 of Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Welcome and aloha everybody. My name is Mark Shklav and I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Today our program is titled In the Vineyard and you'll be seeing very soon some wines but my guest is Seth Buckley. Seth is an attorney with the Hawaii law firm of Chiang Iwamasa. Seth has traveled and studied across the sea in the Asia Pacific region and now he lives and works in Hawaii but he also has worked for law firms in Australia and China. He has a lot of interests. Some of them involves photojournalism, boon and wine and he has a blog titled Musings by the Glass which you can find if you just go online and type in www.musingsbytheglass.com. Today Seth and I will walk through his vineyard and discuss his relationships with law, photography, wine and life and how they are all related to each other. So good morning Seth. Good to see you. Good morning Mark. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. First I want to learn a little bit about you. Yeah of course. Okay you're a lawyer in Hawaii. I'm a lawyer. Okay what what type of law do you do? What is your practice? And then we're going to go into wine and food and photography. So my firm Chiang Iwamasa specializes in real estate development, real estate finance, some bond financing and general corporate matters. So where do I fall into that? I like to focus on business law, small businesses in particular, corporate law, corporate matters and finance and then some nonprofit organization. Okay all right and you like that you like those areas? Yeah. Okay I notice also that you traveled a little bit. You're not from Hawaii. You're from Boston right? I'm from Boston originally. Yeah born and raised and I was there essentially in the northeast through college through undergraduate. Then you got to Hawaii and things changed right? I mean you kind of got into the Asia-Pacific. Yes. Tell me a little bit about that. Sure sure. So in Boston I didn't have a lot of exposure to the Asia-Pacific or its culture and history. So coming out to Hawaii originally was for my MBA and then subsequently my law degree and it was all a very new experience for me. And when I came here really. Being in Hawaii and being in this type of culture it's very very different from Boston, New England area. So it was all a new and exciting experience for me and I really wanted to dive in. Get out there and experience as much as I possibly could. So when I came out here I just fell in love with the history, with the culture, but probably most importantly the food. I just absolutely love the food out here and in this region and that was the starting point for me. And it was your first taste? It was. Yeah, my first taste of the culture and cuisine. And so you liked the Asia-Pacific area, you liked the food, the culture and what did that lead you to do? And you were going to school? Yes. So I started my MBA program and then moved into a JD program and I knew pretty quickly that Hawaii was great, the culture and history here is really great. But I wanted to move beyond that and explore even more. So I used my education as kind of a platform to be able to travel abroad. Student budgets are not always very large so I just dug around and did my own research and found some grants and fellowships that were able to pay in a large part for my travels to Melbourne, Australia, to Hong Kong and then over to Shanghai. Okay, now I just want to ask you a little bit about the grants. Yeah. Were you a law student at the time? At the time for the grants and fellowships I was a law student. At the UH Law School? At UH Richardson School of Law and the UH system has grants and fellowships for graduate programs and I went to them and I asked, hey you know you say graduate programs but you're not specific does it apply to law as well? Because the law school is kind of separate from a lot of the other programs and they said well we've never been asked that question before but we'll look into it and you can write your application and specify why law relates to the fellowship programs that they have and so I did and I was accepted. So that's a good hint for young law students. Yeah. If they're if they have an interest in a grant or traveling or going somewhere else while there's still a law student perhaps there's an opportunity there. Yeah absolutely. I think you know coming out of undergraduate I had student loans and I restricted myself in a lot of ways at first through my MBA program I said I just don't have the money to do this it's really interesting and fascinating to me but I just can't I just can't and in law school I dropped that mentality and said why not you know and and that's when I really started researching grants and fellowships and finding that there's a lot out there for students and and if you just dig around do your due diligence you can come up with some programs that will essentially pay for your travels and get you out and expose to those things. Wow so you went to Australia. Yes. Hong Kong and China. Yes. Shanghai. What were those experiences like? Yeah well Melbourne Australia I was doing studies of course I was studying at La Trobe University they have an LLM program that's focused on business international business and finance as it relates to law of course and the University of Hawaii system their law program doesn't have a lot of international business and international finance classes they have some but they don't specialize in that. So going to La Trobe University in Melbourne was my way of being able to expand on my own personal interests that I couldn't necessarily get lost in here. Which were which were international business comparative business law finance international finance they had