75th Anniversary Issue
As she lay dying, the widow of a Milwaukee newspaper editor made a gift that has now invigorated journalism for 75 years. Agnes Wahl Nieman, a well-educated woman with a fondness for bicycling, willed money to Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism.” That $1.4 million bequest (worth about $23 million in today’s dollars) funded the Nieman Fellowship program that has brought 1,442 journalists from around the world to Harvard for a year of study. To celebrate the Nieman Foundation for Journalism’s 75th anniversary, Nieman Reports tells the stories of 75 Nieman Fellows, among them pioneers in biography, documentary filmmaking, and investigative journalism.
A financial reporter at a time when that was a rare beat for a woman in Japan, Chiba (1940–1987) shocked the nation with her frank columns about her battle with breast cancer
Atsuko Chiba was already an exception of exceptions in Tokyo before she headed for Harvard—a female newspaper reporter for the economics section of Tokyo Shimbun in the 1960s, when Japanese media were still very reluctant to hire women.
The year she spent as a Nieman Fellow changed her life. Bloomberg chief content officer Norman Pearlstine, who hired Atsuko as a stringer for The Wall Street Journal when he was the paper’s Tokyo bureau chief in the early 1970s, remembers Atsuko saying that her Nieman experience gave her the confidence to work for and write about foreigners as well as Japanese. Soon after returning to Japan, Atsuko formed her own company to write reports for foreign financial institutions while writing business stories for foreign publications. She also had the confidence to write about her breast cancer, describing the challenges she faced at a time when talking openly about cancer was taboo. When Atsuko passed away, friends and readers added to her own bequest to the Nieman Foundation to establish the Atsuko Chiba Fellowship.
By Mutsuko Murakama, Tokyo-based journalist and member of the advisory board of the Atsuko Chiba Foundation
Atsuko Chiba was already an exception of exceptions in Tokyo before she headed for Harvard—a female newspaper reporter for the economics section of Tokyo Shimbun in the 1960s, when Japanese media were still very reluctant to hire women.
The year she spent as a Nieman Fellow changed her life. Bloomberg chief content officer Norman Pearlstine, who hired Atsuko as a stringer for The Wall Street Journal when he was the paper’s Tokyo bureau chief in the early 1970s, remembers Atsuko saying that her Nieman experience gave her the confidence to work for and write about foreigners as well as Japanese. Soon after returning to Japan, Atsuko formed her own company to write reports for foreign financial institutions while writing business stories for foreign publications. She also had the confidence to write about her breast cancer, describing the challenges she faced at a time when talking openly about cancer was taboo. When Atsuko passed away, friends and readers added to her own bequest to the Nieman Foundation to establish the Atsuko Chiba Fellowship.
By Mutsuko Murakama, Tokyo-based journalist and member of the advisory board of the Atsuko Chiba Foundation
