BETWEEN
FOUR WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA;
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS: DIPLOMAT, ECONOMIST, JOURNALIST AND
JAPANOLOGIST;
BETWEEN
FOUR LANGUAGES: ENGLISH, CHINESE, RUSSIAN AND JAPANESE
Chapter
19
BACK TO
AUSTRALIA?
1.
Raising Two Bilingual Children
2. Reviving Australian Connections?
3. Getting Nowhere Fast
4. A Bill Hayden Connection?
5. The J.P.Keating Award Fiasco
6. More Spies?
7. Finale
By
the mid-eighties life had settled into a routine.
The lecture circuit ground on. And the committee circuit
too.
The lectures at least brought in income. But both were
getting to be equally boring.
Almost weekly I would be sitting through yet another of the
standard two hour committee sessions – on everything
from post office reform and deciding the new Tokyo symbol
mark to daylight saving, nuclear energy and pie-in-the-sky
plans for some new urban development. *
*(I was still
being seen as some kind of town planning expert, having
been appointed to each of the committees set up to advise
on how to develop the new Makuhari, Odaiba and Yokohama
bayside landfill sites.
(But my advice that the seafront on each site be reserved
for quality hotels and residential high-rise was invariably
ignored.
(I should have known. Many committees, official committees
especially, have their final report and recommendations
prepared in advance.
(We, the members, are only there for decoration.
(And as I predicted, all three sites have suffered stunted
growth as a result.
(Meanwhile Disneyland, a private operation, has profited
enormously by reserving seafront for a string of quality
hotels.
(Town planning is not one of the aptitudes with which our
Japanese friends have been greatly endowed.)
Some committees were bizarre – a committee to discuss
the merits snow, another to discuss the merits of roads,
another to discuss the merits of electric energy.
Whenever an outfit found it had surplus funds it did not
want to see taxed or taken away it would organize a
committee or conference to discuss the raison d’etre
for its existence.
Meanwhile my little patch of forest land in the Boso
Peninsula was becoming the raison d’etre for my Japan
existence. Weekends would see our little family gang of
four heading off to dig out more bamboo.
1. Raising Two Bilingual Children
Schooling for our two children was my main preoccupation.
We wanted them to grow up bilingual but with a reasonably
firm sense of Japanese identity – one reason why we
had arranged for them to have Yasuko’s surname
(Tanno) and nationality.
Apart from anything else I had no idea if and when I would
ever be able to go back to Australia to live – yet
another reason for them to have Japanese identity.
At home I spoke to them in English; Yasuko in Japanese. But
for them it was not English and Japanese. It was
‘Daddy talking’ and ‘Mummy
talking.’
And they would switch from one language to the other quite
naturally, depending on whom they were talking to, even
though they knew that Yasuko spoke English and I spoke
Japanese.
Their instinctive approach to second language acquisition
was grist for my own theories about how one should learn
languages.
-----
To expose them even more to both languages we also rotated
them between local Japanese schools and one or other of
Tokyo’s several international schools.
Watching them being dragged from education in one school
with its language, curriculum, and school friends to
another school with a completely different language etc.,
and then back again after yet another two-three
years…at times it felt like playing God, with your
child’s personality, mentality, identity, everything
in your hands.
Just one false move and a child’s future could be
destroyed.
But they survived. Children are more adaptable than we
adults realize. They kept on top of both languages, though
their Japanese was always bound to be stronger.
Fortunately Yasuko’s work took her to London for a
year (at Ajiken she was their key researcher on African
education systems and London University had some of the
best source materials).
During that year we were able to put the children into
English boarding schools. It gave them the solid foundation
in English that has stayed with them ever since.
They were eleven and eight at the time - seemingly close to
the crucial ages for consolidating language.
From then on we felt fairly safe concentrating their
secondary education in Japanese schools. From there they
were able to get into quality Japanese universities, though
not without a few bumps in the road.
We were also able to avoid the split identity and education
problems that seem to bother many other ‘
international’ families.
But probably none of this would have happened without that
one year in an English boarding school, for which I have to
be eternally grateful - something I never thought I would
feel for English boarding schools .
2.
Revived Australian Connections?
Meanwhile I was starting
to want to get re-involved with Australia.
