I naively stepped onto a military cargo plane that was to deliver supplies to South East Asia several days after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that devastated coastlines in 14 nations killing over 227,000 people.

The 9+ magnitude earthquake gave way to tsunami waves, some reaching more than 100 ft high that wiped out life in flash.

The plane landed in Thailand then left for the epicenter of the disaster in the Aceh Provence of Indonesia. I wasn’t supposed to get off that plane but somehow I ended up wandering around a half destroyed city without any idea of what had really happened.

After gaining my bearings, I walked into the town center, which by all accounts, seemed unaffected. Banda Aceh seemed like any developing nation town with noisy scooters, scarfed women, and belching buses. The markets were selling fruit and fresh meat, and people seemed to be ambling through their normal, daily lives. But something didn’t seem right as I did not see any indication of any tsunami or earthquake damage. But as I kept walking, I kept seeing people’s faces change as I got closer to the disaster zone. Eyes began showing trauma and their faces wrinkled with distraught.

I finally came across what seemed to be the start of a muddy river bank. Then I noticed tons of garbage and debris pushed up all around the river bank and noticed how the road in front of me was caked deep in mud.

I hadn’t found a river but the beginning of where the tsunami waters had ended, more than two miles from the city coastline.


The smells of diesel and cooking began to give way to something rotten that had been under a tropical sun for too long. It was a smell I had never encounter before yet it seemed very familiar, primordial in a way that hinted at something very dark.

Further on the road, through the mud, I saw a large yellow bag that was about six feet long and two feet wide with some people gathered around it.

They wore bright orange coveralls and white helmets. The men turned to me and smiled nervously. One guy then bent over and flipped flipped open the yellow bag revealing a rotting corpse of an adult and what was possibly a child…their bodies terribly decomposed with black flesh, their arms and legs intertwined. The bodies were adorned with torn, dirty clothes, the hair was matted, and they were barefoot. The smell invaded my nostrils, filled my brain and my knees buckled.

The man quickly closed the bag and walked up to me and began to speak to me in Indonesian. I wasn’t sure what he wanted but he and the other beckoned me to follow them.

I hadn’t realized I was standing in what was once a beautiful tree lined neighborhood. The homes were lined up next to each other, their stucco while walls filthy with mud and debris. I remember the cobblestone street had a small gutter that stretched out of site in front of the homes and it was filled with what looked like cement.

The men continued into a destroyed house and were asking me to follow them. Inside the once beautiful home were other men standing in what was more than a foot of mud. The energy was nervous and the smell of rot filled the air. Nervous eyes jetted back and forth and the chatter was a minimum. One man was smoking. The men who asked me to join them pointed towards the center of the room where others were standing.

One man motioned me to take pictures by mimicking a clicking camera. I kept peering into the mud but couldn’t see what they were doing. And as if on cue, the man with the nervous eyes and sweaty brow reached elbow deep into the mud and pulled up an infant, its little body caked in mud and limbs limp as death.

The man’s eyes opened as big as saucers and his pupils darted around the room as he stumbled through the living room mud inside the once beautiful home carrying this tiny baby in his hands. The only sound was my camera clicking, my hands fumbling and shaking and my breath heavy with despair.

And within that second the baby’s body fell back into the earth, the skull bursting, splattering onto all of us in the room. It was as if the baby wasn’t ready to leave its grave, its home for several hours, days, weeks, covered in eternal mud and gunk from everywhere.

Everyone gasped as they wiped the death off their faces, arms, and legs. The man held the headless corps by an arm and a leg, the baby swaying in motion. The man trembled in fear as he lifted one leg after another out of the mud leading him out of the house to another bag which had another body inside already, just as rotten, just as grotesque, just as macabre.

After some time, they men left and I walked away. I turned a corner and found myself dry heaving and I cried a bit. My hands and body shook from something I wasn’t ready for. I had never seen death and I had never seen death so close, so intimate.

My photos were blurry. They basically were unusable. But they were a record of my first moments in Indonesia after the tsunami.

I spent about a week wandering around Banda Aceh taking photos of the destruction and lives lost. I went around with a group of Mexican rescue workers who traveled around the globe recovering bodies in disaster sights. We would drive around with the police or other groups asking people on the streets if they knew of bodies trapped in various locations. We would find them and they would extract them, place them in body bags, and lay them down on the street for an eventual removal. I asked the Mexicans why they called themselves rescue workers when they only recovered the dead.

After returning to the US, I found the news had moved on. No one really cared about the hundred of thousands who died. I found myself broken, both mentally and physically, as I had witnessed something so terrible and had no way to really share my images with anyone.

I approached the East West Center on UH campus and they agreed to showcase my work in their galley and that eventually led to us publishing a book with the images with 100% of the profits going to relief efforts in Indonesia. 

The EWC sent me back to Indonesia as part of the show to document a simple before and after of what I witnessed six months or so later.

