Issue:
April 2024 | Obituary
Tribute to Shiro Yoneyama
I encountered Shiro Yoneyama on the frontline of big-time news reporting for the first time when we covered the 1977 F1 Japan Grand Prix at Fuji Speedway.
Early in the race, Gilles Villeneuve’s Ferrari flew into the stands, killing two people. We scrambled to gather tidbits about the accident for our senior sportswriters, knowing that the whole world was waiting. With an adrenaline rush, we felt like war buddies in our mid-20s.
And so began our camaraderie as two among several dozen locally hired reporters who were part of a vibrant foreign media in Japan. Yone-san, one year my junior, was in his second year at UPI, and I had been at AFP for three years. We were both general assignment reporters. I remember sneaking into several booze-ups at UPI’s Tokyo bureau to mingle with him and the likes of Marianne Ohe and Toshio Aritake.
In 1981, the Fresno State alumnus moved to the English service of Kyodo News, just as several local “Unipressers” led by Ted Shimizu did during that time, when UPI was in decline. I visited him at Kyodo’s Washington bureau in 1989 to see his steady rise at Japan’s leading news organization. But he remained kind and helpful to his fellows, including a stagnant “lifer” like me.
A few months after I retired from AFP in 2014, Yone-san organized a good luck party in my honor at the FCCJ, bringing together two dozen journalists, mostly Japanese in international media.
Active on an FCCJ committee, he also recommended me for writing notices for the club’s news conferences and helped me land translating jobs at Kyodo’s subsidiaries. “You deserve more,” he often told me with a broad smile.
Until the Covid-19 pandemic, Yone-san was a familiar face at the club’s wine-tasting events. He organized afterparties at nearby izakaya, as well as get-togethers with friends such as Reuters’ Teruaki Ueno at the restaurant of Kyodo’s main office.
But the virus scare kept him at home until recently. In his 2024 New Year’s card to me, he wrote that he had finally re-visited the club late last year. “It felt like ‘Yasuragi-no-Sato (Home of Peace),’” he said, referring to a hit TV serial about a nursing home for retired showbiz celebs.
I am still not sure what he meant by that, but I wish I could have enjoyed more time with him in our golden years to repay him and share his timely dad jokes!
Shigemi Sato, a retired Agence France-Presse journalist
