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 5

INTO JAPAN – 1967-8

1. The Hitotsubashi connection

2. The APEC creation

3. Organising a life in Japan

4. The China Book emerges

5. Out of Japan


The standard Australian National University scholarship for PhD researchers was for three years.

Mine had been extended to four to allow me a year in Japan to gather materials and get on top of the language. As well I had been given an extra six months to write my China book.

By early 1967 I was already well into the second year of the scholarship, having spent the best part of a year trying to finish the book. It was time to get to Japan.

First impressions are always the firmest. As someone once put it, the planes coming to Tokyo's Haneda airport in those days seemed to make an audible sigh as they sank into the smog covering the city.

On my first night in Tokyo I set out to test my Japanese at a nearby noodle shop, only to be told that the shop was ‘yatte inai’, or not doing any business that evening.

I was baffled. My Canberra efforts to learn Japanese had not progressed to the level of knowing the colloquial word for ‘to do’ - yaru. Clearly I still had some way to go.

The Hitotsubashi connection

Heinz Arndt, my ANU supervisor, had organised for me to be attached to a Professor Kiyoshi Kojima at the well-known Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.

Kojima was an international economist who spoke good English. As well, my father had had some connection with Hitotsubashi in the past. I felt I would be in good hands.

And to some extent I was. Kojima introduced me to a young official in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry who out of the blue handed me a semi-confidential list (in Japanese of course) giving summary details of all Japanese direct investments abroad.

Fleshed out, it would provide the basis for my PhD thesis. Almost overnight a major Tokyo research objective had been achieved.

But I was still far from realizing my other objective, which was to get to know Japan and its language.

Like all senior Japanese professors, Kojima ran what was called a zemi (seminar) – a collection of deshi (acolyte students) who lived and breathed under his supervision. I was assigned to their care.

They were typical university research students. That is to say, they were not a very exciting lot.

One of them, Yamzawa Ippei, I was to run into several times later in my Japan career.

His one topic of conversation seemed to be the principles of free trade ad free markets he had begun to learn in the Kojima zemi. He ended up as the fairly colorless head of the Institute for Developing Economies (where the same free trade message was repeated endlessly, and dangerously) and the International University in Niigata.

Worse, their main objective was to have me help them practice their faltering English. Since my aim was to improve and practice my faltering Japanese, it was clear we were not going to get very far with each other.

My other problem was accommodation. Hitotsubashi were no use there.

Fortunately Heinz had also arranged for me a research introduction to the Institute for Research into the Asian Economies (the Ajia Keizai Kenkyusho, or Ajiken - now known in English as the Institute for Developing Economies).

Ajiken arranged for me a two month stay at a cheap hostel for foreigners brought to Japan under ODA projects.

It was to be one of Tokyo’s hottest summers on record and the rooms were unbearable.

Eventually I found for myself a room in the house of a faded middle class family in the Kakinoki-zaka area to the south-west of Tokyo, next to Toritsu Daigaku (Tokyo City University).

At around 400 yen to the heavily over-valued Australian dollar, I could just afford the rent and I would remain there fairly happily for the rest of my stay.

But it was a very long way from Hitotsubashi, on the other side of town.

Meanwhile I was beginning to realise I was not going to get very far not only with Kojima’s deshi, but also with Kojima himself. Soon after my arrival I went to an evening dinner party with him and Peter Drysdale, the PhD scholar from the ANU who had preceded me to Hitotsubashi.

The pair of them teamed up to lecture me strongly on the folly of my anti-Vietnam War views.

At the time Kojima was busy dreaming up the concept of a Pacific Free Trade area (PAFTA), to serve as the basis of Japan overseas markets and resource supplies).

He saw me as continuing to play the role played by Drysdale before me, namely help his post-graduate seminar students improve their English and help correct the English of the many draft articles he was sending to foreign journals to publicise his PAFTA ideas.

Once again, I could see my determination to learn Japanese rather than help people with their English would be a problem.