Life had more or less returned to normal but life was never the same. I encountered some very tragic stories from survivors who lost entire families. One man recalled how the earth shook for more than ten minutes. Another told me of how he and his family were swept away by tsunami waters. He held his children in one arm, his wife in the other and in order to save his children, he had to let go of his wife. He never found her body.

I’m certain she was one of the thousands in the mass grave I found. Maybe it was one of the bodies the Mexicans recovered from the ruins of the once Dutch colony.

I don’t know how he went on.

As rigid as Japanese society can be, many have very liberal views on alcohol consumption and public intoxication. On any given night, Japanese entertainment districts can feel like drunk college towns. Smoke filled bars and restaurants are filled with raucous salarymen, all dressed in similar black suits, eating yakitori and guzzling goblets of foamy beru and copious amounts of sweet sake. Afterwards, many make their way to karaoke bars where the older generations croon to the Beatles and Sinatra while the younger ones belt out J pop or Western hits.

Work pressures and an adherence to top down leadership pushes many a salaryman to drink heavily in social settings with colleagues and bosses, much of it to blow off steam as well as succumbing to social and work pressure. Many feel these drinking session build cohesion among the workers and the leadership thus making it harder to complain about unfair work loads or work hours that lead well into the night.

While these drinking sessions are usually limited to just men, female Japanese coworkers, or office ladies (OLs) will also attend but be subjected to subservient roles such as pouring beer for their male counterparts and laughing at their jokes and drunken behaviors. Many of the women are younger and single, tend to occupy secretarial jobs, and might have to fend off a wandering hand from a drunk superior or coworker. They will also be coerced to “drink with the men,” but it’s rare to see a Japanese woman stumbling around in a stupor when the bars empty.

At the end of the night, subways and train stations are filled with red-faced drunks attempting to catch the last trains home. Most people cannot afford to live inside proper Tokyo and the last train home offers salvation from a costly taxi ride. They fumbles through the turnstiles and stumble down flights of stairs all the while carrying their satchels and brief cases.

They clutch their heads, vomit off the platforms, and urinate in the shadows. Many will pass out on benches or squatting against a wall. Some will be shaken awake by concerned passengers to get up and get on a train while others just step over them as they themselves rush home.

While this might seem like a very dangerous scenario in other parts of the world, Japan is a very safe country. Robberies assaults are rare and even if a briefcase, a pair of glasses, or umbrella was left on a train or station, there’s a high possibility it will be turned into lost and found and recovered.

While most in the West would frown upon this tawdry behavior from grown men and women, it’s mostly ignored and accepted. Offices are usually filled the next morning with workers toiling away.

Many of these pictures were taken in the early 2000s and some were published in the now closed Photo District News magazine.

COVID-19 forced the salarymen to stay home causing entertainment districts to shutter thus the drunk salaryman has been a rare sight recently.

In 2010, Frommer’s Guide Books commissioned me to spend a day in the life of a Japanese Geisha in Kyoto, Japan around 2010.

Just a quick look at the passengers I encountered on the Tokyo underground over the many years I’ve visited.

Tokyo never stops. It weaves and wiggles around you. It’s an endless city with endless people and endless movement.

These images were taken over 20 years starting in the late 1990s taken with both film and digital mediums.

Oahu has a number of community gardens operated by the city which allows residents to cheaply rent a small plot of land. In most cases the plots are only a few dollars a month plus a small fee for water usage. The plots are in high demand and wait lists can extend for years with some gardens rarely having openings.

Many of the gardeners, who are elderly, have held their plots for decades. Land is an expensive premium and many live in high rises or lack space at their homes to have an in-ground garden. They will personalize their gardens with some building elaborate fencing with locked doors and place signs and mementos around. Some plots are overgrown with colorful hibiscus flowing over fence lines or vines and stems spreading around their area.

This particular gallery is from the Ala Wai community gardens just outside of Waikiki on the other side of the Ala Wai canal.

As Covid-19 restrictions continue on Oahu, a private water polo group, Lokahi Water Polo Club, has moved its practices from a closed, city owned pool to Ala Moana Beach Park. The reef protected calm waters are perfect for passing a ball around and shooting at a blow up, competitive size goal floating just a few meters off shore. Practice is held near sunset several days a week.

For many decades, locals claim the state bird is a construction crane as high rises seem to sprout from vacant lots across Honolulu. There are currently half a dozen residential towers being built in the Kakaako and Ward Village areas with many more planned for the near future.

When construction begins, builders usually fence off the areas with wooden walls or covered metal gates. Many of the fences have small cutouts for windows giving a peak of what’s going on inside the area from the outside.

The windows come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and heights. The walls around them bare warning signs or advertisements of things to come. Many of the walls have been tagged, scratched, or vandalized.

Many of the window views are obscured while others frame a view of the future.