On a picturesque morning several years ago, the state of Hawaii crapped its collective pants. Andrea Fujii remembers the day well.
Back in 2018, Hawaiians greeted their day on January 13th with a hot cup of coffee and an emergency alert notifying them missiles were targeted at the islands and were on their way. If some skeptics were still holding on to their coffee mugs, they almost assuredly dropped them to the floor when they were informed the notification was not a drill.
“I remember the morning,” Fujii said. “I was in Los Angeles and my parents were in Hawaii. My dad swam in the ocean almost every morning and he was at the beach. My mom was at home and she texted me and informed me the missiles were coming toward Hawaii. She was in a closet. I hadn’t heard anything from any verifiable news source and began freaking out.”
Fujii frantically checked with her news desk and they didn’t have anything new to report. She said everyone around her thought the world was going to end.
“My dad was in the water and didn’t know any better,” Fujii said. “Not a bad place to be.”
Eventually, the news desk at KCAL got a hold of a Hawaii representative in Congress. Someone from the representatives’ office told them it was nothing, there was no imminent threat to Hawaii. No immediate vaporization. That didn’t mean the good people of Hawaii would get over the trauma anytime soon.
“My mom eventually came out of the closet where she’d gone for some kind of safety measure,” Fujii explained. “I was shaken.”
Fujii is currently a correspondent with ABC News in New York. She anchored at the NBC affiliate in Yakima, Washington, before anchoring and reporting at the Fox affiliate in Salt Lake City and CBS’ WJZ in Baltimore. She began working with CBS2/KCAL9 in October 2012.
Fujii was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her father was born in Hawaii, and his grandparents came from Japan. Her mother is from Washington State.
“My dad was a dentist,” Fujii said. “My Uncle on my mom’s side was also a dentist. My Uncle set my parents up on a blind date.”
Before broadcasting Fujii had planned to be a lawyer. At the same time, she held a subliminal thought about being a news broadcaster. After taking and passing the California bar exam she realized she didn’t want to practice law. In a course readjustment, Fujii pursued her dream of reporting.
After undergraduate studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, Fujii went to Santa Clara University to earn her law degree. During her third year of law school, Fujii had just finished an internship. She wasn’t thrilled.
“I didn’t love it,” she said. “I knew other people that didn’t love working as a lawyer. I guess I got cold feet and decided law was not something I could do for the rest of my life. I always wanted to be a news reporter and anchor,” Fujii said. “Friends from high school are not surprised by the way it turned out. I’d always been interested in law but more interested in broadcasting.”
In hopes of discovering a different career path, Fujii spoke with one of her professors about her change of heart. The professor put her in contact with a television consumer reporter in Oakland, who was also an attorney.
“He became my mentor,” Fujii explained. “He was fantastic in every respect. He told me to finish law school and take the bar exam. He said I’d come that far and it made sense to take the exam.”
If her broadcasting career went belly-up, she’d still have the law to fall back on.
In law school, Fujii would argue cases, and it turned out she had a knack for the courtroom. She said as in broadcasting, communication is a huge part of what lawyers need to be successful in the courtroom.
“I never asked my parents if they were disappointed in my not being a lawyer,” Fujii said. “They’d always been extremely supportive. After I’d been working for a while I went to visit them in Hawaii and they were very proud. I can’t say I’m up to speed with the law. It’s like a foreign language where you have to keep up with it or lose it.”
Fujii met her husband Whit Johnson in Yakima, Washington, a couple of hours east of Seattle. Johnson is a journalist and co-anchor of the weekend editions of Good Morning America, and anchor’s the Saturday edition of ABC World News Tonight. When they met he was just getting started.
“I was working in my second job, he was fresh out of college on his first,” Fuji said. “We started in the ‘friend zone’ and worked from there. I knew he was going to be a big talent when we first met.”
Fujii even played a role in Johnson’s hire. Since she was an anchor, the news director sought Fujii’s opinion when hiring new reporters to get an idea as to how they’d work together.
“The news director pulled me aside and we watched demo tapes, then he would ask my opinion. I knew right away Whit Johnson was the right choice.”
When she watched her future husband’s tape, Fujii liked his confidence. “You don’t want the camera to go through you,” she said. “You see some young journalists that aren’t as confident. Whit had that.”
While covering virtually anything, Fujii enjoys general assignments to a specific beat.
“I like variety,” she said. “I enjoy doing a crime story one day, and a happy story the next day.”
When Whit Johnson was offered a job in New York, Fujii saw an opportunity. Perhaps she didn’t need to jump back into a full-time job and could escape some of the daily grinds. Maybe she could take this opening to help raise her daughters.
“It has been rewarding to spend time with kids,” Fujii said. “The move to New York was difficult and we had a great life in Los Angeles. Whit’s family is in California and both of us have very good friends there. It was hard to leave.”
It was never a plan to live in Manhattan.
“We were too used to suburban life,” she said.
The rigorous commute to the city would have been an hour each way, so that also influenced her decisions. At ABC, Fujii works for the overnight shows typically three nights a week.
“They’ll tell me my assignment around 9:00 pm, and I’ll have a script together in an hour and a half,” Fujii said.
When she worked in Hawaii, Fujii observed that the viewers got to know the anchors and reporters. They welcomed them into their lives.
“In New York, I don’t know if there are as many local television news viewers as there are in Hawaii,” Fujii said. “I don’t think TV news is dead, but people are going online for their news.”
As any professional journalist would tell you, don’t get political in your work.
“We’re not supposed to show any bias in our reporting,” Fujii said. “I do know there are some who feel it’s part of their job to give their opinion. My job as a journalist is to pick the correct words. To say things that don’t give a bias. We need to be careful not to say anything remotely questionable.”
Fujii said reporters and anchors can get in trouble even if they didn’t mean anything offensive, and a phrase came across in a way that made it suspect.
Working in the industry provides moments of fun and unique experiences. Fujii and her news-guy husband were featured in a segment On Good Morning America. They shot a segment with Rick Macci who was the tennis coach for Venus and Serena Williams.
“Whit and I are still embarrassed by that,” she jokes. “We started playing tennis a few years ago during the pandemic. We’re still trying to get our footing.
We’re not terrible but it can be a humbling game.”
The GMA segment was shot during the U.S. Open, and Fujii said it was surreal to be on the same courts where the big names were about to play.
“The people in the stands must have been confused as to why we were out there,” she said.
The couple will have been married for 15 years in August. Fujii thinks having children of her own has made her look at the world and stories with a different eye.
“All parents are trying to cope, protect their children,” she said. “I’m leery of any story we do that has to do with kids. At the same time, I don’t want to be overprotective of my own. I try to take things with a grain of salt.”
She likes to think she keeps her daughters grounded, and focused on being humble.
“I want them to be accepting of everybody. I also want us to keep our morals in the way we should. We go to church almost every week and realize we’re blessed in many ways.”
When she worked in Los Angeles, Fujii covered a story where a child was assaulted when she went to the restroom in a restaurant. Her parents were just a few yards away.
“After I reported that story, I decided my young kids weren’t going to use the restroom without me in public places.”
