Kumi Taguchi Understanding vulnerability

In sharing her story, Insight host Kumi Taguchi learned the importance of holding a safe space for people to feel vulnerable and tell their truth.

- SIMONE ZIAZIARIS

With a career in journalism spanning more than two decades, Kumi Taguchi has become intimately familiar with vulnerability.

The host of SBS's flagship current affairs program, Insight, has interviewed families who have lost their homes to bushfires, military personnel diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and people living with addiction, to name a few. But it wasn’t until Taguchi documented and shared her own story that the journalist truly understood what she asks people to do daily.

In 2019, when she was the host of the ABC's Compass, Taguchi was encouraged by her team to explore her story of belonging. Her father, Akira, had passed away two years earlier, but his relatives in Japan were still unaware of his passing. Interested in understanding her father’s relationship with Japan and her own sense of identity, Taguchi set out to share her story. Her tearm planned the program over a series of months, but the idea of a documentary focusing on Taguchi's life felt deeply uncomfortable to her.

“As a journalist, feel like our credibility is nearly based on the fact that we aren't the story, and I’ve always had visible resistance to journalists becoming the story,” she says. My boss at the time said to me identity is a very big thing to get your head around, and she had a belief that the bigger the concept, the closer in you have to go to a Story.

“It wasn't so much me desperately wanting to reveal all and go back to Japan and tell my story to strangers, but could see that it was the best way to do justice to what we were trying to do as a unit.”

They arrived at the through filming, Taguchi called it quits. She told her film crew that she wanted to stop, pack up and go home to Australia.