Louis Kraar, who died Friday at 71, was an Asian correspondent for Fortune and Time, and reported on tumultuous change in the region for more than five decades.

He was among the first American journalists to focus on the emerging Far-Eastern economies.

Kraar wrote three books in collaboration with Asian business leaders, including the founder of Korea’s Daewoo Group, Kim Woo-Choong, and the chairman of Japan’s Canon, Seiichi Takikawa. He became an expert in Asian family business networks, and at the time of his death was completing a book on the topic, his widow, Maureen Aung-Thwin, said.

Kraar began his career as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in 1956, and first visited Asia in 1961, accompanying Generals Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow on a fact-finding trip to Vietnam. American involvement was still nascent, and “the staff people were frantically reading all these books about Indochina because the experts were going out there to decide what to do, and they weren’t very expert,” Kraar told the Singapore Business Times in 1997.

Kraar was an Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations in New York City in 1967, and his work received citations from the Overseas Press Club in 1987 and 1988.

Kraar joined Time magazine in 1962 as Pentagon correspondent, and the following year was named bureau chief in New Delhi. He headed the magazine’s bureaus in Singapore and Bangkok, and in 1973 was named Asian editor for Fortune. He retired from Fortune in 1988, but continued to write cover stories for the magazine. Last July, he chronicled the return of the now-disgraced Mr. Kim to Seoul after several years of living abroad in the wake of the collapse of Daewoo.

“The latest chapter of Kim’s saga is largely a ritual of contrition,” Kraar wrote in Fortune’s Asian edition. This drama has a standard scenario in Korea: Prominent senior executive confesses white-collar misdeeds, is convicted, but serves only a small portion of his prison term before being released and, once public passions fade, pardoned.”

Kraar concluded, “Former World-Com chairman Bernard Ebbers, who is facing a possible life sentence for directing the largest securities fraud in U.S. history, may wish he had been tried in Korea.”

(Ebbers was sentenced to 25 years for his conviction on accounting fraud charges in the collapse of WorldCom; Mr. Kim stands indicted, and the furor in Korea does indeed seem to be dying down.)

Louis Kraar

Born July 26, 1934, in Charlotte, N.C.; died March 10 of a heart attack at his home on the Upper West Side; survived by his wife of 30 years, Maureen Aung-Thwin, his children Jennifer and Adam, two grandchildren, and two brothers.