Vague nostalgia combined with lack of variety in my Japan
activities were probably the main reasons.
Despite the rough experiences of the Vietnam and then the
Whitlam years, I was still not ready to cut the umbilical
cord.
And at that stage I still had few firm Japan commitments. I
was free to move.
Maybe I could do something more meaningful back in
Australia for a few years, and then for the sake of the
children, if nothing else, resume the Japan connection
later.
Journalistic
Urges
Writing had been one way to maintain some link with the
home country.
I was still doing some work for The National Times, and for
anyone else who asked, even The Australian from time to
time (but they never got round to paying me).
Meanjin, the intellectual magazine of the Left, then being
run by the much respected Clem Christensen, allowed me to
write two of my best think-pieces on Vietnam, where I could
make what for me was the very important East European
analogy.
Just as Bulgaria and Poland have been stronger than Moscow
in seeking the 1956 Hungarian intervention (because of
their proximity and domino fears), Australia was even
stronger than Washington in seeking the Vietnam
intervention, fearing both China and future communist gains
in the area to its immediate north.
It was probably the best thing I ever wrote putting Vietnam
into perspective.
But it drew little reaction.
Australians simply could not understand this kind of
Left-Right mirror-image analogy, as I had discovered
earlier with my Dissent piece pointing out the mirror-image
similarities between Australian rightwing hardliners and
Soviet leftwing hardliners.
Even more than elsewhere the tribal instincts said that in
any confrontation our side had to be right and the other
side wrong.
There was no place for the idea that both could be equally
evil.
----
Curiously I got my best run in Quadrant – the
magazine for the anti-communist Right in Australia. Its
then editor Robert Manne seemed happy to use my
anti-anticommunist material (much of it is on my website).
I even, for once, managed to get some reactions. Ideologues
like debate.
Manne also arranged for me to go down to Melbourne to give
a talk to his readership about Japan.
Standing before the audience in a downtown restaurant I
could almost feel the loathing that many of them - stalwart
Quadrant right-wingers and anti-communist émigrés from East
Europe - still felt for me over Vietnam.
But Manne persevered. He even devoted a special issue to my
‘tribal’ explanation for Japan’s economic
success – then a topic of some interest in Australia.
Manne was that rare specimen in Australia– a
genuinely liberal conservative willing to see both sides of
a debate.
He had been radically anti-Soviet during the Petrov spy
furor of the fifties, little realizing that everyone,
including Australia, and not just the Soviet Embassy in
Canberra, had spies.
His anger was focused especially on the few Australians who
had tried to deny the existence of Soviet Embassy spies.
He failed to realize how a generation of idealists who had
seen the fascist evil of the thirties, the cut and run
behavior of the capitalist democracies in confronting
fascism, and finally the extraordinary sacrifices and
anti-Nazi heroism of the Soviets when they came under
attack in the forties, might have concluded that Moscow for
all its faults was the one hope for the future.
Fortunately, by the time I met him his rightwing
anti-communist militancy seemed to have been dented by
Vietnam events.
(He was later to move well to the Left on the question
whether or not Australia should formally apologise to its
aborigine population for the forcible assimilation policies
earlier in the century – policies which I had seen as
inevitable given the mores at the time, when assimilation,
even if forced, was seen as bestowing a blessing to
backward unfortunates.)
Later I discovered that we had one topic of genuine common
interest, namely the way Australia's economy was being
mishandled.
This in turn was to get me to try to be involved much more
deeply involved in Australia’s economic debate than I
needed, as I explain in the next
chapter.
3. Frustrations
All this activity revived
my interest in not just writing into Australia but actually
getting involved policy-wise.
And while I could do little on the economic policy side (as
it turned out), could I get re-involved in foreign policy?
First step in this direction had been a friendly letter to
Bob Hawke soon after he became prime minister in 1983,
reminding him of our earlier links and suggesting I could
be of some use to his government back in Canberra.
I did not even get a reply. I think he still saw me as one
of those nasty Vietnam War radicals opposed to his
rightwing takeover of the ALP.
As well there was the run-in he had had with my father in
Oxford in the fifties. And the run-in that I had had with
the ALP over Whiltam in the seventies.
Hawke had no reason to like Whitlam. But memories die hard
on the tribalised leftwing of Australian politics.
A China Connection?