Taken together I decided I really did not need the Hitotsubashi connection Arndt had kindly arranged for me.

Instead I would do my research in the well-staffed and much better stocked library of the Ajiken, which was also much more conveniently located in central Tokyo.

2. The Ajiken Connection

The move to Ajiken was fateful, for several reasons.

As a MITI subsidiary, Ajiken had the budgets and contacts needed for serious work on the Asian, and quite a few other economies.

I would not have to waste any more time with Kojima and his deshi debating the theoretical merits of free trade (which in a world of volatile exchange rate movements and increasing returns to scale are much more complex than the theorists seem to realise).

But by moving to Ajiken I had broken the Kojima-ANU connection which Peter Drysdale had been sent to establish before me at Hitotsubashi.

That would have disappointed Heinz Arndt and maybe the ANU itself.

Later Drysdale would be put in charge of ANU efforts to develop a Japan-Australia economic research center, with Kojima and Hitotsubashi as its spearhead into Japan.

Between them they would seek to dominate very large areas of the Japan-Australia academic relationship, with rivals, potential and otherwise, excluded.

(In a long career, I have run into various kinds of bitchiness, but none compare with that shown by academics. Basically it is a question of lack of maturity and knowledge of he outside world, which is another reason they get caught up so easily on crackpot theories.)

Meanwhile Kojima continued to press on with his unrealistic PAFTA project, and its subsequent mutations into what today is known as APEC.

APEC was a classic example of how the ideas of unworldly but politically minded academics, fed into maws of mindless bureaucracies, can develop a momentum of their own.

But first, some background:

3. At the APEC Creation

In the 1960’s the Japanese rightwing had a problem.

The leftwing was arguing strongly that Japan’s postwar economy badly needed access to the markets and raw materials of China, North Korea and the Soviet Union if it was to survive (in prewar years it had depended heavily on China and the Korean peninsula for both).

This meant that Japan could not afford to go along with the US-inspired, Cold War strategies that said it had to see these nations as enemies.

Kojima’s 1967 PAFTA concept was in effect an attempt to answer this leftwing argument.

The concept said that Japan’s economy did not have to rely on these communist nations to the west. It could and should rely on the much more reliable raw materials suppliers and markets to the east, in the Pacific – specifically the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The key to all this would be a Pacific Free Trade Area.

But even at the time it was obvious to me even as a fledgling economist that PAFTA had flaws, and not just because of its unpleasant Cold War bias.

A free trade area including nations like Canada, Australia and New Zealand would automatically see demands for the dismantling of Japan’s agricultural protectionism. If Japan's farming lobby would be opposed.

Kojima’s answer seemed to be that the US and others would overlook the problem. They would realise the Cold War merits of encouraging Japan to look to the Pacific rather than to Asia. They would be willing to give Japan a free ride.

Another flaw was the fact that multilateral free trade schemes between nations with different economic levels and needs inevitably cause problems. It is one reason why the WTO is in such a mess, and why the EU found it so hard for so long to get off the economic ground.

If freer trade is seen as desirable, then the bilateral FTA’s which we see today make much more sense.

A further flaw was that the US, even then, had global ambitions. It was not going to tie its economy to one small area of the globe, just for the sake of Japan.

Already it was trying to link up in some way with the emerging EU.

Years later while insisting on the right to dominate APEC, it was working to create NAFTA and other Latin American trade blocs clearly aimed to protect Latin American markets from Asian trade inroads.

Finally, there was the fact that PAFTA, in turning its back on communist Asia, also had to exclude non-communist Asia.

True, at the time non-communist Asia did not amount to very much. But could Japan really afford to ignore the nations on its doorstep? .

PAFTA becomes PAFTAD

For these and other reasons, PAFTA died an early and well-deserved death. But Kojima was not about to give up.

He repackaged the idea as some kind of Pacific Vision for the new Japan and sold it to enough politicians and bureaucrats to keep it alive.

For many Japanese, including even some progressives, the idea of a postwar Japan making a fresh start looking out towards the advanced Westernized nations of the Pacific rather than having to look backwards to the dark impoverished Asia which had caused Japan such trouble in the past, was attractive.

