My first day at the ABC's Tokyo bureau turned out to be one of the biggest news days in modern Japanese history.
Five Japanese citizens who had been abducted by North Korea in the 1970s returned home after talks were held between former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and Kim Jong Il.
Back then, I was a news assistant.
Twenty years later, I'm now a producer and photographer and things have only become busier.
In my time at the ABC I've worked with seven correspondents, each with their own skills and quirks.
The job has taken me all over Japan — from deep underwater to see amazing ruins to deep underground to witness incredible science experiments.
Our building started to sway
There's one news event I will never forget — the March 2011 triple disaster, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear explosion, that devastated northern Japan.
March 11, 2011 was shaping up to be a quiet Friday.
I was working in the office by myself that day as correspondent Mark Willacy, a cameraman and another producer were in western Japan, filming a story about Japanese swords.
Suddenly, I heard some noise and the building started to shake.
We get a lot of small earthquakes in Japan, but this one was different.
It became bigger and bigger and didn't stop.
The building started to sway so much that it was like being on a rocking boat in rough waters and I ducked underneath my desk and held on to it.
I experienced the huge quake in Kobe in 1995, but I knew this one was bigger and I was scared.
It went on for about three minutes.
I tried to call Mark Willacy several times but then found out that all communications were down.
The only line that worked was the internal number connected to the ABC in Sydney.
Local news bulletins started to flash warnings for big tsunamis in the northern coastal areas and calls came in from the ABC asking me about the situation.
Luckily, there was no visible damage in the office except some camera tapes that had fallen down.
After talking to many radio and television programs until late at night, I walked to Mark's house to check if his family was OK and meet up with my partner and stayed there for the night.
Communications were still down and trains were stopped in Tokyo and thousands of people were stranded, waiting at taxi stands.
Many chose to walk for hours to get home.
Flying into a disaster zone
Mark Willacy and the ABC crew in western Japan were frantically trying to get back to Tokyo.
As soon as they did, they packed up to head to the disaster-hit areas.
The ABC sent in several crews in the coming days and after initially working as a coordinator in the office I headed into the field with a crew from our Beijing bureau.
It was taking more than 12 hours to drive to the disaster zone but, luckily, we secured seats on a helicopter.
We hardly had any time to pack food or water and we had no idea where the chopper could land until the last minute.
When we arrived in Miyagi Prefecture, communications were still down but, thankfully, we found a taxi that took us to the coast.
It was an eerie atmosphere, extremely quiet.
Soon after the earthquake and tsunami hit the areas, most people had evacuated and there were no police, military or other media.
As we got closer, we saw cars flipped upside down in the middle of rice fields and started to see piles and piles of rubble.
We had to hike over fallen trees and rubble.
Everything was closed and we had to find a place to stay.
We found one small hotel in a safe area that kindly let us in, but they had no electricity or water.
There were many people sheltering at the hotel and some were sick.
They lit candles and provided some food they prepared with a generator.
I felt a deep appreciation for them sharing food with us.
There were endless aftershocks that shook the ground while we slept.
Police arrived and carried out bodies.
I still think about the policemen who showed their respect to the victims, praying for the dead before carrying them out.
One day, the situation suddenly and drastically worsened.
As we were filming a live-cross with Stephen McDonnell, people behind him started running and shouting there was another explosion at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
We were just a little north of Fukushima.
As Stephen mentioned that in his cross, the line dropped out and we lost connection with the ABC studio in Sydney for several hours.
We evacuated to a town called Tono, a place I had never heard of, which was a five-hour drive north, taking us to the region of Iwate.
There, the damage from the tsunami was extensive and much more devastating. But the residents we saw were resilient.
The stories and people I can't forget
The Tokyo bureau continuously reported on the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant and the victims of the triple disaster for the next decade.
There was one father, Norio Kimura, who we visited several times.
He had lost his father, wife and a daughter, Yuna, in the tsunami.
Mr Kimura never stopped searching for Yuna's remains.
When we visited him for the fifth anniversary, he was digging in the rubble with heavy machines.
When we visited him for the 10th anniversary, he had found a small bone of his daughter.
Ten years since the disaster, I have my own son that is the same age as Yuna was when she died.
I can't imagine the pain he went through.
Fukushima was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl and I've been inside the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant several times.
Not a lot of people envy me going into a highly radioactive place, but, we wore protective clothing, and it was very important to report on the state of the decontamination work.
I've also been inside the Fukushima no-go zones many times.
It's always a sad sight to see abandoned homes, classrooms, overgrown grass, and eerie empty streets.
You can see how people rushed to evacuate and never returned.
Meals were still on tables and many clocks had stopped exactly at 14:46 — the time the massive quake struck.
The challenges of reporting in Japan
One thing that you might not know is that filming in Japan is no easy task.
Most organisations will ask to submit an official filming proposal and it takes a long time until you get an answer.
First-hand information from government ministries and authorities gets shared with a closed Japanese press club — not with the foreign media.
It takes many phone calls to reach the person who has the information.
You have to repeat your request every single time to a new person and it can start to wear you down.
Another surprising thing is that interviewing people on the street (known as a vox pop) is actually one of the most challenging things to do.
Japanese people are camera shy and many just walk away.
We are often virtually begging people to be on air and it's a reward when they say yes.
But when it happens, people can be incredibly generous with their time.
One such vox pop with a woman for a news story about the Olympics in Tokyo led to us later sharing a meal with her entire extended family (including dogs!) on the island of Okinawa for a Foreign Correspondent documentary.
Another led to us filming a wedding in the middle of COVID restrictions.
What I love about this job is you never know where it will take you and I've had the privilege of meeting so many amazing people.
It's been an honour to help tell their stories.
We interviewed a double atomic bomb survivor called Tsutomu Yamaguchi.
After he was exposed to the bomb in Hiroshima he was evacuated to Nagasaki and then survived the second attack.
His emotional interview opposing war brought me to tears.
I'm very glad we had the chance to record his story while he was alive.
Another person I won't forget is 86-year-old Iwao Hakamada.
He was a former boxer who was on death row for 48 years, holding the Guinness World Record for spending the most time on death row.
He was released after the court believed evidence against him had been falsified.
When we got special permission to film him and visited his house, he was walking back and forth inside his apartment room.
His sister told us that he often walked 12 hours continuously.
He chanted strange things when he ate.
He'd been in solitary confinement throughout his prison stay and it showed how it can affect a person's life and mind.
The list goes on … a Buddhist monk/make-up artist who is inspiring many LGBTQI people around the world, a former kamikaze pilot who became an anti-war campaigner, a young man inspiring people on YouTube who lost three limbs, an Aussie rugby player who stayed behind to help at a tsunami-hit area and returned to see the community hosting a Rugby World Cup game, a former musician who cleans up lonely deaths, a yakuza gangster who became a monk.
I've been lucky, too, to have had opportunities to visit some incredible places.
Super Kamiokande (or Super-K) as they call it, is a massive underground tank filled with the most-pure water on Earth surrounded by massive bulb-like devices that detect light.
It searches for neutrinos and scientists are looking for clues about the origins of our universe.
It's mostly full of water, but we were granted an extremely rare chance to go inside for one hour.
Jake Sturmer and I set up many cameras and we shot as much as possible in the time.
As the gondola descended into this tank deep underground in central Japan, I was overwhelmed and amazed by its beauty.
It was like being inside an enormous treasure box surrounded by giant jewels and this was a moment I truly appreciated my job.
I'd like to thank all the people who shared their precious personal stories and the great crew I've worked with over the past two decades and look forward to telling many more.
