Japanese photographer Hiromichi Mine was born on 12 October 1940 in, what was then, Mukden in Manchuria, and is now Shenyang, China. After graduating from Sophia University in Tokyo, where he studied economics, he went to work for the Tokyo bureau of United Press International (UPI). In July 1964, he came to Vietnam, where he made his most famous photograph, the image of the Caribou transport plane, hit by an artillery shell. The picture won a World Press photo award and a prize at the Picture of the Year competition.
On 5 March 1968, he died after the armored personnel carrier, in which he was riding, hit a 500-pound land mine on the road between Hue and Phu Bai. Mine was the first Japanese correspondent who was killed in Vietnam. His colleague Kyoichi Sawada, who would also be killed in the Vietnam War, accompanied his body back to Tokyo.
