Pacific exposures

Miles, Melissa

Gerster, Robin

2018

DOAB

"Photography has been a key means by which Australians have sought to define their relationships with Japan. From the fascination with all things Japanese in the late nineteenth century, through the era of ‘White Australia’, the bitter enmity of the Pacific War, the path to reconciliation in the post-war period and the culturally complicated bilateralism of today, Australians have used their cameras to express a divided sense of conflict and kinship with a country that has by turns fascinated and infuriated. The remarkable photographs collected and discussed here for the first time shed new light on the history of Australia’s engagement with its most important regional partner. Pacific Exposures argues that photographs tell an important story of cultural production, response and reaction—not only about how Australians have pictured Japan over the decades, but how they see their own place in the Asia-Pacific. ‘Pacific Exposures presents the first study of the photographic exchanges between Australia and Japan—its photographers, personalities, motivations, anxieties and tensions—based on a diverse range of archival materials, interviews, and well-chosen photographs.’ — Dr Luke Gartlan, University of St Andrews ‘[Pacific Exposures] will become a key text on Australia’s interactions with Japan, and the way that photographs can inform cross-cultural relations through their production, consumption and circulation.’ — Prof. Kate Darian-Smith, University of Tasmania"

History

Arts in general

Medicine (General)

Languages and Literatures

English

9781760462543 (print)

9781760462550 (online)

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PACIFIC
EXPOSURES

PACIFIC
EXPOSURES
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE
AUSTRALIA–JAPAN RELATIONSHIP
MELISSA MILES AND ROBIN GERSTER

ASIAN STUDIES SERIES MONOGRAPH 11

Published by ANU Press
The Australian National University
Acton ACT 2601, Australia
Email: anupress@anu.edu.au
Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au
ISBN (print): 9781760462543
ISBN (online): 9781760462550
WorldCat (print): 1076493862
WorldCat (online): 1076494153
DOI: 10.22459/PE.2018
This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

The full licence terms are available at
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode
Cover design and layout by ANU Press.
Cover photograph: Ciaran Chestnutt, My niece, enthralled by a geisha, strolling back
from Senso-ji, 2013.
This edition © 2018 ANU Press

CONTENTS
List of Figures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’: Photographing Japan
in the Early Twentieth Century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom: 1915–41. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3. Shooting Japanese: Photographing the Pacific War. . . . . . . . . . 81
4. Japan for the Taking: Images of the Occupation . . . . . . . . . . . 113
5. Through Non-Military Eyes: Developing the Postwar
Bilateral Relationship. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)Understandings: Independent
Photography since the 1980s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
7. Conclusion: Revising ‘Us and Them’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 0.1. Untitled postcard, Wallaroo Mines c. 1915 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Figure 1.1. Futaba and Co., Untitled [Japanese Child], c. 1926. . . . . . . . . . . 12
Figure 1.2. Mortimer Menpes, Advance Japan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Figure 1.3. Leo Arthur Cotton, Untitled [Japanese Children], c. 1926 . . . . . . 19
Figure 1.4. George Rose, Cherry Blossoms, Ueno Park, Tokyo, Japan,
c. 1890–1900. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Figure 1.5. Cavendish Morton, L’Entente Cordiale from the series
‘Young Japan and Friends’, c. 1905. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Figure 1.6. Cavendish Morton, Pals from the series ‘Young Japan
and Friends’, c. 1905. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Figure 1.7. Cavendish Morton, Two Handy Men from the series
‘Young Japan and Friends’, c. 1905. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Figure 1.8. Cavendish Morton, That’s How It’s Done from the series
‘Young Japan and Friends’, c. 1905. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Figure 1.9. Anon., The Motherland’s Misalliance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Figure 1.10. George Rose, Japanese schoolboys waiting to see
soldiers bound for war. When the train arrives they all sing a war
song and shout ‘Bonzai’ (good luck), c. 1904. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Figure 1.11. Photographs of Mark Foy and family, including a trip
to Japan in 1902. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Figure 1.12. Photographs of Mark Foy and family, including a trip
to Japan in 1902. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Figure 1.13. Ruth Hollick, Untitled [Child in Kimono], c. 1910–30 . . . . . . . . . 40
Figure 2.1. Harold Cazneaux, Photographic Society Outing, Sydney,
c. 1915. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Figure 2.2. Attributed to Ichiro Kagiyama, Untitled [Portrait of JapaneseAustralian Family], c. 1915 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Figure 2.3. Photographer unknown, Mikado Farm, Guildford, 1915 . . . . . . . 53
Figure 2.4. Attributed to Ichiro Kagiyama, Untitled [White City], c. 1915 . . . . 55
Figure 2.5. Attributed to Ichiro Kagiyama, Untitled [White City], c. 1915 . . . . 55
Figure 2.6. Monte Luke, The Girl in the Kimona. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
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Pacific Exposures

Figure 2.7. Ichiro Kagiyama, Untitled [Japanese Dancing Doll] . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Figure 2.8. Attributed to Ichiro Kagiyama, Untitled [Parade], c. 1915. . . . . . . 59
Figure 2.9. Kiichiro Ishida, A White Gum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Figure 2.10. Kiichiro Ishida, Mountain Decoration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Figure 2.11. Stanley Eutrope, Winter’s Curtain, c. 1922 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Figure 2.12. Cover design for The Home, December 1921. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Figure 2.13. Ichiro Kagiyama, ‘Sydney—Seen Through Japanese Eyes’. . . . 71
Figure 2.14. Advertisement for NYK Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Figure 2.15. Ichiro Kagiyama, B.M.A Macquarie Street, from
‘Sydney—Seen Through Japanese Eyes’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Figure 3.1. George Silk, Australian Soldiers with Japanese Dead after
the Final Assault on Gona, Papua, 17 December 1942. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Figure 3.2. Norman Stuckey, Troops of the 2/16th Australian Infantry
Battalion Unearth a Dead Japanese Soldier, Shaggy Ridge area,
New Guinea, 27 December 1943. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Figure 3.3. Unknown photographer, Troops of 47th Australian Infantry
Battalion with Dead Japanese by Enemy Pillbox, Bougainville,
16 January 1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Figure 3.4. Unknown photographer, Troops of the 2/17th Australian
Infantry Battalion Search Japanese Bodies, Brunei, North Borneo,
13 June 1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Figure 3.5. Ronald Keam, Australian Infantry Filling a Mass Grave
with Japanese Dead, Bougainville, 6 April 1945 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Figure 3.6. George Silk, Lieutenant John R. Greenwood, 2/14th Australian
Infantry Battalion, New Guinea, 23 November 1942 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Figure 3.7. Unknown photographer, Japanese Prisoner Known
as ‘Mickey Mouse’, with Two Australians, Morotai, c. 1945. . . . . . . . . . . 99
Figure 3.8. Unknown photographer, Suspected Japanese War Criminals
on Trial in Darwin, March 1945 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Figure 3.9. George Silk, Wounded Japanese Carried by Australian
Soldier, c. 1942 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Figure 3.10. Unknown photographer, Two Japanese Prisoners Being
Conveyed to Casualty Clearing Station, c. 1944. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Figure 3.11. Unknown photographer, Military History Section Photographer
Lance Sergeant Norman Stuckey (left) and an Australian Soldier with
Japanese Prisoner, New Guinea, 10 October 1943. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

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List of Figures

Figure 3.12. Allan Cuthbert, Japanese Schoolgirls Welcome Home
Repatriated Prisoners-of-War, Ujina (Hiroshima), 27 June 1946. . . . . . .108
Figure 3.13. Unknown photographer, Portrait of Lieutenant William
Harry Freeman, Official photographer, Hiroshima, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Figure 4.1. Lt Gaetano Faillace, Emperor Hirohito and General
MacArthur, at Their First Meeting, at the U.S. Embassy, Tokyo,
27 September 1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Figure 4.2. William Harry Freeman, Members of BCOF Taking
Photographs of ‘Geisha Girls’, Kyoto, August 1947 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Figure 4.3. Unknown photographer, BCOF Public Relations,
Australian Soldier Shopping in Ginza, Tokyo, c. 1946–48 . . . . . . . . . . . 122
Figure 4.4. Neil Town, ‘Australia Is There—With Our Occupation Force
in Japan’, Australasian, 9 March 1946, 25 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Figure 4.5. Unknown photographer, Australian Soldiers in Hiroshima,
c. 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Figure 4.6. Allan Cuthbert, View South from Central Hiroshima,
28 February 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Figure 4.7. Alan Queale, Peace Festival, Hiroshima, 6 August 1948 . . . . . . 130
Figure 4.8. Phillip Hobson, Australian Serviceman with a Group of 
Japanese Women, Japan, c. April 1952. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Figure 4.9. Alan Queale, Venereal Disease Cases Discovered during
a Medical Examination of Japanese Female Employees of BCOF,
Hiro, 26 September 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Figure 4.10. Ron Lovitt, Pressmen Being Entertained, Japan,
date unknown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Figure 4.11. Allan Cuthbert, Japanese Shipyards Labourer, Kure, 1948. . . 139
Figure 4.12. William Harry Freeman, Emperor Hirohito on Tour,
Osaka, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Figure 4.13. Allan Cuthbert, Soldiers of BCOF 65th Battalion, on Patrol,
Fukuyama Prefecture, 10 September 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Figure 4.14. Phillip Hobson, Grandmother Gardening with Granddaughter,
Kure area, c. Nov 1949. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Figure 4.15. Alan Queale, Oysterman, Kaitaichi, Hiroshima Prefecture,
c. 1946–48. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Figure 4.16. Claude Holzheimer, Japanese Farming Family, Hiroshima
Prefecture, c. 1953. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Figure 4.17. Phillip Hobson, Australian Soldier Offering Money to Beggar,
Tokyo, 11 January 1955. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
ix