It was a postwar version of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Meiji era concept of datsuA, nyuO (leave Asia, enter Europe).

Kojima moved quickly to have PAFTA replaced by PAFTAD – a talkfest operation where academics could discuss endlessly something called Pacific Trade and Development, even if their governments were reluctant to talk about pie-in-the-sky PAFTA free trade area plans..

PAFTAD was soon supplemented by PBCC (an equivalent talkfest operation for businessmen) and the quasi-official PECC (Pacific Economic Cooperation Council) where both the academics and the businessmen could come together for more discussions, this time with bureaucratic and political endorsement.

Meanwhile Japan’s Gaimusho was toying with various schemes that would see the non-communist Asian nations brought together in some vague way – ASPAC, MEDSEA.

In the event, they all foundered on vagueness and Asian suspicion of Japanese leadership intentions.

At this point official Japan, with the indefatigable Kojima still at the helm, began to push for something that would allow the wreckage of ASPAC and MEDSEA, together with the floundering PAFTAD, PBCC and PECC , all to be amalgamated into some entity enjoying full government backing.

It was to be called APEC. And that would be in 1989.

The Birth of APEC

Kojima’s fingerprints were heavy on the original APEC design.

For example, to retain his original Pacific Basin concept, APEC has had to include a bunch of Latin Americans – Mexico, Chile, Peru.

Their relevance to Asian trade and development was, and remains, minimal. Indeed, Asian manufacturing interests were, and remain, antagonistic to Latin American interests.

(In Peru recently I came across an excellent brand of Made In Peru shirts - Baronet. There was only one problem. The company was being pushed out of business by shirt imports from China. Peru's poverty and unemployment situation would take another hit.)

(If that useless APEC could have turned its large bureaucratic self to look at this kind of problem it would have had some use. But it was too busy espousing free trade, which in the case of China with its heavily undervalued currency is meaningless.)

Even so and even now, the Latins have to be dragged all the way across the Pacific for meetings.

And APEC has occasionally to drag itself all the way in reverse, simply to maintain the original Kojima dream of a pan-Pacific economic unit.

Meanwhile, the Asian communist nations close to Japan had to be kept on the sidelines for as long as possible, even as the distant Latins had to be included.

And with Taiwan favored over China at the start, the anti-communist agenda also managed to survive for a while, even if today the organisation has finally had to bow to realities.

Yet even today politics intrude freely into this ostensibly economic organization.

Australia to the Rescue

There remained the problem of APEC sponsorship.

Tokyo was anxious not to repeat its ASPAC experience where Asian suspicions of Japan had caused so much trouble. It did not want to appear to be too pushy with the alternative APEC scheme.

So it turned to Australia to take the lead.

Then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, never reluctant to seek global headlines, was easily persuaded to be the front-runner.

And it goes without saying that the ANU people were more than happy to see Kojima’s baby finally come of age, at Australia’s alleged initiative.

Meanwhile, the Canberra bureaucrats were delighted to discover a paper link with the Asian economies — without themselves having to go out and do the hard work needed to build real economic bridges into Asia.

(This curious Australian reluctance physically to get involved with Asia, despite the constant talk about Australia being a part of Asia, is curious.)

(For example, the Europeans send hundreds of young people to Japan each year to be trained so they can work at the grassroots of the Europe-Japan relationship. Ireland alone sends several dozen.)

(Australia sends none.)

(The Scandanavians work hard to help mediate Asian conflicts, from Sri Lanka to Aceh. Australia does nothing.)

Today it seems hard to believe, but at the time Australia's businessmen, academics and journalists lined up to speak profusely about the golden opportunities for the Australian economy that would flow from APEC.

(In fact they were to get those opportunities...but from the China that Australia was still going out of is way to antagonise, and that APEC had originally been intended to exclude.)

(A Canberra-sponsored outfit called the Commission for the Future asked me to write something about these golden opportunities.)