a lot of those programs that that I was able to utilize. Okay and Hong Kong what what was your experience? So Hong Kong was similar through a fellowship program with the university I was able to go to Hong Kong went and study there for a semester and that university the Chinese University of Hong Kong also has a program that specializes in comparative corporate law international finance world trade law some some of the programs that in classes that I couldn't get if I stayed local. Okay and then ultimately Shanghai yeah how'd you get there? So Shanghai again that's just you know when you do your due diligence and you get out there and you talk to people you come up with these relationships that you never know when they're gonna pay out context relationships you never know who's gonna call you when and what they're gonna have for you and while I was in Hong Kong well before I was in Hong Kong I was of course trying to talk to anyone who had Asia Pacific experience who might know fellowships and grants I could apply for or just had information that I thought would help me to get to those places and one of those contacts called me up and said hey I know you're in Hong Kong I don't know what you're doing in the summertime but a friend of mine has a law firm in Shanghai and they're looking for a summer associate and if you're interested go ahead and apply. So I did on their recommendation I interviewed and got that position in Shanghai. And you were still were you still in law school at that time? Yes it was it was during the summer so I didn't miss class. Great experience absolutely and and you enjoyed your times there and yes oh yes absolutely now as a Boston boy had you ever been in I had not you hadn't been to Australia or or Hong Kong or China this is all first time all first time all first time all my friends thought I was crazy and and and you just found these opportunities yeah that's great that's great and and the whole experience working for law firms in those areas was was good positive and you made good contacts yeah how'd that work out yeah oh I still have contacts there we still chat back and forth we refer business back and forth Melbourne is a fairly similar practice to what you might find in the United States in Shanghai and China it's a little different you have to be a little bit more practical the clients we were dealing with foreign clients that had business interests in China so either they had a greenfield investment physically located in China or they're dealing with manufacturers explain what greenfield means so greenfield investment is essentially when someone a foreign investor makes investments and they actually break ground in in another location so they're physically present there whereas you know with the manufacturing you basically have a relationship with a Chinese manufacturer that manufactures and ships your products so there's there's a difference for the client in how they need to approach those two and they really need advice and they really need advice and and I was surprised I dealt primarily with European clients some US clients and a lot of clients from Australia and I was really surprised to sophisticate or the spectrum of sophistication of these clients some were highly sophisticated and they knew what they were doing in China they had a lot of experience they were there for a long time and we didn't have to hold their hand as much with some of these new clients that just saw China broadly as you know a way to invest and make money I guess that was almost their simple mind mindset for moving into China and they really needed not just legal advice which of course was important but business advice practical advice how to deal with the government how to deal with you know a system that isn't always there's some corruption involved let's let's put it that way it's different it's different and how do you as a foreign company interact with that with that system so they needed a bit of practical advice on how to deal with people and yeah what would be normal in China and everybody knows about they had no idea they had no idea and a lot of times they were taking advantage of especially with for example intellectual property the system is different in China is here and so a lot of U.S. clients would go over to China thinking the system's the same it's not and these Chinese companies were able to basically grab intellectual property from these companies before they registered in China so that's why they that's why they need count that's why they need lawyers that's why they need lawyers who know who knows something about what's going on absolutely and in the United States we're very careful to narrow our scope to tell clients we don't give business advice we don't give you know governmental advice you know where lawyers we stick to the law in China that doesn't really work very well because these clients really need a broader spectrum of counsel advice and that's often what they'll get now just in general as to that part of your your life and you still have friends there and how did you find the people in Australia in China on the one-to-one type basis well while it's interesting a couple of different ways first when I was still preparing to travel to these locations so before I was there I was just emailing as many people as I could find online friends of mine that had friends that had a cousin that had a friend any contact I could possibly try to manufacture while I was here I knew would help me when once I was on the ground because I literally knew zero people in all of those locations so I didn't want to have myself in a position where I would step off the plane and really not have any person contact so I did a lot of research ahead of time and some