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 6
BACK TO AUSTRALIA – 1968-9
1. Thesis Preparation
2. Blacklisted by Australian Academia
3. A Western Australian Connection
4. The Okita Saburo Connection
5. Looking Abroad, China or Japan?
6. Back to 'The Australian?'
7. The PhD Thesis Problem
Arriving back from Japan and Southeast Asia in May, 1968,
the Canberra autumn colors seemed even stronger than I had
remembered.
I set about the painful business of writing up my doctoral
thesis.
1. Thesis
Preparation
My problems were probably greater than those suffered by
most Ph.D. students. Materials were in a difficult foreign
language. And I still did not have enough data.
Japan was still not a very large, or welcome, player on the
world economic stage. Its direct investment overseas was
still small.
My supervisor, Heinz Arndt, had chosen my topic for me
largely because he was interested in Japan's unusual
'develop and import' style of investment in Indonesian
resource goods.
But there were only three of such projects at the time, and
to try to write a thesis based on their activities would
have been impossible, even if I could get total access to
everything they were doing.
True, my main general conclusions - that Japanese direct
investors put emphasis on securing sources of supply (raw
materials investments) or overseas markets for finished
goods (sales network investments) and parts and materials
(assembly operations behind tariff barriers) - were quite
interesting in the context of direct investment theory at
the time.
Most direct investment by firms in other nations aimed to
generate income more directly through dividends, transfer
pricing and royalties.
Japanese investors had a more "organic" approach, both at
home and abroad. Hence the high proportion of joint
ventures.
In Indonesia they were even prepared to experiment with
unusual production sharing techniques in a bid to secure
raw materials.
(I was also impressed by the instinctive,
"seat-of-the-pants" approach to some major investment
decisions.)
(My efforts to find some cultural explanation for this and
other investment behavior differences were to lead to me
eventually into a fullscale study of the culture. More on
that later.)
And thanks to the semi-confidential MITI list of
investments I had obtained, I had some original data to
back up these conclusions. Within the year I had a draft
thesis ready.
Arndt said he liked what I had done. All I had to do was
get it typed up in the elaborate style demanded of doctoral
candidates, and my four years of effort would be over.
I could begin to think about my next move - how and where
to get re-employed.
2.
Blacklisted by Academia
Clearly External Affairs would be a non-starter. Apart from
anything else, Plimsoll's 1965 promise to have me come back
after the "Vietnam thing" was over would be of little use
since the Vietnam thing was still far from over.
I had also had that ugly run-in with Canberra's spy
apparatus. That alone would effectively put an end to any
chance of going back to working in a government, a
conservative government especially, which is why I made
such a fuss, albeit a futile fuss, about the incident at
the time.
My first move was to go through the motions of approaching
J.D.B.Miller at the ANU international relations department,
to see if the China research position he had offered me
back in 1962 was still open.
I knew he would say no. But I wanted to get the rejection
on record.
In 1962, at the very young age of 26, I had been seen by
the university as someone very suitable for appointment to
a well-paid research position on China, despite the fact
that at the time my only qualifications were a few years
experience working in External Affairs, and a so-so
knowledge of the Chinese language.
Now, seven years later, in 1969, I was that much more
mature. My Chinese was much better (thanks to the year I
had spent with C.), I now had good Russian and adequate
Japanese, a further three years of valuable EA experience
(China desk and in Moscow) and was about to get a doctorate
in international economics.
As well, I had produced a fullscale book on Chinese foreign
policies whose chapters on the Sino-Indian frontier
dispute, the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute and the
importance of Taiwan were filled with original and closely
researched material of doctorate standard.
It was probably one of the very few books on foreign
affairs to be published in Australia at the time that could
be republished today without change - something that
certainly could not be said for the rubbish that was coming
out of Miller's department at the time.
In short, if I was qualified for the position I had been
offered in 1962, I was certainly a lot more qualified in
1969. So was I offered the position in 1969?
Of course not.
By 1969 I had become a critic of government policies,
possibly even a communist agitator. It took Miller just
five minutes to close the door on me.
And at the time ANU Chancellor Crawford was telling the
world how the ANU was a center of something called academic
excellence. Some excellence!
More worrying was the fact that my informal approaches to
other universities were getting nowhere.
Monash University in Melbourne seemed an good place to aim
for; it was said to be both fairly progressive and trying
hard to move into Asian studies.