(When I came back with a cautionary critique, my copy was turned down as being far too negative.)

(They later published a watered-down version. But they ‘forgot’ to pay me what they had promised – a prescient warning of morality in the Future that they were supposed to be predicting and creating for Australia.)

As it turned out my negativity was justified.

APEC has limped along for a decade and a half now, doing little more than provide jobs for an army of academics and bureaucrats.

At its annual summit meetings it also manages to force the political leaders of the various nations to assemble and waste time repeating the same free trade platitudes, and to wear funny clothes, with occasional US leaders having the sense to skip the meetings, or leave early.

(If the fact that the Okinawa summit organised by Japan pulled US President Clinton away from the Israeli-Palestinian talks at Camp David for one crucial day, and so caused them to fail, as Clinton himself has claimed, then APEC has a lot to answer for.)

True, APEC has collected many member nations, including even Russia. But this simply reflects the way governments will always jump at the chance to join any international grouping. They are always afraid of being left out of something, even if no benefit is obvious.

This has been especially true of the Russians.

Hopefully the rise of China and the growing clout of ASEAN will eventually put this hybrid outfit out of its misery.

But in the meantime, it will continue to provide Australian academics, the ANU ones especially, with endless opportunities for conferences, research projects and many other expensively useless activities.

But once again I get ahead of my story.

3: Organising a Life in Japan


Thanks to Ajiken, I was able finally to do some serious research at my own time and pace. And I had been able to find a place in the suburbs to stay.

The Toritsu-dai area in those days was a typical 'village-suburb.' It was ideal for me as a starting place to try to integrate into Japanese life.

Tokyo is not really a city. It is a collection of ‘villages,’ each centered on one or other of the stations strung out like beads along one or other of the many railway and subway lines radiating from the central district.

(Only on the outskirts do we run into those soulless New Towns with their rows of identical houses or danchi condominiums.)

Each village has its own separate existence and identity, complete with a full range of shops and other services, almost as if the next ‘village’ down the line did not exist.

Within its tight surrounds, residents can find a warmth and community, somewhat like what they would have had if they had stayed in their original farming villages.

I too was to enjoy the same warmth and community, in the infinity of tiny bars, eating places and shops surrounding the Toritsu-dai station not too far the place where I was renting a room.

One little bar in particular was to change quite a few of my ideas about Japan.

I would walk past it each evening on my way home from Ajiken. From inside I could hear the very particular rhythm of relaxed and slightly inebriated Japanese male conversation, and could smell the sweet fumes of grilled chicken yakitori.

One night I decided nervously to open the door, even if only to see what went on inside. Immediately I was called inside: 'gaijin-san, haire nasai.'.

Someone moved up to give me a stool alongside the others facing a counter with the mama-san on the other side. Someone else offered to help me order. And one in particular - a salary-man he called himself - went out of his way to make me feel welcome and chat with me in the basic Japanese I could understand.

In just a few minutes I was made to feel part of this tiny community of locals - builders, writers, eachers etc - who lived nearby and who regularly relied on the mama-san to feed and look after them.

From then on I too became a regular client, with the salary-man giving me special attention (later I found he was the boyfriend of the mama-san). Early spring, 1968, they got me to join their hanami - cherry blossom viewing - with the mama-san on the banks of the nearby Tama river.

Soon after when they knew I had to leave to go back to Australia they orgainised a little farewell party for me.

And these were the same Japanese who in many foreigner imaginations are supposed to be resolutely anti-foreign...

As I discovered many times later, in Japan you are either inside the group or outside. If you are outside, there is little you can do to ingratiate yourself inside, whether you are Japanese or foreign, though sometimes the foreigner has the slight advantage of novelty value.

But if for some reason you have been placed inside the group you are given full credentials as a member, even if you do have a big nose and blue eyes. And often getting inside the group involves little more than opening the door of a bar and walking in.

That said, making friends with educated Japanese was not easy in those early days. The psychological and other gaps between Western and Japanese society were still wide; among the women at least, foreigners still carried some of the stigma of the Occupation days.

