This photo from Dec. 1, 2015, shows The Associated Press' North Korea Bureau Chief Eric Talmadge in Pyongyang, North Korea. AP-Yonhap

By Foster Klug

Eric Talmadge, who as North Korea bureau chief for The Associated Press tenaciously chronicled life and politics in one of the world's least-understood nations, has died. He was 57.

Talmadge died this week in Japan after suffering a heart attack while running.

A decades-long resident of Japan with deep expertise on Asian security and military issues, Talmadge seemed to have found his ideal job when he was appointed in 2013 to lead the AP bureau in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital. From his base in Tokyo, he traveled almost monthly to report on the nuclear-armed country's remarkable evolution under its young leader, Kim Jong Un, who took over after his father died in 2011.

"For years, Eric's sharp work in North Korea has helped shape how the entire world saw a country that many of us knew little about," said Sally Buzbee, AP's executive editor. "He took that responsibility very seriously, and it was never far from his mind."

In this Dec. 3, 2015 photo The Associated Press' North Korea Bureau Chief Eric Talmadge, left, speaks to village elder Song Hong Ik, center, about his experience as a young boy during the Korean War on Ryongyon-ri hill in Kujang county, North Korea, via a translator. AP-Yonhap

Talmadge was one of only a few international journalists with regular access to North Korea, where the AP established a video news office in 2006 and a text and photo bureau in 2012. With his frequently exclusive on-the-ground view, Talmadge latched onto and reveled in the small, telling details that upended widespread Western stereotypes about North Korea.

There were few journalists more insightful about the North's push to develop atomic weapons capable of striking the United States. But Talmadge also filled the AP wire with stylishly written stories of daily life, often seeded with traces of his bone-dry sense of humor.

He wrote about a beer festival in Pyongyang, where "brews are cheap and carry the ruling family's seal of approval." He wrote about the millions of North Koreans using mobile phones and the popularity of a game called "Boy General," describing it as "a spinoff of a new TV animation series that is both beautifully produced and genuinely fun to watch."

His intelligent, curious eye also regularly seized on the moments that often got lost or ignored in the frenzied coverage of the long-running nuclear standoff between Washington and Pyongyang. "He saw meaning in everything he came across," said Ian Phillips, AP's vice president for international news.

In this Saturday, Oct. 10, 2015 photo The Associated Press' North Korea Bureau Chief Eric Talmadge stands in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang as the country prepares to hold one of its biggest celebrations for the 70th anniversary of its ruling party's creation. AP-Yonhap

In 2014, Talmadge wrote of a weeklong road trip through North Korea ― unprecedented for foreign reporters ― that stopped at the forest-covered Kaema Plateau, known as the "Roof of Korea."

He showed readers the "blink-and-you-miss-them villages," the government propaganda slogans that covered posters, murals, banners and stones, and the isolated truck stops where elderly folks sat on weed-covered embankments and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes.

"It's quite possible," he wrote, that "none of them had ever seen an American before."

Talmadge was equally probing when it came to covering politics and nuclear tensions. His muscular observations and analysis about the country were drawn from reporting that faced frequent obstacles from a government that sometimes treated media access and coverage as a peril to the regime. Along the way, he became one of the key public faces of independent journalism in North Korea.

Talmadge was candid about the constraints of reporting in North Korea: No interviewing random people; no photos of checkpoints or military installations; no breaking away from ever-present government minders, "even on the loneliest of lonely highways."