But I did not even get through the door there.
I had hoped to get the vacant China slot at Monash. In the
event, it went to a quite unqualified, and now totally
forgotten, right-wing ideological fanatic called Bob
Beveridge.
A poor Chinese speaker and a former bureaucrat from Prime
Minister's department, he used to hector me in public for
my Vietnam views.
Years later I learned from Max Teichman (who was in a very
good position to know) that the Monash authorities had been
told firmly by some ASIO type not to offer me any position
under any circumstances. I assume the same thing was going
on at other universities.
To this day the extent of ASIO infiltration of our
universities at the time has never been fully realised, let
alone criticised.
True, at the time even some otherwise balanced and sensible
academics went along with the China/Vietnam threat talk
enough to want to cooperate with ASIO.
One of them, a former External Affairs colleague, who had
moved to University of Tasmania, had even told me he felt
he was doing the nation a service by helping find recruits
for ASIO. (If he was introducing people of intelligence
that may have been true.)
But today, now that it is obvious they were wrong over
Vietnam and China, why no apology or mea culpas ?
The Australian psyche seems impervious to objective
standards of right and wrong. Right lies in doing what
everyone else is doing and thinking at the time.
Wrong lies in opposing the consensus, in rocking the boat,
in seeming to cause trouble, even if you are proved right
later..
It is a curious morality, though I find the same attitudes
in Japan.
In most of the civilized world outside of Japan and
Australia, the search for objective standards of judgement
and morality is important, certainly among academics.
A Daniel Ellsberg is today honored and respected for his
role in opposing the Vietnam War, even if at the time he
was reviled.
True, many years later Miller was to write an article for
the journal of the Australian Institute of Political
Science where he at least had the honesty to admit he and
quite a few others had been wrong over China.
But, he added, he had been quite right to oppose
left-wingers like Clark and Jim Cairns.
Quite apart from his obvious desire to absolve himself of
guilt for the personal harm he had caused me, it was a
totally gratuitous insult, both to myself and Cairns.
Cairns' deeply intellectual approach to Asian foreign
policy issues left him streets ahead of people like Miller
whose only real interest seemed to be Commonwealth affairs.
As for myself, the conservative attitudes I have inherited
from a Queensland rural background, make me more of a right
a rightwinger than a leftwinger.
(The 1950's Brisbane farm on which I was raised was just a
few miles down the Brisbane river from Pauline Hanson's
famous Ipswich fish and chip shop.).
I have little time for the harmful bleeding heart attitudes
to aborigines and phony asylum seekers.
I believe strongly that individuals are responsible for
their own welfare and should not depend on the State.
I just happen to object to States deciding they have the
right to go into foreign countries to slaughter of
inhabitants there in the name of spurious causes. I am not
sure why that makes me a leftwinger.
But to come back to my own affairs.
More
Brick Walls
By early 1969 it was clear I had no future in Australia,
either as a Japanologist or as a Sinologist.
Crawford was making sure that the still non-Japanese
speaking Drysdale would consolidate his ANU dictatorship
over Japanese studies and research.
And he had obviously forgotten how in 1962 he had tried to
recruit me to set up a China economic research group. (In
an empire- building move typical of ANU politics, China was
soon to be taken over those non-Japanese speaking Japan
research academics, in partnership with non-Chinese
speaking academics claiming expertise on China.)
Meanwhile Fitzgerald, who had finished his Ph.D. work on
the topic of Overseas Chinese in Asia, had moved into the
China slot in the ANU Asian Studies department. He was
already making his run in the ALP and elsewhere as
Canberra's resident expert on China.
With both Japan and China ruled out, for a while I tinkered
with the idea of going back into the Russian studies field.
I had long had an amiable relationship with Harry Rigby,
then in charge of ANU Soviet studies.
But he was not very helpful (I had the feeling he was
getting tired of the subject).
Eventually I was to be stymied by a highly unremarkable
Brit called Paul Dibb who was finishing up a very
unremarkable thesis on the Soviet Far East.
As far as I could make out, Dibb had little grip on either
the Russian language or Soviet affairs. Certainly he had
never spent any serious time in the USSR.
But in Canberra's intellectually impoverished climate that
did not stop him from making a strong run later as an
expert on Soviet military affairs, and by natural
progression, all military affairs.
He ended up as military affairs guru for the entire
Australian establishment.