Pacific Exposures

Figure 4.18. Phillip Hobson, Australian Soldier and Japanese Stand
Guard at Ebisu Camp, Tokyo, 8 August 1954. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Figure 5.1. Stephen Kelen, Hiroshima, c. 1946–48, published in
I Remember Hiroshima (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1983), 18. . . . . . . . 154
Figure 5.2. Albert Tucker, Three Boys Near Osaka, 1947 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
Figure 5.3. Herbert Cole (‘Nugget’) Coombs, Children in a Tokyo Street,
May 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
Figure 5.4. Neville Govett, Street Scene, Hiroshima, c. 1947–49. . . . . . . . . 160
Figure 5.5. Neville Govett, Smokestack and Ventilator on the Hokkaido
Ferry, c. 1947–49. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Figure 5.6. Frederick Frueh, On the Road to the Railway Station,
Iwakuni, c. 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Figure 5.7. Brian and Cecilia McMullan, Street Scene, Kure, c. 1947–52 . . 163
Figure 5.8. Bruce Howard, Murray Rose with his Japanese Rival Tsuyoshi
Yamanaka after the 400m Freestyle Final at the 1956 Olympic Games,
Melbourne, 4 December 1956 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Figure 5.9. Photographer unknown, Prime Minister Menzies Greets
Japanese Prime Minster Kishi at Essendon Airport, Melbourne,
2 December 1957. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Figure 5.10. Ellen Brophy, ‘Memories of Japan’ (Album), Kobe-Osaka,
1957–60. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Figure 5.11. Mark Strizic, Monorail Viewed from Inside the Australian
Pavilion, Expo ’70, Osaka, 1970. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
Figure 5.12. Mark Strizic, Exterior of the Australian Pavilion, Expo ’70,
Osaka, 1970. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Figure 5.13. Photographer unknown, Visitors and Crew Make a Toast,
Darwin Harbour 1961. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
Figure 5.14. George Lipman, Matsue Matsuo Pays Her Respects to
Her Son Lieutenant Keiu Matsuo, Sydney Harbour, 29 April 1968. . . . . 181
Figure 5.15. Cliff Bottomley, Visiting Japanese Schoolchildren at an 
Australian Family Barbecue, near Melbourne, 1963. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Figure 5.16. Photographer unknown, Gough and Margaret Whitlam with
the Emperor and Empress of Japan, Tokyo, 26 October 1963 . . . . . . . 186
Figure 6.1. Christopher Köller, Untitled from the series Zen Zen
Chigau, 1984 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Figure 6.2. Christopher Köller, Untitled from the series Zen Zen
Chigau, 1984 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Figure 6.3. Kristian Häggblom, Yoyogi #11, 2006. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
x

List of Figures

Figure 6.4. Kristian Häggblom, Kichijoji #6, 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Figure 6.5. Kristian Häggblom, Aokigahara Jukai, Bible Translations,
2000. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Figure 6.6. Kristian Häggblom, Aokigahara Jukai, Donald Duck Badge,
2000. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Figure 6.7. Matthew Sleeth, 12 Views of Mt Fuji #4 [Fujikyu Highland
Park], 2004. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
Figure 6.8. Matthew Sleeth, 12 Views of Mt Fuji #43 [Shinjuku Southern
Tower Hotel], 2005. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Figure 6.9. Matthew Sleeth, 12 Views of Mt Fuji #24 [Kawaguchiko],
2004. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Figure 6.10. Matthew Sleeth, Kawaii Baby #15 [Tokyo], 2006. . . . . . . . . . . 211
Figure 6.11. Matthew Sleeth, Kawaii Baby #16 [Tokyo], 2006. . . . . . . . . . . 212
Figure 6.12. Matthew Sleeth, Millenario Lights, Marunouchi [Tokyo],
2006. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
Figure 6.13. Matthew Sleeth, North West from Shinjuku [Tokyo], 2005. . . . 215
Figure 6.14. Ciaran Chestnutt, My Niece, Enthralled by a Geisha,
Strolling Back from Senso-ji, 2013 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Figure 6.15. Meg Hewitt, Underwater Observatory, Katsuura, from Tokyo
is Yours, 2016. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Figure 6.16. Meg Hewitt, Tokyo is Yours, 2015–17. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Figure 6.17. Meg Hewitt, Tokyo is Yours, installation view, Flinders Street
Gallery, Surry Hills 2017 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Figure 7.1. Mayu Kanamori, Untitled from You’ve Mistaken Me for
a Butterfly, 2017–18. © Mayu Kanamori 2017 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Figure 7.2. Mayu Kanamori, Untitled from You’ve Mistaken Me for
a Butterfly, 2017–18. © Mayu Kanamori 2017 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228

xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Research for this book was funded by the Australian Research Council
under its Discovery Projects scheme (DP140100039). Monash
University’s faculties of Arts and Art, Design and Architecture provided
stimulating and supportive environments for this project. We are
particularly grateful to Shane Murray, Kathie Barwick, Athena Bangara,
Luke Morgan and Kristy Davidson, who provided encouragement
and invaluable assistance at various stages along the way. Research
assistants Viona Fung, Jessica Neath and Kate Warren helped with
gathering literature, images and managing image permissions for this
book at different stages throughout the research project. Kate Warren’s
commitment, attention to detail and efficiency in the final stages of this
project are greatly appreciated. We also thank Anna Berry Fukuda and
Basil Cahusac de Caux for their translations of Japanese language texts.
Parts of this book adapt and expand on articles previously published
in the journals History of Photography, History Australia, the Journal
of  Australian Studies and Meanjin, and we thank the publishers for
permission to develop the work here.
At ANU Press, Craig Reynolds championed the original proposal
through to publication. The thoughtful feedback offered by the
anonymous peer reviewers enabled us to refine and consolidate our
arguments, and Capstone Editing copyedited the final manuscript with
great care. We are indebted to the photographers Kristian Häggblom,
Mayu Kanamori, Matthew Sleeth, Meg Hewitt and Christopher Köller,
whose work is featured in this book and who generously shared their
time, work and impressive knowledge. We thank Noreen Jones for her
time, thoughtfulness and for making her image archive available to us.
In  Japan, Keiko Okubora from the Hida-Takayama Australia-Japan
Society, Kumiko Tango, Mutsumi Tsuda and Mr Tanaka provided
invaluable help in sourcing information in private and public collections.
Sincere thanks also to the Australian War Memorial, National Library
of  Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of NSW,

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Pacific Exposures

State Library of NSW, State Library of Victoria, National Archives of
Australia, Fairfax, Hiroshima Municipal Archives and the Takayama
Machi Hakubutsukan for facilitating access to photographs and for
providing reproductions. Finally, we thank our families for their tireless
support and patience over the four years of this project.

xiv

INTRODUCTION
Sometime around 1915, a dozen Australian women paused for
a  photograph as they readied for a Japanese-inspired parade at
Wallaroo Mines in Kadina on South Australia’s remote Yorke Peninsula
(see Figure 0.1). The women are dressed in homemade interpretations
of kimonos and obis and wear chrysanthemums in their hair. Two of
them hold Japanese umbrellas and one a painted fan. A young child
clutches a Japanese doll and large paper chrysanthemum as she sits in
a sedan chair decorated with flowers. The Japanese war flag, the ensign
of the powerful Imperial Navy, flutters somewhat limply near the front
of this little procession. Japan, for the time being, was an ally if not
quite a friend. Its navy was protecting Australia’s coastline and escorting
Australian troopships to distant wars for and on behalf of Great Britain.
This wartime connection is elsewhere apparent in the photograph.
Towards the back of the pictured group, one woman has adorned her
Japanese robe with the ribbon of the Australian Red Cross Society,
formed in 1914 to provide comforts to serving soldiers overseas such as
knitted socks, vests and chocolate bars.
This photographic performance of Australian conceptions of women’s
wartime duty using elements of Japanese culture speaks powerfully to the
connections between Australian perceptions of Japan and photography
at that time—connections that were to go through periods of rupture
and reconciliation in the decades to come. Photography is an evocative
means of crossing time and territory in imaginative and physical senses.
The Wallaroo Mines photograph was likely taken as a memento of
an Australia Day community pageant in 1915 in which participants
demonstrated their imagined allegiance with the Allies by appearing in
their national costumes. A group of so-called ‘geisha girls’ and ‘Japanese
ladies’ received special mention in the local newspaper.1 Japanese
decorative arts and textiles, moreover, were a la mode in Australian homes
and it was not unusual for Australian women to identify with their
Japanese sisters to the far north by posing for photographs in which they
1

‘Australia Day. Magnificent Kadina Pageant’, Kadina and Wallaroo Times, 28 July 1915, 2.
1

Pacific Exposures

Figure 0.1. Untitled postcard, Wallaroo Mines c. 1915.