Fortunately, a British Embassy contact introduced me to a professor of English at some university. He was said to be an expert on Shakespeare but could hardly speak the language – a typical victim of the Japanese education system.

But the professor then introduced me to his deshi and they tried to look after me. That gave me my first real break-though into normal Japanese society. I will always be grateful.

I was not so fortunate with the Australian Embassy. It had me firmly black-listed as a dangerous anti-Vietnam protestor. Fortunately my one contact at the Embassy - a junior third secretary, Richard Broinowski, and his wife Alison - took me under their wings to some extent and invited me to the occasional party.

That gave me some more introductions into the Japanese world.

But if we are talking about break-throughs, by far the most important was from within Ajiken itself.

Her name was Yasuko Tanno. She came from Sendai to the north of Japan, and had studied English literature at Tohoku University. She worked in the Ajiken library where I was trying to pore through difficult Japanese economic texts.

We would often lunch together in the Ajiken cafeteria. Soon we were into swimming expeditions to the nearby public pool after work, evening meals at nearby yakitori shops and then on into the dark Tokyo night.

(Some years later we were to have two sons, Dan and Ron.)

With her I was to have many happy memories.

One was taking the train from Tokyo to the Boso Peninsula with her on a bitterly cold February evening, checking in at an inn at the tip of the peninsula a few hours away to the south, and waking the next morning to a scene of greenery and flowers.

Spring had arrived already, only 100 kilometers to the south of Tokyo.

We also began to discover some of the great hiking country in the hills to the west of Tokyo.

A mere one hour by train brought one to a world very different from grey, polluted Tokyo – a world of deep forests, unspoiled villages, winding valleys, temples and shrines hidden high on the ridges, overnight stays in mountain huts and inns.

Those experiences, plus other happy memories of that year , would do much to bring me back to Japan a year or two later. I have written about it elsewhere…..

In between excursions I would work on my Japanese with Yasuko's help. I would also try to keep up with my thesis work.

Heinz at the ANU was trying to encourage me as much as possible . He even got me to write something for his Indonesian economic bulletin on Japan’s investment in Indonesian resource development.

That made some of my research efforts finally look worthwhile.

In short, life was beginning to look up. But I still had my problems.

The news from Vietnam was a constant agony, compounded daily by the gloating reports of bombing raids and body counts coming over FEN, the US military English-language radio station in Japan.

Unbelievably, one of them proudly compared the alleged ‘bravery’ of US troops in Vietnam with the exploits of Buffalo Bill against the native Indians in North America.

As others have pointed out, the success in exterminating the American Indians provided the US military with much of the rationale for its scorched earth policies used the occupation of the Philippines a few decades later.

Clearly the tradition had carried over to Vietnam. .

In the Tokyo bars and clubs one was inevitably coming up against crass US military types on R and R leave from that atrocity. Meanwhile, I had received the proofs of my China book from Lansdowne to correct.

The irony of having the Vietnam horror pushed daily into my face while trying laboriously to correct the proofs of a book which I had hoped would put an end to that horror was hard to ignore.

4. The China Book Emerges

The publisher had done his best. But neither he nor I had much experience with academic books.

I was forced to realise even more painfully than before the damage those nice people at the ANU and Melbourne University presses had caused me.

They had succeeded in at least one of their ambitions, namely to make sure that no serious critic of government policies would have access to whatever academic respectability they could provide.

Eventually the book emerged. Almost 400 pages of closely argued details and facts. My baby.

I had called it “In Fear of China,” a title I still like. The blurb was less inspiring, but the photo attached shows me exactly as I was at the time – pale, and very pensive. I was wearing a black sweater that J. had given me in Moscow four years earlier .

In Australia the book sold reasonably well, by Australian standards – about eight thousand copies. Ken Randall in The Australian had given it a good review, and it got into most of the libraries, where it can still be found.

But the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Herald, both still determined to see China as a menace over-hanging Asia, managed to ignore the book altogether.

