BETWEEN FIVE WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN, PERU AND AUSTRALIA.
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS and FIVE LANGUAGES

Fifty years in Japan – A Summary

Fifty is a good round number, though the reality is somewhat longer.

I had first visited Japan in 1962 on my ‘do it yourself’ tour of Japan after visiting South Korea. Enchanted by the people and the rural scenery (and being able to use the Chinese I had studied to read some of the language) I vowed to return. 

I did return, in 1967.  Canberra’s Vietnam war hysteria had convinced me to seek a new career – possibly in the direction of Japan since Canberra’s determination to avoid all contact with Beijing meant there was no way I could get to use the Chinese I had learned so painfully. 

First step in finding that new career was a four year ANU scholarship to research one aspect of the Japanese economy, though much of my research time went to  anti-Vietnam war activities. Inevitably I was to decide it was time for me to stop being a thesis-writing student and get out into the real world.

But that meant I had to find a job. The spy agencies had made sure that as a Vietnam War protestor I could not get a position in any university (including the universities that had been keen to employ me before the anti-China hysteria).  But I could get a job as correspondent for The Australian in Tokyo (1969-74). 

That position in 1971 allowed me persuade a group of Australian table tennis players in Japan to ignore a Canberra directive to go to Taiwan after Nagoya championships and instead visit China as part of Beijing’s now famous pingpong diplomacy.

The publicity for the pingpong visit gave our bitterly anti-Beijing government in Canberra little choice but to back down and recognise China. Joining subsequent missions or events in China over the next three years allowed me both to see something of the shambles of post Cultural Revolution China and to consolidate my still weak Chinese into smoothing much more fluent.

 In 1974, John Menadue, who had been involved in my getting the Tokyo job, gave me an interesting year working in the Policy Research Committee of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. But the collapse of the Whitlam government at year end gave me little choice but to return to Japan with my family, this time as a lowly academic.

But the year in Australia had given me time to complete a book I had been asked for by Simul, a new and controversial publisher.

I had wanted to call the book ’The Japanese Tribe.’ But Simul had wanted to call it ‘Japan – Origins of Uniqueness’ to give it more publicity. 

But I had a better idea. As an example of Japan’s ‘uniqueness’, we should focus on Japan’s media strange and total reluctance to follow up on a recent media disclosure in Australia that Canberra had been secretly decoding Japan’s cable traffic.

The resulting outburst of publicity, both in Japan and abroad (where the story had also been ignored) led not just to a recognition of my presence in Japan, but also to a professorship at the elite university (Jochi) where I had been teaching part-time, invitations to join many committees (including some official), and finally to a hectic two-decade career as an in-demand speaker and commentator criss-crossing. Japan until well into this century.

…

In between, and together with the wonderful woman I had met on a 1967 research year in Japan we were blessed with two sons. (She died tragically in 2019.)

We raised them bilingually and moved them through the Japanese education system while developing some land for a house in a little-known part of the Boso peninsular near Tokyo and facing the Pacific Ocean. 

It was to remain my home for the next fifty years.

…

I also set out further to try to understand the mentality of the Japanese.  For example, why had the Japanese developed so differently from the Chinese, despite much shared culture.  

And how to explain the wartime brutality of the Japanese towards those Chinese.

But I am getting ahead of my story.

1. First Impressions

 

Moving to live and work Japan in 1969, my first impression was simply the feeling of blessed peace. 

Finally I had escaped the noisy hawkishness and stupidity of the Vietnam War debate in Australia (‘Hanoi is a puppet of China’ etc.).  I had arrived in a country where common-sense seemed to prevail.

Finally I was with people who realised the horror and immorality of the Vietnam War, something that seemed to have escaped my academic colleagues back in Canberra.

Finally I was in a place where efforts to protest that war would not result in the destruction of one’s academic career.

…

Soon some of Japan’s progressives came to know of my existence – mainly people who shared my feelings about that Vietnam war.

One was Ohira Masayoshi, the intelligent LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) politician who later became prime minister of Japan (1978-80). 

Like many politicians in Japan, he felt the need to create committees to support him.  The one on which I found myself was his plan to create garden cities.

Since I rather liked the warm humanity in the multitude of the ‘villages’ that naturally come together to create mega cities like Tokyo, I did not see much need for artificial  ’new towns’. But I liked his personality.

