Japan in Australia

Culture, Context and Connection

David Chapman, Carol Hayes, David Chapman, Carol Hayes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429589874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Japan in Australia is a work of cultural history that focuses on context and connection between two nations. It examines how Japan has been imagined, represented and experienced in the Australian context through a variety of settings, historical periods and circumstances.

Beginning with the first recorded contacts between Australians and Japanese in the nineteenth century, the chapters focus on 'people-to people' narratives and the myriad multi-dimensional ways in which the two countries are interconnected: from sporting diplomacy to woodblock printing, from artistic metaphors to iconic pop imagery, from the tragedy of war to engagement in peace movements, from technology transfer to community arts. Tracing the trajectory of this 150-year relationship provides an example of how history can turn from fear, enmity and misunderstanding through war, foreign encroachment and the legacy of conflict, to close and intimate connections that result in cultural enrichment and diversification.

This book explores notions of Australia and 'Australianness' and Japan and 'Japaneseness', to better reflect on the cultural fusion that is contemporary Australia and build the narrative of the Japan–Australia relationship. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Asian, Japanese and Japanese-Pacific studies.

1 Japan in Australia, an introduction

David Chapman and Carol Hayes

Introduction

Contemporary Australia’s engagement with Japan continues a relationship of some 150 years that has deeply impacted Australia’s social, cultural, economic and political landscape. Australia’s proximity to Asia has meant it has developed close ties with neighbours in the region, and perhaps its relationship with Japan has become one of the most intimate. Such familiarity has been equally the result of nation-level interactions as it has been of everyday, personal and community contacts. However, this relationship has seen both extremes, and tracing its trajectory provides an example of how history can turn from fear, enmity and misunderstanding through war, foreign encroachment and the legacy of conflict to close and intimate connection that results in cultural enrichment and diversification.

This book incorporates a diverse range of disciplinary approaches to comprehend the countless ways in which Japan has been imagined, represented and experienced in the Australian context. At the same time, this approach furthers our understanding of the contribution from Japan in Australia’s course as a nation. As a part of this, the contributors to this book have interrogated definitive notions of Australia and ‘Australianness’, and Japan and ‘Japaneseness’, where tensions emerge alongside attempts to place Japan and Australia into definable and distinguishable categories that are often labelled for consumption, representation and reassurance.

The critical approach of this book identifies and underscores a blurring of lines and smearing of borders that emphasise an interconnectedness that is transnational, translingual and transcultural. Moreover, as this interfolding continues, the necessity to rethink what we believe to be Australian and, equally, what we consider to be Japanese becomes more apparent. Even today, the juxtaposition of Japan and Australia often evokes notions of a binary of Oriental and Occidental, Asian and non-Asian and East and West. In this book we ask how we can better understand how dichotomies of Self and Other are challenged and disrupted when we explore the ways in which Japan and Australia intersect and interrelate. In doing so, we confront and unsettle commonly held notions of Japan, Japanese culture and Japanese society through scholarly engagement within diverse settings. This book is the result of the 2016 Japan in Australia conference held at the University of Queensland and generously supported by The Japan Foundation.

Book structure

The book is structured in loose chronological order starting with early contacts between Japan and Australia. The 12 chapters reflect the diverse and dynamic context in which we find Japan’s presence in Australia through overarching themes such as early contact, war and rebuilding relationships, cultural fusion, identity and intercultural relations, contemporary culture and Japanese language education. The book is topped and tailed by two personal contributions, beginning with University of Queensland Emeritus Professor Alan Rix’s reflections on the importance of exploring Japan and Australia’s shared cultural relationship and concluding with an afterword from Professor Vera Mackie, a leader in the field of Japanese studies.

Drawing on his long and celebrated academic engagement with Japan in Australia, Rix reflects on a number of pivotal points in the bilateral relationship and argues the importance of recording both the ‘people-to-people’ contact and the myriad multidimensional ways our two countries are interconnected, from the wool trade to horse racing, from the tragedy of war to shared engagement in peace movements, from technology transfer to community arts. He celebrates this book for the new stories it adds to the narrative of Japan and Australia’s shared relationship. Concluding the manuscript, Vera Mackie provides an afterword for the book reflecting on how Japan is imprinted on the very streets of our Australian cities, from high fashion to Muji and Uniqlo-style mass production, from haute cuisine to sushi trains and supermarket sushi, all speaking to the deep interconnectedness between these two cultures.

In this introductory chapter we provide a sketch of Japan in Australia from the earliest contact in the late Tokugawa Period through to the present, touching on the themes of the chapters within the volume. In it we posit that not only will we benefit by understanding more about Japan through this research, we suggest that a greater understanding of Australia is also gained through this work. Japan is well positioned as an important voice both within Asia and globally. Australia, too, stands in an important geopolitical sphere, part of and yet separate to Asia, with strong past links to the United Kingdom and United States but also a country with deep ties to Japan, China and other neighbours in the region. At a time when tensions between different religious, ethnic and other identities have escalated, we offer an example of how greater interaction and involvement can create lasting connectedness. We begin at the first recorded contacts between Australians and Japanese in the nineteenth century.

