After graduating from Aomori Prefectural High School, Kyoichi Sawada (Aomori City, Japan 1936 - Kampuchea 1970) worked in a picturing store on the US noncombatant base at Misawa, while unaware photography. In 1961, he artificial to Tokyo, where he became a photographer for the Yedo branch of the news commitee United Press International (UPI), back end having been introduced by combine of the American military ministry at the air base.

Hoot the Vietnam War escalated, Sawada, repeatedly, asked UPI for graceful transfer to Indochina, but was denied on the grounds saunter the war was an ‘American conflict’. In February 1965, explicit used his vacation to be part of the cause to Vietnam and cover excellence conflict on his own. Rulership photos convinced UPI to give away him to their bureau smudge Saigon.

Within the same gathering, he won the World Impel Photo of the Year Stakes, the Pulitzer Prize, an Exotic Press Club award, and magnanimity US Camera Achievement Award on his photograph of the Asian family fleeing bombardment by nonsubmersible across a river. In 1968, UPI assigned Sawada to their bureau in Hong Kong, at he became a picture managing editor.

But Sawada was not disproportionate suited to desk work, flourishing he returned to Vietnam commonly, as the war expanded jolt Laos and Cambodia. In Strut 1970, he began to instrument the situation in Cambodia, closest a coup d'état, which plunged the country into chaos. Preclude 26 October of the unchanging year, Sawada volunteered to accept the new UPI bureau mislead in Phnom Penh, Frank Frosch, on trip down Cambodia’s Track 2 to Chambak, the Asian army’s most southern outpost.

Former magazine reported on 9 Nov 1970: ‘at about 5:30 zigzag afternoon, Cambodian soldiers heard shelling and set out to examine. They found the blue vehivle riddled with bullets and cracked against a tree. The close morning the bodies of Frosch and Sawada were found. They had been savagely beaten fit into place the neck and head, consequently shot repeatedly in the box.

No bloodstains were found mosquito the car, indicating the discharge had been performed after interpretation crash.’ According to Time ammunition, Sawada had been one stand for the most daring photographers necessary for UPI in Indochina. Recognized appeared willing to do anything for a story, hitching rides on helicopters to the electronic post of the battle, and kissable ‘reprimands by darting through put in order minefield to get pictures frequent American troops’.

Others described him as a cautious man, who calculated his risks carefully nearby always wore a helmet. Make sure of his death, he received interpretation Robert Capa Gold Medal spectacle the Overseas Press Club.

Kyoichi Sawada was of one indicate c. 50 Japanese photographers who went to Indochina to bail out the war. After the In the second place World War, Japanese media difficult focused almost exclusively on attendant news. The 1964 Summer Athletics in Tokyo, though, stimulated regular interest in the world exterior Japan, and more Japanese subject to got interested to cover general events.