To: All Members:

New FCCJ Website to Premiere Friday, June 1st.

Dear Member,

I am very pleased to announce that on Friday, June 1st, FCCJ will premiere its new Website at www.fccj.ne.jp

After over a year of preparation, false starts and false hopes, FCCJ finally has a Website that looks great and shows the Club at its best, and is able to handle social media and video, including live and recorded video of press conferences.

From the beginning, the purpose of the new Website has been to help bring FCCJ back to its basic mission as a journalism club. The IT committee believes the new layout reflects that goal. Members will also find the site more user-friendly, although a couple of things will change that need to be mentioned here.

In order to register for a PAC event through the new site, download an MP3 file, or watch a video of a press conference, you must first log in with your Username and Password. If you do not know your username or password, please contact either Webmaster John Lawrence at jdl@apac-media.org or the Front Desk.

In addition, Members will be able to access Livestream video of FCCJ press conferences. We're working out the final details of whether we will be broadcasting live or delayed. But with this new service, we can begin building a video archive of press conferences, as well as continue to build are already extensive MP3 archives.

The old website will continue to serve as a ''back-up'' site for a month, to provide members and staff time to adjust to the new Website. It will be officially shut down, however, on July 1st, when the new President and BoD take over. After that, you must use the new Website to register for PAC events.

However, portions of the old Website, specifically the MP3 archives section, will continue to be accessible through the new site until we have transferred all MP3 files to the new site.

In conclusion, let me offer my sincere and heartfelt thanks to Webmaster John Lawrence for his above-and-beyond the call of duty effort to make this happen. Talk of building a new Website has been going on since at least 2000, when I first joined FCCJ. But until today that's all it's been -talk. John, along with the FCCJ staff, made it happen, overcoming obstacles too numerous to mention and setbacks that would have defeated many other Webmasters. For that, everyone at FCCJ owes John and the staff a round of applause and thanks.

Best Regards,

Eric Johnston
IT Committee Chair

To All Regular & Professional/Journalist Associate Members:

It's time for FCCJ Happy Hour !

Invite your journalist friends and colleagues to enjoy an hour of
drinks, a delicious buffet, and some lively conversation. It is a good
opportunity to catch up with colleagues, swap reporting tips and
complain about editors!

Tickets are 1,000 yen and entitle you to a light buffet with free-flow
draft beer, house wine, gin tonic/vodka tonic and soft drink/juices.
Please pick up your tickets at the front desk. The buffet will not be
replenished after 7:45pm, so come early !

This is also an opportunity to introduce non-member journalist friends
to one of the most active press clubs in the world. Non-member
journalists coming to a Happy Hour for the first time are welcome to
attend free. A free bottle of wine awaits both you and your guest, if
the guest hands in a completed application form by the end of the hour.
Facility tours and FCCJ membership explanations will be available for
those who are interested in joining the Club.

Orders taken after 8pm will be charged to members, and guests can
purchase coupons (valid for the same day) at the Front Desk to continue
imbibing.

To help the staff with preparations, please reserve in advance by
emailing Ms. Kanako Nishimura (k.nishi@fccj.or.jp) or calling reception
(3211-3161).

Membership Marketing Committee

Horst Faas, AP combat photographer, dies at 79

By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — As chief of photo operations for The Associated Press in Saigon for a decade beginning in 1962, Horst Faas didn't just cover the fighting — he also recruited and trained new talent from among foreign and Vietnamese freelancers.

The result was "Horst's army" of young photographers, who fanned out with Faas-supplied cameras and film and stern orders to "come back with good pictures."

He and his editors chose the best and put together a steady flow of telling photos — South Vietnam's soldiers fighting and its civilians struggling to survive amid the maelstrom.

Faas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning combat photographer who carved out new standards for covering war with a camera and became one of the world's legendary photojournalists in nearly half a century with the AP, died Thursday in Munich, said his daughter, Clare Faas. He was 79.