Early contacts

Contacts between Australia and Japan are as old as the treaties that marked the end of Japan’s seclusion.

(Sissons 1972, 193)

It is impossible to discuss Japan and Australia without recognition and reference to the research of Australian historian David Sissons (1925–2006). Serving in the Australian Army, Sissons learned Japanese through the military from 1944–47 and then studied in Tokyo 1957–60 (Sissons 1998, 40; Stockwin 2016, 1). Much of Sissons’s meticulous research on the history between the two nations is stored away in ‘60 capacious boxes at the National Library of Australia Manuscripts Collection in Canberra’ (Stockwin 2016, 3). Thankfully, the public now has greater access to this material with the recent publication of two volumes entitled Bridging Australia and Japan. In Volume 1, Sissons (2016, 87) divides nineteenth-century Australian contacts with Japan into three periods: the sakoku¹ period (1633–1866), the second period (1867–1891) and the third period (1892–1902). In the sakoku period, he focuses on the last years of Japan’s seclusion from the West and the influx of foreign residents as well as Japanese travelling abroad. The second period, says Sissons, is characterised by ‘unfettered but infrequent and small-scale contact’ with important and increasing labour for the pearling industry sourced from Japan, and ‘the appearance of the Japanese prostitute’, or ‘karayuki-san’ throughout much of Australia. The third period was one of increased Japanese emigration to Australia sponsored by large companies that ended with the 1901 introduction of the Immigration Restriction Act excluding non-European migrants and forming the basis of the White Australia Policy (hakugōshugi).

Although the first of Sissons’s three periods includes the very beginning of the Tokugawa period through the opening up of Japan, not much happened between Japan and Australia before 1859. Therefore, the total length of time between the bookending of Japan’s opening up after sakoku and Australia’s clamping down on immigration of non-whites in 1901 constitutes just over 40 years. This was only a brief period of time, within which both countries interacted on many levels and in multiple ways.

Although the time prior to 1859 is like a black hole in Japan’s interaction with the West, there are some recorded instances of Australians and Japanese encountering one another. Sissons (2016, 41, 88–89) speculates that the first encounter was with the 1831 landing of the Sydney whaler the Lady Rowena in Hamanaka Bay on Hokkaido. The Australian crew, according to a Sydney Gazette article, destroyed a village and fired upon its people (The Sydney Gazette 1831, 2). On this point, Sissons (2016, 42) playfully declares that, ‘[i]f this was in fact the first encounter between our two peoples, then the relationship got off to a bad start’. However, it seems that encounters soon after this one on Hachijōjima and with other Japanese junks were amicable and friendly, with the captain of the Lady Rowena, Bourne Russell, making purchases of food and supplies on the same trip without incident (Sissons 2016, 89). In fact, the Lady Rowena safely returned to Sydney Harbour in July 1832, with 600 barrels of whale oil from Japan (Japan Club of Australia 1998, 25).

Sissons’s assertion of this being the first encounter between Australians and Japanese, however, may require revising. There is evidence that a landing on Japanese shores by an Australian vessel took place the year before the Lady Rowena in 1830. In 2017, an English teacher in Japan, Nick Russell, came across documents that provide strong evidence of the arrival of the Cypress on 16 January 1830 off the town of Mugi on Shikoku Island (Robertson 2017). The crew of the Cypresswere escaped convicts who had mutinied in 1829 while on their way from Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) to Macquarie Harbour (The Sydney Monitor 1829, 3). Although this event may take precedence, Sissons’s claim about early Japanese-Australian relations getting off to a bad start still holds. Initially, the encounter was one of mutual curiosity with some limited interaction, but suspicion took over and the convicts were lucky to escape with their lives, being hastened away under cannon fire from the Japanese.

Interestingly, Japanese accounts record an illustration of a gift offered by the convict crew to the Japanese villagers that looks much like a boomerang. Other details recorded by the Japanese are of one of the crew who produced ‘a big glass of what appeared to be an alcoholic beverage and indicated that we (the Japanese) should drink’ (Robertson 2017). ‘We declined by waving our hands, upon which they passed the glass around themselves, one by one tapping their heads as they drank to indicate the good feeling it brought them, and finished the lot’. Mima, a local commander, suspicious of the ship and its crew, stated, ‘The men on the ship do not look hungry at all and in fact they seem to be mocking us by diving off the stern and climbing back onto the ship again, it is very strange that everyone who goes out for a closer look returns feeling very sorry for them. I think they are pirates. We should crush them!’ (Robertson 2017). The Cypress eventually made its way to Macau and China, where she sunk due to the holes in her hull from Japanese cannon fire (The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser 1831, 2). The convicts were then recaptured. Two were executed and one, William Swallow, was sent back to Van Diemen’s Land, dying four years later.

