Great Barrier Reef Photography © Matt Greenfield / Magnesium & Jon Ellis / Magnesium

The photos depicting peaceful inlets of coastal water are of Taiji, a little known whaling town on the Pacific coast of Japan’s Kii Peninsula in Wakayama Prefecture. The area is known as Kumano, and is a world heritage site, renown for its pilgrim trail and striking temples set in both ancient Cedar forests and along pristine coastline, such as this. The jagged asymmetry of the windswept trees perched on jutting outcroppings of rocks, themselves constantly battered by the sea, feels like something out of the Ukiyo-e artist Hiroshige’s well-known repertoire.

Yet every September when a group of fishermen emerge from Taiji’s sheltering coves to catch the yearly dolphin migration in order to supply the world’s aquariums and dolphinariums with fresh dolphins (at around 200,000USD a head), these picturesque waters turn from cobalt blue to blood red in a matter of hours. How? Why? It depends on who you ask.

Last October, HESO asked Louie Psihoyos founder of OPS (Oceanic Preservation Society) and director of The Cove. Referring to the annual slaughter of approximately 2000 dolphins in the waters of Taiji, he said Japan is “a microcosm of the oceans.

Louie Psihoyos © Manny Santiago

“I really feel,” he continued, “we only have a couple decades to turn around what’s going on in the oceans. This generation coming up and maybe the next one are going to be the only generations to be able to fix this before it’s too late, before well, just break out all the champagne and drink it because…there’s not going to be anything left for anybody else…”

Jon Ellis, diver and photographer from the Magnesium Photography Agency, commented on diving the Great Barrier Reef:

The truth is that the reef really isn’t in that good condition. Even in areas where people rarely dive there is a lot of dead coral around. It’s true that it appears to be recovering – new growth dots the outcrops of dead coral, but the predominate atmosphere is not one of vibrant health.

While it’s hard not to buy into the popular notion of having repeatedly soiled our own diapers, to the point of ruination, it’s also hard not to applaud what a dedicated few are still doing to in trying to race the clock to help stem the tide (pun intended) of the current big biological catastrophe. Can Pollution, habitat loss, overfishing, global climate change and ocean acidification be overcome?

Save coral reefs for one, which constitute less than one percent of the ocean’s space, but are home to more than 25 percent of its fish and you save humanity. Kill them and you kill us. How are we planning on saving them from bleaching—a whitening of corals that occurs when symbiotic algae living within coral tissues are expelled? Bleached coral may recover over time or simply die out altogether. The truth is, as Bill Bryson puts it in A Short History of Nearly Everything, “We are astoundingly, sumptuously, radiantly ignorant of life beneath the seas.”

What we do know is that the seas around the country’s 20,000 miles of coastline are notoriously stingy. Enough so as to exclude them from the top fifty fishing nations, according to Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters. Magnesium Photo’s Matt Greenfield, an avid diver, recently photographed sharks around the Great Barrier Reef off the east coast of Australia—one of the only places in their coastal waters where sea-life is truly abundant.

Shark Feeding from ジーマー on Vimeo.

Finning sharks, dredging the ocean floor, selling tainted dolphin meat as whale: the animal rights argument rightfully doesn’t stop nearby Japan from scouring the world for what the Aussies—despite 9 million miles of territorial waters—have to import. Japan’s very long and extremely well protected fisheries arm—accounting for more than 15 percent of the worldwide catch—is often openly hostile, misleading and willfully ignorant toward their own customers and any such international pressure citing the human rights argument. Tsukiji Fish market in central Tokyo, the country’s seafood nerve center, is the largest in the world and is only one of many fish markets which have misrepresented dolphin and other cetacean meat selling as whale meat. Their spokespeople seem to have a preternatural gift for keeping the masses ignorant of the unsustainable truth, flouting international law and deflecting criticism from abroad.

Most Japanese people are completely unaware of this hunt – it’s the largest direct hunt of any whale, dolphin and porpoise in the world and is putting these animals at risk while producing hundreds of tonnes of toxic meat for human consumption.