A native of Germany who joined the U.S.-based news cooperative there in 1956, Faas photographed wars, revolutions, the Olympic Games and events in between.

But he was best known for covering Vietnam, where he was severely wounded in 1967 and won four major photo awards including the first of his two Pulitzers.

"Horst was one of the great talents of our age, a brave photographer and a courageous editor who brought forth some of the most searing images of this century," said AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll. "He was a stupendous colleague and a warm and generous friend."

Among his top proteges was Huynh Thanh My, an actor turned photographer who in 1965 became one of four AP staffers and one of two South Vietnamese among more than 70 journalists killed in the 15-year war.

My's younger brother, Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut, followed his brother at AP and under Faas's tutelage won one of the news agency's six Vietnam War Pulitzer Prizes, for his iconic 1972 picture of a badly burned Vietnamese girl fleeing an aerial napalm attack.

Faas was a brilliant planner, able to score journalistic scoops by anticipating "not just what happens next but what happens after that," as one colleague put it.

His reputation as a demanding taskmaster and perfectionist belied a humanistic streak he was loath to admit, while helping less fortunate ex-colleagues and other causes. He was widely read on Asian history and culture, and assembled an impressive collection of Chinese Ming porcelain, bronzes and other treasures.

"Horst Faas was a giant in the world of photojournalism whose extraordinary commitment to telling difficult stories was unique and remarkable," said Santiago Lyon, AP vice president and director of photography.

"He was an exceptional talent both behind the camera and editing the work of others and even in the grimmest circumstances he always made sure to live life to the fullest," Lyon said. "He will be sorely missed by scores of colleagues, especially that reduced group with whom he covered conflict, particularly the Vietnam generation."

In later years Faas turned his training skills into a series of international photojournalism symposiums.

Faas also helped to organize reunions of the wartime Saigon press corps, and was attending a combination of those events when he became ill in Hanoi on May 4, 2005.

He was hospitalized first in Bangkok and then in Germany, where doctors traced his permanent paralysis from the waist down to a spinal hemorrhage caused by blood-thinning heart medication.

Although requiring a wheelchair, he continued to travel to photo exhibits and other professional events, mainly in Europe, and collaborated in the publishing of two books in French — about his own career and that of Henri Huet, a former AP colleague in Vietnam. Faas also made two arduous trips to the United States, in 2006 and 2008.

His health deteriorated in late 2008. Hospitalized in February for treatment of skin problems, he also underwent gastric surgery.

Faas' Vietnam coverage earned him the Overseas Press Club's Robert Capa Award and his first Pulitzer in 1965. Receiving the honors in New York, he said his mission was to "record the suffering, the emotions and the sacrifices of both Americans and Vietnamese in ... this little bloodstained country so far away."

Burly but agile, Faas spent much time in the field and on Dec. 6, 1967, was wounded in the legs by a rocket-propelled grenade at Bu Dop, in South Vietnam's Central Highlands. He might have bled to death had not a young U.S. Army medic managed to stem the flow. Meeting Faas two decades later, the medic recalled the encounter, saying, "You were so gray I thought you were a goner."

On crutches and confined to the bureau, Faas was unable to cover the February 1968 Tet Offensive, but directed AP photo operations like a general deploying troops against the enemy. AP photographer Eddie Adams came back with the war's most famous picture, of Vietnam's national police chief executing a captured Viet Cong suspect on a Saigon street.

"Generally we had to go pretty far into the field but this was a situation in which the war came to us. It was right next door," Faas recalled.

He often teamed with Pulitzer Prize-winning AP reporter Peter Arnett to produce powerful and exclusive reports such as the 1969 story of Co. A, an Army unit that balked at orders to move against the enemy. Faas witnessed the "combat refusal" incident during an effort to reach the site of a helicopter crash that had killed seven U.S. soldiers and AP staff photographer Oliver E. Noonan.

