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.

The day before, Sawada, 34, and Frosch, 27, had left the capital for Chambak, 38 km south, in a blue Datsun truck to see whether any fighting was going on in the area. When they failed to make contact with the bureau, one of their colleagues drove along the same highway the next morning in search of them. He found their bodies in a marshy wooded area. Both had been shot several times in the chest, apparently by the Khmer Rouge.

Sawada was already an established photojournalist, with a 1966 Pulitzer Prize for his dramatic photo of a Vietnamese mother and her children desperately crossing a river in search of safety. In addition, he had won a number of international photographic awards for his coverage of the war in Indochina.

These award-winning photos are now on display at the Japan Newspaper Museum in Yokohama. Titled "The Battlefield -- Two Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographers," the exhibition features about 120 photographs by Sawada and another Japanese photojournalist, Toshio Sakai, who also won the Pulitzer Prize two years later, in 1968, for his photo of a weary U.S. soldier asleep in the rain in South Vietnam.

Sawada and Sakai were colleagues, although Sawada was four years senior to Sakai. Sawada was hired by UPI's Tokyo bureau in 1961, while Sakai joined in 1964.

Sawada was assigned to UPI's Saigon bureau in 1965, and Sakai followed two years later. Incidentally, both Sawada and Sakai earned their Saigon postings by demonstrating their eagerness to cover the war. Independently, both photographers took time off from work at separate times and headed to Vietnam to photograph the war on their own.

With the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam in 1965, the war intensified, eventually turning into an American quagmire. Sawada was already there; his Pulitzer-winning "Flee to Safety" was taken on Sept. 6, 1965, in a South Vietnam village. (Incidentally, he helped carry the children onto the riverbank once the picture had been taken.) After winning the Pulitzer, Sawada returned to the village and was reunited with local residents.

In 1985, on the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Sakai and Fuji TV newscaster Yuko Ando visited the village for a news program and traced the whereabouts of the people depicted in the photograph. Although the mother holding the baby in Sawada's prizewinning photo had later died in labor, the four children had all survived the war.

What inspired Sawada, Sakai and dozens of other journalists to cover the battlefield, knowing that they were risking their lives to do so?

Bunyo Ishikawa, a veteran photojournalist who also covered the Vietnam War, wrote in his tribute to the exhibition that the Japanese media in the postwar era focused its coverage almost exclusively on domestic news, while only a few major news organizations could afford to send their journalists overseas.

With the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, however, both media and public attention became more global and more Japanese journalists were motivated to cover international events, especially the Vietnam War, he said.

This media interest was backed, he continued, by the growing antiwar sentiment among the public at a time when U.S. troops were heading to Indochina from Okinawa, Atsugi, Yokosuka and other bases in Japan. Ishikawa added that the Vietnam War also provided the Japanese media with its first opportunity to exercise the freedom of the press in war coverage.

About 50 Japanese photographers went to Indochina during the war, as part of an estimated 3,000 journalists from around the world who reported from the front line.

Like Sawada, more than 170 journalists, including 15 Japanese, were killed while covering the war from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Sakai became a freelance journalist, stringing for Newsweek, Time and other publications from 1977 to 1985. He joined the Tokyo bureau of Agence France Presse in 1986 and covered the overthrow of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and the Tiananmen Square riots of 1989, among other events.

It was Sakai who delivered the ashes of Sawada to his wife, Sata, who was living in Hong Kong at the time. In 1999, Sakai died of a heart attack in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, at the age of 59.