Clare Perry – EIA Senior Campaigner

Meanwhile, many Japanese Fisheries apologists counter with statements like, “…in a world where we eat millions of chickens, cows and pigs, where we seem intent on plucking every salmon, cod, oyster and shrimp out of the ocean, is there something morally wrong about hunting a marine mammal like a dolphin?”

Not morally, but concerning consumer’s health, yes. Based on 1972 World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations, Japan’s fisheries and Health Ministry (JMHLW) have been ignoring the self-imposed maximum contamination levels in seafood products of 0.3µg/g (parts per million – ppm) Methylmercury (MeHg) and 0.4ppm Mercury (Hg). Recently tested Dall’s porpoise samples (caught in northern Japan) being 1.02µg/g, almost three-and-a-half times the recommended limit, often more (Source: EIA-International). The giant Blue-fin Tuna, sold in sushi bars around the world as maguro, are regularly toxic as well. In fact any fish, or ocean going mammal over a certain size and age is likely a repository for dangerous levels of Mercury and any other heavy metals dumped in the ocean over the past 60 years.

Lucky then that not many are actually eating it. Certainly not the Japanese. According to the Guardian, of the 1,873 tons of whale meat processed in 2001, 70 tons went unsold. As a recent poll suggests, some 95 percent of the 1,047 respondents reportedly ate whale meat “very rarely”, had not eaten whale meat in a “long time”, or ate it “not at all”. 34.5 percent of the poll’s participants thought commercial whaling should resume, and 39.2 percent “neither agreed nor disagreed” with the idea.

One Japanese scholar with an opinion, Jun Morikawa of Rakuno Gakuen University in Sapporo, argues that whaling’s popularity—and therefore the fishing of all cetaceans—is largely a myth promulgated by certain governmental bodies and major players within the whaling industry. Though it seems that as long as 39.2 percent of the world “neither agree nor disagree” with any of this, our oceans will be in trouble.

[View with PicLens]

More can be read by downloading the Environmental Investigation Agency’s (EIA) Poisonous Policies (EIA International, 2008)

The numerous tattered wooden groynes, broken concrete slabs, and piles of housing bricks bear witness to nature’s relentless attacks. Many of these defenses date back to the period of time after the North Sea Flood of 1953, and in the area around Happisburgh (pronounced /ˈheɪzbrə/) they are really showing their age. Ragged wooden piles, twisted iron reinforcements, and heaps of concrete are all that remain of these monuments to Canute.

A managed retreat from the most vulnerable areas has been proposed. The plan would let the marshes regain their role as a buffer for the flood tides, but the local residents are resisting, asking for more money to be invested into the Sisyphean task of protecting the coast.

And yet, there is a stark beauty in the landscape / seascape. This delicate border of sand and flint cliffs form the ‘last ditch’ defense of the flat Norfolk hinterlands.

[View with PicLens]

Text & Photography © Alan Dejecacion / Magnesium

For centuries the Mekong river and its tributaries have been the lifeline to the southeast Asian nation of Laos with its life-sustaining role as trade and communication route. Carving a 900 kilometer border between Laos and northeast Thailand, the Mekong continues to be the main highway for many where paved roads are virtually non-existent. Cut off from major markets by a lack of reliable surface transport (the Mekong is not all that navigable year-round), the provinces and nearby villages along the river banks have developed a small, fragile and largely insular economy of local production and services resting on a foundation of traditional subsistence.

The Mekong swells during the monsoon, bringing silt deposit and nutrients, thus allowing the area to thrive via rich soil for agriculture and great numbers of fish. The richest soils of the country are on the river banks and inland as far as the river silt is carried. For landlocked Laos, the Mekong and its tributaries are the all-important source of fish. In mountain streams, in rivers small and large, in flooded rice fields, people cast their nets and set their traps.

China’s ravenous appetite for hydroelectric power at home and its thrust southward into southeast Asia in search of trade is changing the very character of the river. This is true not only in China itself, but also for the livelihoods of people living downstream in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

This complex ecosystem, and the livelihoods of millions who depend on it, is threatened by China’s plans to build eight large dams on the upper reaches of Mekong in Yunnan Province. The plan will drastically alter the river’s natural flood-drought cycle and block the transport of sediment. Despite these serious potential impacts, construction of the upper Mekong dams has proceeded without any real assessment of the likely impacts to the river and its people.