Another hope was that
maybe via Australia I could revive my Chinese interest.
In particular I wanted to follow up on something I still
feel genuinely proud about (even if the pro-China crowd in
Australia, led by Fitzgerald, had gone out of their way to
deny it), namely my role in opening up the relationship
with China by organizing the ping-pong diplomacy team in
1971, and in trying to break down Australian anti-China
phobias with my book in 1968.
One way to get back into the action, I thought, was to
answer an ad calling for someone to replace the departing
trade officer at the Australian Embassy in Beijing.
True, a trade officer is well down in any Embassy
hierarchy.
But for me at the time pragmatism was more important than
pride. Besides, my economics background gave me genuine
interest in, and qualifications for, working in trade
matters.
I had been into many of Japan’s top exporting or
importing companies and knew most of Japan’s top
businessmen.
One
of the many committees I had served on in Tokyo had been
one devoted to Japan-China trade.
The Non-Selection Process
Canberra had set up a
three-person committee to choose the new trade officer. But
one of the committee, unfortunately, was none other than
the Stephen Fitzgerald who had given me such trouble in the
past.
I was given the courtesy of a telephone interview from the
committee in Australia.
I was then given the courtesy of a telephoned answer - no.
The job went to a Fitzgerald colleague - a woman who as far
as I know was to make little impact on the China-Australia
scene.
Other
Routes to China?
On a trip back to
Australia I checked in at the China-Australia Foundation to
see whether it could help me get to China in some academic
capacity.
The Foundation had been set up in imitation with the
Japan-Australia Foundation, in the creation of which I had
played the role I mentioned earlier.
Its Canberra office was being run by a former Foreign
Affairs colleague, Geoff Price. But there too Fitzgerald
was also closely involved. Once again the answer was no.
And to think that but for my generous action that cold
winter morning in Canberra, 1965, Fitzgerald probably never
would have got his foot on the first rung of the China
ladder.
I was reminded again only too forcefully of the Machiavelli
quotation I mentioned earlier.
But even Machiavelli, I suspect, had not thought that
someone could use a major favor from another to do such
major disfavor to the other.
4. A Bill
Hayden Connection?
The setbacks did not end there.
An old friend, Geoff Miller, had been sent as ambassador to
Japan. We had known each other favorably for almost twenty
years.
Soon after I had resigned from Foreign Affairs back in 1965
he had arrived in Canberra from some posting.
He had gone out of his way to contact me, saying he wanted
to talk about Vietnam and my reasons for leaving.
At the time it was very unfashionable for anyone in that
department to want to have anything to do with a dangerous
anti-Vietnam War deserter like myself, let alone talk
serious politics. I was impressed.
Now, as ambassador in Japan, Geoff was happy to help me get
re-involved with foreign affairs.
His idea was to recommend me for the position as Foreign
Affairs department archivist/historian. It was a two year
assignment, and had just come open.
In that position I would have access to a wealth of policy
material. I would work also directly to the Minister, then
Bill Hayden.
Foreign Affairs Archivist?
It seemed a good idea.
I realized that Hayden, then Foreign Minister, had already
begun his move away from his principled anti-Vietnam war
positions of the sixties, when myself and Bruce Macfarlane
had been involved in helping him prepare anti-war questions
to Parliament.
An agonised letter I had sent him from Japan begging him to
do something about the horror of El Salvador went
unanswered (he was already making statements showing
sympathy for US policies in Latin America.
(In El Salvador the US-trained military with its US
advisers was using techniques that would have shocked even
the Nazis, but which the Japanese used sometimes against
the Chinese.
(This was to march into a village in suspected guerrilla
territory and literally wipe out the entire population
– man, woman and child; the elderly, the infants,
even the dogs and the cattle.
(Scorched earth, literally.)
(But then the killers got smart. They realized they did not
have to kill the very small children. They could sell them
to US adoption agencies, for good money.
(Many years later one of the guerrilla force women who had
survived was able to track down her child stolen for
adoption, now 15 years old and with an all-US family. She
wanted the child back.
(The US media made a fuss about the suffering for the
family being forced to relinquish the child they had
adopted and raised.
(No one noted the horror that had led to that adoption.
(And we in the West, the US especially, claim to have some
superior morality that allows us to tell other peoples how
to behave and govern themselves!)