3. A West
Australian Connection
The only academic opening I received, and then only
tentatively, came from West Australia.
Partly as a result of my own experience at the ANU and
Japan, I had been using the media to push the need for
university courses that would train people properly both in
the language AND in business/economics.
That way, when they arrived in Japan they would be able to
move into jobs which might do something useful for the
Japan-Australia economic relationship - something which
those non-Japanese speakers with their PhDs in theoretical
economics would never be able to do.
WA University seemed to have heard my message. In any case,
it was going to set up a special course along just those
lines.
It had sent Professor Reg Appleyard to Canberra to try to
find someone to set up and run the new course.
I was one of the first on his calling list.
I said I was interested, but would have to wait a few more
months till I had finished my ANU work. But despite seeming
to have had a very positive interview with him, I never
heard anything more from him.
Spies at Work, again?
Years later I discovered that WA university had also
approached officialdom for a recommendation as to who
should be appointed to run the course.
Officialdom had contacted TW. - their chief spy operative
in Japan, an occupation era hangover with good business
cover and quite good Japanese. .
To his credit, TW was an intelligent and at times even
flexible spy.
When Labour gained power in 1972 he used his positions in
various Australia-Japan organisations to be nice to me,
invite me to give talks etc.
But when it came to the crunch, especially when the
conservatives were in power in Canberra, the camaraderie
quickly disappeared.
He tapped into the Drysdale-Kojima Hitotsubashi connection
I mentioned earlier, and came up with the name of an
American, Bernard Key, about to graduate there with a Ph.D.
in the history of foreign investment in Japan.
Key had no connection with Australia, or with the world of
business. But he was given the position anyway.
As it turned out, Key was conscientious and did quite a
good job in Perth.
But he left after a few years to become a stock analyst in
Japan and the WA course fell apart soon after, thanks
largely to the appointment, recommended almost certainly by
TW or someone else in concerned officialdom, of a retired
Japanese ex-CIA operative who proved to be totally
unsuitable, or even worse.
(Ironically, Key was to approach me for a university job
almost thirty years later.)
( I had been made president of the business- oriented Tama
University in Tokyo. Key wanted to get out of the grubby
stock-market world, and back into academia.)
(We gave him a job. But he only lasted a few years. He
succumbed to the mental pressure of trying to teach
Japanese university students, and I do not blame him.)
That the WA course was able during its brief span under Key
to produce most of the young Australians who were to come
to play important roles in the Australian business
relationship with Japan during the seventies and eighties -
Bill Hall, Ken Boston, Richard Pyvis, the Walker brothers -
proved the value of my original idea.
Many more could have been produced if the course had not
been collapsed so quickly by officialdom's obsessive desire
to plant its operatives in our universities, or if other
Australian universities had had the sense to run similar
courses.
Needless to say, the ANU was, and would remain, impervious
to my suggestions that it should have its own undergraduate
Japanese language/ business studies unit.
For the ANU "academic excellence" crowd, a clutch of
non-Japanese speaking ANU Ph D's claiming expertise in free
trade theory , APEC etc was far more important than the
difficult business of setting out to train young
Australians how to speak Japanese and do business with
Japan.
It would be decades before any of the products from the
ANU's well-funded operations would make any impact at the
grassroots level of the Japan- Australian business
relationship. Meanwhile others with more practical
experience of Japan were excluded.
True, there is nothing unusual about academics staking out
exclusive research areas and keeping others at bay.
But when this is done with government-supplied funds, by
people who do not know the language of the country they are
supposed to be studying, and who use their power and
position to discriminate against those who do know the
language, and the country, then it IS unusual.
On the other hand it is also true that in the narrow world
of Australian academic bureaucracy, not knowing the
language of the country you are supposed to be studying is
not quite the sin it would be in some of the more
academically advanced nations of the world.
In any respectable UK or US university, even then, it would
have been out of the question to work in any Japan or China
academic area without the language. But not in Australia,
which at the time was boasting about its close relations
with the Asian countries.
A
Personal Affair
Obviously at the time I was not very happy about what was
happening around me at the time.
I am still unhappy, even though fate was later to deal me
some much more favorable cards - cards I would not have
received if I had stayed in some arid academic position in
Australia.
But there is another and far less selfish reason for my
unhappiness.
I had been brought up in a 1950's Anglo-saxon ethic that
said if you study hard and work honestly, then the society
around you will recognise you for what you are, and treat
you accordingly.