people thought you know who is this guy emailing me but for the most part a lot of the early relationships I had were through those those emails and those phone calls and then when I was there I was able to get on the ground and really start to do my own networking on the ground and I'm an introvert by nature so that was a little difficult for me but it was something just I had to get out of my box and I had to push myself to do that okay well let's get out of your box right now and talk about your your blog you have a really interesting photo journalism wine blog musings by the glass yeah what's that about and I think it kind of ties into what you were just talking about in a way but tell us what how did you get started in the blogging and choosing those topics sure how'd you get into it sure so the blog started originally as a passion of photography when I was traveling I love to have my camera with me wherever I went and in particular a photojournalistic style I was always trying to capture a story I love how photography can evoke an emotional response from an image or a dialogue just based off of an image I love how photography can provide a social commentary whether that commentary is positive or negative I think both are important but that was my framework when I was in Asia was taking pictures and trying to capture a narrative wherever I was and for the blog it started as that but when I came back I realized I'm not going to be in those situations as much here I'm going to be settling into a position I'm not going to be traveling as much and I want to be able to do something locally so I took the concept of the photography and being able to have a narrative and in the blog context you can still have your photography that's important but you can also write and expand on that narrative which I found fascinating I really wanted to try that and and what you've done is you've talked about food and wine and we're going to take a break and when we come back I'm going to ask you to talk a little bit more about food and wine and also to show us some of your photos absolutely all right thank you thanks Aloha I'm Kili Iakina and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii together in Hawaii together we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together working together for a better economy government and society so I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network join us for Hawaii together I'm Kili Iakina Aloha. Hi I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at 1 o'clock I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Mana and at that program we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space going underwater talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and other things which have a direct relevance not only to Hawaii but also to our economy so please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon to Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Mana and see you then. Right we are back with Seth Buckley and we are walking through his vineyard and we are going to take a little look right now at some of his photos from his blog and hear a little bit about each one and he kind of Seth you kind of break it up into into kind of two areas I mean there there is kind of a food and wine area and then there's a social area right for your photos and then you then you have a separate section on wines which you brought a few for us to talk about but okay so let's first talk about first couple of photos and see if you can tell me a little bit about what they are what your feelings were where you came up so the first photo is looks like a wine the first photo is a sake that's being poured into a glass and it's a simple concept it's sake being poured but the point of this is to really capture a mood and with food photography and wine photography the whole point is to make the the viewer kind of call them to action you know you want them to to be salivating you want them to be thirsty you want them to be hungry you want them to want to go out and have that experience and that's what I'm trying to capture in this image and I liked how the light hits the bottle and the glass with the green in the background that's kind of bulk it out it kind of gives you a sense of of calm and serenity you want to be in this situation where you're just relaxed and enjoying the glass and there's no worries in the world kind of concept and with food photography I'm always looking to set them where was this taken this was taken at a friend's house he has a backyard that has a little koi pond with some greenery so I had to kind of set up the shot a little bit with the with the Japanese elements but the spot really sold itself which is why I chose it okay let's take a look at the next next slide yeah what's that so you know with food photography as I mentioned you you want the food to look delicious you want to have the person be thirsty and want to grab that beverage that you're pouring but there's also a story behind food and wine and a lot of my photography you know again being journalistic in nature I'm trying to capture the narrative of the food and wine itself so in this picture you have this master chef that was at an event I was shooting and you just see his careful preparation even in an event where he had to make hundreds of these I mean it was an event with several hundred people he was just trying to keep pace with the people pulling them off the table but he's being an artist here but he's being an artist you know and you can see his you can't see his eyes but you can see his face you can see that there's there's focus there you know and there's focus in his hands he's got tweezers that he's holding to kind of position the elements