[View with PicLens]

Only a few man-made structures lend themselves to automatic inclusion in science-fiction movies. Locations so out-of-this-world they have to be used as phantasmagoric shooting locations. San Diego’s Geisel Library, half the Statue of Liberty, the Bradbury Building…

On the Northern outskirts of Tokyo, the list also includes a drain. Also known by the fabricated name “G-Cans” (not an abbreviation of anything in particular), the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel however is no ordinary drain, but a series of enormous, interconnected, underground facilities. Massive holding tanks, surge suppressors, huge pump rooms, networked tunnels, control rooms, inlets, outlets, overflows, and more – all fifty meters underground.

With one hundred kilometers of flood control tunnels, the overall project was started in 1992, with the G-Cans section finishing in 2009. Designed to provide flood control for the northern reaches of the greater Tokyo metropolis, the G-Cans element alone is massive on an unimaginable scale.

Photography: Ken Lee / Magnesium. Nikon F100 35mm and XP2 Super.

The two billion dollar G-Cans project is nearly six and a half kilometers long, with an interconnecting series of holding silos, varying in size up to sixty-five meters tall and over thirty meters in diameter. The largest holding tank is the massive “cathedral” – one hundred seventy-seven meters long and seventy-seven meters wide. Its roof is supported by sixty massive pillars, designed to provide both strength and low resistance to the swirling waters.

The basic design function of G-Cans is to re-channel potential flood waters from one watercourse to another, balancing and regulating the water flow to ensure flood surges and river breaches are kept to a minimum. As well as natural water flows, a turbine hall, equipped with ten megaWatt of Pratt & Whitney pumping capacity, can move over two hundred thousand liters of water per second into the adjacent Edo River. That’s enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in just over one second.

Photography: Skorj / Magnesium.

Construction of the main tunnels utilized a conventional Tunnel Boring Machine (“TBM”) and a two-layer lined tunnel – supporting framework and internal smooth sleeves for water flow. Ground water freezing was undertaken with large-scale expander insertions into the surrounding rock, with condensate forming on their many coupling heads, the now-removed expanders resembled alien spawning stations.

Standing meters below the previous high-water mark, with the sound of compressors and dripping water in the distance, is a remarkably surreal experience. The damp languid air adds to the feeling of potentially being swallowed up by a flooding wave as it careens through the tunnels, sweeping everything to its doom along the way. Fifty meters below the surface, fifty meters below the suburbs, with the kids playing soccer on the fields of Saitama above our heads, riding bicycles through the tunnels as we explored really added to the off-world feeling.

Since completion, the tunnels, side chambers, and main “cathedral” hall have been used in making a Tetsujin 28 film, a Range Rover commercial, numerous other TV spots, and some of the photographs here were used in the source rendering for a computer game.

While the main tunnels are now off-limits for access, the control room, above-ground infrastructure, and main cathedral are sometimes available for tours during the non-typhoon season. Bookings are available for Japanese speakers via their main website.

Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com or use the Contact form for more information on licensing these photographs and others on this issue.

Along with two other photographers, I am sitting in a rented car. As we sit parked on a sparsely lit dock in the south of Japan, we are watching the sun rise. Even before our arrival it feels like a unique journey; short-hop commuter flights, business hotels, a rented Honda rep-mobile, plotted routes on topographical maps, ramen dinners and konbini breakfasts.

It is 04:30, and after having driven through the early hours from Nagasaki to a remote fishing village in search of our boatman, we are ready to embark on the final leg to our ultimate destination – Hashima. An abandoned island-city, Hashima remains untouched in the nearly forty years since its 5000 or so occupants vacated by boat, taking with them only a few scant possessions.

With mining operations established in 1810, on an island less than 500 metres long, Hashima’s well known legacy includes it once being the most densely populated place on earth, housing what was Japan’s tallest building, and its first large-scale reinforced concrete apartment block. The erroneous claim of this island city being shelled by the US Navy in World War Two, ‘as it looked like a battleship’, contributes to the legend of Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, evident in the popular local nickname for Hashima.

