Richard Lloyd Parry: collector of underwear and disaster tales

Richard Lloyd Parry keeps Osama bin Laden’s underpants next to his own in his underwear drawer | LISTEN

The Times Asia editor Richard Lloyd Parry in Sydney. Picture: John Feder.

Richard Lloyd Parry keeps Osama bin Laden’s underpants next to his own in his underwear drawer.

They are sealed in plastic, of course. “They are a bit large, ­larger than you expect for such a slim-looking man. And they are from Marks & Spencer — the finest underpants in the world. So I took those as a trophy and filed a story on it,” says the foreign correspondent of his unusual souvenir from his days reporting on terrorism group al-Qa’ida and its ­elusive founder.

In a career spanning 28 years, Lloyd Parry has reported from 29 countries, including ­Indonesia, Iraq, East Timor, North Korea, Kosovo and Papua New Guinea. In 1999 he was on assignment in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, exploring a compound where bin Laden had stayed before he fled to Tora Bora. In a back room, he spotted some washing on a clothesline.

“Now it’s possible, I suppose, that they belonged to one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards, but I choose to believe that they are Osama bin Laden’s,” he tells The Australian’s Behind The Media podcast.

It all seems a very long way from posing for photographs in a Surry Hills laneway around the corner from The Australian’s offices, where Lloyd Parry, who is ­approaching 50, looks just like an unassuming, floppy-haired Oxford University graduate, which he is.

It was always going to be Japan for Lloyd Parry, who, as a nerdy teenager in the 1980s, won the grand final of the TV quiz Blockbusters. First prize: two weeks in Tokyo. He has lived in Japan for 23 years, reporting firstly for The Independent and then for The Times, where he is Asia editor, with a mix of literary intellect and hard-nosed reporter. His delivery is often deadpan, with his wry ­humour poking through.

As we walk and talk after the interview about his method for sneaking into Myanmar, Lloyd Parry says: “I was wondering how you knew about that. It isn’t on my Wikipedia page.”

Richard! I did consult some sources, you know. One of those, Sian Powell, sits next to me at The Australian and worked with Lloyd Parry in Asia.

“He can absorb a particular situation, listen to stories of conflict and mayhem, or intrigue and disaster, and distil them into a few hundred or few thousand words that convey the facts and the feelings to readers half a world away,” Powell wrote, reviewing Lloyd Parry’s book Ghosts of the Tsu­nami, which prompted his visit for the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Ghosts of the Tsunami is ­witness to the tragedy of the 2011 Japanese disaster. In it, Lloyd Parry decides not to tell the story of the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown but instead ­recount the tragedy of Okawa primary school, attended by 74 of the 75 children who died in the tsunami while at school.

Through countless interviews, Lloyd Parry reports on why. He talks about the “knack of detachment” a journalist must have, of attending appalling situations but not being appalled by them, of a mother who discovers the body of her 11-year-old daughter and tries to clean the mud out of her eyes, of another mother who searches for the body of her child, a quest so consuming she takes out a digger operating licence to continue it.

Journalists in disaster zones need to have the temperaments of paramedics, “empathetic but professional”.

“We’re there to do a job, not just to wallow in the grief. I do find it hard going to places of disaster and approaching strangers and asking to talk to them because you imagine an angry or upset, to a grief-stricken, reaction.”

But people have various needs at times of disaster, he says.

“Food and shelter and medical treatment are often the priorities, but you find very often that ­people also have a need to tell their stories. When strangers like me come in and talk to them, very often that can be a source of relief.”

In the Japanese tsunami, 18,500 died but journalism simply couldn’t tell the full story.

“In daily journalism we do our best and the best people do a very good job. But you can never really capture more than a corner of the picture.”

I ask Lloyd Parry if he is a journalistic relic, a dying breed of ­foreign correspondent.

“I do sometimes feel like one of the dinosaurs soon after the comet hit the Yucatan Peninsula. But I’m still standing at least.”

Do we need his kind, given ­social media is ubiquitous, as is video footage? He points out that citizen journalism was a hot topic a decade ago, but no longer.

What is needed are full-time journalists “thinking about the news, about the moral and ethical issues behind it”.

“And also people who have the experience and the training to cut through the bullshit, as it were. Not everyone naturally has that way of looking at the world, that ability to make fast judgments, to write fast, think fast and present information in the right way for the right audience.”

In common with many journalists, Lloyd Parry has been sued for libel. But in his case, it was by a killer.

Korean-Japanese man Joji Obara was a serial rapist brought to justice, eventually, for killing British woman Lucie Blackman, which became an enormous story in Britain (he also killed Australian woman Carita Ridgway, which people have forgotten about here). His book about the case, ­People Who Eat Darkness, featured the prolonged and bizarre trial that brought Obara to justice. “And one of the lesser twists was that he sued me for libel.”

Lloyd Parry experienced the reaction typical of many journalists when they are sued. “My first thought was, ‘Someone is suing me, I must have done something terrible’. But of course I haven’t done anything terrible. The ­reporting was all sound.”

The Times backed him and the case was eventually won. “He was using the courts as a way of trying to, I believe, intimidate not just me but other reporters.”

Lloyd Parry has been The Times correspondent for 15 years, but the newspaper has had a Tokyo correspondent since the 1870s. The first was Major General Henry Spencer Palmer, to whom Lloyd Parry pays annual tribute at his gravesite. “Once a year, (during) the cherry blossoms, we go and pour sake as an offering to him.”

Lloyd Parry says Japan still fascinates him. “I haven’t got to the end of Japan. It’s a constant stimulation, both intellectual and emotional as well.”