of the dish and I love the stories that you can find in food and if you looked at that table just at the event you might just see oh hey there's some food I'm going to eat it but you know look a little bit closer and you see you see the detail being put into it this goes beyond this goes to the preparation and this goes to the intent and this goes to the love of the person doing it yes actually yeah you can see you can feel that okay so this is this is a different type a different type of photo that you have here then then your your other photos tell us about those those are more of a social social aspect yeah so I think on a couple of levels I love photo journalism and street photography because you know there are stories on every corner everywhere you go there's a story in the alleyway in the street vendor that's selling his food in the the farmers markets where the farmers are selling vegetables there are stories all around us and most of the time we fail to even notice them and you know we're busy we're trying to get from one place to another and we don't really observe the world around us and are you going around with with your camera I mean is this it's in your hand so you're you're thinking yeah to look and see something and boom yeah so photography for me is a way to slow down and observe the world around me and engage the world around me and see something and see something different maybe that's yeah I kind of get that from what you're saying yeah and so a lot of my photography and the ones we'll see coming up I don't want to manipulate the environment I want to see what's in the environment capture it and tell that narrative okay let's take a look at your your next photo tell us a little bit what this what what is this yeah so this was in Taiwan I was traveling in Taiwan with my wife and we had the opportunity to go to Hualien which is on the eastern side it's a place that not many tours go and there are certain places that are restricted because there's a large indigenous population there and we had a friend who's a university professor in that area and she does a lot of research on the various indigenous groups in the area and so she invited us knowing that we were going to be in Taiwan to come over and do some field research with her which was really really exciting for me as a as a photo journalist and this was captured it's an older woman and she's teaching the the group that's there's a small group the the art of the tuku weave she's uh she's the tuku that's her her tribe and it's it's very elaborate and it was used at first for women to get husbands that's kind of how they started with their we of course they need it for clothing and other things but it was it was used primarily as a way for for women to show their worth to husbands that in cooking but she you know she's in her 90s and yet she's still so passionate about this weave she's still doing it every day it takes a tremendously long time to do to create garments and to create blankets but i just love the care that she has and the smile on her face she's really really enjoying it intensity yeah all right let's take a look at the next next photo so this I took in Cambodia my wife and I invest in an NGO or donate to an NGO that does some work in Cambodia and we're both very interested in social justice and equality and trying to use our financial resources in a way that that helps others and Cambodia is one of the projects that we are invested in and we don't want to just give money we want to actually go and be a part of it and observe it and do whatever we can while we're there to help the project so this was a project at a school in a very rural part of Cambodia and the program built this school along with some other community structures and provided teaching they provided clean water and they were teaching the kids the the primary thing that they wanted to teach kids was cleanliness washing your hands I mean things that we take kind of for granted these days and I just love the picture of this this girl she's you know she has this look going away from the camera she's intrigued by something she has this beautiful colorful dress that's kind of contrasted to the the colorful but but you know dirty circumstances behind her with the school but despite that circumstance she was just this vibrant beautiful little girl and you can almost feel her thinking yeah you can I mean you don't know what she's looking at or what she's thinking about but she's definitely very focused on it yeah okay I'm gonna skip to the wines and talk a little bit about them so that we can get them within our time frame here so you brought some wines I brought some wines please the wine blog yeah you're a wine blogger but and a photography blogger and and there's a lot that you have tell us a little bit about what you brought and what their significance are yeah you know it's it's always hard to recommend wines when people say well tell me a one I should buy because it matters a lot on that person's taste their palette matters what they're going to be doing with the wine how they're going to be enjoying it and what they're going to be eating with it there's a lot of factors but for this this show I thought you know hey we're talking about the Asia Pacific let's showcase some wines here because a lot of people when they think of wine they think of Europe they think of France Italy Spain Germany which have tremendous wine regions but a lot of people kind of look over the Asia Pacific region and I think that's a mistake in in Hawaii in the United States I think we're more prone to look to California which I definitely consider an Asia Pacific population so so we do have some familiarity with Napa but I think the region as a whole is very