Fumikazu Nishitani, Part 2

Cambodia was my inspiration

Mr. Nishitani (left) with friends on a school trip when he was in high school. (Photographed in Nagano Prefecture in the summer of 1977)

Fumikazu Nishitani

Born in 1960. He started working as a civil servant at Suita City Hall in Osaka in 1985. He enjoyed traveling, and his visit to Iraq brought him into contact with children who had come down with cancer apparently as a consequence of depleted uranium weapons. He founded 窶彝escue the Iraqi Children窶・in December 2003. At the end of 2004 he left his job at Suita City Hall and became a journalist covering conflict areas. He continues performing NGO work to deliver humanitarian aid while working as a journalist exposing war crimes. In 2006, he received the 窶弃eace & Cooperative Journalist Fund of Japan Award.窶・He lives in the city of Suita.

I remember the day I came upon a book of photographs on Cambodia by Goro Nakamura at a book shop. I read through it right there. I was in my third year of high school and I had just taken a practice exam for the university entrance examination, prior to taking the real test. I saw photos of the killing fields strewn with skeletons, workers on an endless march to dig an irrigation canal under the watchful eyes of soldiers, and a portrait of the dictator Pol Pot. I felt overwhelmed by the images.

Toward the end of 1978, Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to opposition forces and the mass killing perpetrated by Pol Pot's regime was made known to the world. The number of people murdered was estimated at 1 or 2 million people.

Before I saw the book, I had thought that the history of genocide in the world ended with the Nazis. I was thinking such tragedies only took place in history textbooks, but the situation in Cambodia had taken place only recently, and I found that incredibly shocking. How could a man named Pol Pot kill so many people? How could I have gone about my days without being aware of such a significant event?

I wanted to learn the reality of the world as it was occurring now, not the history I had memorized from a textbook just to pass an examination.

When I was a college student, cheap airline tickets didn't exist and I couldn't afford a trip to Cambodia and Vietnam. I vowed to save my money for such a trip...and yet I was also afraid of the idea. Caught between these two conflicting feelings, I thought: "If I work for a newspaper, I'll be able to travel abroad at the company's expense." So I applied for a job as a reporter, but I failed to receive an offer. As a second choice, I became a civil servant, working for a local government.

Perhaps that was the right decision because I could earn enough money to travel to Cambodia, and it was easy for a civil servant to take vacation time back then. Finally, in 1993, I took a paid vacation and flew to Cambodia.

However, as soon as I arrived at the airport in Phnom Penh, I wasn't able to take a single step. Men who had only one leg grabbed at my clothes and my camera, shouting "Give me money! Give me food!" and they wouldn't let me go. They were landmine victims and I'm ashamed to say that I knew very little about landmines at the time. I couldn't speak Khmer back then, and they couldn't speak Japanese. To make matters worse, the English that I had learned for test-taking wasn't useful for real life.

Still, I tried communicating with them through body language, asking them such questions as "Where did you step on the landmine?", "How is your family?", and "How many people were killed under the Pol Pot regime?" After I returned to Japan, I started practicing to improve my listening ability in English. I became consumed with traveling alone around the world and I visited a variety of conflict areas, including Bosnia, Kosovo, and countries in Africa. I visited Cambodia again in 1998 and 2000, and, after the difficulties I had encountered the first time, I was now able to do proper interviews of the people there.

On September 11, 2001, the United States was hit by terrorist attacks, and the world erupted into a global war against terrorism. The number of innocent people that have been killed in the name of this war, in Afghanistan and Iraq, is estimated to be from a few hundred thousand to more than a million. After I ran out of vacation time to travel, I decided to leave my job and become a freelance journalist.

The inspiration for my work today was my experience in Cambodia. I realized that it was actually a good thing I didn't begin my career by directly becoming a newspaper reporter. If my marks in school had been high enough for me to join a newspaper company, I wouldn't have been able to visit the world's conflict areas. The reason I'm now able to work as a journalist, the job I had dreamed of, is because I didn't give up despite making an earlier detour in my career.