There should be no need to engage in grubby political
maneuvers in order to get ahead.
And in the early years of my career that seemed to be the
case.
Entering External Affairs, I had worked hard to learn
Chinese and Russian. I think I had handled my work with
some responsibility. My superiors had noted all this, and
had rewarded me with good postings and promotions.
To have been made First Secretary at age 28, and offered
the job of Australian representative to the UN Disarmament
Commission at age 29, despite the fact that Canberra
already knew I did not agree with them on Vietnam and
China, is a tribute to an ethic now quite dead in the
Canberra bureaucracy.
Today it is dog eat dog in the race up the promotion
ladder. You survive only by keeping close to the political
line of the day.
They say it is all in the interests of efficiency.
Efficiency? In the old days the Australian Embassy in Tokyo
was efficient.
Despite small numbers it operated widely across broad areas
of Japanese society. Its staff tried hard to master
Japanese.
Today it is a bloated bureaucratic establishment absorbed
in its own administration and filled with non-Japanese
speakers clinging to the current Canberra line over Japan
while saving generous allowances and organising their
career paths back in Canberra.
We never get to see them making any impact on Japanese
society.
Over the years I think I was to see most of the corridors
and citadels of political and business power in Japan.
I saw quite a few Americans, Brits and Canadians there. But
I never saw any Australians.
The change was part of Australia's sudden transition,
beginning in the sixties, from what could be called
traditional values of noblesse oblige and service to the
country, to rationalistic McKinsey style values of every
individual out for himself.
At the ANU I discovered the same changes. In the early
sixties I could feel a genuine searching after academic
excellence and fairness.
But by the late sixties it had become bloated and
bureaucratic, with an ethic that said the rewards went to
activists skilled at political maneuvering.
Those who went quietly about the difficult business of
serious research and gaining required academic skills were
easily ignored.
I once tried to pin down Heinz on the morality of all this.
The ANU Japan people had by far the loin's share of
Australian official funds for academic research and
involvement with Japan. Yet in effect they were being
allowed to use those funds to pursue petty jealousies and
personal ambitions.
He muttered something about things being the way they were
and left it at that.
I should have remembered that he himself had once done the
political maneuvering which had prevented my father from
getting the post he had wanted so badly in Canberra ten
years earlier (see chapter two).
My father, by contrast, was very much part of the older
ethic.
He had gone through life blithely unaware of the need to
play academic politics. He seemed to assume that others
would automatically recognise him for his accomplishments.
And for the most part that was what happened. It was only
in Australia (and to some extent under the Thatcherites in
the UK) that he came unstuck.
I may have inherited some of his thinking. Which is why I
was so shocked when I ran into the brick walls of exclusion
in the Australian academic world, where the prizes went to
the quick, the cunning and the politically astute.
The serious and the qualified were almost automatically
ruled out.
4. The
Okita Saburo Connection
Sometimes the exclusions approached the absurd.
I had long been involved with Okita Saburo, a well- known
MITI official whom Kojima at Hitotsubashi had early on
recruited to give respectability to his various pro-APEC
moves (later Okita was made Foreign Affairs Minister).
Some time in the seventies, the ANU people had seized on
Okita as their one point of high-level contact into Japan
(like Kojima, he spoke good English). They were even to
publish the English version of his memoirs.
Okita was not a proper economist. He was originally just a
run-of- the-mill bureaucrat who had made his name as a
signatory of the somewhat bogus Club of Rome 1970 report
saying the world was about to run out of raw material
resources.
But in Japan, just seeming to be involved in something of
international significance was enough to make one famous in
those days.
During the war years Okita had been involved with Japan's
colonial efforts in Manchuria, including the rather
unsavory Koyain opium production and sales operation
designed to impoverish and enslave the Chinese - a point
ignored in the many eulogies Okita was to receive at the
ANU where he was revered as a god-like internationalist.
But then again, it is very unlikely that the ANU's Japan
experts were even aware of what Japan was doing in China in
the war years, let alone Okita's role.
But that aside, Okita had a likeable personality and was
part of the postwar generation of bureaucrats seeking
seriously to rebuild their nation. If only for that reason
I was interested in him, even if I did not think much of
his grasp of economics or international affairs.
And like many Japanese of his generation, Okita was an
admirer of my father.