Source: National Library of Australia, PIC Album 1197/2 #PIC/15675/262.

interpret and adopt their dress at home.2 Such imagined connections
are heightened by the physical movement of the photograph across time
and space. Not long after it was made, the Wallaroo Mines photograph
travelled as a postcard connecting its writer with her brother, who lived
150 km away in Adelaide. Her message wished her brother good health
and, in pointing out a special someone among the group, allowed the
photograph to bring them emotionally closer to someone far away. After
moving from one private collection to the next for almost a century,
shifting from personal keepsake to collectable, the postcard acquired
new value as an object of public cultural heritage when it entered the
National Library of Australia collection in 2013.
This kind of complex, material and imaginative movement makes
photography a valuable medium of historical analysis and cross-cultural
interpretation. Photographs are highly adaptable objects of material
culture that are equally at home in personal and public realms. Evident
2 Melissa Miles and Jessica Neath, ‘Staging Japanese Femininity: Cross-Cultural Dressing
in Australian Photography’, Fashion Theory 20, no. 4 (2016): 545–73.
2

Introduction

in their multitudes in immigration documents, government archives,
the news media, postcards, tourism, advertising, art galleries and family
albums, they also readily shift between and across these realms. Unbound
by the limitations of written or spoken language, photographs are
likewise well suited for moving between cultures. Their longevity means
they can be revisited again and again, allowing them to acquire and shed
meanings in often unpredictable ways. Yet, while they offer insight into
the big questions of history—involving identity, place and conflict—
there remains a quiet intimacy in historical photographs. When held
in the hand, they offer a powerful material connection to other people,
times and places.
Australia’s historically ambivalent relationship with Japan—its oldest
and arguably most significant regional partner—is fertile ground for
analysing the critical nexus of photography, history and cross-cultural
interpretation. While the connections between two such different
countries should not be overstated, Australia and Japan share a certain
geo-cultural commonality that lends itself to the kind of analysis that
Pacific Exposures undertakes. Both Australia and Japan are uneasily
located in the traditional East/West binary. One is ostensibly the most
‘Western’ country in the Asia-Pacific, and the other is in many ways
the most Asian country in the ‘West’. Crossing the vast Pacific in literal
and figurative senses has represented a major cultural challenge to
Australians—one that has been enabled by and reflected in photographs.
From the fascination with all things Japanese in the early twentieth
century through the bitter enmity of the Pacific War and the tortuous
path to reconciliation in the postwar period and beyond, Australians
have used photography to express a divided sense of conflict and kinship
with Japan.
It is surely significant that Neville Meaney’s comprehensive history of
transformations in Australian–Japanese relations, Towards a New Vision
(1999), was inspired by a pictorial exhibition, curated by the author,
first shown in the New South Wales Parliament House in 1997. It is
significant also that Meaney used a visual reference to signify the shifting
points of view and perspectives of two countries thrown into an unlikely,
enduring relationship.3 Understanding the cultural process of response
and reaction that characterises this relationship involves extending the
3 Neville Meaney, Towards a New Vision: Australia and Japan through 100 Years (East Roseville:
Kangaroo Press, 1999).
3

Pacific Exposures

interest in historical photographs beyond the events depicted, to also
consider what photographs do. The photographs examined in Pacific
Exposures indicate how Australians adopted an array of visual practices—
including snapshots, lanternslides, art, news photographs and military
public relations—to express their own experiences of international
relations and their changing relationship to the past. As facilitators of
encounters both real and imagined, as confronting images of battle, and
as postwar reflections of rapprochement and anticipations of a fruitful
mutual future, photographs have found an intimate place in Australian
homes and also figured prominently in the public domain.
Pacific Exposures is, therefore, a story of transnational connection
and movement—of people, ideas, labour, commodities and culture.
It acknowledges that national histories are the products of relations with
foreign countries, rather than merely an internalised vision of national
uniqueness. The photographers examined in this book are not simply
citizens, residents or public servants of Australia, they are also tourists,
consumers, migrants, artists and workers who have forged their own
emotional, material, aesthetic, familial and political links with Japan.4
In looking at these links, this book contributes to an existing body of
research that examines Australia–Japan relations from the grassroots level
to complement and extend histories structured around political, military
and economic relations.5 Further, it develops research on cross-cultural
photographic relations. Modes of photographic encounter between
Japan, Europe and the United States (US) have been the subject of
numerous books and articles. Some historians have interpreted AngloEuropean appetites for late nineteenth-century Japanese photographs as
a sign of prevailing romantic impressions of Japan as an Oriental fantasia
of cherry blossom, teahouses and geisha.6 The thriving Yokohama trade
in studio photographs has represented a particularly appealing subject
4 See Akira Iriye, ‘The Making of the Transnational World’, in Global Interdependence: The World
After 1945, ed. Akira Iriye (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
5 See Paul Jones and Pam Oliver, eds., Changing Histories: Australia and Japan (Clayton: Monash
Asia Institute, 2001); Michael Ackland and Pam Oliver, eds., Unexpected Encounters: Neglected
Histories Behind the Australia-Japan Relationship (Clayton: Monash Asia Institute, 2007); Noreen
Jones, Number 2 Home: A Story of Japanese Pioneers in Australia (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre
Press, 2002).
6 Lorraine Sterry, ‘Constructs of Meiji Japan: The Role of Writing by Victorian Women Travellers’,
Japanese Studies 23, no. 2 (2003): 178; Gennifer Weisenfeld, ‘Touring “Japan-as-Museum”: Nippon
and Other Japanese Imperialist Travelogues’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 3 (Winter
2000): 757.
4

Introduction

for historians, who have examined the production and consumption
of these images in Europe, Britain, Australia and the US.7 However,
the ways in which Australians have used photography to express their
responses to Japan, and more broadly their place in the Asia-Pacific
region, has received far less critical attention. The photographs examined
here not only provide new insight into the travels and experiences of
individual photographers, they also contribute to photography history
by revealing many other ways that photography serves as a medium for
social and cultural connection.
While structured chronologically, Pacific Exposures is not simply an
illustrated history of Australian–Japanese relations. It focuses on key
moments when the practice of photography played crucial roles in
Australian perceptions of and relations with Japan. Building on a body
of scholarship on nineteenth-century photographs of Japan and their
reception in Australia,8 this book begins in a time of major change and
ideological ferment in the two countries’ histories. The interconnected
issues of race, national identity and Australia’s tenuous identification with
its situation in the Asia-Pacific were hotly debated during the lead-up to
Federation in 1901 and through to the interwar years. (Indeed, they
have never really disappeared from the public conversation.) This period
largely coincided with Japan’s Meiji era, in which the formerly feudal
society began ostensibly to ‘Westernise’ its social structures, economy
and international relations. Significantly, Japan strenuously objected to
the racially exclusionary immigration policy that came to be popularly
known as ‘White Australia’ when it was enacted in 1901, not so much
because of its fundamental inequity, but because they saw themselves as
entitled to the same status as Europeans.9

7 Maki Fukuoka, ‘Selling Portrait Photographs: Early Photographic Business in Asakusa, Japan’,
History of Photography 35, no. 4 (2011): 355–73; Luke Gartlan, ‘Types or Costumes? Reframing
Early Yokohama Photography’, Visual Resources 22, no. 3 (2006): 239–63; Luke Gartlan, A Career
of Japan: Baron Raimund Von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Mio
Wakita, Staging Desires: Japanese Femininity in Kusakabe Kimbei’s Nineteenth Century Souvenir
Photograph (Berlin: Reimer, 2013).
8 See for example Luke Gartlan, ‘Japan Day by Day? William Henry Metcalf, Edward Sylvester
Morse and Early Tourist Photography in Japan’, Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 2 (2010);
Gartlan, ‘Types or Costumes?’, 239–63; Isobel Crombie and Luke Gartlan, Shashin: NineteenthCentury Japanese Studio Photography (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2005).
9 See Neville Meaney, The Search for Security in the Pacific (Sydney: Sydney University Press,
1976), 111.
5

