Family, friends and colleagues bade farewell to Hiro Muramoto, a Reuters cameraman who was killed during a demonstration in Bangkok, at a funeral in Tokyo on April 18.
The large number of colleagues and news professionals underscored his immense popularity, the respect he commanded as a veteran video journalist and shock at his sudden death on a Bangkok street.
Muramoto was shot dead during a clash between anti-government protesters and Thai troops on April 10. The Thai government has promised a full and impartial investigation into the 43-year-old cameraman’s death. The Japanese government has called on Thailand to conduct a thorough investigation. Thomson Reuters has said it will do everything in its power to establish how and why he was killed.
More than 1,000 mourners attended the wake and the funeral. Leading the Thomson Reuters delegation were Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger and Japan Senior Company Officer Kotaro Okamura. A large number of grieving Thomson Reuters staff, many from overseas, attended, as did the Thai ambassador, senior executives from major Japanese media companies and Japan’s foreign press corps.
Muramoto is survived by his wife, Emiko, and their two young daughters.
Muramoto worked as a cameraman for Reuters for more than 15 years and covered a wide range of news stories, from the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, to earthquakes, to robots and a monkey waiter in Japan. Images from some of the stories he covered were shown to mourners during at the funeral.
Muramoto’s death was a major news story in Japan and his funeral was widely covered by the Japanese media.
David Schlesinger told the funeral: “As the world struggles to understand why Thailand is in chaos, Muramoto-san went there to provide the visual images to make the story vivid.
“Muramoto-san's chosen profession is about going to the scene of the action to record the truth so that the world's citizens are better informed. We know how dangerous that can be, and how Muramoto-san paid a terrible price for his commitment to his company and his profession. We never want such a tragedy to occur again; we are terribly sad and sorry that it happened to Muramoto-san.”
Speaking on behalf of Muramoto’s friends, Tomoo Itoh told the mourners: “I cannot help but think, Hiro, that it was because of your kind and gentle nature, you, who could never hurt anybody, must have trusted completely that nobody else would hurt you either – that it was the most unfortunate flash of a second where your kindness worked against you.”
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