John Kung

People rush to cross Aioi Dori in Kamiyacho, Hiroshima

Just got home today from a brilliant 17 days in Hiroshima and Hong Kong, introducing our son to his grandparents and great-grandparents. Despite the recent tragedy in north-eastern Japan, the people in Hiroshima seemed perfectly normal; but for the days following there would be groups of people calling for donations at busy street corners in an insistently loud but completely polite way. And I was told since courier services restarted to the Tohoku area and Tokyo, people have been sending boxes of bottled water to friends and family, making it hard to buy bottled water in the city.

Japanese TV was, unsurprisingly, devoting a lot of time covering the tragedy, as well as the drama unfolding at the Fukushima nuclear plant. But unlike the idiotic fear-mongering that some of the international “news” organisations seem to prefer, Japanese TV was filled with heart-wrenching tales of loss, and I can’t ever remember feeling so relieved to watch the fund-raising Japanese Celebrity “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”.

The Fukushima nuclear accident also gave rise to a small personal project I managed to shoot while I was in town. I wondered what Hiroshima people thought of nuclear power, before and after the accident. My wife’s parents are atomic bomb survivors, and I had the privilege to photograph and interview them, as well as some other Hiroshima locals, on their thoughts on Fukushima. More of that coming up, after the translations and the transcriptions are all complete.

Left: All this construction is on reclaimed land, only a few years ago the harbour ended at the row of buildings on the far right. Right: The view from Victoria Peak, Hong Kong.

Hong Kong provided another personal opportunity: to introduce my son to his great grandparents, and to gather four generations in one room. My family is spread out all over the world, and it’s not often we can all meet. Even this time my sister couldn’t come, so it wasn’t a full family gathering, but it was nice to see so many people that I had not seen, and to, believe it or not, meet cousins that I had only known when I was a child and they were merely babies. I wish I had more time to photograph all my family, I will have to make time to pursue that project. I also wish I had time to photograph all the incredible food we ate!

I did manage to see and photograph a few places in Hong Kong, it’s amazing how much has changed. Hong Kong has been embarking on a huge scale of land reclamation projects in order to build vital housing and infrastructure. There are beaches in Hong Kong that my parent’s generation used to go to that simply no longer exists — it has been built over, and more often than not the coastline itself has been artificially moved hundreds or meters away. One thing that I had forgotten is that there is a remarkable amount of greenery in Hong Kong still, which just serves to make the skyscrapers look even taller.

The defining characteristic of Hong Kong, the 24hr lifestyle and the crushing crowds, none of that has changed. We were staying in a hotel in Kowloon Town in the dirtier end of town, and restaurants and shops were open right up to midnight — and beyond. Kids were playing on swings at 11 at night, the MTR stations look the same at peak hour as it does at midnight — on a Tuesday. I found the vibrance intoxicating, my wife found it overwhelming, but we both wondered if we could find a future that involved more of Hong Kong, and Japan.