Pacific Exposures

Chapter 1, ‘“The Child of the World’s Old Age”: Photographing Japan
in the Early Twentieth Century’, focuses on the significance attributed to
photographs of children at this pivotal time. Although they are less well
known than photographs of ‘exotic’ geishas, images of Japanese children
were prevalent in women’s magazines, newspapers, travel books, studio
photographs and amateur photographic performances.10 This chapter
argues that the recurrence of this symbolic imagery reveals much about
Australian perceptions of Japanese cultural traditions, its growing military
strength, industrialisation and Australia’s status as a British colony on the
fringes of the Asia-Pacific. Popularly described in Australia, Britain and
the US as ‘the child of the world’s old age’, Japan was often personified
as infantile—sometimes as an unpredictable, unmanageable enfant
terrible. The international trade in commercially produced photographs
of children, as well as postcards and tourist photographs, allowed these
and other ideas about Japan to circulate widely in public culture and
Australian homes. As  photographs of children helped to reinforce
conflicting conceptions of Japan as a children’s paradise and a budding
(and threatening) military and industrial powerhouse, they also offer
new insight into Australian attitudes towards modernity and what it
meant for the two nations.
Extending this discussion of how the Australia–Japan relationship was
represented symbolically in photographs, Chapter 2, ‘“White Australia”
in the Darkroom’, addresses how aspects of this relationship were
negotiated through direct, interpersonal relations between Australian and
Japanese photographers in the 1910s through to the 1930s. The chapter
looks at the contributions to Australian visual culture made by two
Japanese photographers living and working in Sydney during the ‘White
Australia’ era—Ichiro Kagiyama and Kiichiro Ishida. Japan’s status as
an enemy during World War II (WWII) has meant that much of the
original photographic work examined in this chapter has been hitherto
inaccessible and absent from historical analysis. Kagiyama’s intriguing
photographs of Sydney, its Japanese community and Japanese-inspired
public spectacles have only recently been rediscovered—having spent
10 See Alison Broinowski, ‘The Butterfly Phenomenon’, The Journal of the Asian Arts Society of
Australia 1, no. 3 (1992); Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni, ‘Kimono and the Construction of Gendered
and Cultural Identities’, Ethnology 38, no. 4 (Autumn 1999); Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East:
White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Mikiko Ashikari,
‘The Memory of Women’s White Faces: Japaneseness and the Ideal Image of Women’, Japan Forum
15, no. 1 (2003); Miya Elise Mizuta, ‘“Fair Japan”: On Art and War at the Saint Louis World’s Fair,
1904’, Discourse 28, no. 1 (Winter 2006); Wakita, Staging Desires.
6

Introduction

70 years in obscurity following the photographer’s return to Japan amid
escalating tensions in the lead-up to the Pacific War.11 Additionally,
many Japanese-inspired photographs produced by Australians in the first
decades of the twentieth century are now known only in reproductions
in magazines; the originals were lost, perhaps deliberately, at a time when
to express sympathy with Japan was enough to be placed under official
suspicion. As well as forming a compelling counterpoint to governmental
and military attitudes towards Japan during this period, this chapter
highlights how past political and military relations can shape historians’
access to photographs and how the more secure bilateral relationship
today affords a deeper investigation of these once neglected images
of the interwar period.
Chapter 3, ‘Shooting Japanese’, discusses the Australian photography of
the Pacific War from 1941 to 1945, which came to dominate and even
define Australian relations with Japan long after the military conflict
itself had ended. A large corps of official Australian photographers—
working for both government and civilian agencies—expressed the racial
ideology of a war fought against an opponent who was increasingly
loathed as hostilities intensified. Their battlefield pictures of the
Australian encounter with the Japanese, including graphic and often
deliberately demeaning pictures of the dead or captured enemy, reflected
the compulsions of wartime propaganda. At the same time, they also
expanded on a body of visual and textual cultural references derived from
decades of concern about the threat of invasion and revealed the national
obsession with the battlefield as the ultimate arena for a contest of rival
national masculinities. Australian photographers, including George Silk
and others less well known, produced some remarkable pictures of the
vicious conflict with the Japanese in the jungles and on the beaches of
the Pacific islands. However, the enormous photographic archive has
been largely ignored, except as a source of emotive illustrative material
to popular and tendentiously patriotic histories of the campaign. This
chapter delves deep into that archive to provide insights into national,
cultural, military and geopolitical insecurities, as Australians sought
to identify and produce purportedly definitive images of the Japanese
bogeyman.

11 Melissa Miles, ‘Ichiro Kagiyama in Early Twentieth Century Sydney’, Japanese Studies 37,
no. 1 (2017): 89–116.
7

Pacific Exposures

Australia’s enthusiastic participation in the US-led postwar military
occupation of a defeated and temporarily demoralised Japan was a pivotal
historical moment in its postwar relations with Japan, and with the AsiaPacific region generally. Chapter 4, ‘Japan for the Taking’, examines how
photography was the principal medium by which the Occupation of
Japan was both officially recorded and circulated to the Australian people
back home, a public that remained hostile to and deeply suspicious of its
recent, bitter adversary. Phillip Hobson, Alan Queale and their colleagues
formed a large cohort of official photographers charged with capturing
the activities of the Australian military community in Japan—a force
based largely in Hiroshima Prefecture, quite literally in the shadow of
the atom-bombed city. Their images expressed the ambivalence of a force
torn between the punitive control of a Japan still hated for the barbarities
committed by its military against Allied prisoners of war and the wellintentioned governmental commitment to its positive reconstruction.
The photography of the Occupation is analysed as a collective example
of neo-colonialist visual representation. The images strategically
produced to provide positive public relations for the occupying force
betray a fundamental if illuminating contradiction. The postwar Japan
they portrayed was dependent on the received imagery of the traditional,
essentially rural Japan; the country was voided of ugly reminders of the
war and pictured as timelessly ‘picturesque’, paradoxically so given that
one of the major rationales for the Occupation was to revamp Japan into
a forward-thinking, advanced nation. That the official photographers
were so resistant to signs of the emerging Japan reflects a broader
postwar Australian anxiety about the powerful modern nation it was in
the process of becoming.
Chapter 5, ‘Through Non-Military Eyes’, looks at photography as
a register of revisionary images of Japan in the late 1940s through to the
epochal signing of the Basic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in
Tokyo in 1976, when Australia sought to finalise conclusive links with
Japan, economically, politically and culturally. Photography was a crucial
tool of rapprochement in the rebuilding of the bilateral relationship in
this period. For all their indulgence in the privileges of the conqueror,
the men and women of the large Australian military community in
Occupied Japan were the trailblazers of a new era of engagement with
the Asia-Pacific region, later signified by the reoriented itineraries of
Australian travellers and the belated embrace of Eastern cultures. Many
of the private pictures taken in Occupied Japan identified a nation
8

Introduction

to which the official picture was blind—a country that was rapidly
modernising and responding to outside influences while remaining
true to its cultural roots. Post‑Occupation, the photographic record of
the Australians in Japan from the 1950s to the 1970s suggests a visual
narrative of reinterpretation, in which the recently despised ‘enemy’
was humanised and revisioned as a potential ‘friend’ and ally. Beyond
the pragmatic forging of diplomatic and trade links, photography was
the most productive means by which Australians sought not merely to
reconcile themselves to Japan but also to identify with it. An essentialised
‘traditional’ Japan was reframed into a dynamic society whose bright
promise could bring benefit to Australia. Sources include both press
and governmental images of interaction in fields such as trade, sport
and forms of popular culture. These images of both momentous and
mundane examples of cultural and political diplomacy are sometimes so
contrived that they inadvertently suggest the tensions that continued
to simmer beneath the smiling surface of bilateralism.
‘Cross-Cultural (Mis)Understandings’, the sixth and final chapter,
considers how several Australian photographic artists since the 1980s have
rejected the clichés of yesteryear and emphasised ambiguity, contradiction
and even deliberate misapprehension in their interpretations of Japan.
Seemingly in conflict with bland contemporary discourses of ‘mutual
understanding’, these independent photographers have eschewed the
official representational niceties of closer Australian–Japanese relations
dominated by discussions of trade and security. Christopher Köller,
Matthew Sleeth, Kristian Häggblom and Meg Hewitt use their cameras
to ask more difficult questions at a time characterised by a more mutually
confident bilateral relationship. In doing so, they have developed complex
responses to Japan and Japanese people that speak to new possibilities
of cross-cultural photographic interpretation. Their work suggests that
Australia has arrived at a point in its responses to Japan when it is now
no longer necessary to say—and photograph—the ‘right thing’. Their
images of today’s Japan provoke us to re-examine the past and think
critically about how we come to know it. Japan is no more seen reduced
to ‘the child of the world’s old age’, but a photographic subject both
captivating and confounding, a place to build personal friendships and
professional networks, and one open to multiple opportunities while at
the same time frustratingly—but nonetheless fruitfully—uncapturable.