Born in Berlin on April 28, 1933, Faas grew up during World War II and like all young German males was required to join the Hitler Youth organization. Years later, he wrote that Allied air raids and "the fascinating spectacle of anti-aircraft action in the sky" were part of daily life, as was being required "to stand at attention in school and listen to an announcement that the father or older brother of a classmate had died for fuehrer and Fatherland."

As the war ended in 1945, the family fled north to avoid the Russian advance on Berlin and two years later escaped to Munich in West Germany.

During the postwar Allied occupation, Horst became the 15-year-old drummer for a black GI jazz band in Munich. Asked recently where he learned the drums, he said, "I didn't know how. I just played them."

In 1960, at age 27 and an AP photographer for four years, Faas began his front-line reporting career in the Congo, then Algeria. In 1962 he was reassigned to the growing war in Vietnam where he landed on the same day as Arnett.

Faas for a time shared a Saigon villa with the late New York Times correspondent David Halberstam, who said of Faas, "I don't think anyone stayed longer, took more risks or showed greater devotion to his work and his colleagues. I think of him as nothing less than a genius."

Faas left Saigon in 1970 to become AP's roving photographer for Asia, based in Singapore, ranging widely on assignments. He teamed with New Zealander Arnett on a cross-country reporting tour of the United States as seen by foreigners, and covered the 1972 Munich Olympics where he photographed a ski-masked Palestinian terrorist on the balcony of the building where Israeli athletes were being held hostage, hours before they were murdered at the airport.

The same year, he won a second Pulitzer Prize, along with Michel Laurent, for gripping pictures of torture and executions in Bangladesh. Laurent later became the last journalist killed in the Vietnam War, two days before the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, while working for the French Gamma photo agency.

In 1976, Faas relocated to London as AP's senior photo editor for Europe, until he retired from the news agency in 2004.

He was co-editor of "Requiem," a 1997 book about photographers killed on both sides of the Vietnam War, and was co-author of "Lost Over Laos," a 2003 book about four photographers shot down in Laos in 1971 and the search for the crash site 27 years later.

Survivors include his wife, Ursula, and his daughter.

Richard Pyle covered the Vietnam War for five years and was AP Saigon bureau chief 1970-73.

To All Regular & Professional/Journalist Associate Members:

Start Golden Week off early at the FCCJ Happy Hour!

Tickets are 1,000 yen and entitle you to a light buffet with free-flow draft beer, house wine, gin tonic/vodka tonic and soft drink/juices.
Please pick up your tickets at the front desk. The buffet will not be replenished after 7:45pm, so come early !

Every Regular and Professional/Journalist Associate Member is encouraged to bring a friend or colleague to an hour-long food and drink fest, and it is a good opportunity to introduce other journalists to one of the most active press clubs in the world.

Non-member journalists coming to a Happy Hour for the first time are welcome to attend free. A free bottle of wine awaits both you and your
guest, if the guest hands in a completed application form by the end of the hour.

Facility tours and FCCJ membership explanations will be available for those who are interested in joining the Club.

Orders taken after 8pm will be charged to members, and guests can purchase coupons (valid for the same day) at the Front Desk to continue
imbibing.

To help the staff with preparations, please reserve in advance by emailing Ms. Kanako Nishimura (k.nishi@fccj.or.jp) or calling reception
(3211-3161).

Membership Marketing Committee

In honor of the late Roy Essoyan

Please join us on April 12 to remember and celebrate the "full and adventurous" life of Roy Essoyan, a former FCCJ member and distinguished journalist, who broke news of Sino-Soviet split when he was reporting from Moscow for The Associated Press and was expelled from the Communist country in 1958 for what the authorities called was "a rude violation of the Soviet censorship." He passed away at age 92 at his home in Hawaii on March 22.

Essoyan was born in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, after his refugee family landed there in a desperate escape from 1919 Bolshevik revolution, and grew up in Kobe until 1932, when the family moved to Shanghai. He joined AP in Shanghai in 1945.

After leaving Moscow, he was posted in Hong Kong, Cairo and Beirut, where he was named chief of Middle East operations. He returned to Japan in 1973 as AP's chief of North Asia services. He was general director for North Asia when he retired from AP in 1985.