There was another instance in 1850 in which an Australian vessel, the Eamont, intruded upon a closed Japan not far from where the Lady Rowena had landed 19 years earlier. The crew of the Eamont remained in custody for four months and were eventually transported to Nagasaki to be sent away aboard a Dutch ship to Batavia. One crewmember, James Higgins, died during a storm at sea and was buried amongst the Dutch graves in the grounds of Goshinji temple. According to Sissons (2016, 90), Higgins was the first Australian to be buried on Japanese soil. During the storm that killed Higgins, the crew saved the life of the Japanese officer who had accompanied them. This officer then gave orders that they be released from confinement, and they were then taken to Matsumai accompanied by 500 Japanese (Geelong Advertiser 1851, 2).

Although the brief landings of the Cypress, the Lady Rowena and the Eamont are recorded as the very first encounters between Australians and the Japanese, as Sissons’s quote above clearly outlines, sustained interaction only began with the end of sakoku. Twenty-nine years after the Cypress left Japan’s coastline, the country ended its more than two-century seclusion policy and opened selected ports and harbours to trade and foreign residents. The first from Australia² to encounter the newly opened Japan were Alexander Marks (1838–1919)³ and his brother Henry (?–1871), who took up residency in Yokohama and set up a business in 1859. Henry Marks, alongside another brother, Lawrence, died in a typhoon aboard the Schooner Julie in 1871. Alexander Marks left Japan and returned to Australia the following year in 1872. After returning to Melbourne, he became the first Honorary Consul for Japan for the Australian colonies from 1879 to 1896. Marks was appointed by the Japanese government because of increasing court cases concerning the exploitation of Japanese crew by unscrupulous British captains who had recruited the men in Treaty ports in Japan (Sissons 2016, 93). From 1896, Marks went on to become Honorary Consul for Japan in Victoria, a position he held until 1902.

Following Marks, John Reddie Black (1826–1880) was the next from Australia to engage with Japan. Originally a Scotsman, Black arrived in Japan from Australia in 1862, and he remained there for more than 11 years. Black was a singer and newspaper publisher, and also the father of Henry James Black (1858–1923). Australian-born Henry Black lived in Japan from the age of 3 and became famous as a kabuki actor and the first foreign-born rakugoka. He performed as Kairakutei Burakku (Pleasure Black) and was eventually adopted as a Japanese, changing his name to Ishii Black. He died of a stroke at the age of 64. Not long after Black Senior’s arrival in 1867, British-born politician John Henry Brooke (1826–1902) moved from Melbourne to Yokohama. Taking over from Black as proprietor and editor of the Japan Daily Herald, he wrote a series of articles for The Australasian newspaper in 1867 under the pseudonym ‘An Australian Colonist’ and remained in Japan until his death on 8 January 1902.⁴

The migration of Japanese to Australia was a little slower and did not begin until after the Sakoku Edict, which restricted travel outside of Japan, was lifted on 23 May 1866. Although some Japanese left Japan without permission or passports before 1866 (Yamamoto 2017, 8), sanctioned travel did not begin until late in 1866, or, in the case of the first Japanese to visit Australia, 1867. These first travellers were acrobats and jugglers, with the very first group of 12 members being part of ‘Lenton and Smith’s Great Novelty for the Colonies – The Great Dragon Troupe of Japanese – 12 Wonders from Yeddo’ (Sissons 2016, 50), who performed at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne. The first naturalised Japanese in Australia was also an acrobat. He was Ewar Dicinoski (likely Sakuragawa Rikinosuke), who performed with the Royal Tycoon Troupe, a group of 13 members that came to Australia in 1871. Dicinoski decided to stay on and, 11 years later, in 1882, naturalised as an Australian (Armstrong 1973, 3; Sissons 2016, 51). His grave can be found in the Toowong Cemetery in Brisbane (see Figure 1.1).

In the 1860s, alongside the arrival of these f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Prologue: celebrating Japan in Australia
• 1 Japan in Australia, an introduction
• 2 Youthful first impressions: Tsurumi Kazuko and Shunsuke in Australia, 1937
• 3 Forging an Australian artistic modernity: how Japanese woodblock prints informed Margaret Preston’s early paintings and prints
• 4 Japan-Australia friendship through bat and ball: the Yomiuri Giants’ baseball tour of Australia in 1954
• 5 Japan at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics
• 6 Japanese sleeping beauties abroad: Australian retellings of Kawabata Yasunari’s fairy-tale novella
• 7 The irrepressible magic of Monkey: how a Japanese television drama depicting an ancient Chinese tale became compulsory after-school viewing in Australia
• 8 Nikkei Australian identity and the work of Mayu Kanamori
• 9 Trans-Asian engagement with Japan in/and Australia
• 10 The Australian literary scene and Murakami Haruki: Nobel laureate heir apparent or marketing overhype?
• 11 Why introductory Japanese? An Australian case study
• 12 Mobility and Children Crossing Borders
• Coda
• On the streets of our town
• Index