It was Ohira who, in the middle of the Vietnam War, said on record that Japan should not be too critical of the US over Vietnam:  The US was simply making the same mistakes in Vietnam as Japan had made with its former attempts to occupy Asian countries. 

It had ignored the forces of local nationalism.

…

I was attracted also by the humility of the Japanese bureaucracy.  Officials padded around shabby offices in sandals. 

What in most countries would be called a War Ministry was relegated to the status of Department (cho). It had to work out of shacks with a single soldier guarding the weed-covered entrance gate.

 

Alongside was a recruiting poster showing a cute dog in military uniform. It gave me the headline for one of my first stories – The puppy-dog army.  (Today the ‘puppy dogs’ work out of a bureaucratic fortress with 10 soldiers guarding an entrance gate covered by an enormous granite span.) 

In those days one could walk into the Gaimusho (Foreign Ministry) without an appointment and go straight to the desk of the person you wanted to talk to.  (Today at the heavily guarded entrance gates, they demand full evidence of identity and appointments.) 

Among the officials I met it was possible to have genuine friends – those handling Australia especially (including the father of the empress in waiting, Owada Hisahi).

 

Some of The Australian Embassy people were impressive, with their good Japanese learned wartime or through experiences in areas of Japan occupied by Australian troops.

Japan was recovering from defeat in war and was open to ideas. People wanted to know what we thought of them and their future. 

Looking back it was extraordinary that I should be given ten-fifteen minutes to speak freely on the national NHK radio, on any topic. Print media were equally generous: Requests for articles or comments were unending. 

In short, I had almost the ideal re-entry to Japan. The opinion of our RSL (Returned Servicemen’s’ League), then strong in immediate postwar Australia, that Japan could be a future threat seemed absurd. 

And not just the  RSL. Today we forget that it was fear of revived Japanese militarism that led Canberra to demand the ANZUS Treaty as a condition for agreeing to the US-brokered 1951 peace treaty with Japan. 

 

Canberra felt the peace treaty was too lenient to the nation that had once threatened to invade Australia and had abused Australian POWs.

(Today Canberra relies on that same ANZUS Treaty to calm fantasy fears of aggression from a very different direction – China. Today Japan is supposed to be an ally against that China.)

(Global geopolitics have never been Canberra’s strong point.)

But for me at the time none of this impacted greatly. Far from my native country I seemed to have found a haven of foreign-policy common sense and moderation.

…

Later, much later, I was to come to realise the emotional forces underlying Japanese mentality ~ and which allowed the nation to switch so easily from wartime barbarity to genuine warmth and common sense, and then back to militaristic stupidity.

2. The Rise of the Right

It was only when the Rightwing pundits began criticising the heiwa byo (peace sickness) of Japan’s  progressives, sometime in the seventies, that I began to realise how postwarJapan, for all its attractive wartime-hangover pacifism, still harboured people who had not moved very far from their prewar militaristic roots – that beneath the pacifism lay a streak of ugly revanchism.

Even so, the Rightwing only began to gain ground politically, and then by luck, when the illness of the progressive leader, Ishibashi Tansan (1956-57), allowed the ultra-Rightwing, wartime minister for munitions, Kishi Nobusuke, to form a government (1957-60). 

Some have since speculated how different Japan might have become but for that misfortune.

But even after Kishi, an unspoken rule said no politician overtly anti-China should gain the prime ministership: Japan still seemed to have some conscience over what it had done to that country and was reluctant to revive new antagonisms.

But after a brief lull the Rightwing began to consolidate further under Kishi’s half-brother, the deceitful Sato Eisaku, prime minister 1964 -72, who as late as 1972 could pretend friendship to China while promoting the large Taiwan lobby in the LDP. 

He also managed secretly (but unsuccessfully) to lobby the Latin Americans in a bid to prevent Beijing’s 1971 entry to UN – a very significant detail ignored by the history books. 

 

But the world, ignorant of what was really going on in Japan, continued to see Japan as a peace-oriented model. 

The devious Sato was awarded the 1974 Nobel peace prize for keeping Japan out of the Vietnam War even as Japan’s Right-wingers were covertly helping the US in Vietnam.