Coming across a few fishermen, who are enjoying their last cigarette before returning home, we are gruffly told our boatman is on the other side of the dock. Approaching him within earshot of his companions, he mumbles nothing more than our departure time, and walks off. At sea, our boatman’s demeanor changes immediately to a jovial, entertaining host arranged at the behest of our sponsors, telling us stories of the sea, and of his Hashima. Forty-five minutes later, he lands us on Hashima, and three of us scramble ashore with a day’s supplies, cameras, and more film than I have ever carried.

After giving us his promise to return before sunset, our boatman maneuvers off station, leaving us alone with the silence of Hashima, awed, and not really sure of what to do next.

Photography: Ken Lee / Magnesium. Nikon F3 20mm and XP2 Super.

The feeling of being in some far off post-apocalyptic land is immense. To experience a place where every way you turn is abandoned desolation, immediately overwhelms; you do not need to imagine what it would be like to stand in a once occupied city after a plague, The Bomb, or at the end of time.

Everything from the hospital, the school, factories, apartments, the bathhouse, the gymnasium, and the shrines stands vacant. Dark canyons of fallen lumber fill the streets, collapsed roofs abound, the detritus of a modern life is scattered under your feet as you walk – washed from the buildings by the wind, the rain, and the sea.

With little more to hear than a plaintive sea bird, and ominously the occasional clattering sound of falling masonry and concrete, we step over telephones, sake cups, toothbrushes, broken toys, milk bottles, and curiously, dental tools, all laying under foot as we scramble over what were once streets, and through the vacant buildings.

It is tempting to try and extract a man-against-nature message when coming to Hashima. The message here however is simply one of isolation, the feeling of vulnerability, and the opportunity to travel back in time to explore the lives of a coal mining island-city; to experience a snapshot of life in Japan from the 1960s and 1970s.

I cannot speak for my companions, but over the course of a day on Hashima as we document what we see, I go from being a photographer intent on making some serious commentary with my work, to gawking like an American tourist in Paris.

With the declining need for coal in the 1970s, Mitsubishi closed operations over a period of a few short months, ferrying the inhabitants back to the mainland with not much more than what they could carry. What they left behind in 1974, is the Hashima you see now.

Photography: Skorj / Magnesium. Polaroid Type-665.

With the passing of ownership and control from the Mitsubishi Mining Corporation to the local Prefecture Office, a 220 meter public walkway has now been opened on the south end of the island. Twice-daily tours, either as a stand-alone Hashima access ticket, or as part of a regional historic pass, are now available. Hashima, as we experienced it, will most likely disappear with the expected advent of the eager day tripper.

Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com for more information on licensing these photographs and others on this issue.

For more on abandoned Japan, click here.

Pulling up just before sunrise at the Salton Sea, California’s biggest lake, is a surreal experience. It is eerily quiet at this time of day, with only the sound of the lapping water, a few desolate cries of waking birds and the noise of Polaroid cameras as we pull the film through the rollers.  It reminds me of Cormack McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic tale The Road, with artifacts littering the area: abandoned and (partially) destroyed mobile homes, a chair in the water, a lone boot, a pink sink, a bent BBQ. One is left to wonder what has happened.

Salton City © Nathalie Farigu

At the beginning of the 20th century, when farmers settled in the Imperial Valley, there was a need to tap into the Colorado River for irrigation purposes. The California Development Company dredged two intake gorges just north of the Mexican border without using floodgates. For three years, the system worked well, but in the summer of 1904 the flow of water stopped when intakes became clogged with silt deposits from the river. At that point another intake gorge was created, and once again, a floodgate was omitted. This human error resulted in a massive flood, when in 1907 the Colorado River began to swell from heavy rainfall and snowmelt. The enormous volume of water breached a dike in the Imperial Valley, resulting in the two rivers carrying it all into what became then known as the Salton Sink, and creating the Salton Sea.