One result was that back during my Hongkong days in the
early sixties we once had a hilarious party with him and my
father on the balcony of my Hongkong penthouse.
That was long before any of the ANU crowd had even begun to
appear on the Japan scene.
Later, when I was trying to get established in Japan, Okita
had helped me through a MITI-backed research committee he
headed.
Despite these strong connections, not once during my long
stay in Japan did any of the ANU people, or the Tokyo
Embassy people, see fit to have me join in any of the many
activities they organised around Okita.
It was embarrassing, for both of us, to have to pretend
ignorance of this petty exclusiveness.
Much the same went on with the ANU's Hitotsubashi
connection.
Various joint seminars and other activities were arranged
there. But I never got to see anything of them, even though
I was very much alive and well in Tokyo and had had a long
connection with Hitotsubashi.
One of my good friends at that university was the senior
economist Ishi Hiromitsu. He liked some of the things I had
written about Japan's land tax policies, and once asked me
to address the government tax commission he headed.
Later he was made the Hitotsubashi president, and asked me
to be a member of the university's oversee committee
(shimon iinkai.) In theory at least, one of my jobs was to
oversee the ANU people involved with the university.
The wheel had finally turned full circle, though once again
I doubt whether any of those non-Japanese speakers in the
ANU ivory tower were even aware of details like that.
The amateurism of Australia's academic, business and
official contacts with Japan was, and still is, a scandal
waiting to be exposed. Even the minerals people had yet to
get their act together, as I was to discover later.
5.
Looking Abroad, China or Japan?
With the door closed firmly on me in Australia, I began to
look abroad.
I wrote to Derek Davies, the well-known editor of the
Hongkong-based Far Eastern Economic Review and with whom I
had had a friendly relationship earlier in Hongkong.
In those days the Review was an authoritative and generally
progressive source of information on China and the rest of
Asia. It was far removed from the pro-business rants and
the anti-Beijing slants it was to acquire under its later
owners, the Wall Street Journal.
Davies wrote back saying he could give me the job as chief
China watcher. The offer was very attractive.
Not only would I have a chance to get back into the China
field.
Over the years the Review had nurtured some of the West's
best China watchers, and was to train more - Mirsky,
Gittings, Bonavia etc.
But the pull of Japan was to prove to be too strong.
The fact my In Fear of China book was about to published
there, in Japanese, gave me a base from which to work -
something I certainly did not have with China
(To this day I have had no recognition whatsoever from the
Chinese of the fact I once wrote a book trying to throw a
more favorable light on their foreign policies. But that is
what you have to expect from that very self-centered, even
if very dynamic, nation.)
Most of all, there were those happy memories from my
one-year student existence in Japan, and what I call the
Yasuko tapes.
The Call
of Japan
While in Tokyo I had tried to learn the language as much as
possible by taping radio broadcasts of interest and
listening to them concentratedly.
One broadcast I liked especially was called Watashitachi no
Kotoba - readings of letters sent in by public minded
citizens, most elderly, suggesting ideas for improving the
society - proper garbage disposal, removing abandoned
bicycles, better school education, etc.
The letters taught me a lot about Japan. The concentrated
listening taught me a lot about the language.
Back in Canberra I had wanted to keep my Japanese up.
I had asked a typically rightwing Japanese academic invited
by ANU international relations department for yet another
useless semi-Cold War research project, to record a text,
any text, on tape for me to listen to (Yoneda was his name
I think)
In those primitive days commercially-produced language
tapes were hard to come by.
He had refused pointblank. He seemed to think he did not
need to waste his valuable time helping this no-good
Australian learn his nation's precious language.
But Yasuko would tape the Watashitachi no Kotoba broadcasts
for me each week, and send them to me regularly by mail.
She would also write charming letters in simple Japanese
telling me what was happening with her and her friends. (It
was typical of the gentle consideration the Japanese, the
women especially, can show in personal relationships.)
Stuck in the cold, antiseptic, bitchy world of Canberra
academia, those letters were a lifeline - a lifeline of
memories pulling me back to Japan.
The
Moment of Decision
Meanwhile I had to prepare the final version of my thesis.
No amount of nostalgia for Japan could help me there.
Sometime when I was about to deliver my second draft to the
typist for the complete and meticulous re-type demanded by
the primitive technologies of the time, the futility of it
all began to crowd in on me.
Why was I doing all this? The establishment had already
made it clear I would have no career in Australia, even
after I had submitted the final version and had it
approved.