In making the award, the peace prize committee also said ‘the Japanese Prime Minister had represented the will for peace of the Japanese people, and that he had signed the nuclear arms Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970.’

 

He did sign the treaty. But strong Rightwing opposition to ratification, led by Sato himself and his successors, lasted six years and could only be overcome in 1976 thanks to a move by ourselves in Canberra, to back up the peace-minded, progressive Miki faction in the ruling LDP opposed to the Sato faction.  (See chapter 40 of Life Story on my website.)

Already the split between hardliners and progressives in Japan was being played out before uncomprehending eyes in distant Canberra. 

…

Since then the influence of Japan’s progressives has begun to slip even further away. Beginning in the 1970’s, the hardliners have gradually gained clout, over postwar territory problems especially. 

 

The Japanese Rightwing finally began to dominate under the hard Rightwing Prime Minister, Abe Shinzo (2006-7 and 2012-20).  We began to see a much more assertive and revanchist Japan.

 

0ver territory, even minor concessions came to be seen as quite unacceptable,   ‘traitorous’ even, with the bureaucrats responsible deserving punishment, even when the Japanese position was weak and concessions were needed.

For 50 years, 70 years, 100 years – Japan would persist with its various weak positions, unchanging. 

To make sure they remained unchanging Tokyo would build monuments and designate days of the year to mark their existence – hoppo ryodo hi, Northern Territories Day, Februrary 7.

Any concession, it could be argued, would require the monument to be destroyed and the calendars to be changed. 

  

It is a dangerous way to conduct foreign policy.  Fortunately the main opposite number, China, seems also willing to wait 100 years.

…

We saw flashes of progressive recovery, under the prime-ministership of Hosokawa Morihiro, 1993-4. But inevitably his initiatives would be shot down by Rightwing snipers – by alleged exposes in that favourite magazine for Japan’s conservatives, Bungei Shinju.

Since then it has all been downhill, culminating with the deliberate misuse of the North Korean abductee issue by an Abe Shinzo bent on derailing the important Japan-North Korea, 2002 Pyongyang Declaration, promising cessation of nuclear rocket testing, among other concessions. 

The Declaration aim was to resolve the issue of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea, with an omnibus agreement for their release and better relations between the two countries.

It was negotiated by a Foreign Ministry progressive and acquaintance, Tanaka Hitoshi. His negotiating partner was in direct contact with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, whom Tanaka discovered to be much more progressive than the outside world realised. 

 

It would include a promise for normalisation of diplomatic relations, provision of significant economic aid, the suspension of rocket testing and the punishment of ‘rogue elements’ responsible for the abductions that had occurred. 

It promised not just a new era in Japan’s relations with its communist neighbour, but a new role for Japan in the north Asian region. 

But Abe simply decided Japan could ignore the document his predecessor, prime minister Koizumi Junichiro, had signed just four years earlier. 

That move would throw North Korea’s 27 million population into continuing deprivation and oppression. It should have been exposed for the diplomatic atrocity it was. Yet it remained unnoticed by an unthinking West.

With Japan-North Korean relations thrown in deadlock, Japan’s progressives – including those who helped produce that remarkable Pyongyang Declaration – have been replaced by the militaristic and revanchist.

 

One symbol of the change was the line of Rightwing politicians waiting each year to pay homage at Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, a monument unashamedly dedicated to the glories of past wars and praises for past war criminals. 

     

Naive Western observers, mesmerised into thinking Abe Shinzo was just the strong leader Japan needed, barely noticed as he went about demonising a peace-seeking North Korea, locking Japan into US  Asian policies and breaking the postwar obstacles placed on Japan’s rearmament – moves not greatly dissimilar to Hitler’s destructions of the Versailles Agreements of 1919.

 

The politicians who had tried to lead Japan into more progressive policies have been silenced, or worse. Some – Tanaka Hitoshi for example – have had their houses threatened with arson attack by Rightwing fanatics and have had to remain under police guard for years. 

For the Chinese-speaking, progressive, and once prominent LDP politician, Kato Koichi, the arson was followed by his premature death.

It has all been part of the sea change in Japan’s postwar posture – from attractive postwar pacifism to a dangerous revanchism, encouraged not just by the US but also by an Australia seemingly ignorant even that Japan’s Rightwing exists.