Abroad it was much the same story.

Lansdowne had got a joint publication agreement with the UK publisher, The Cresset Press. Some foreign academics got to notice it. But overall the reaction was muted.

The one place where I had hoped the book would get a proper review was the China Quarterly – the main outlet in those days for serious China scholars. But it got little more than a passing comment.

The editor of the Review was David Wilson, my former acquaintance at the Chinese language school of Hongkong University, and later to be made governor of Hongkong.

As a thoroughly conservative, UK government official (conservative enough to be made Hongkong governor), I knew it was unlikely Wilson would like my revisionist view of China.

Even so, the fact that a UK Foreign Office official could in effect be able to veto a serious review of a serious book on China in the one supposedly objective academic publication dealing with China in those dark days was a major setback for me..

I had liked to think that with world attention focused so strongly on Vietnam, people would respond to a book which, no matter how obscure its origins, contradicted in detail most of the conventional wisdom about China, its foreign policies, and ultimately about Vietnam.

I was wrong, badly wrong.

I had even sent the book to Newsweek, which at the time was turning skeptical about the Vietnam War ( the more rightwing Time remained highly bullish). I assumed that there at least I would get the publicity I needed so badly.

I did not even get an acknowledgement.

True, it was early 1968. Tet had yet to come. China was caught up in its Cultural Revolution madness. Few were interested in a revisionist view of Chinese foreign policies.

In the foreword to the book I had tried to explain the Cultural Revolution as a pure power struggle between moderates and radicals for the post-Mao succession.

As it turned out, I was right. But at the time the world preferred to think differently.

Ultimately, I suppose, it was inevitable that a book by an unknown author put out by an unknown publisher in a distant part of the world would do little to change global opinion. That was part of the very large price we had to pay at the time for the hegemony of established US and UK publishers.

The problem is still with us, even if the Internet has killed some that hegemony.

What still upsets me is the fact that at time there was still nothing published to give the correct story about the Sino-Indian and Sino-Soviet disputes.

The biased versions of both events still exerted enormous influence on the policy makers, and as official documents now confirm, were crucial to some US decisions to intervene in Vietnam.

I had liked to think that if my material had got into proper circulation, it could have had some influence on the policy makers, and maybe even on Vietnam events. Even some recognition by Newsweek would have helped.

Ironically, and in retrospect, the one good result of the biased versions of Chinese behaviour prevalent at the time was that they inspired enough fear of China to prevent the US from full-scale attack against North Vietnam.

In Australia the one serious academic review I got was from Peter King of Sydney University, who praised the analysis of the Sino-Soviet dispute.

Against that was a vicious review from J.D.B.Miller, head of the ANU International Relations Department.

While admitting that it was a serious book (earlier either he or someone in his department had told the ANU Press that my manuscript was a useless, pro-Beijing tract), he then slammed me on what he called three crucial points of fact – my claims that the CIA had been involved in Indonesian events up to 1965, that it was India that had attacked China in 1962, and that the problem of Taiwan was focus of Chinese foreign policy.

I leave it to the reader to decide who has been proved right by history.

At the time Miller’s department was using the ANU Press to get its own literature into print, much of it anti-Beijing. Few of the tracts they produced survive in any shape or form today, even in public libraries.

Perhaps the most forgettable of the department’s publications was a book urging the Cold War idea of India, Australia and Japan getting together in a joint anti-China alliance, with Crawford as its firm backer.

(Crawford, in addition to his strong anti-China bias, had, like my father, a soft spot for India and its geopolitical potential.)

One of the book’s authors was so worked up with anti-Beijing fervor that he managed to accuse China of Han chauvinism for wanting to reunite with Taiwan. Clearly he did not know that Taiwan’s native population was in fact almost entirely Han Chinese – migrants from China’s nearby Fujian province a few centuries earlier and who still spoke the Fujian dialect of Chinese.

The ANU and Crawford were so proud of this wretched book that they had leaned on Japan’s then Foreign Minister, Miki Takeo, who was visiting Australia at the time, to join in a big book-launch ceremony.