9

Pacific Exposures

Pacific Exposures argues that photographs and photographic practices
tell a compelling story of cultural production and response. Making,
distributing and interpreting photographs are fundamentally cultural
and political practices that show how people relate to one another and
how they see themselves in the world. Whether made in times of peace
or conflict, photographs both produce and are the products of relations.
Therefore, the following chapters reveal not only how Australians have
framed Japan over the decades, but also how they have defined their own
place in the Asia-Pacific—through periods of heated social debate and
political turbulence, vicious armed conflict, and social and economic
changes that have been both dramatic and incremental—to arrive at
today’s era of bilateral cooperation and exchange. In seeking to represent
and relate to Japan, Australians have revealed much about themselves.

10

1
‘THE CHILD OF THE WORLD’S
OLD AGE’: PHOTOGRAPHING
JAPAN IN THE EARLY
TWENTIETH CENTURY
In 1926, while visiting Japan as a delegate to the third Pan-Pacific Science
Congress in Tokyo, the Australian geologist Professor Leo Cotton
purchased a series of lantern slides as mementos of his trip. Based at the
University of Sydney, Cotton was the father of the celebrated modernist
photographer Olive Cotton, who was just 15 years old when he made the
trip. Along with photographs reflecting his research interests, including
the crater rim of volcanic Mt Aso, Cotton collected photographs
of Japanese children. One lantern slide produced by Futaba and Co. of
Kobe features a joyful young child wearing a beautifully crafted silk vest
and ceremonial kimono (see Figure 1.1). The distinctive blurred edged
geometric pattern of the kasuri textile has been brightly hand coloured
to accentuate the child’s vitality and enhance the commercial appeal of
the photograph. The child exuberantly waves the rising sun flag, which
was adopted as the war flag of the Imperial Japanese Army in 1870 at the
beginning of the Meiji era (1868–1912). Combining youth, innocence,
artistic traditions and Japan’s imperial might in one very appealing image,
the photograph distilled many of Australia’s impressions of Japan itself.
This chapter focuses on the ways in which Australian perceptions of
Japan were visualised in photographs of children during a critical time
in the two countries’ histories. For Australia, the period from the lead-up
to Federation in 1901 to the interwar years was one in which national
identity and Australia’s place in the Asia-Pacific were hotly debated. This
period coincided with a time of radical change in Japan, during which
11

Figure 1.1. Futaba and Co., Untitled [Japanese Child], c. 1926.

Source: National Library of Australia, ‘Papers of Olive Cotton, approximately 1907–2003’,
MS Acc11.129.

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

its social structures, economy, military, industries and international
relations were reshaped. Described popularly as ‘the child of the world’s
old age’, Japan was frequently personified in the Australian press and
travel writing as essentially childlike, innocent or unruly. The symbolic
dimensions of the child and the ‘real’ children who were photographed
are inextricably linked in these photographs. Embodying views of Meiji
Japan as a fledgling modern nation and an emergent partner in the AsiaPacific region, photographs of children satisfied demand for images
of Japanese culture as ancient yet forged through innocent artistic
sensibilities.
Commercially produced photographs of children, like that purchased
by Cotton, and postcards and tourist photographs affirmed these
conceptions of Japan-as-child and allowed this imagery to find a place
in Australian homes. Personal and public modes of cross-cultural
encounter are intertwined in this process. The scale and light weight
of photographs made them highly portable objects of material culture,
and facilitated their movement across the seas with travellers or through
the mail. Postcards, family photographs and photographs produced
commercially were collected, assembled in albums and stored in the
home where they also operated as a means of interpreting international
relations and defining political and diplomatic networks. In these
photographs, the domestic, diplomatic, industrial and imperial are
enmeshed in fascinating ways.

Two Child Nations
It is not surprising that a commercially produced photograph of
a Japanese child caught Cotton’s eye during his travels. Beginning decades
before Cotton’s visit and extending many years beyond his return, the
child was invoked symbolically and metaphorically in descriptions of
Japan, Japanese culture and Japanese people in the Australian press. This
language is evident in popular descriptions of the Japanese courts in
Australian international exhibitions, which staged many Australians’
first encounters with Japan. Art critic James Smith’s description of the
artisans at the Japanese court at the 1880 Melbourne exhibition reflects
how the childlike innocence of the artist sat alongside conceptions
of ancient Japan ‘awakening’ to the ‘West’:

13

Pacific Exposures

In a word, the mind of the executant appears to be as young, as open
to impressions from external phenomena, as receptive of lessons from
every object he sees, and as capable of spontaneous, almost childlike,
admirations, as if it belonged to the member of a race living in the infancy
of civilisation; while the hand which fulfils the behests of that mind is
the hand of an accomplished artificer, of a master craftsman, with all
the dexterity and finesse capable of being acquired and exercised by one
belonging to our ‘wondrous mother age’. He is old in the technique of
his art, but youthful in thought and feeling.1

Smith’s comments encapsulate how childlike innocence became code for
authenticity, in which ‘authentic’ Japan was grounded in artistic naiveté
and ancient traditions.
Popular notions of Japan-as-child must, therefore, be distinguished from
what eighteenth-century European commentators and missionaries
commonly referred to as ‘child races’. Underpinning this troubling
concept is the belief that races are marked by a progression from infancy
to maturity, as with individuals. ‘Primitive’ races were identified with
the intelligence and innocence of children, deemed to lack rational
thought and seen to become threatening if they reached adulthood too
quickly. Recognition of Japan’s ancient civilisation and artistic traditions
meant that it was not viewed as a child race in these terms. Yet, there is
a comparable desire to position Japan as the subordinate to Britain and
Europe, which were implicitly cast as more developed and advanced.
The description of Japan as ‘the child of the world’s old age’ provided
a very popular means of reconciling this sense of ancient Japan with
its Meiji-era modernity. This pervasive expression was popularised by
Henry Norman’s book, The Real Japan (1891), and was repeatedly used
in the Australian press to describe Japan as ‘young in years, but old in
wisdom’ during the first decades of the twentieth century.2 The expression

1 James Smith, ‘The Japanese Exhibits and Japanese Art’, Argus, 5 March 1881, 4.
2 Henry Norman, The Real Japan. Studies of Contemporary Japanese Manners, Morals,
Administration, and Politics (London: FT Unwin, 1891), 337. The phrase ‘child of the world’s old
age’ recurred throughout the press and popular culture. For example, ‘The Anglo-Japanese Treaty’,
Freeman’s Journal, 22 February 1902, 21; ‘Hard Case of Japan’, Tasmanian News, 22 December 1903,
2; ‘Just Now in Little Japan. The Child of the World’s Old Age’, Evening Telegraph, 15 February
1904, 2; ‘Japan. The Child of the World’s Old Age’, Wyalong Advocate and Mining, Agricultural and
Pastoral Gazette, 2 March 1904, 4; ‘Japanese Courage’, Newsletter, 20 February 1904, 11; ‘Some
Reflections’, Gerldton Guardian, 2 October 1913, 2; ‘Japan’, Daily Examiner, 29 April 1918, 2.
Pastor and Mrs Greenaway, missionaries from Japan, toured offering lectures including one titled
‘Japan! Child of the World’s Old Age’ in Brisbane in July 1938.
14

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

positioned Japan as a child of modernity, yet ‘brought up by parents
who lived through centuries of development and civilisation’.3 Such
newspaper and travel texts served as pre-reading for travellers to Japan,
anticipating their search for ‘authentic’ Japan, shaping itineraries and
informing their selection of photographic subjects. Photographs like
Cotton’s souvenir lantern slide reproduced that sense of authenticity
for travellers, validating their experiences and reiterating impressions of
Japan-as-child among family and friends when they returned.
Like Japan—but more so—Australia was perceived to be a fledgling
nation. The Japanese political geographer Shiga Shigetaka personified
Australia as a child in his book, Current Affair in the South Seas, written
after his visit to Australia in 1886. In a section addressing Australia’s
potential for independence from Britain, Shiga likened the Australian
colonies to a newly hatched egg evolving into an adult:
The child is obviously now becoming an adolescent; as it begins to have
a mind of its own, it is searching for its own national identity, distancing
itself from its mother country Britain.4

Australia often represented  itself in comparable terms. People born in
Australian colonies—framed as  a  population yet to mature or find its
own voice—became known as ‘Young Australia’ in the 1880s. After the
New South Wales Government sent Australian troops to fight under
British command in Sudan in 1885, Young Australia took the form of
‘The Little Boy from Manly’. This character was named after a real boy
who wrote to the government expressing his desire to join the troops. In
political publications like the Bulletin and the Melbourne Punch, ‘The
Little Boy from Manly’ was represented as a Fauntleroy-like boy clad in
pantaloons, frilled shirt and flat peaked cap looking up to John Bull—
the personification of British paternalism and authority.5 Although Japan
and Australia were both identified with children, this sense of a young
British colony and emergent Australian identity differs significantly
from representations of Japan-as-child, which were repeatedly linked to
assumptions about Japan as a land of ancient artistic traditions.

