicago Sun-Times. Later she was Tokyo
bureau chief for the Press Foundation of
Asia. In 1976 she produced the path-breaking
video Women Pioneers. During the 1980s and‘90s she worked on United Nations women’sconferences. She trained Japanese, other Asianand African journalists as UNESCO media
development consultant and lecturer at Sophia
University. Haruko-san joined the FCCJ in 1981
and has served on the board as vice president,
director and kanji. She is the Special Projects
Committee chair and a life member.

JULY 2018 | FCCJ | 17

In Memoriam

An Appreciation:
Susumu Awanohara, 1945-2018
by TRACY DAHLBYS

usumu Awanohara, by a long shot,
didn’t fit the image of the impulsive,
daredevil foreign correspondent you
see in Hollywood movies. Susumu
was a big-hearted, beautifully rumpled man,
who observed the world from behind smudged
glasses, his incisive mind working to crack its
puzzles with the instincts of a great detective.
A respected former denizen of the FCCJ, Susumu spent two decades covering Asia and its rolein global affairs for the Far Eastern Economic
Review, alternating between editing turns in the
Hong Kong newsroom and bureau chief postings in Tokyo and Jakarta in the 1970s and Singapore and Washington in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Armed with a Ph.D. in economics from Yale
University (and an undergraduate degreefrom Tokyo University), Susumu immersed
himself in transformative, large-canvas
stories. What would China’s economic awakening mean for the world? How would rising
economies in Southeast Asia alter the faceof business and politics? Whither sprawling, complicated Indonesia? A dogged fieldreporter with a knack for languages, Susumu
loved to repair to a desk strewn with newspapers and reference books and tease out clues
to the shape of things to come.
In the mid-1990s, Susumu embarked ona second career as a financial policy maven.
After a stint at the Nikko Research Center in
Washington, he moved to a New York job asanalyst of Asian business and economic trends
for Medley Global Advisors. He lived in Manhattan’s East Village with his wife, Mary-Lea Cox.
He had been retired for several years when hedied of pancreatic cancer at Calvary Hospital in
the Bronx on June 11, at 72. In addition to MaryLea, he is survived by children from a former
marriage: son Gen (and Gen’s wife Meagan) anddaughters Mika and Yuri; two grandchildren,
Max and Elle Awanohara; an older brother, Kan
Awanohara; a nephew and two nieces; andmany friends across the globe.
My own debt to Susumu is profound. In
1976, when he opened the Review’s firststand-alone Tokyo bureau in the Nikkei Shimbun’s infamous “Gaijin Ghetto,” he hired me
as his back-up reporter. New to journalism,
I knew neither how to do it nor why it wasdone. Susumu pulled double duty teachingme the craft. He showed me how to block a
story and fashion those pesky ledes and nut
grafs. He also taught me that a good reporter
covers not just the “what” of the news but
also the “why”—and is a tireless student ofany beat, inhaling its history, politics and the
intricacies of its social fabric.
Susumu was expert in looking out for his
friends. When the Review asked Bradley
Martin, then of the Baltimore Sun, to replace
Susumu as Jakarta bureau chief, Susumu
advised him not to come — Jakarta was noplace to take a wife who was recoveringfrom a serious illness. “Besides being one of
the best-educated journalists I’ve ever met,”
said former Review colleague Mike Tharp,“Susumu was one of the nicest … not in a saccharine sense … but in caring about people
both individually and in sum.”

If Susumu covered Asia at a transformative time, he was born into aturbulent one – August 1945, in Japanese-held Manchuria. His maternal
grandfather, Tsutomu Nishiyama, hadbeen serving as president of the Central Bank of Manchou. With Japan’s
defeat, the Russian army swarmed
across northern China. In the chaos,Susumu and his twin brother, Shinji,
were spirited back to Japan, where
Shinji soon died of malnutrition. The
dramatic circumstances of Susumu’s
birth contributed to his desire to get
to know Asia, in all its complexities.
Susumu was a man of charming
eccentricities who modeled himself
after the artfully fumbling 1970s TV
detective Columbo. A Medley Advisors
colleague fondly recalls him carryinga hardboiled egg in his suit pocket; hewon office prizes for “most bad hairdays” for his prodigiously spiky mop.
Yet his unflappable, cerebral demeanor also masked a courageous spirit.
When right-wing extremists phonedin threats to the Tokyo bureau overa Review cover of Emperor Hirohito,
Susumu didn’t flinch.
Former Review editor-in-chief Philip
Bowring recalls a hard trek throughKalimantan in the early 1980s with
Susumu’s “relaxed good humor overcoming innumerable obstacles.” When the twowere ready to fly on to Manado in Sulawesi, “theplane we were supposed to take crashed onlanding at Balikpapan and after three days waiting in vain for a relief plane we had to return toJakarta. Susumu kept me sane and smiling.”
On a visit to Susumu’s hospice in the Bronx,a pilgrimage other Review alumni made, as
well, he and I reviewed the magazine’s galleryof memorable characters for a last time andtraded a few laughs and barbs. Mary-Lea,
watching us from across the room, said it best:“There will never be another Susumu.”● Tracy Dahlby, a former FCCJ member,
reported from Tokyo in the 1970s and 1980s
for the Far Eastern Economic Review, The
Washington Post and Newsweek, respectively.
He now teaches journalism at the University ofTexas at Austin.

18 | FCCJ | JULY 2018Club News

Land ofCloudsby STIRLING ELMENDORF

PHOTO
EXHIBITION
July 7 - Aug. 3
at the FCCJJULY 2018 | FCCJ | 19

Club News

New in the Library
1.

New Members
2.

3.

REINSTATEMENT (Regular)●● Anthony Trotter,
ABC News
PROFESSIONAL/
JOURNALIST ASSOCIATE
MEMBERS (Japanese)●● Hiromi Higurashi,
The Electric Daily NewsAru oranda jin no [Showa Japan]
ron: futashikana heisi kara mita
tashikana showa
Hans Brinckmann;
Hiromi Mizoguchi (trans.)
Random House Kodansha
Gift from Hans Brinckmann

Moto isuraeru taishi ga kataru
shinkoku Nippon
Eli-Eliyahu Cohen; Hiroyuki
Fujita (Comp. and trans.)
Hatoshuppan
Gift from Hiroyuki Fujita

4.

5.

A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir
Ian Buruma
Atlantic Books

PITCH US YOUR STORY
China at War: Triumph andTragedy in the Emergence of the
New China 1937-1952
Hans Van de Ven
Profile Books

A World of Empires: The Russian
Voyage of the Frigate Pallada
Edyta M. Bojanowska
Harvard University Press

Please send your story ideas tono.1shimbun@fccj.or.jp, andbe sure to note whether you
have (or have access to) visuals.
Our rates are ¥20 per publishedword, ¥20,000 for a front coverphoto. Photo essays: ¥15,000
for full-page photos and ¥5,000
for smaller shots. All payments
will be made in credit to yourmember account.

Pilates

ASSOCIATE MEMBERS●● Humayun Akhter Mughal,
Pakistan TV Corporation
Kenneth Reilly,
AIG General Insurance Co., Ltd.
●● Megumi Kumabe,
Mylan Seiyaku Ltd.
●● Shinichiro Tsuchida,
Nippon Interpublic Co., Ltd.
●● Takashi Terano,
Oosaki Iin Clinic●● Hiroshi Hayashi,
Hayashi Jimusho
REINSTATEMENT (Associate)●● Russell Saito,
Touchdown K.K.
●● Isamu Kajino,
Citigroup Global Markets
Japan Inc.

Takae method
For a healthy life
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