Bombay Beach

As a consequence of not having an outlet, the Salton Sea gets saltier every year; water is lost through evaporation, disappears and the salt stays behind. At the moment, the Salton Sea is about 25% saltier than the ocean. One can consider this ghastly place as one of the country’s largest ecological disasters: massive fish die-offs are common, due to a lack of oxygen in the water, and the presence of many parasites. The shores are lined with bones from dead fish.

It’s difficult to imagine now but in the 1950s the Salton Sea was a happening holiday spot, and the area brimmed with activity. As the sea transformed, its popularity waned. Developers started their exodus in the 1970s, and high water levels in the 1980s flooded many business and private properties, leaving them abandoned and in decay.

Massive fish die-offs at Bombay Beach.

After a day of driving around the Salton Sea, and a pile of Polaroids spread out on the car dashboard, we head down to the Ski Inn for a greasy patty melt. While at Bombay Beach’s only eatery, another word comes to mind besides “disaster” when trying to describe what we saw: dreamscape, horrific and beautifully surreal at the same time. Right now it is not apparent what will happen to the communities around the Salton Sea, but despite the evident decline, there are pockets of life at places such as Bombay Beach. As California’s needs evolve, a place may be found for the Salton Sea, a place that has yet to be defined.

Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com for more information on licensing these and other photographs on this issue.

The major problems facing the human race are massive as ever and show no sign of abating anytime soon. Resource wars are becoming the norm. The environment needs a breath of fresh air. American obesity is getting serious (picture a muumuu-clad Homer Simpson when his fingers were too fat to dial the phone). Despite the overwhelming negativity slowing most forward-thinking legislative bodies, there seems to be a palpable worldwide trend toward cleaner living. Maybe it’s the economic recession talking or perhaps people are finally getting the idea that spending and consumption can be controlled to the gain of everyone, even those invisible third-worlders starting to demand their fair share of the world’s resources over in…wherever they are.

Smoking too appears to be declining. Even in Asia, where cigarettes are cheap- ¥300~¥350 or about €2.50 / $3.50 per pack. Yet despite all efforts to the contrary, the culture of cigarettes persists. Cigarettes have an attitude about them. Smoking is (still) cool. Smokers have a swagger. We see this in movies, on television and in advertisements that target youth. Just watch Jon Hamm’s implacable Don Draper chain-smoke at his ad agency in AMC’s historically correct Mad Men for examples of mid-1960s societal mores amid the peak of doctor-endorsed smoking and compare to now. What America was in the Madison Avenue 60s, Japan was in the opulent 80s. A commonly heard phrase of the time being, “65% of men smoke and 35% of women smoke, which means 100% of Japan smokes.”

Slowly but surely times have changed. Unless the boss says otherwise, smoking in the office is basically a no-no. The same goes for almost any enclosed indoor space, at least in California, New York, Hawaii, (despite the U.S. leading the charge against the tobacco lobby, no national legislation has been enacted, leaving the decision up to state and local governments), most of Europe and elsewhere where the government has moved to reduce health risks caused by second-hand smoke. More than two-thirds of the German population does not smoke. Less than one-third smokes regularly. Men smoke more (32% of the total sum of men smoke while only 22% of women puff). Consumption of cigarettes among youth is declining not due to smoking bans, but rather information campaigns alongside a shift in the characteristic affectations of role models.

In Denmark, the small popular bars called bodegas packed nightly with patrons would die- especially the ones with names on little brass plates in front of stools at the bar: ‘You cannot sit there, this is Lars’ chair.’- if these regulars stopped showing up to get their daily dose of booze simply because they can’t top it off with a share of nicotine.

And that is where it all goes wrong. If the bar is under forty square metres, then you can smoke inside. The sane man in all of us says, “The smaller the room the more prone it would be to become really smoky and dangerous.” But talking to the man in the street about these places was surprising. “It’s fair that smoking is prohibited, so I can bring my wife and kids without stinking afterwards,” iterated a few patrons while lighting stick after stick and discoursing on the matter. None of them was very concerned about the health of the bartender. ”Who cares about him? It’s his choice to be here…”

Please contact licensing@magnesiumphotos.com for more information on licensing these photographs and others on this issue.