 

Abe Shinzo was regarded in Canberra as the brave, new leader that Japan had to have for the 20th century. This, despite his militarism and the exposure of his corrupt land deals to assist supporters – one for his wife so she could revive school teaching in Japan aligned with Japan’s past Emperor-centered feudal ethic.

The progressive leaders and bureaucrats that Japan needed so much in the postwar years were allowed to sink into obscurity. 

 

3. Moderate Japan?

The Japanese people are not an inherently Rightwing or reactionary minded nation. Given a choice at the individual level, they would probably be progressively inclined. 

In many respects – sensible acceptance of foreigners, welfare policies administered by careful bureaucrats, gender equality in the schools, restrictions on the outrageous salaries common in the West – Japan is a surprisingly progressive nation, one which we in the West could admire in some ways.

Some even used to describe it as communist. With more than 70 percent of the electorate voting without compulsion in postwar national elections (falling to around 50 percent today) the way would not seem to have been open to political parties advocating dangerously nationalistic policies. 

 

Blatantly militaristic political parties have been quickly demolished at the ballot box, with 2-3 percent voting counts in elections.

Japan does not seek war.

In the immediate postwar years Japan, briefly, even had a Socialist Party-led government – Japan’s electorate was not in the mood to vote for the kind of people who had created that war. 

But since then the Socialist Party has only managed to come out on top once – for 18 months in 1974 following a LDP implosion, with a Socialist, Murayama Tomiichi, heading a shaky coalition. 

That party has since collapsed, almost completely. The once-powerful Communist party is also in trouble.

4  Leftwing Factionalism 

So why did the moderately-minded Japanese electorate allowed conservative, or even Rightwing, governments to gain power subsequently? 

One reason was the factionalism of the ideologically-minded Left. 

The 1960 split of the mid-road Democratic Socialist Party away from the more leftist Socialist Party badly weakened progressive forces in Japan.

As Wikipedia notes: ‘Declassified United States government documents later revealed that covert CIA funding had also helped encourage the founding of this breakaway party’. 

Even after the split, the Socialists would have been able to form a government if they could cooperate with the then powerful Communist Party. But once again, factional differences said no.

In election after election, electorate after electorate, the results would be roughly the same story: LDP (35 percent of the vote), Socialists (25 percent), Communist (20), Democratic Socialists (15), Others ( around 5).

The result, in a first-past-the-post voting system: Victory for the conservative LDP candidate, despite having much less than 50 percent of the vote.

 

Any coalition of the Socialists with either the Communists or the Democratic Socialists would have spelt the defeat of the LDP candidates.  But intense factional disputes, often over minor problems, would keep them apart. 

…

Factional differences did not worry the LDP which embraced all, from a weak pro-China faction to a powerful pro-US, pro-Taiwan lobby. 

The main problem for the LDP was how to divide up the funds, licit and illicit, guaranteed once its power had been consolidated. 

The large business groupings – Keidanren, Doyukai for example – have been a consistent source of funds. And it was no secret that the CIA too was a prolific source, at least through to the end of the 1960s.

Also, and as been exposed more recently, another source has been squalid deals with religious groups for funds and votes gouged from obsessed devotees in exchange for allowing the groups to continue to exist.

 

Meanwhile the opposition parties, denied power for decades, have gradually weakened to the point where their only chance of power came in 1993 when they all came together to change the unfair electoral system.

But the Hosokawa Morihiro government which they formed (and in which I had a minor role as member of Hosokawa’s Action Committee) soon fell apart once the electoral reforms it urged were in place. 

The progressives and the leftists have managed to keep themselves out of power ever since, even though more recently the much weakened Socialists have finally picked up the courage for electoral cooperation with the Communists.

But too late. The LDP is now so firmly entrenched, and the electorate so firmly bombarded with Cold War, anti-China propaganda, as to make an Opposition win almost impossible. 

To say the un-sayable, the Japanese people maybe reverting to the crude anti-China attitudes unleashed in the 1930’s and only terminated with extreme prejudice at Hiroshima.

One indicator of the continuing China allergy is the political willingness to join any alliance that boosts Taiwan and threatens China, as if Japan has not done enough harm and insult to that nation in the past.  