3 ‘Japan’, 2.
4 Shigetaka Shiga, Nan’yō Jiji (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1887), 41–45.
5 Ken Inglis, ‘Young Australia 1870–1900: The Idea and the Reality’, in The Colonial Child, ed.
Guy Featherstone (Melbourne: Royal Historical Society of Victoria, 1981), 1–23.
15

Pacific Exposures

A Paradise for Babies
P.L. Pham described how British and American commentators on Japan
readily slipped between descriptions of Japanese children and ascribing
childlike characteristics to the country itself.6 This slippage is particularly
evident in references to Japan as a ‘paradise’ for children and babies,
a notion attributed to the British consul general in Japan, Rutherford
Alcock, and his book, The Capital of the Tycoon.7 Japan’s reputation as
a ‘paradise of babies’ was popularised in Australian, British and US
travel writing through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and pervaded the Australian press from the 1890s to the 1920s.8 These
publications variously referred to the freedom enjoyed by Japanese
children, their many opportunities for play and the love and patience
that they were shown by their attentive mothers. An appreciation for
artistic creativity and the natural world, as well as the love of play, were
said to stay with Japanese children into adulthood as an essentially
Japanese characteristic.
Although they proliferated in Australia during the early twentieth
century, conceptions of childlike Japan have a much longer international
history. Pierre Loti belittled the Japanese as a ‘frivolous and childish
people’ throughout Madame Chrysanthème.9 Mortimer Menpes, an
Australian-born British painter who visited Japan in 1887 and 1896,
also wrote of the ‘almost childish simplicity of the Japanese woman’ in
Japan: A Record in Colour.10 In a section on children, Menpes argued
that the ‘national artistic and poetic nature of the Japanese people’
6 P.L. Pham, ‘On the Edge of the Orient: English Representations of Japan, Circa 1895–1910’,
Japanese Studies 19, no. 2 (1999): 170.
7 Rutherford Alcock, The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in Japan
(London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863), 82.
8 William Elliot Griffis, The Mikado’s Empire (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1895), 452;
Henry T. Finck, Lotus-Time in Japan (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1895), 314; Douglas
Sladen and Norma Lorimer, More Queer Things About Japan (London: Anthony Treherns and Co.,
1905), xxi; James A.B. Scherer, Japan Today (Philadelphia and London: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1905),
94; ‘A  Children’s Paradise’, Adelaide Observer, 4 July 1896, 34; ‘A Children’s Paradise’, Evening
Journal, 4 July 1896, 3; ‘The Children’s Paradise’, Daily News, 5 August 1899, 1; ‘The  Paradise
of Children’, Armidale Express and New England General Advertiser, 20 September 1901, 2;
‘The  Children’s Paradise’, Adelaide Observer, 30 May 1903, 8; ‘The Children’s Paradise’, Sydney
Mail and NSW Advertiser, 25 March 1903, 742; ‘Japan. A Paradise for the Little Children’,
Brisbane Courier, 10 May 1911, 20; ‘Child’s Paradise. Sidelights on Japan’, Sydney Morning Herald,
25 December 1923, 8; ‘A Child’s Paradise’, Advertiser, 29 December 1923, 14.
9 Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthème (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1897), 44, 125,
182, 218, 308.
10 Mortimer Menpes, Japan: A Record in Colour (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 126.
16

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

Figure 1.2. Mortimer Menpes, Advance Japan.
Source: Mortimer Menpes, Japan: A Record in Colour
(New York: Macmillan, 1901).

is embodied in  children. Looking forward to the ways in which
photographs of Japanese children  came to symbolise these qualities,
some of Menpes’s painted illustrations of children were given allegorical
titles such as Advance Japan (see Figure 1.2) and Young Japan. Geo H.
Rittner described ‘artistic’ Japan as a nation of people who never lose
their love of play and childlike fascination for nature. His Impressions of
Japan asked readers to:
Imagine an aged gentleman with grey hair flying a kite for pure
amusement, playing marbles, or spinning tops. We should term it
second childhood, but in Japan that is unknown; they are born children,
and die children.11
11 Geo Rittner, Impressions of Japan (New York: James Pott and Co., 1904), 112.
17

Pacific Exposures

This sense of Japan as a land of adults who never lose their childhood
innocence recurs in the Australian press during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Douglas Sladen’s account of ‘child life in
Japan’ proclaimed:
It has been the lifelong prayer and advice of every Japanese parent for
endless generations that their children, when they have reached the estate
of men and women, should retain their child’s hearts … Childhood
certainly is the Golden Age in Japan, more than in any other country
in the world.12

Other articles linked descriptions of the model behaviour of Japanese
children to aspects of traditional culture such as festivals for children,
lovingly made and gaily coloured children’s kimonos, and even Japanese
architecture.13 Children accordingly became potent symbols of Japanese
cultural traditions and the supposedly childlike qualities of the Japanese
people more broadly. Photographs proved an ideal medium for
reinforcing this image of Japan-as-child. As the photograph arrests time
and fixes the child in an image forever, it dramatises the very idea of
Japan as an eternal child.
Futaba and Co.’s commercially produced photograph of a child waving
a flag in a glorious ceremonial kimono capitalises on this widespread
international interest in children as symbols of Japan. Cotton’s own
appreciation of this imagery is also reflected in another item in his small
collection of Japanese glass lantern slides. Taken by Cotton at Lake
Chūzenji near the celebrated shrine site Nikko, it features a group of
plump children in kimonos, including two small children who each
carry a baby on their backs (see Figure 1.3). Cotton has framed the
children quite tightly so they dominate the photograph, and the elderly
woman accompanying them is cropped almost entirely out of the image.
By crouching down to their level and photographing the two children
on the left in profile, Cotton captured the full length of their little bodies
and the relative scale of the babies they carried. In this practice, known
in Japanese as onbu, babies were secured to the backs of their carers with
a pair of crossed sashes. The practice offered babies a form of close contact
with a loved one, deemed important for the socialisation of children, but
to tourists and travel writers it had long attracted attention as a sign of
Japanese exoticism.
12 Douglas Sladen, ‘Child Life in Japan’, Brisbane Courier, 15 October 1904, 13.
13 ‘The Children’s Paradise’, 1; ‘Child’s Paradise. Sidelights on Japan’, 8; ‘A Child’s Paradise’, 14;
‘Japan. A Paradise for the Little Children’, 20; ‘The Paradise of Children’, 1.
18

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

Western travellers viewed onbu with a mixture of admiration and scorn.
To Menpes, the practice was evidence of the impressive deportment
of Japanese children.14 For others, it was a marker of these children’s
extraordinary sense of responsibility. In an article referring to Japan as a
‘paradise for little children’, a writer for the Brisbane Courier described
how Japanese children between the ages of six and 10 learn to take
responsibility in the household:
As soon as a baby is born it is handed over to a sister, who takes care
of it, and it is a common sight in Japan to see little girls of 6 or 7 with
sleeping babies strapped to their backs like a knapsack … Hence when
quite babies themselves they are taught to look after others.15

Figure 1.3. Leo Arthur Cotton, Untitled [Japanese Children], c. 1926.

Source: National Library of Australia, ‘Papers of Olive Cotton, approximately 1907–2003’,
MS Acc11.129.

14 Menpes, Japan: A Record in Colour, 140.
15 ‘Japan. A Paradise for the Little Children’, 20. This article was published in several US
newspapers in 1910, reflecting the international circulation of these ideas. See ‘The Flowery Land’,
Cook County Herald, 18 March 1910, 14; ‘Nippon Babies’ Paradise’, Detroit Free Press, 17 April
1910, 40; ‘A Paradise of Babies’, Plymouth Tribune 9, no. 31 (1910): 3.
19

Pacific Exposures

Others were far more critical, arguing that this responsibility was
harsh on the young carrier, a sign of lazy ‘selfish, cruel’ mothers and
the cause of physical damage to young bodies.16 It is interesting that
Yanagawa Masakiyo, a shogunal envoy on the first Japanese mission to
the US, found Western preferences for baby carriages just as shocking.
He commented in a diary entry on 23 May 1860 that:
In Washington and Philadelphia and all other American cities the
mothers do not carry their babies on their backs or in their arms but put
them in small baby carriages which are pushed by maidservants.17