….
Despite my doubts about Hayden, I did feel I was reasonably
qualified for the position Geoff Miller was recommending.
But once again the answer was no. The position, I was told
later, went to a lady called Robyn Lim.
I had visions of some young, pushy/progressive Chinese
Malaysian or Singapore lady researcher in Australia who had
caught Hayden’s fancy (together with his move to the
Right, he already had a reputation as something of a ladies
man.)
On that basis I could just accept the rejection.
Only later did I discover that the young Chinese lady was
in fact an elderly Australian woman with hardline foreign
policy views. Nor, judging from the photos that accompanied
some of her anti-China articles, would she have got the job
on the basis of feminine charm.
(We never got to know who Mr Lim was.)
What’s more, she was able to use the archivist slot
to get involved with an Australian military/intelligence
complex only too glad to get some backing for their
primitive anti-communist, anti-China prejudices.
My ideas about useful re-involvement in Australian foreign
affairs were disintegrating rapidly.
Australian
Flip-flops
The Hayden ability to
flip-flop from progressive leftwing positions over Vietnam
and other issues to extreme rightwing positions on almost
every issue was impressive, even by Australian standards.
But it did highlight yet another quality Australia has in
common with Japan (I look at many more in the next chapter)
- an inability to remain ideologically consistent, both at
the individual and the national level.
Or to put it another way, the ability to be swayed
emotionally, or even sometimes pragmatically, by the moods,
fashions, fads or pressures of the times.
In Japan it is called tenko – a 180 degree switch in
position. It was common in prewar years when official
pressure combined with the atmosphere of the times to make
many of Japan’s progressives and left-wingers want to
embrace rightwing causes.
In Hayden’s case I am not sure of the reasons.
Possible causes include East European events, distorted
versions of China’s still unstable policies, the
ability of rightwing magazines like Quadrant to set the
intellectual tone.
There were also quality leftwing magazines like Meanjin.
But they could not hope to compete with the well, and for a
while very suspiciously, funded rightwing magazines.
Whatever the reasons, Hayden’s drift to the Right,
including open contempt for his earlier leftwing colleagues
and supporters, was impressive even by prewar Japanese
standards.
….
Another tenko example was the Quadrant editor who followed
Manne, Paddy McGuiness.
He had been a way-left libertarian when I had known him in
Sydney during the sixties. But by the time he reached
Quadrant he was hard rightwing, unwilling even to provide
the latitude I had had under Manne.
Complementary copies of Quadrant I had been receiving in
Japan were stopped. Material I sent him remained
unpublished.
Elsewhere, as a Sydney Morning Herald columnist especially,
he was to show a cranky rightwing conservatism, on
everything from Iraq to economic policy and the rights of
tobacco addicts
Blacklisted?
Meanwhile my problems with
the Australian official presence in Tokyo were continuing.
Apart from only two brief periods when ex-Foreign Affairs
colleagues were ambassadors (Geoff Miller and Rawdon
Dalrymple), I was to remain essentially excluded from any
Embassy contact other than the annual Australia Day event.
The exclusion policy did not bother me too much (though as
mentioned earlier, my family were to be victims).
Apart from various irritations (hey Greg, how come we did
not see you at such and such an Embassy function), I could
reconcile it with my standard rationalization, already in
danger of serious overuse, namely that if some outfit does
like your existence then that proves it was a fairly
undesirable outfit to begin with and thank God you did not
get involved with its existence to begin with.
Which is fine enough as it is. But what happens when it
sneaks round and bites you on your existence?
4. The
J.P.Keating Scholarship Fiasco
After
eight years of political posturing, including wrecking any
chance of an intelligent policy on Aborigines, Bob Hawke
had moved on to other pastures.
He was replaced in 1991 by a media-creation - an alleged
Labor Party whiz-kid, John Paul Keating.
I knew little directly about Keating, other than a fatuous
letter he had once written to some journal of opinion,
criticizing my criticisms of the man who had done such
damage to any hope of a resources policy towards Japan,
namely former minerals and resources minister, Rex Connor.
Keating had naively seen Connor as a great Australian
nationalist fighting to protect the Australian national
interest from Japanese resource depredations, at a time
when everything should have been done to lock Japan into
Australian resource supply. (Japan’s steel industry
subsequently moved some of its supply sources to other
nations, like Brazil.)