 

Even the revelations, via the assassination of Abe Shinzo, of ugly LDP ties to the South Korean Unification Church (Moonies) operating in Japan, followed by revelations of funds corruption within the LDP itself, can probably be papered over enough to rescue that party from self-destruction. 

4. The Rightwing Danger Emerges – via Foreign Policy 

The speed with which Japan’s hawks have come to dominate foreign policy and obliterate progressives has been alarming. 

It is backed up by an ultra-right activism. The lines of sound trucks in Tokyo streets blaring insults and threats, sometimes using the name of the emperor, broadcasting their messages of hate against favourite enemies, usually Russia and China, says something very disturbing.

A mere hint from the imperial palace to cease using the emperor’s name for political purposes would stop these political cockroaches dead in their tracks.   But the message never comes, even from the large bureaucracy charged with protecting the regal name. 

Foreigners coming to Japan see this activism and shrug it off as a harmless Japanese foible. But the Chinese have suffered from these foibles in the past.  They do not need to suffer them again. 

The very toleration of these sound trucks, not just for their noise but also for their tacit claim to regal approval (realised by those of us who can read the kanji on the sound-trucks), is alarming. 

…

Japan’s calendar system is another dinosauric inconvenience we all have to suffer in the name of the emperor.

With the demise of an old emperor and the arrival of the new (and now we do not have to wait till they die; they are allowed to retire) everything is thrown into chaos.

A new dynastic era is supposed to begin (Showa, Heisei, Reiwa), the dates all have to go back to zero (I end up having to remember and write two birthdays-Showa 11 and 1936), computers have to be reset, the financial year has to change.

It is all part of the seeming assumption that what is Japanese will remain Japanese, for ever, even inconvenient calendars. (The Chinese have had no trouble moving to a Western calendar.) 

Even when it is territory lost by treaty or though defeat in aggressive war – that too has to reman Japanese. That those who have failed to negotiate recovery should be condemned as traitors says something.

That media which refuse to go along with the North Korean abductee fantasy should be forced to apologise is alarming, very alarming.

That the world should not even realise these moves is absurd.    

…

True, Japan’s population is declining and the flabby new generation lacks the fighting spirit of previous generations. The Japan Times of July 30, 2024, reports how in the past Navy recruits would be beaten and yelled at, but ‘these days they cry often.’ 

The ‘puppy-dog army’ has become the ‘cry-baby army?’

The Japanese were said to be avid readers. And on a train you will find some deep into serious books. But a glance at cell-phones will tell you that most are absorbed with comics and games. 

 

The idea that the Japan of today could create an army to match China is far-fetched. 

Instead, the current hope of Japan’s militarists is to link up with Taiwan and piggy-back on a militaristic US which will do the hard work of trying to defeat or divide China ― a task even Japan’s prewar armies failed to complete despite use of massacres, plague germs and scorched earth policies. 

The job now for Japan’s militarists is to keep the Japanese population and the US fired up over the need to confront a China ‘threat’ as Beijing seeks to recover some of its China Sea properties lost to the West and Japan in recent decades, and as its economy begins to overtake that of the US.

Taiwan will provide the excuse for this operation. It will be based on the very tendentious Taiwan Relations act, effective as from January 1,1979, the same date as the US formal agreement for the recognition of China. 

Despite having just recognised Beijing as the sole legal government of China, the US had passed a law allowing it in effect to go to war with China.

And it talks about a rules-based international order. 

….

Fuelling the revanchism of Japan’s rightists is the not entirely inaccurate belief that Japan’s Pacific War was forced upon it by a hegemonistic US seeking to expand into Asia and the Pacific – that its nuclear-imposed defeat was unfair, and that it was occupied by the US to promote further US hegemony.

The more informed of Japan’s revanchists also realise US responsibility for the postwar loss of some territory, the Kuriles especially, in order to promote US interests elsewhere. (I was made to realise this by former Tokyo governor in the seventies and eighties, Shunichi Suzuki, as he went out of his way to publicise my ideas of this issue and even grant me some kind of award.)

(If anyone is interested a copy it is still hanging on the living room wall of my house, in Japanese.

The aim will be not so much to defeat China (something impossible to achieve) but at least to see it split into components.

