This minimemoir by former New York Times Tokyo bureau chief Nicholas D. Kristof is the latest in a series of regular contributions from former Club members who have reached the zenith of their profession.

In the early 1990s, the most coveted news bureau in the world, the place hacks scrambled and jockeyed for a posting, the city where it seemed impossible not to have a front-page story, was Tokyo.

So when my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and I were finishing up our tour in China in 1993, we lobbied within The New York Times for joint postings in Japan. We got the jobs, although perhaps mostly because the Times’ accountants salivated at the prospect of paying only one munificent housing allowance for two correspondents.

(All this will, of course, seem like an essay from a time warp: most-coveted bureau? Front-page Tokyo stories? Munificent housing allowance?!?)

After a year of Japanese training, we arrived on New Year’s Day, 1995, and a few days later then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama gave me an interview as a welcome gesture. I was thrilled, for it would be my first article as Tokyo bureau chief.

Then the interview began, and Murayama wouldn’t say much beyond: “Saaa, muzakashii desu ne.” Desperate, I asked every provocative question I could think of, but he simply repeated one well-rehearsed cliché after another. That night I called New York and said that I had interviewed the prime minister but that he had said nothing and so I would display the courage not to file.

The prime minister’s office was unimpressed by my journalistic judgment, but soon we did have bigger news. Just two weeks after I arrived in Tokyo, the great earthquake struck in Kobe. Again, I displayed the impeccable judgment and resourcefulness you would expect from a seasoned correspondent, underscoring why it’s so important for news organizations to have their own staff in bureaus around the world. A bit after 5 a.m., my wife was nursing our second child, Geoffrey, when she felt the room shake.

“Nick,” she said urgently. “It’s an earthquake!” “Mmmmmm,” I said, rolling over and going back to sleep. A couple of hours later, when I did get up, I found a message from the foreign desk. An editor had seen a wire story about an earthquake and wanted to know if I planned to file. “Actually, Japan is very seismic,” I replied rather condescendingly. “There are earthquakes here all the time. No need to file. If there are any deaths or injuries, just use a wire.”

That wasn’t my best call. It soon became clear that the earthquake was huge and had caused many fatalities, and by noon I was scrambling to file a story for the last edition of that day’s paper, soon to be bannered six columns across the top of the front page. It was the first time since 1945, the surrender ending World War II, that a Japan story had enjoyed a banner headline across the front page of the Times.

Just a couple of months later, it happened again. I was just about to take the Hibiya subway line into work when I began getting calls about some kind of strange poison gas on that line and others. When it became clear that this was a terror attack involving sarin nerve gas, the Times again bannered the story across the front page.

I peaked early. Overall, Japan waned steadily as a news story in the late 1990s. Once we Americans were no longer afraid of Japan’s economic juggernaut, we also turned out to be not so interested, either. The front page became more and more resistant to Japan datelines, and the paper began dispatching me around Asia and the world.

Sheryl and I left at the end of the summer of 1999, with wonderfully warm feelings for our Japanese friends and neighbors. We had sent our children to hoikuen and yochien, we had worked hard on improving our Japanese, and we had had a wonderful time exploring Japan. But the Tokyo we left was much less coveted as a journalistic hot spot, and by then it seemed exceptionally difficult to have a front-page story. And that, alas, has been the trend since. ❶