As prime minister, Keating’s main claim to fame was
to flip-flop in the other direction.
Instead of Connor-style restrictions, he saw
liberalizations as the great answer to Australia’s
problems. Some of them did some good. Most of them ended up
doing much damage (including ‘the recession we had to
have’, and fouling up the banking system).
Even more than most others, Australians seem unable to
think mid-road – to understand there are times when
policy A might be needed and there are times when policy B
might be preferable, or some combination of the two.
Instead we have flip-flops. Policy A is the flavor of this
month. Its opposite, Policy B, becomes the rage a few
months later.
From the excessive Puritanism of the fifties Australia
flip-flopped to the open slather pornography of the
sixties.
From White Australia exclusivity, and keeping out people of
clear benefit to Australia, suddenly it became
Multicultural openness and allowing in people bound to
create problems.
Earlier, Keating had been known for saying that Asia was
the place you flew over en route to Europe and America.
But now that Asia had become the flavor of the month, he
condescended to take more interest, especially in Japan,
then Asia’s dominant nation.
He came several times to Tokyo, and with much pomp.
(I was never invited to any of the high-level Embassy
ceremonies to greet him, even though I probably knew more
of the Japanese at the receptions than any of the Embassy
people.
(But once again, if some outfit wants to ignore your
existence….)
The
J.P.Keating Scholarship Offer
To prove the importance
Keating attached to Japan, the Embassy announced proudly
that it was offering a generous J.P.Keating scholarship for
one, and only one, bright, up-and-coming Japanese academic
who would do PhD quality research at the ANU in Canberra,
and later go on to serve as the foundation for the
development of Japan-Australia economic studies in Japan in
the future.
I was impressed by the offer. Just possibly this would lead
to a breakout from the usual stable of second-rate Japanese
academic hacks who together with those non-Japanese
speaking Japan ‘experts’ at the ANU, had
dominated academic ties with Australia.
I was soon to discover just how wrong you can you be.
…….
The Embassy official in charge of the scholarship offer was
also in charge of the Australia-Japan Foundation office in
Tokyo.
I never saw much of him, even though one of his main jobs
was supposed to be promoting Japan-Australia academic
relationships, and as mentioned earlier I had been closely
involved in setting up the Foundation.
But at the time that did not matter much since I was even
busier than usual.
Almost every day saw me heading off to some lecture site,
often at the other end of Japan, or some committee meeting
in Tokyo.
Writing commitments were also heavy, and this was in
pre-computer days when you had to type and retype
everything laboriously on a typewriter.
If I had had an experienced and committed office secretary
I might just have been able to hold everything together.
But such were few.
Finding Secretaries in Japan
To find a secretary I had to rely on newspaper ads. They
produced dozens of responses requiring dozens of
interviews.
Sometimes I felt that the time I spent looking for
secretaries might even exceed the amount of time I saved by
using their services.
So losing and replacing a secretary and having to go out
and find another was a major disaster. To have such a
disaster imposed on one deliberately by an Embassy whose
job was supposed to be to help fellow Australians operate
successfully in Japan was an even greater disaster, as I
was about to discover.
Losing a
Secretary
At the time I had managed
to find a pleasant enough young lady willing to work for
me. She had just finished two years getting an MA in
Brisbane.
She helped get my office into some kind of order. But her
main concern, as she admitted frankly, was to find herself
a nice husband, preferably Australian.
Working for me might provide some contacts in that
direction, she hoped.
She was to achieve that ambition, but not in a way that
either of us would have predicted.
------
Suddenly I discovered that she had been awarded the
J.P.Keating scholarship.
I was astounded. Her only academic qualification was an
extremely shallow MA thesis on Japanese management from the
less than heavyweight Griffith University in Queensland.
I had read it hoping to glean some information on a topic
of my own concern and had found nothing of academic or
research value.
During the year or so she was working for me she showed
little interest in trying to develop or maintain any
academic contacts in Japan or anywhere else, or even to
follow up on her original research interest.
I assumed that she simply saw the J.P.Keating Scholarship
as a way she could get back to Australia, enjoy the good
life there and maybe even find that husband.