…

The crudity with which those attempting in 1980 to solve the territorial dispute with Russia were pushed aside, and even condemned traitors to the nation, showed not only how firmly Japan’s Rightwing is now in control but also the collectivist-encouraged amnesia to this control.

The thoroughness with which Japan’s foreign policy progressives involved with the 2002 attempt to normalise relations with North Korea were pushed aside by the Abe Shinzo Rightwing hinted at something even more unpleasant in the state of Japan.

 

But the world was not interested in these details, or even the ugly revelations that emerged from Abe Shinzo’s assassination.

 

Japan is a very rare example of a nation that has reached economic maturity while still in a state of relative isolation and still clinging to the more collectivist values in its original society. 

This explains the strength and attractiveness of many of the rules by which it organises itself. But it also explains the crudity of its foreign policies.

It lacks the intellectual consistency and maturity found in nations that developed in stronger contact and conflict with other nations. 

A result is that the population can easily be guided by the nationalistic mood of the moment, a mood dictated by Japan’s rightist politicians and media, as we discovered when some dared to challenge the myth about abductees allegedly remaining in North Korea.

The myth is Japan’s version of the Vietnam War M.I.A myth propagated by another immature nation, the USA. 

 Foreign Ministry moderates, alarmed by rightwing hysteria over the alleged fate of non-existent abductees, in particular that of a young woman called Megumi  taken from a beach in western Japan in 1977 and who had died in North Korea in 1994, had leaked this fact to some in the media.

(I had managed indirectly to confirm Megumi’s premature death from a chance meeting with Megumi’s mother, Sakie, in 2018)

But Japan was not interested in such details. It was determined to believe Megumi was still alive, and suffering. Those who published Foreign Ministry leaks were forced publicly not just to admit but also to apologise for their mistakes, and in one case even pay compensation.

Suppression of information on this scale normally occurs only in the most repressive dictatorships, communist or other. Often it is carried out secretly. Yet here it was being carried out openly by an alleged democracy, Japan.

…

For me the story also gets personal.

A strongly rightwing newspaper, Sankei Shimbun, with connections to the powerful Yomiuri media chain published a large front-page article about how one, Gregory Clark, had in a remote US newspaper blog written about the false abductee claims in Japan’s media.

How could this person have been given a university position where he could poison the minds of young Japanese

Almost immediately the shutters came down. Most of my committee memberships and media connections were cancelled. An earlier announcement of my appointment as outside director of Mitsui and company was withdrawn, (though it was accompanied with generous compensation).

My extraordinary five decade career in Japan was ended.

…

Meanwhile in Japan the moderate prime minister, Ishiba Shigeru, tries to keep the rightwing under some control.  But a close second to Ishiba in the LDP election to succeed the assassinated Abe was a deeply conservative and extremely rightwing lady, Takaichi Sanae,  who had been close to Abe.

One false step (and Japan’s conservative forces are adept at creating false steps), and we could well be back in the Abe Shinzo years. Even the more sensibe Ishiba has been forced to go along with the Megumi myth still propagated  by the powerful abductee lobby – the Association of Families of Victims Kidnapped by North Korea (AFVKNK) – now headed by Megumi’s younger brother, Yokota Takuya.

In 2025 Takuya led a delegation to Washington to lobby US Congressmen to work for the return of alleged remaining abductees. 

The myth continues. 

Japan is supposed to be lynchpin for Western security structures in East and South Asia.  A lynch pin that fantasises – that allows itself to be swept in whatever crazy direction its unscrupulous leaders decide?

This is a Japan very similar to the one we knew and struggled against in the 1940’s.

 …

I admit that for the most part Japan has treated me well, more than I deserved.  If Japan operates by instinctive values – by collectivist feelings rather than cold logic – then by an accident of circumstances the good feelings moved in my direction more than I deserved. 

And when they suddenly reversed I was not as dismayed as I should have been. My theories about the emotional and irrational nature of Japanese values had been proved correct, even if they also were to lead tp my almost complete exclusion from Japan’s political and social life.

Meanwhile I continue to enjoy that life in my small wooden house, facing the blue Pacific and the warm Boso sun, helped by my new wife, Carolina, with my two sons nearby, surrounded by the gardens I have planted over the years while writing memoirs.   

Japan has at least given me that option. I should not complain.