Colleagues admired Essoyan as a plain-speaking, old-school professional with a lively sense of humor but always ready to battle with editors in the news cooperative's New York head office, when he deemed it necessary. He was widely regarded a man of integrity and a trusted friend of Japanese newspaper publishers and editors.

At FCCJ, he served on the board and a number of committees and always supported the club's journalistic activities. Close friends of his are planning to set up a donation box when this event takes place and make a collective donation in Essoyan's memory to Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres, a cause close to his heart.

Members planning to attend are kindly asked to inform the reception desk (03-3211-3161) so that the club staff can make appropriate preparations.

Georges Baumgartner
FCCJ President

To All Regular & Professional/Journalist Associate Members:

Join us for a fun evening with journalist friends old and new. It's time for FCCJ Happy Hour !

Tickets are 1,000 yen and entitle you to a light buffet with free-flow draft beer, house wine, gin tonic/vodka tonic and soft drink/juices.
Please pick up your tickets at the front desk. The buffet will not be replenished after 7:45pm, so come early !

Every Regular and Professional/Journalist Associate Member is encouraged to bring a friend or colleague to an hour-long food and drink fest, and it is a good opportunity to introduce other journalists to one of the most active press clubs in the world.

Non-member journalists coming to a Happy Hour for the first time are welcome to attend free. A free bottle of wine awaits both you and your guest, if the guest hands in a completed application form by the end of the hour.

Facility tours and FCCJ membership explanations will be available for those who are interested in joining the Club.

Orders taken after 8pm will be charged to members, and guests can purchase coupons (valid for the same day) at the Front Desk to continue imbibing.

To help the staff with preparations, please reserve in advance by emailing Ms. Kanako Nishimura (k.nishi@fccj.or.jp) or calling reception (3211-3161).

Membership Marketing Committee

Obituary

With deep regret I would like to inform FCCJ members that Roy Essoyan, retired foreign correspondent of AP, and also a former active member of FCCJ, passed away on March 22, 2012, in Hawaii, his family said. He was 92.

Please read the obituary written by Richard Pyle, an FCCJ Life member.

Georges Baumgartner
FCCJ President

Obit-Roy Essoyan
Roy Essoyan (born Sept 15, 1919)
Reporter who broke news of Sino-Soviet split, dies at 92
AP Photos to come

