Mr Kenji Nagai in Iraq
Originally uploaded by nofrills.
Off TV screen. Collage. See notes after clicking on the picture. Archive footages of Mr Nagai's reports from Iraq. These are what he's been doing.
About Mr Kenji Nagai:
www.flickr.com/photos/nofrills/1451789581/
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ALSO read an excellent AFP article on 28 September 2007:
www.abs-cbnnews.com/story_page/tabid/55/cat/world/news/36...
QUOTE:
Slain Japanese journalist passionate for world hotspots
Agence France Presse
... With a shaggy head of hair and professorial glasses, Nagai was employed by APF News, a small agency based in Tokyo that specialises in reports from countries where most Japanese television networks dare not tread.
Nagai's motto was "someone's got to visit places that no one else will," said Toru Yamaji, the president and founder of APF News.
Photographs published in Japanese newspapers Friday showed Nagai shaking hands with the top brass of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas at their Syrian base and sitting for a haircut in Amman on his way into Iraq.
Hailing from a quiet town in Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands, Nagai went to the United States to learn English after university and then started roaming the world, first as a writer and then with video cameras.
...
Nagai was in Bangkok on a separate assignment when Yamaji called him. He jumped at the chance to go to Myanmar and arrived Tuesday, with at least one of his reports already broadcast on Japanese television.
Nagai felt a passion inside him to cover humanitarian suffering, his colleagues said.
Jiro Ishimaru, the chief editor of Asia Press International, a Tokyo-based cooperative of Asian photo and video journalists, said he first met Yamaji [sic] five years ago at the border between China and North Korea.
Nagai, who also produced documentary films, spent extended stretches of time with North Koreans who risked their lives by defecting from the secretive state, Ishimaru said.
"He was interviewing them very closely and carefully, taking substantial time," Ishimaru told Agence France Presse.
"He was the type of a journalist who went to places that no one goes to, like some forbidden areas of North Korea where he had to go secretly," he said.
"He was a rather quiet type and was very well received by his interviewees. I think he was driven by his desire to do something that others aren't doing."
While much of mainstream Japanese media stay away from combat zones, a small group of Japanese independent journalists is famed for heading on tough assignments.
Two Japanese freelance journalists, Shinsuke Hashida and Kotaro Ogawa, were killed in Iraq in 2004 when their car was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
Nagai's father, Hideo Nagai, expressed outrage at his son's death.
"I want to say to those responsible in Myanmar, its government, that they cannot do something so outrageous," he said. "I don't want to see anything like this ever happen again."