And that is what seems to have happened. For soon after her
arrival in Australia she disappeared from the radar screen.
Certainly she has never reappeared in Japan to carry the
banner for Japan-Australia academic studies.
Embassy
Plots?
Needless to say I wanted
to check out the background this atrocity.
Her sudden departure was bound to cause intense office
disruption.
But the main question was how a person like her could
possibly have been chosen for such an important
scholarship.
Was it deliberate, yet another Embassy attempt to make life
difficult for me in Japan? Or was I just suffering from
paranoia?
I confronted the Embassy man responsible.
Did he realize that references were needed for academic
appointment or scholarships? And since the lady had no
academic attachments in Japan how had he got any
references?
How had he managed to avoid contacting probably the only
person in Japan who could even comment on her academic
abilities, namely myself?
Worse, why had the entire exercise been carried out behind
by back, with every care taken to make sure I did not know
about it?
(She had been told by the Embassy to keep things secret
from me while the selection process was underway.)
Said Embassy official seemed quite unflustered by my
questions.
The Embassy had called widely for applicants, he said. She
was the only respondee. So she automatically qualified. No
references needed.
And how had the Embassy sought applicants?
It had advertised in the media and had sent letters to
universities calling for applicants.
Did he realize that universities in Japan usually ignored
advertisements and letters, that personal contacts were
needed and that it had long been his job as the person
running the Foundation office to have such contacts?
No response.
Calling
in the Ambassador
Clearly there was something either suspicious or totally
amateurish about the entire process.
I wrote to the then ambassador, Ashton Calvert, an
intelligent man with an ability very unusual for an
Australian ambassador in Japan – some knowledge of
Japanese, even if not very good Japanese.
I knew his reputation for hawkish attitudes during a
previous posting to Washington. But he also seemed to have
some integrity; he had been one of the two officials
involved in the 1976 reversal of the foolish
Menadue/Whitlam decision to reject a friendship treaty with
Japan.
We had had some interesting and frank talks about
Australian policies in general.
But now he was quite happy to abuse whatever integrity he
had had in my eyes, with a reply worthy of a hack
bureaucrat - that he was sure that all the correct
procedures were followed, that person chosen was an
excellent choice, and that he was certain she would
contribute greatly to future Japan Australia academic
relations etc.etc.
And at that the friendly contacts that we had had earlier
were terminated, abruptly.
Bad
Consequences
It was a disgusting affair, and not just for the reasons I
have already given.
The aim of the scholarship had been to promote
Japan-Australia academic relations. But it had been handled
in a way that had done great harm to the one Australian
closely involved with the Japanese academic scene, namely
myself.
If the lady could possibly have gone on in some capacity to
contribute to those relations, my loss could be accepted.
But clearly this was not going to happen.
Without wanting to seem too paranoiac I had to assume the
whole exercise had probably been deliberate, with the ANU
cooperating.
Angst also lay elsewhere - from the resurgence of my old
Vietnam War traumas.
A Vietnam
Connection?
I had long known that the Embassy had become a refuge for
several ex-Vietnam War intelligence types who, having
failed to extract enough finger-nails to gain the
information needed to win the Vietnam War, had had to be
recycled somehow or other.
Some of them ended up in the Australian Embassy, Tokyo.
Clearly none of them would be enamored with an anti-Vietnam
War veteran like myself. And one of them happened to be the
embassy person handling the J.P.Keating scholarship offer.
How was a background of intelligence activities in Vietnam
supposed to qualify one for academic/cultural work in
Japan?
Maybe it provided a convenient slot for continued spy
activity. Or maybe simply since there were no more
finger-nails to be extracted, the man had to do something
else in life.
Yet another of these people had ended up as a top Embassy
official allegedly handling trade matters. He traveled
widely amid rumors (which my Embassy contacts did not deny)
that he was controlling Australia’s spy network in
much of Asia.
I did know for a fact that he was active in making sure
Clark was excluded from Embassy activities.
The Embassy had long displayed a plaque praising the
services of another one of these ex-Vietnam types who had
ended his career working on the premises – Simpson
VC. His main achievement had also involved the killing of a
large number of Vietnamese.
But I guess I should not have been too surprised.
Australia’s conscience over Vietnam was about as
outstanding and noble as Japan’s conscience over
China.