The sight of Miki, a genuine internationalist who had opposed Japan’s militarists during the war and had long advocated better relations with China, being dragged in to endorse this quite unrealistic, Cold War, anti-China tract, the contents of which he obviously did not know, was less than edifying.

(Crawford’s political position requires some understanding.)

(Some such as Helen Hughes, a former close ANU friend, argue that he was a genuine liberal, mainly because he was willing to stand up and defend her from establishment attacks back in the days when she was associated with the communist party and with communist Czechoslovakia in some way.)

(But he clearly had a very different view of myself after I had come out against the Vietnam War, despite my having no communist or any other leftwing connections.)

(Crawford’s position was typical of what I call the Kennedy Liberals — people with some progressive bias but only a superficial knowledge of the Asian communist societies, who had decided that while European communism might need some kind of understanding, Asian communism epitomized a kind of Hitlerian evil that progressives had no choice but to oppose.)

(Ironically, it was just these Kennedy Liberals who would be responsible for most of the evil in the West’s Cuba, China and Vietnam policies.)

(Many other ANU progressives shared Crawfordian views, which explains many of the problems I had and was to have in that alleged Center of Excellence.)

(Ultimately it was a sophisticated form of Yellow Peril, anti-Asian racism - academics too lazy or biassed to go out and find the truth of what was happening in Asia.)

(Unfortunately for me, it was to be even stronger in Australia than in the rest of the Western world, at least until China became the flavor of the month some years later. Then we saw an ideological flipflop of dimensions worthy of Japan - another nation weak in ideological consistency and strong in sudden emotional shifts. )

A Japanese Reaction

As it turned out, it was only in Japan, blissfully free of both Kennedy Liberals and rampant hawks in those days, that my China book got treated seriously.

I had come to know well the Ajiken researcher on Chinese affairs – Matsumoto Shigekazu. Matsumoto’s English was not very good (his Chinese was better). But he was determined to translate the book into Japanese, and have it published by Ajiken.

The Japanese version appeared in 1969 under the title of Kokusai Seiji to Chugoku – International Politics and China. The translation was less than perfect. But it put me on the map in Japan.

One of Japan’s top scholars on China, Nakajima Mineo, was later to tell me how my theory about the 1958 Taiwan Straits crisis underlying the Sino-Soviet dispute of the early 1960’s was a major break-though in his own thinking about China.

Nakajima was somewhat anti-Beijing, and, like quite a few rightwing Japanese scholars, he was a frequent visitor to the ANU. But unlike our ANU conservatives he managed to retain some sense of academic curiosity and objectivity.

His appreciation of my book was later to help me very much in Japan. He was even to invite me in 2002 to help him set up an international university in Akita, in northern Japan.

But once again I am getting ahead of my story.

5. Out Of Japan

I had arrived in the early spring: I left in the early spring.

Yasuko went to see me off at what was then Tokyo's tiny international Haneda airport.

I think I was too disorganised and confused even to realise I was leaving Japan, let alone know what I would be doing in the future.

Heinz arranged funds for me to return to Canberra via various Southeast Asian countries. The idea was that I should visit Japanese projects in the area and finally get some insight into how and why the Japanese did their investment.

Normally one would not expect Japanese investors to want to talk much about their activities to an unknown foreigner speaking broken Japanese and knocking at their door for information. But I had a neat technique working for me.

I would show them the MITI materials I had received from Kojima's MITI contact, where the basic facts about their investment project were listed. I would then say that I was just checking whether those facts had since changed.

Their curiosity would be sparked since many did not even know about the MITI list, or that their project was on it.

Soon they would be showing me around their farms or factories, and inviting me even to their homes. The experience taught me a lot about Asia, and about how the Japanese operated there. It also gave me useful Japanese contacts – some of whom would help me in later years.

Jakarta was the last stop. From there it was back to Canberra, and an end to a year filled with experiences, hopes ….and more setbacks.
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