In effect, I still had another month or so of exhausting
editorial work to get the document into the shape demanded
by academics who were determined to make sure that I would
never get any academic recognition in Australia.
Even Arndt, my one point of honest contact at the ANU, had
made it clear I was on my own once I finished the thesis.
As he saw it, my China book (of which he disapproved
mightily) meant I was still more of an international
relations specialist than an economist.
Maybe he was right. But it was clear I would not going to
go very far in the IR direction.
He thought he could help me get a job with the Asian
Development Bank in Manila (where by coincidence my
Japanese speaking brother, Christopher, had ended up), but
that was about all.
Worse was the pretentiousness of it all.
PhD theses have to be presented as original contributions
to knowledge fit for book publication. Yet everyone knows
that the research is often either too narrow or too
superficial.
In the social sciences, being able to add the words PhD to
your name may give you an academic meal ticket. But in
reality it often means little more than that you had
nothing better to do for three years than engage on some
area of useless esoteric research - years in which you
could have been out in the world doing something useful.
It can be academic credentialism at its worst - at best
wasteful, at times quite damaging.
I see the damage in the way some Japanese universities
insist on recruiting English language teachers who have
PhDs. Invariably these people have spent years researching
some quite irrelevant branch of linguistics.
Worse they are determined to impose the results of that
research on hapless Japanese students who simply want to
learn how to say: "What is the way to the train station."
Post-graduate study for mature students makes more sense.
In my own case, the exposure to good economics teachers at
a stage of life when, as my father had told me many years
earlier, I had the maturity and experience to understand
what was being taught, was invaluable.
That, plus the chance for hands-on experience in Japan, was
greatly to expand my career possibilities.
But for those who were coming directly from the
under-graduate world, post-graduate economics would simply
guarantee they would become fundamentalistic slaves to the
theoretical, often rationalist, economists who have often
done more harm that good to economies in recent years.
Hardly any of the thick, carefully bound and annotated
documents produced by most PhD candidates in the social
sciences could qualify for book publication. Few would
deserve even summary publication in an academic journal.
So why was I, at age 33, going along with these
intellectual pretensions, simply to satisfy a bunch of
people who deep down hated my anti- Vietnam War guts.
They would almost get visceral pleasure from seeing me as a
newly minted PhD seeking futilely for some kind of
employment in Australia.
So why break my guts simply to keep them happy?
I had no ready answer. On the other hand, I sensed that if
I did not serve out my time, there would a lot of people
out there only too happy to throw rocks.
Later I would find out how right I was.
6. Back
To 'The Australian?'
It was just at this moment of doubt and indecision that I
ran into Eric Walsh again - the consummate fixer who had
given me my introduction to The Australian four years
earlier.
I told him my problems.
Why not get a job as Tokyo correspondent for The
Australian, he said. Under its new editor, Adrian Deamer,
it was still Australia's only progressive newspaper, and
Deamer remembered my earlier Vietnam and China
contributions.
As well, the Japan-Australia business relationship was
heating up.
Lacking a Tokyo correspondent, The Australian was being
hammered almost daily by big headline articles in the
Sydney Morning Herald and the Financial Review, breaking
news about new major resource export contracts with Japan,
from their active, Tokyo-based stringer, Max Suich.
The Australian badly needed someone in Tokyo to match the
competition, Walsh had noted.
He said he would check possibilities with John Menadue -
the same Menadue he had introduced me to when I had wanted
to get to Whitlam in 1966, and who was now the business
manager for The Australian.
I had to say yes, even though I had no experience of
journalism, or of Menadue.
Menadue was receptive enough.
But he said that while the newspaper could not afford to
have someone in Japan purely as a news correspondent (the
paper was still suffering heavy red ink) they could send me
there if I would help garner Japanese advertising - yet
another area where The Australian was being beaten badly by
the Fairfax Press.
I was agreeable.
But Deamer, who was also keen to have a Tokyo
correspondent, was not happy about the idea of my having to
handle advertising too. Good newspapers try to keep a clear
barrier between advertising and editorial, he warned.
Later I was to discover that he was not entirely wrong -
not so much because the ads influenced the editorial, but
because of the demands on time.
7. The
PhD Thesis Problem
But if I was to take up the Tokyo job, what was I to do
about the ANU thesis? I still had at least a month or so to
go before I could hand over the kind of document demanded
by the PhD system.