In that sense they make a good pair.
Keating had praised Australian military bravery in a battle
where pinned-down Australian troops had done little more
than call in heavy artillery and gun-ships to wipe out
several hundred Vietnamese peasant soldiers.
This was the1966 so-called battle of Long Tan, which
Keating was lauding even as he was claiming Australia
needed to look more to Asia, and Vietnam.
6. More
Spies?
With heavy heart I set about the business of finding
another secretary – more advertisements, more days
wasted in fruitless interviews etc.
Then just as I was about to give up I had a call from
someone with seemingly excellent credentials – fluent
English, office experience, fast and accurate typing,
young, alert.
Even better, she had UK Embassy experience, and
recommendations.
But from the start she was strangely picky, checking my
work carefully and querying payments.
Soon after hiring her, on a day when I had to go to Kyushu
for a speech, I returned to find a letter of immediate
resignation waiting for me.
She had also arbitrarily taken money from my office
account, as wages allegedly due for the brief period she
had been with me.
The whole thing was puzzling.
Had she been set up by the UK Embassy to check out my
office and possibly cause me more problems?
And were the Australian Embassy people who had created my
earlier secretary problem involved?
The coincidences seemed too strong to be ignored.
Spy
Connections
I had long had problems with the Brits in Tokyo.
When working as a correspondent in the early seventies, a
UK Embassy press secretary had rung me to say the Embassy
was very impressed by my reporting.
Would I like also to make reports for them on the Japan
scene, with payment of course?
I knew this was a technique that both MI 6 and the KGB
liked to use. Inevitably the report writer would then be
drawn into a web of deeper intelligence activities.
I knew also that the Western spy agencies sized up every
non-communist journalist in Tokyo, Australians especially
because of their vulnerability (inability in the language,
lack of contacts), as potential recruits.
I could happily say no.
….
I was also bothered much by second-rate Australian
academics and various journalists claiming to be very
interested in my Tokyo work. They would contact me, asking
if they could interview me in depth for some article or
book they were writing.
But invariably there would be no article or book, not even
a follow-up to say thanks.
One of them – an Australian journalist struggling for
existence when I first arrived in Tokyo on my 1968 research
project - later had the honesty to admit that he had been
acting on behalf of his Embassy contacts.
His pretext then to come and check out my office was a
claimed interest to learn more about Japanese investment
overseas – a topic about which he had never written
before and has never written since.
At the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan two journalists
with close UK Embassy connections seemed keen to peddle
rumors about my earlier Moscow existence, rumors that might
come from the Australians or else from my British Embassy
contacts in Moscow in the sixties.
They claimed they knew how the KGB had tried to blackmail
me with a video of my indiscretions.
Uh huh? Quite apart from the fact that my problems with the
KGB never involved blackmail, there was also the fact that
in the early 1960’s the video machine did not even
exist!
Journalist groups cry freedom of the Press whenever some
foreign government imprisons one of their colleagues.
That is all very fine. But I suggest they should first make
sure their ranks have not been infiltrated by people whom
some foreign governments might have good reason to want to
imprison.
And they can begin with quite a few of the British,
American and Australian journalists roaming the globe.
7. Finale
Taken together, and with some setbacks in trying to get
involved with Australian economic policy (which I relate
later), I was beginning to realize that my efforts to get
reinvolved with Australia were not going to get me very
far. But the coup de grace had yet to come.
False
Pride
It began with my former
employer, The Australian, sending one Richard McGregor to
Japan as its Tokyo correspondent.
McGregor was unusual in that he had learned some Chinese in
Taiwan (how that happened I am not sure) and was trying to
learn Japanese.
He wanted to be friendly and I was very happy to
reciprocate. Here finally, I thought, was someone on my own
wavelength.
Not only would he be able to follow up on my own efforts to
introduce Japan to the newspaper’s readers.
With his Chinese interest he would also understand some of
the problems I had had back in Australia.
We would meet occasionally and I would try to push him in
the direction of good Japan stories.
I also made no secret of my upset over Canberra’s
China policies and earlier Vietnam War activities.
(He made as if to agree with me, but I was wrong. He turned
out later to be yet another typically immature Australian
hawk and ended up with the UK Financial Times.)
