It was a rough drive to the Cambodian town of Takeo in 1992. Going faster than 30 kph would have been suicidal. National Highway 2 was an unsurfaced dirt road pockmarked with craters from shells and land mines. Takeo, about 60 km south of the capital Phnom Penh, served as a base that year for an engineering battalion from the Self-Defense Forces, the first Japanese troops ever to be dispatched overseas in the post-World War II era. I was covering the work of the troops for The Japan Times.
The 600-strong battalion was sent to the war-torn country as part of a United Nations peacekeeping mission to repair the national highway running south from the capital to the Vietnam border.
It was along one section of National Highway 2, about 32 km from Phnom Penh, that Japanese photojournalist Kyoichi Sawada and his fellow United Press International correspondent, Frank Frosch, were found dead on Oct. 28, 1970.