Repeated references to onbu made it a potent signifier of Japanese
traditions and conceptions of Japan-as-child. Photographs of women
and children carrying babies on their backs, produced for the substantial
international tourist market in Japan by studio photographers Felice
Beato and T. Enami, helped to reinforce this interest. An enterprising
Melbourne photographer, George Rose, circumvented the need for
Australian collectors of Japanese photographs to take the long journey
to Japan. During his visit to Japan in 1904, Rose produced many
photographs of the Japanese people and countryside. He also made
an arrangement with Enami to publish his photographs in Australia
and distribute them through the Rose studio.18 Alongside Rose’s many
stereographs of pretty geishas and gardens filled with cherry blossoms
are several photographs of children. Cherry Blossoms, Ueno Park, Tokyo,
Japan (see Figure 1.4) features Japanese women carrying babies on their
backs, while The Perambulators of Japan depicts Japanese babies being
carried on the backs of their older sisters.19
Stereography added to the experience of these images. Commercialised
in the 1850s and 1860s, stereographs were immensely popular in
the United Kingdom, the US, Europe and Australia from this period
through to the early twentieth century. Stereography was thought to
be particularly suited to the depiction of foreign sites because of the
16 Connie Keat, ed. Amy’s Diaries: The Travel Notes of Elizabeth Amy Cathcart Payne 1869-1875
(Morwell: LaTrobe Valley U3A, 1995), 57. ‘Child Nursing in Japan’, Darling Downs Gazette,
27 June 1907, 2; Douglas Sladen, Queer Things About Japan (1904; repr., London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trübner & Co., 1913), 16–17.
17 Lizbeth Halliday Piel, ‘The Ideology of the Child in Japan 1600–1945’ (PhD diss., University
of Hawaii, 2007), 28.
18 Ron Blum, George Rose: Australia’s Master Stereographer (Oaklands Park: Ron Blum, 2008), 65–68.
19 US Marine Joe O’Donnell’s moving photograph of a young Japanese boy standing erect with
a  lifeless, slumped baby strapped to his back at a crematory in Nagasaki in 1945 decades later
became a powerful image of lost innocence in the wake of the atomic bombing.
20

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

Figure 1.4. George Rose, Cherry Blossoms, Ueno Park, Tokyo, Japan,
c. 1890–1900.
Source: State Library of Victoria. Accession no: H83.125/88.

illusion of three dimensions it created.20 In the closed viewing field of
the stereoscope, which was held right up to the face, stereographs offered
a highly accessible form of simulated travel within the home, especially
appealing to those without the means of travelling themselves. The Rose
Stereograph Company’s employment of six staff is indicative of the high
demand that these photographs generated in Australia. Photographs of
foreign countries occupy a significant proportion of Rose’s catalogue,
with Japan being the subject of over 200 stereographs.
In contrast to the private viewing space of the stereoscope and the intimate
familial enjoyment of photo albums, lantern slides, like those purchased
and produced by Cotton, afforded the display of the photograph on
a larger scale for collective spectatorship. Slides were viewed with the
use of a projector for public entertainment, educational lectures or in
the home among family and friends.21 Public lantern slide lectures on
Japan were also offered in Australia at this time, including one given by
Professor Arthur Sadler who taught Oriental Studies at the University

20 Joan M. Schwartz, ‘The Geography Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of Imaginative
Geographies’. Journal of Historical Geography 22, no. 1 (1996): 16; Pauline Stakelon, ‘Travel through
the Stereoscope: Movement and Narrative in Topological Stereoview Collections of Europe’, Media
History 16, no. 4 (2010): 407–15.
21 Joy Sperling, ‘From Magic Lantern Slide to Digital Image: Visual Communities and American
Culture’, The Journal of American Culture 31, no. 1 (2003): 1.
21

Pacific Exposures

of Sydney.22 Such lectures offered a kind of armchair travel that was
entertaining, public and communal. Popular conceptions of Japan-aschild helped to incorporate the fragmentary impressions offered by the
photographs into a unified experience for both the traveller and viewer.23

Child Labour and Education
One of the consequences of the repeated recycling of these ideas was that
modernity and Japan’s Meiji-era industrial growth were framed as both
the source of Japan’s youth and the cause of its potential corruption.
Geo Rittner accordingly lamented that ‘formerly every man, woman,
and child in that country was a born artist, but through the change it
has undergone, much of the artistic feeling has been destroyed’.24 This
sense of the damaging power of modernisation and industrialisation is
particularly evident in discussions of Japanese child labour. Japanese
industrial expansion from the 1880s saw a growth in child labour outside
of the home. Work in factories manufacturing cigarettes, textiles, shoes
and matches proved a more cost-effective alternative for families to child
labour within the home because it provided families with much needed
cash. As child workers were paid around one-quarter of the rate of adults,
it also provided Japanese manufacturers with a significant advantage
over foreign competitors in international markets. In the early twentieth
century, Australian newspapers commented critically on these child
labour practices as a source of corruption for the ‘child’s paradise’. More
sensational commentaries referred to ‘child slaves of Japan’, ‘Japan, the
child devourer’ and ‘factory prisoners’.25 Criticism of child labour was
concentrated particularly heavily in workers’ publications. One article
quoted Walter Kingsley from World’s Work, who described the Japanese
capitalist as ‘the most remorseless devourer of little ones the world has
ever known’. Contrasting Meiji Japan with an imagined pre-modern
ideal, the article noted that children:

22 ‘Japan. Country Life’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 July 1923, 16; ‘Lecture on Japan’, Mercury,
14 January 1909, 3; ‘Lecture on “Through Japan”’, Brisbane Courier, 18 October 1912, 9.
23 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Postcards—Greetings from Another World’, in The Tourist Image: Myths
and Myth Making in Tourism, ed. T. Selwyn (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), 201.
24 Rittner, Impressions of Japan, 138–39.
25 ‘Child Slaves of Japan’, Truth, 4 March 1911, 9; ‘Japan the Child Devourer’, Worker, 9 January
1908, 18; ‘The Child Slaves of Japan’, Worker, 11 February 1911, 2.
22

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

do not laugh as blithely as in the old days. Happiness was their heritage
then, but now the nation demands that the little ones go to work at
a time of life regarded in England as infancy. In the manufacturing cities
like Osaka there are no longer seen thousands of boys and girls playing
in dainty, many-colored costumes like gorgeous butterflies on the grass
of temples. You will find them in coarse dull clothing, working like
pathetic dolls in the factories. These babes toiling for a few pennies a day
form a vast and sorrowful army.26

International concerns over child labour during this period extended
well beyond Japanese child factory workers and became an important
feature of the early history of social documentary photography in the
US. American photographer Lewis Hine hoped that his photographs of
children working in mines, factories, textile mills and canneries would
bring about an end to the exploitation of child labour in his home
country, but it took many years before changes to child labour practices
had an impact.
The immense popularity of photographs and texts that locate Japanese
children in an idyllic, pre-industrial context is indicative of international
resistance to the roles children played in Japan’s industrialisation. This
criticism of Japan’s supposed transformation from a child’s paradise to
Dickensian nightmare can be seen in part as a reaction to Japan’s sizable
exports of cheap textiles, produced for costs with which Australia and
Britain could not compete. It was also informed by Australian shifts in
ideologies of childhood from Victorian notions of its essential innocence
to ideals of childhood health supported by the rise of the infant welfare
movement and the professionalisation of childcare. Australian women in
the early twentieth century were increasingly ‘instructed in the science
of motherhood’ as a mode of progressive thought justified in terms of
humanitarianism and the growth of the modern nation.27 The criticism
of Japanese child labour helped Australians to define their own modernity
in terms of the vigour, strength and promise of youth.
In Meiji Japan, approaches to childhood were also being redefined
in relation to the needs and ambitions of the modern nation.
Industrialisation, the movement towards universal education and greater
investment in childhood development led to new ideologies of the
26 ‘Japan the Child Devourer’, 18.
27 Judith Raftery, ‘“Mainly a Question of Motherhood”: Professional Advice-Giving and Infant
Welfare’, Journal of Australian Studies 19, no. 45 (1995): 67.
23

Pacific Exposures

child in the twentieth century. Compulsory elementary education was
introduced in 1872 ‘with the goal of preparing Japan’s future generations
for “civilization and enlightenment” (bunmei kaika)’. The dilemma for
the Meiji government was that while it valued education, it also sought
to protect its industries and resist ‘taking actions that would raise the
cost of production, such as restricting the availability of low-wage child
workers’.28
Lizbeth Halliday Piel has pointed out that the higher ratio of girls to boys
in factories correlated with the lower ratio of girls to boys in schools.29
Yet, the education of girls was deemed especially important. The Japanese
ideal of ryōsai kenbo or ‘good wives and wise mothers’ gained momentum
in the late nineteenth century and played an important role in the
redesign of Meiji-era education for girls. The ideal combined Japanese
traditions of feminine restraint with British conceptions of the Victorian
woman. This Victorian ideal of motherly virtue was also evident in other
nations undergoing processes of modernisation. As ‘good wives and wise
mothers’, Japanese women helped to advance the nation by building
a workforce capable of competing with the West, acting as helpmates to
their husbands and teachers to their sons. Piel argued that:
With the exception of a handful of protesters such as Ueki Emori and
Yokoyama Gennosuke, concern over child labor [in Japan] was not
driven by sentimentality or sympathy for children. It was driven by the
Meiji Government’s agenda for mass indoctrination through schools,
as well as by the army’s need for fit soldiers.30