exciting so the first wine I brought closest to you is is actually a sake it's called Wandering Poet it's named after an old famous Chinese poet Li Po who he was famous for drinking sake and writing poems which I guess that's not a bad life if you get famous for that and he the legend has it that he died by drowning because he was in a small boat by himself drinking sake and howling at the moon so I guess the moral is no don't do that but but I just wanted to highlight sake because it's a beverage that a lot of people don't really understand the the labeling can be quite confusing to the western audience but it's a delightful delightful drink and there's a lot of sophistication and a lot of elegance in it and on my blog I have a couple of posts that help people to select select and discern the labels and kind of know what they're looking for but I think if you live in this region and you don't have sake you're not exposing yourself to that it's it's it's really too bad okay what are we what do we have here the second line is from Napa so it's a region that a lot of people know Napa Valley but I chose this to highlight one thing and in Napa Valley it's a valley but it's surrounded by two mountain ranges and as so when it started as a region most people were on the valley floor and since then people have discovered going up in elevation up these mountain ranges and when you go up in elevation you do a couple of things you get above the cloud cover so you have some beautiful morning sunshine you get pacific breezes that you don't get on the valley floor because they're blocked by them by the mountain ranges and you get a very complex terroir the the gravel rocks the soils are different from the valley floor so to me you get a really really beautifully structured opulent elegant wine when you go up into these mountains so what is this one called this particular is an O'Shaughnessy it's a Cabernet Sauvignon and it's from Howell Mountain which is my favorite mountain in the region okay what is this the third and the fourth both highlight value wines I want to give something for everyone so I'll jump back and say the the wandering poet the sake you can find for about thirty dollars at Fujioka's wine time the O'Shaughnessy Howell Mountain generally where this wine is from you're looking at the hundred dollar range so it's it's it's a little bit more expensive but you know if you have a really good event you want to impress um that's a good wine for it or if you really want to howl at the moon or if you really really want to howl at the moon yeah um the the last two are uh under 20 so these are more for the you know bargain wine for the weekday table kind of thing um and they come from australia and new zealand so the first is from new zealand it's a mountain beautiful Pinot Noir Pinot Noir is a grape that's well traveled um it's it's all over but it's a very very finicky grape it's hard to do well um and a lot of people try and a lot of people fail and it's also a wine that's not usually cheap in france burgundy is famous for Pinot Noir that's that's where it's from but those wines can go easily over a hundred dollars they can go up there some of the most expensive wines in the world so you know there's there's a price point there california sonoma valley or again they they do very well with Pinot Noir but they're again 50 to 70 dollars for a good bottle um these locations in new zealand this bottle is about 1999 at uh at tomoras so you can find a good value much cheaper and it's they're tremendous the new zealand is in australia are both really doing amazing things with wine right now they were known at first for being uh exporting kind of cheap wines and not very elegant sophisticated but they're changing um that perception really quickly so the the the Pinot Noir from uh new zealand is fantastic um Pinot Noir generally from zealand is really really good and then australia a lot of people think of australia was thrust it's kind of that that's where they got their start exporting and they exported they they were growing and creating wines specifically for export and specifically to the united states and that's where they got their reputation for kind of cheaper not very good wine but since then they've really put an emphasis on quality and um this wine from margaret river is one of my favorite regions it's on the far west side on by the ocean it's a very small region it kind of reminds me of like denver you know denver for craft beer and all of the exciting things they're doing for craft beer there that's what margaret river is for australian wine i think and this is a reisling which i chose also because uh the perception on reisling is often it's kind of a sweet wine um it's a sweet white wine and and you know some people don't really like it because they don't like sweet wines they want dry wine this is a very dry crisp wine lots of minerality great fruit and it just shows the spectrum that you can get with reason okay well those are that's good advice for us uh from a lawyer and uh it shows that there's more to law and life than just the practice uh and if they go on to your web i'm on to your blog they can find out about this if folks want to find out more about wine and see more of your photos yeah absolutely going on to your musings by the glass yeah yeah and i and i have um uh food pairing suggestions for local food because i think it's really important to pair wine with local food i think it's brilliant um so i have recommendations for that i have recommendations for wine um and then some of that photojournalism as well well well saith look thank you very much for showing us this aspect of of law across the sea i appreciate having you here thank you very much it's been a pleasure thanks