By RICHARD PYLE
For The Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) _ Born in a Japanese fishing village just after his refugee family landed there in a desperate 1919 escape from Russia's Bolshevik revolution, Roy Essoyan arrived in the Soviet Union nearly four decades later as an American journalist.
But after three years of hobnobbing with Premier Nikita Khrushchev and other communist leaders, the Associated Press reporter's Cold War adventure ended abruptly. In 1958 he was expelled for reporting that a serious breach had developed between the USSR and Mao Tse-tung's China.
By committing what the foreign ministry called "a rude violation of Soviet censorship," Essoyan had exposed what became known in diplomatic parlance as the "Sino-Soviet split," _ and earned himself a one-way ticket out of Moscow.
>From Hong Kong, a pulsating world away from the dreary Soviet capital, Essoyan continued a career that took him around the globe, with major stops in Cairo, Beirut and finally, Tokyo.
In 1985 he retired to Hawaii, and died there on Thursday, his family said. He was 92.
Roy Essoyan was the youngest child of Armenian parents who in fleeing from Vladivostok as the communist-led upheaval gripped Russia, became part of that ethnic nationality's 20th century diaspora.
Stateless when they reached the coastal fishing town of Tsuruga, where Roy was born, the family found Japan welcoming to foreigners _ but destined to become less so as war-fevered militarist factions gained influence and power.
After starting a new life in the city of Kobe, the Essoyans moved in 1932 to Shanghai, which offered its own business opportunities, and were there when Japanese invaders took over half of the city in 1937.
Roy had aspired to a journalism career even before graduating from Shanghai's Public & Thomas Hanbury School in 1936. "I always wanted to write," he said in a 2002 interview. "I thought I had a flair with things like essays and what not."
But when Shanghai's English-language papers refused to hire him as a cub reporter, the 17-year-old youth shipped out on a Danish freighter, the Peter Maersk, and spent the next year and a half at sea.
According to Essoyan's daughter Susan, "the ship's captain found his given name, Karekin, too difficult and asked, 'What do I yell when I need you?' They settled on 'Roy,' which later became his byline," she said.
Returning to Shanghai in 1939, Essoyan and a friend teamed up to publish small news magazines, and he was working as an editor for the English language Shanghai Times when World War II finally reached Asia in late 1941, trapping many foreigners in China.
Essoyan had been married on Dec, 5, 1941, and when the paper called him to work on Dec. 8, saying war had begun, he hung up the phone.
"I thought they were being funny," he recalled. "And sure enough I went out on the street and Japanese soldiers were everywhere... overnight they had effectively completed the whole takeover by commandeering utilities and power companies, the telephone company, the radio stations."
Life became hard during the occupation. Roy's older brother was killed by a hit-and-run Japanese army truck, and the Essoyans found that being stateless did not protect them from the harsh treatment endured by citizens of western countries living in Shanghai's famous International Settlement.
"It was better to have a government standing up for you," Essoyan said in the 2002 interview.
As the conflict ended in 1945, Roy, then 26, got a $90 a month job with the AP in Shanghai, and impressed his boss enough to be offered a visa and assignment to Hawaii. There he became a U.S. citizen and burnished his English, his fourth language after Armenian, Russian and Japanese.
He also lost his wife, Sadie, and a son, Daniel, to illness.
In 1953 he married Betsey Biggs, a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. She survives, along with their four children, Catherine, David, Susan and Stephen, and nine grandchildren.
After a steady news diet of Hawaiian volcanoes and VIP visits to the islands, the Russian-speaking Essoyan was tapped in 1955 _ the height of the Cold War _ to join AP's Moscow bureau.
Years later, he recalled how foreign correspondents were forced to live in state-assigned apartments where elevators took passengers up but not down, and government eavesdropping was so pervasive that "even the lampshades were bugged."
Denied contact with ordinary Russians, reporters scoured propaganda-laden newspapers and official pronouncements for nuggets of news and never missed diplomatic receptions where Soviet officials might turn up. But everything was subject to strict and sometimes arbitrary censorship.
In 1958, Essoyan slipped past the censors a "news analysis" saying Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung were secretly but sharply at odds over Mao's refusal to agree to an international summit meeting unless his communist regime replaced Nationalist China as Beijing's representative.
Essoyan had already been warned twice by Soviet censors, but his expulsion from Moscow _ a distinction regarded by many western journalists as a badge of honor _ was likely assured when the influential Washington-based columnist Joseph Alsop singled him out for praise.
"If the Russian censors have permitted Essoyan to say that Nikita Khrushchev has suffered a public setback, then Nikita is out," Alsop told his readers.
That wasn't what happened, Essoyan noted later. The censors had not approved his story, and Khrushchev was not out. Essoyan was.
However, being banished from Moscow did not totally end his interaction with Soviet officials.
During a visit to Indonesia a few years later, Khrushchev spotted a familiar face _ Essoyan's _ among the press, and to the dismay of other reporters, invited the American to join him for a private talk.
As they chatted in Russian, Khrushchev made a sneering comment about Essoyan's baseball cap: "Why do you wear those silly beanies?" Essoyan responded by playfully sticking the cap on the Soviet leader's head _ a moment captured by photographers for a worldwide audience.
Based in Hong Kong after leaving Moscow, Essoyan helped AP cover the early days of the Vietnam war, accompanying South Vietnamese troops and their U.S. advisers on helicopter-borne operations.
Essoyan described one such mission as "gamesmanship, beautifully orchestrated and achieving absolutely nothing because the Viet Cong knew what was happening, the (South) Vietnamese didn't want bloodshed. I wrote a lovely, long story which ended by saying, 'As we flew away, the flag of South Vietnam was flying, but tomorrow morning the communists would be back.' And this is what happened... most of the time."
After a brief stint in Cairo, Essoyan was named AP's chief of Middle East operations in Beirut in 1965 and became its chief of North Asia services, based in Tokyo, in 1973, coming full circle to the land of his birth.
Colleagues admired Essoyan as a plain-speaking, old-school professional with a lively sense of humor but always ready to battle with New York editors when he deemed it necessary.
Harry Koundakjian, a fellow Armenian in Beirut who later photographed Lebanon's civil war for AP, recalled that New York chiefs had ordered Essoyan to "fire Harry" after his photos from earthquake-ravaged Iran showed up only in Life magazine.
"Roy answered back, saying I was only a stringer, and AP's New York and London photo desks had earlier rejected my photos. Then came another message: Hire Harry."
James Abrams, an ex-Peace Corps volunteer who joined AP in Tokyo in 1979, recalled Essoyan as "everyone's mentor" in a bureau stocked with legendary AP veterans and ambitious newcomers.
"Everyone, from the uptight Japanese newspaper executives who loved his company, to the young Japanese and American reporters who learned from him, were infected by his hearty laugh and buoyant take on life," said Abrams, a long-time member of AP's Washington, DC staff.
"Roy Essoyan understood Japanese feelings and always took care of his local staff," said Shigeyoshi Kimura, a retired AP newsman in Tokyo. "Roy was the first bureau chief to promote staff social interaction _ invitations to AP events, outings and visits at his home. Appreciating Japanese reticence, he encouraged wives and children to join in, saying, 'Everyone is a member of our AP family.' He was the best."
In interviews after retiring to Hawaii in 1985, Essoyan offered a nostalgic view of the fast-paced, demanding craft of wire service reporting.
"It was a great life, 40 years of expenses-paid vacation," he told one interviewer. "Think of all the places that people want to go to, whether it's the Pyramids or the Sphinx or the Great Wall or the Taj Mahal, I've been there...
"We used to say, 'how else do you get to talk to kings and emperors and presidents and prime ministers?' "
"The AP was more than a family to me," Essoyan said. "It was like a nationality."
_____

