Kamagasaki: Japan's slum:
Kamagasaki is known as Japan's largest slum, with the country's largest day laborer concentration. Some 30,000 people are estimated to live within a 2,000-metre radius in the region.
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Otaku Rooms
Since the 1970s, the "otaku" subculture has emerged with people who like reading manga, watching animation and playing video and later computer games. The once-underground culture of gigs, who enjoyed their hobbies at home and could hardly communicate with people that didn't have similar hobbies, is now rapidly becoming mainstream. With the Akihabara area of Tokyo as its centre there are more and more places where otaku hang out, buy items for their collections, try new games, or enjoy the company of maids at maid-cafes. |
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Category: Spot News: for the best photo of news events taken in Asia
First Place:
Lino "Linus" Guardian Escandor
The body of two-year-old Ian Colagong is dug up in the mud after his house, near a river in San Jose, Philippines, was buried in a mudslide in September 2009.
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Second Place: Kittinun Rodsupan
Students in an astronomy program watch a solar eclipse through a filter made from plastic bottles at Chulalongkorn University in January 2009. |
Third Place: Dannyboy Pata
A policeman tries to draw his gun on students during a protest near Malacanang Palace in Manila in August 2009.
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Honorable Mention: Thiti Wannamontha
The fire at Santika in Bangkok on New Year's Eve 2008-09 left 59 dead and at least 243 injured. The blaze broke out while some 1,000 revellers were celebrating and bidding farewell to the pub, which was to be closed after the "Goodbye Santika" party.
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 Honorable Mention: John Javellana
Motorists drive by vehicles lined up along a road after flash floods caused by Tropical Storm Ketsana hit a village in Manila in September 2009. Nearly 60 people in the area werekilled.
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Category: Feature Photography: |
 | First Place: Graham Crouch
Severely undernourished and wasting, one-year-old Neeraj Adiwasi is weighed at a feeding centre in Shivpuri, Madhya Pradesh state, in India. Despite 15 years of economic growth, the incidence of child malnutrition has barely changed - 46 per cent of children under five in India are malnourished, which is twice the rate of sub-Saharan Africa. A report released recently said that a mixture of poor governance, the caste system's disempowerment of women and superstition are preventing children getting the nutrition they need, condemning another generation to brain damage, low earning potential and early death. Currently, about 3,000 children die every day in India as a result of malnutrition.
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Second Place: Sudipto Das
A 6-year-old Royal Bengal tiger is released into a mangrove swamp at Kalash Island in West Bengal, India after being trapped in a nearby village. The big cat is slipping towards extinction due to a shortage of prey in the forest and rising water |
Third Place: Ritesh Uttamchandani
Pravin Janak was born with a birth defect that led to the amputation of his left leg. His dream was to win the Mumbai Bodybuilding Championships for the handicapped. But he did not win. An alcoholic, he now scavenges on his father's income and has given up hopes of being an ace body builder.
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 Honorable Mention: Nicolas Asfouri
Contestants get dressed backstage during Miss Tiffany's Universe Contest 2009 in Pattaya, Thailand in May 2009. The Miss Tiffany contest is held to promote a positive image of transvestites and Thailand tourism.
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Honorable Mention: Sandipan Majumdar
Village boys play with geese in West Bengal, India |
Category: Migrants and Refugees
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First Place: Andrew Biraj
A woman sits between carriages as a train travels to Mymensing from Dhaka in Bangladesh. Millions of residents travel from the capital city to celebrate the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday, and many cannot afford the ticket price. |
 Second Place: Orit Drori
Finding a way to fill their stomachs at the end of the day is the principal occupation of millions of Burmese, especially the residents of Arakan State in the northwest, which includes many stateless Rohingya migrants.
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Third Place: James Mackay
More than 2,100 political prisoners are currently incarcerated in Burma's notorious jails. Many others have been set free but are haunted by their experiences there. "Even Though I'm Free I Am Not" is a global documentary photography project through which former Burmese political prisoners in Southeast Asia, Australia, Japan, Europe, USA, Canada and Burma itself are photographed to raise awareness of their colleagues still in jail. |
Category: Photo Essay |
First Place: Brent Lewin - Urban Elephants
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An elephant finds refuge from the sun in a room at the housing development | After years of unsustainable growth in Thailand in the 1990s, countless developers went bankrupt and were forced to abandon their projects. Ten years later, many of Thailand's poorest live among the abandoned foundations of skyscrapers and suburban homes-to-be, including in the Bangkok suburb of Bang Bua Thong. Surrounded by marshland and overgrown tropical vegetation, several hundred squatters occupy the concrete foundations of two-storey townhouses. Unknown even to many of its inhabitants, five families live with 10 domesticated elephants, side-by-side with their handlers, or mahouts. Many of the elephants use the abandoned structures as a jungle gym-they clamber in and out of the many rooms, and some even climb the stairs to the second floor. The families are rice farmers from a poor province in northern Thailand who supplement their income when the rice season ends by trucking the elephants into town daily, walking them in the street to find people willing to pay to feed the elephants.
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An elephant scratches its head on a wall at an abandoned housing development in Bang Bua Thong, Thailand. |
Mahout Wan poses with his elephant Cola
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A mahout holds an elephant's trunk. |
A close-up of an elephant's eye at the complex
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Second Place: Afriadi Hikmal: Sheltered Lives |
In a house in West Java, Indonesia, a group of people afflicted by cerebral palsy and other disabilities and who have known each other since childhood spend their days undergoing physical therapy and counselling. Most were sent to live here as toddlers. For many, their families have moved on, losing contact as life hands out its distractions.
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A child undergoes sitting therapy. The therapy only works at the age when a child's bones are still developing. |
Iwan is now the oldest dependent of the shelter. He has lived there since he was three, brought by his family, who then disappeared. |
Third Place: Susetta Bozzi: The Two Indias of Gurgaon |
Sureender, a construction worker in Gurgaon. |
 Sita, a schoolgirl lives in Chakharpur shantytown in Gurgaon.
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Kishor Baba, a priest at Hanuman Mandir in Gurgaon |
 Ajay Sharma, a human resources assistant at Infinity Towers in Gurgaon |
Honorable Mention: Richard Humphries: Southern Thailand |
Southern Thailand Ethnic tensions continue to claim lives in Southern Thailand. The conflict has claimed more than 3,000 lives since 2004, and yet a solution seems as far away as ever. The region is becoming increasingly militarized, with militia units armed and trained by the Thai Army, and reports of human rights abuses continue. |
 Muslim children attend evening prayers at an Islam school, or Pondoh, near Narathiwat. |
 A Buddhist Monk collects morning alms under armed military protection in the southern Thai town of Pattani. |
Honorable Mention: Gerhard Jörén - Living Among the Dead |
This cemetery in the heart of Pasay in Manila is the resting place for over 10,000 deceased people - and some living ones. About ten cemetery caretakers and their families live in the graveyard, in terribly poor conditions. But the residents feel safer among the graves than living on the outside in a neighborhood known for drugs and violence. |
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