Time Machine: How a talented female TV journalist was forced out for asking tough questions

This story originally appeared in the Japanese newspaper Yukan Fuji in 2016.

TOKYO — Hiroko Kuniya was a rarity in Japanese television. A female anchor, Ivy League educated, as fluent in English as she was in Japanese, with a razor sharp mind. I have seen her do interviews with leading political figures like Henry Kissinger, on live television, in which she asked the questions in English, then translated the answers in English almost simultaneously into Japanese, all while explaining the import of the comments to her viewers, without skipping a beat. She did an enormous amount of research for her program, which she hosted sometimes four times a week. 

She's been doing Close Up Gendai for a long time now, for more than two decades, since 1993. She makes it look easy, but it is really a difficult task to master all the information one needs to moderate a program like Gendai because it deals with so many diverse and complex subjects. From TPP to Blue LED to stem cell research to hangure and yakuza participation in the nuclear industry. But she always came well- prepared and with a mastery of her subject.