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APRIL 19, 2004
Irene M. Kunii, 1953-2004 She had a laugh that filled a room and an infectious optimism that made believers of her colleagues, even when the odds of her getting a story seemed extreme. She never let us down. She had the gifted correspondent's eye for the big trend story and tried to capture the rise and fall of Japan through the covers and hundreds of inside pieces she did for this magazine. As a Canadian who landed in Tokyo in the late 1970s to study at Sophia University, she stayed on, married, and became a respected personality on the journalistic scene. That made her exceptionally well-placed to record the evolution of her adopted country in a manner that most international correspondents on short-term rotations never experience. In so many ways, Irene Kunii, who died on Mar. 31 after a two-year battle with cancer, was unique for all of us. Irene was our science and technology correspondent, and as such, she wrote many of the big stories of Japan's transition over the past decade from global economic threat to struggling economic giant. She was the first to see Sony, the icon of the 1980s, struggling as the consumer-electronic business migrated offshore and its famed products were "reduced more quickly to rank commodities." She was walking around Tokyo one afternoon in 1999 with the first prototype mobile phone that connected to the Internet, and then she wrote a cover story about its inventor, NTT DoCoMo, introducing a formidable corporate name to the rest of the world. She saw Fuji Photo Film preparing for the digital camera revolution in 1999, four years before Eastman Kodak fully acknowledged the transition. Although it wasn't her beat, she was a student of Japan's bizarre politics. "How can you call yourself the Clean Government Party after this new scandal?" she berated an opposition leader in his office one evening. "Means relatively clean," he laughed. But for all of her professional polish, Irene's most enduring quality was her fascination with all things Japanese. She delighted in showing visitors around Tokyo, or taking them to her weekend house on the Izu Peninsula with her husband, Osamu, and her two dogs. Her fighting spirit never flagged, even in the final weeks. A nurse asked as she was entering surgery, " Are you nervous?" "I don't have time, I'm filing tomorrow," she replied. We'll cherish her memory. 
BW MALL
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