-------
One day he came to me saying he wanted to write up my
lecture circuit activities. He saw me as the successor to
an 19th century Australian who had been popular in Japan
for his rakugo (joke talking) performances.
I was not too impressed by the rakugo connection but said
yes.
Deep down I was keen to have someone reporting back to
Australia about what I was doing in Japan.
I could help me greatly in my efforts to reconnect, I
thought, foolishly.
A Trip To
Osaka
So that he could see I was into something more serious than
rakugo I invited him to come to Osaka with me and watch a
speech I was due to give there to some company’s
employees.
En route, there and back, I could also give him some
background on how I found myself in the lecture circuit
business, thinking this would help his story.
I also found time to expand confidentially on some of the
things we had discussed briefly at earlier in Tokyo
meetings – about my problems with the Whitlam regime,
with the post-pingpong China lobby, the ANU etc.
He was, after all, a colleague (I too was still doing some
writing for The Australian). I saw it as a chance to fill
him in on some of my background.
It never occurred to me that he would abuse these
confidences. Apart from anything else, he was not taking
notes or recordings.
…
Some month’s later I got the result.
Splashed as the lead item in The Australian’s weekend
magazine was a piece that said very little about my lecture
circuit life. But it did say a great deal about the
confidential details I had given him about other things,
both during the Osaka trip and before.
If he had quoted me accurately and in context I could have
lived with the result. But that was not to be.
He had distorted whatever he could to make it look as if I
was a bitter and twisted refugee from Australia, demonized
by Vietnam.
I had, he said, been run out of Foreign Affairs in 1965 for
opposing Vietnam policy.
(In fact, as mentioned earlier, I had in 1965 at an
extremely early age been asked to become Australian
representative on the UN Disarmament Commission in New
York, and had turned this down in order to resign, partly
over Vietnam, with Foreign Affairs hoping I would return.)
I was, he said, employed as a teacher of Japanese at Sophia
University.
(In fact, as mentioned earlier, I was a professor of
economics and comparative culture who also ran a very
successful course in Japanese economic readings. I had told
him how pleased I was with the way the course had
encouraged students to self-learn. He had twisted this to
make it look as if I was employed by the university solely
to teach Japanese.)
And so on.
Worse was the way he had made some of my very personal
remarks about various people and events look as if I had
given them to him in a formal interview.
It was journalism at its Murdoch, irresponsible,
gutter-press worst.
In my friendly confidential talk with him I had for example
referred to someone as a ‘little shit.’
He had then quoted me as if I was saying this in a formal
interview.
(Fortunately it backfired since anyone of journalism
commonsense could realize that he was abusing a confidence,
that no one would use this kind of language in a formal
interview.
(Colleagues told me they were distressed both by the
bitchiness of the article, and the fact that it was even
published.
( Unfortunately this Murdoch ‘little shit’ was
to come close in his objective, however, which was to
destroy me as a possible rival for space in the Australian
media.
(Subsequent requests to write were few.)
-----
A friendly Sydney lawyer (yes, they do exist) was also
distressed by the article. He offered to take action on my
behalf.
But he advised against seeking damages. He knew how the
Murdoch people operated in the law courts.
He suggested a formal protest from myself, with the errors
of fact retracted, and it worked.
Even The Australian editors could realize some atrocity was
involved.
But as always with these things, the damage had been done.
----
Later I discovered that it was my nice friends in the
Australian Embassy and some of their hangers-on who had
been feeding and encouraging McGregor, particularly with
the idea that I have been run out of government employment
and had had no choice but to try to eke out an existence as
a miserable teacher of Japanese in Tokyo.
The Empire had struck back, and with a vengeance.
It was typical of something I look at in detail in the next
chapter – the Australian ‘tribal’ need to
denigrate fellow Australians who have been able to survive
by their own efforts in Japan.
Starting from their own inability to relate to Japan, they
feel tribally impelled to conclude that there is something
either sick or sad with any Australian who can relate
– who has chosen to live in Japan, raise a family and
make a career there.
I leave it to the reader to decide where the sickness lies.
*(Makuhari wasted the seafront for a stadium and forest
parks – the latter now being a hangout for late-night
winos and hobos. Odaiba left it for warehouses and even a
metal factory. Yokohama was only a bit more enterprising.
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