Richard Pyle is a former foreign correspondent who spent seven years in Tokyo as AP's Asia News Editor.

Obituary

Fredrick H. (Ted) Marks, a former FCCJ president who lived in Tokyo and other parts of Asia in the 1970s as a correspondent and executive for UPI, died of prostate cancer on Feb. 24 at a hospital in Brunswick, Maine. He was 69.

Born on March 22, 1942, he began his professional career as a reporter for a newspaper in Connecticut. Later, after military service, he joined UPI and worked in Boston prior to being transferred to Tokyo in 1970. After staying in Tokyo for two years and serving as No. 1 Shimbun editor, he was sent to Hong Kong to become an editor at UPI's Asia Division headquarters. Subsequently, he was named Bangkok bureau manager and was also on the team of UPI correspondents who covered the climax of the war in Indochina.

Marks moved back to Japan in 1975 as general manager for North Asia with responsibility for all of UPI's editorial and business affairs in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. He also served as FCCJ president in 1977-1978.

He returned to the U.S. in 1980 to take up various posts, including marketing director for UPI's conversion to satellite communications, executive assistant to the president, and vice president and general manager for UPI's New England division.

After leaving UPI, he joined Knight-Ridder. In 1990, he organized Marks & Frederick Associates (MFA) providing its clients with research and analysis, the development of business plans, product development and marketing services.

On a private matter, Marks found an old Japanese flag in 2010 that his father, a military surgeon, brought home from New Guinea. He asked club member Rikio Imajo to help find the family of the owner of the flag. The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare found the wife of the dead soldier's brother and delivered the flag in May last year.

Georges Baumgartner
FCCJ President