On the other hand, both Menadue and Deamer wanted me to get
to Tokyo quickly. And I did not want to lose this golden
opportunity to get back to Japan, with a job.
I decided to try to find a compromise.
I wrote to the ANU, telling them that while I was close to
finishing my thesis, I was sure I could write a much better
thesis if I could get back to Japan.
Which was true. A lot more information on Japanese overseas
investment was coming out of Tokyo at the time (the Export-
Import Bank people were finally publishing the detailed
statistics demanded by the IMF).
As a correspondent for a major Australian newspaper, I
would also have chances to get into large Japanese firms
and query them on their overseas investment policies -
chances I rarely had had as a struggling researcher two
years earlier when all I could do was pore over magazine
articles and limited statistical data looking for clues.
In short, I could say in all honesty that the job offer
from The Australian would let me get back to Japan to get
the extra information that I needed to prepare a much
better thesis, and at no expense to the ANU.
The ANU establishment was not impressed. Crawford came back
with a blunt letter saying they would give me a six months
unpaid extension, and no more.
To some extent I could understand his position. The ANU
provided quite generous three-year PhD scholarships. The
university had a right to demand that people finish their
research in the time allotted.
I had already been given an extra year because I had to
learn Japanese, plus another six months unpaid to write my
China book.
But few can learn Japanese even to semi-fluency in one
year, even if they have Chinese. And the China book had
taken a lot more than six months to research and write, and
was a lot more important than any number of PhDs.
As for my PhD research, the fact that if it was to be
handled properly the topic required a very wide range of
sensitive inside information from businessmen and
bureaucrats in a very foreign nation meant it was never
going to be easy.
In this situation, if people are willing to spend their own
time and money to complete research of some importance,
exceptions can and should be made.
(One allegedly Japanese-speaking researcher in the ANU
international relations department, who shall remain
nameless, had spent twenty years working on his rather
irrelevant Japan topic. And he still could not produce a
book at the end of it.)
But clearly none of this made any impression on Crawford
and the other ANU top people. They had seen me as a
political thorn in their side. They were glad to be rid of
me.
What to do? Deep down I already realised that the work
demands in my new job would make it hard to meet the six
month deadline.
Apart from anything else, I would have to spend two of that
six months in Sydney learning how to be their Tokyo
correspondent.
So should I abandon all academic pretensions and just head
off for Tokyo?
I tried to rationalize: Maybe I would have to give up hope
of the PhD tag. But that would not stop me from putting out
a worthwhile book out on the subject sometime later while I
was in Tokyo. That, I was sure, would be seen as much more
important than any PhD - assuming I would want to go back
into academia.
True, all that would take a lot more than six months, years
even. But in the meantime I would be gaining valuable
experience in a variety of other Japan fields - politics,
foreign affairs etc.
Hopefully by the end of all that the political climate in
Australia would have improved to the point where I could
finally return and use my experience to get a job there.
Besides, I had already prepared the basic data and
conclusions of the thesis. Even if I did not do a book, I
could get that material published in Japan (which I did,
two years later, via Ajiken). If others felt that was not
enough, then that was their problem.
I also happened to disapprove of academic credentialism.
One of my first anti-credentialist efforts had been
refusing in 1956 to pay the ten pounds sterling that Oxford
demanded as the price for automatically being awarded an MA
(as Oxford saw it, the research thesis needed for a BA
qualified their graduates for an MA without any more study
or research).
Fortunately, my father found out about my delinquency, and
had paid the ten pounds which today allows me to call
myself an Oxford MA.
But in non-credentialist Japan, which in those days had a
healthy disrespect for PhDs (they called them
'over-doctor', or over-studied) it would be irrelevant
whether I had spent more time to get that meaningless PhD.
But all that aside, I had another and much deeper reason
for wanting to get out of Australia and back to Japan.
This was the shallowness and hopelessness of the continuing
Vietnam debate in Australia.
Even planting trees in the Japanese mountains would be
better than trying to cope with the daily barrage of
ignorance and insensitivity to the war for which Australia
had so much responsibility.
I had to get away from it all.
Concern about PhDs and other academic credentials had
become secondary.
And so, on a bright early winter mid-1969 morning I set out
by car from Canberra to begin a new career in the offices
of The Australian in Sydney.
Just how new and different that career was to be was
something I was soon to discover.
Chapter 6a
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