On the June morning in 1950 when war broke out in Korea, John Rich was ensconced in what he calls a "correspondents villa" in coastal Japan, anticipating a long soak in a wooden tub with steam curling off the surface and a fire underneath. Rich's editor at the International News Service had other plans. "Get your fanny back to Tokyo!" he bellowed over the phone. Days later, the 32-year-old reporter was on a landing ship loaded with artillery and bound for Pusan, Korea.
Along with notebooks and summer clothes, Rich carried some Kodachrome film and his new camera, a keepsake from a recent field trip to a Japanese lens factory led by the Life magazine photographer David Douglas Duncan. Rich, who was fluent in Japanese after a World War II stint as an interpreter with the Marines, had tagged along to translate. "It was a little company called Nikon," he recalls.