Infant Prodigy and Enfant Terrible
Meiji Japan’s military and diplomatic advances were another important
context in which notions of Japan-as-child were contested and
re‑evaluated. Japanese writers took exception to Western representations
of childlike Japan. In ‘Misunderstood Japan’, published in The North
American Review in 1900, Ozaki argued that such ‘misconceptions were
corrected’ by Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). He
lamented that, in early 1894, ‘Japan was regarded as a spoiled child,

28 Piel, ‘The Ideology of the Child in Japan 1600–1945’, 95, 103.
29 Ibid., 100. In 1877, an estimated 55.97 per cent of boys were enrolled in school compared to
22.48 per cent of girls. Some 20 years later (in 1895), the number of girls enrolled in school had
doubled to 43.87 per cent, but still lagged behind the number of boys at 61.24 per cent.
30 Ibid., 107.
24

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

wantonly bent on amusing herself with her newly devised toy army and
navy’. Yet, by mid-1895, in foreign eyes Japan had become ‘a formidable
military power … a deadly menace to the peace of the Far East’.31 Some of
Ozaki’s sentiment is echoed in Kakuzo Okakura’s book, The Awakening
of Japan, published in English in 1905. Like Ozaki, this Japanese
scholar remarked that ‘until recently the West has never taken Japan
seriously … We are both the cherished child of modern progress and
a dread resurrection of heathendom—the Yellow Peril itself!’32 At least
one Australian commentator agreed that the dramatic growth of Japan’s
military power meant that it had left its childhood behind:
Japan has been described by somebody as the ‘child of the world’s old
age’, and if that were ever true of Japan in the past it only requires a brief
practical experience of the present condition of the ‘Land of the Rising
Sun’ to convince the most sceptical that it is now developing rapidly into
a vigorous manhood.33

These comments highlight the gendered quality of these discourses of
Japan-as-child. Whereas Meiji-era Japan’s growing military and industrial
strength were typically identified with boys, conceptions of Japan as
artistic, traditional and eternally childlike were commonly feminised.
Despite such commentaries about Meiji Japan’s impending maturity, the
view of Japan as ‘the cherished child of modern progress’ was ultimately not
displaced by Japan’s growing military strength. Instead, the Japan-as-child
motif became a means of symbolically containing its ‘vigorous manhood’
as diplomatic relations were tested in the early twentieth century.34
A series of commemorative postcards titled Young Japan and Friends is
indicative of how images of children were used to symbolically manage
diplomatic and military relationships between Japan, Britain and
Australia. Produced by the London-based company Raphael Tuck
and  Sons, these postcards centre on hand-coloured photographs by  the
British photographer, actor and art director Cavendish Morton. The series
features an English and Japanese boy in various poses in front of British
and Japanese flags. These postcards, and other products by Raphael
Tuck and Sons, were advertised extensively in the Australian press and
found an eager market in Australia.35 Young Japan and Friends was likely
31 Y. Ozaki, ‘Misunderstood Japan’, North American Review 171, no. 527 (1900): 567.
32 Kakuzo Okakura, The Awakening of Japan (New York: The Century Co., 1905), 4.
33 ‘The Awakening East’, Bendigo Independent, 28 November 1906, 6.
34 Ibid.
35 This particular series of was advertised in ‘Raphael Tuck and Sons’, Daily News, 16 October
1905, 8.
25

Pacific Exposures

produced to commemorate the first Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which was
negotiated in response to the threat of Russian expansion in Asia. The
Alliance was signed in London on 30 January 1902 by Lord Lansdowne
(the British foreign secretary) and Hayashi Tadasu (the Japanese minister
in London), and was renewed and expanded in 1905 and 1911. At first
glance, Morton’s  photographs appear to capture the spirit of friendship
between the two nations. In one image, the boys adopt a common
diplomatic pose, facing partly towards the camera and partly to each other
as they shake hands to seal their partnership (see Figure 1.5). Captioned
L’Entente Cordiale, this postcard also alludes to a series of agreements
signed on 8 April 1904 between the United Kingdom and France that saw
a significant improvement in Anglo–French relations.
Although Britain and Japan are both represented by children in this series
to symbolise the young Alliance, the boys are posed in a manner that
suggests an unequal relationship. The English boy, dressed in a sailor suit,
is notably taller than his Japanese counterpart. It also is pertinent that the
Japanese child is shown wearing a kimono, rather than European dress.
The Japanese emperor and empress actively promoted European clothing
at this time, reflecting their desire to embrace modern European
technologies, infrastructure and partnerships. The couple were often
photographed for official portraits wearing European dress, including
Uchida Kuichi’s official portrait of the Meiji emperor of 1873. In contrast,
the Japanese child’s traditional dress in this postcard recalls contemporary
conceptions of Meiji Japan as the modern offspring of essentially ancient
parents. It is telling that Australian newspapers repeatedly referred
to Japan as the ‘child of the world’s old age’ in accounts of its naval
victories, alongside Japan’s ‘courage’, ‘fighting spirit’, ‘readiness for war’
and the ‘pluck of the Japanese soldier’.36 However, at times that child
took on menacing qualities. One account in the Daily Mail, quoted
in several Australian outlets in 1904, used the phrase ‘the child of the
world’s old age’ to describe the Japanese soldier ‘and the spirit which
animates him’. The author referred to Japan as an ‘infant prodigy’ as
‘poor old China … learnt to her exceeding cost’, and an ‘enfant terrible’

36 ‘Hard Case of Japan’, 2; ‘Japanese Courage’, 11; ‘Japanese Readiness for War. A Proud and
High-Spirited People’, Evening Journal, 29 January 1904, 2; F.J. Norman, ‘The Japanese Army’,
Geelong Advertiser, 9 January 1904, 4.
26

Figure 1.5. Cavendish Morton, L’Entente Cordiale from the series ‘Young Japan
and Friends’, c. 1905.
Source: State Library of Victoria. Accession no: H99.166/199.

Figure 1.6. Cavendish Morton, Pals from the series ‘Young Japan and Friends’,
c. 1905.
Source: State Library of Victoria. Accession no. H99.166/198.

Pacific Exposures

Figure 1.7. Cavendish Morton,
Two Handy Men from the series
‘Young Japan and Friends’, c. 1905.
Source: State Library of Victoria.
Accession no. H99.166/202.

Figure 1.8. Cavendish Morton,
That’s How It’s Done from the series
‘Young Japan and Friends’, c. 1905.
Source: State Library of Victoria.
Accession no. H99.166/200.

as experienced by Russia.37 Accordingly, the notion of the troublesome
child helped to represent conceptions of Japan as ‘a misfit in the assumed
patterns of East-West power relations’.38
That misfit is brought under the control of a protective big British brother
in Morton’s postcards. The postcard titled Pals shows the English boy with
a protective arm around the smaller Japanese boy’s shoulder while his
other hand is placed authoritatively on his hip (see Figure 1.6). They both
smile for the camera as though perfectly happy with this arrangement. The
construction of an unequal power relationship becomes more pronounced
in Two Handy Men (see Figure 1.7). Here, the English boy looks to the
camera with a very stern expression while standing over the seated Japanese
boy who holds a toy cannon on the table in front of him. The Japanese boy
hunches forward, seemingly overwhelmed by the towering English sailor.
37 ‘Japan. The Child of the World’s Old Age’, 4. This material was also reported in ‘Just Now in
Little Japan. The Child of the World’s Old Age’, Telegraph, 15 February 1904, 7; ‘The Child of the
World’s Old Age’, Geelong Advertiser, 27 February 1904, 6.
38 Tomoko Akami, ‘Frederic Eggleston and Oriental Power, 1925-1929’, in Relationships: Japan
and Australia, ed. Paul Jones and Vera Mackie (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2001), 103.
28

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

As evinced by the 1904 headline in the Sydney Morning Herald declaring
the Japanese Navy ‘The Child of Great Britain’,39 Japan was represented as
a diligent student but, nonetheless, junior to Britain. Readers of this article
were told that the Japanese naval fleet was not only modelled on its British
counterpart but also benefited from the strategic advice of British officers.
Two Handy Men gives form to this relationship by positioning the English
child as the teacher and supervisor of the Japanese boy. Nonetheless,
Morton’s postcards do not represent this relationship as entirely dominated
by Britain. That’s How it’s Done shows the English boy seated with his
hands passively in his lap as he looks at the toy cannon being held firmly
in the hands of the standing Japanese boy (see Figure 1.8). The Japanese
child is here in the position of authority as he teaches the British boy the
art of warfare.
Postcards were an especially effective means of promoting ideas about
these diplomatic relationships. Raphael Tuck and Sons’ distribution of
these postcards in Australia coincided with a period of postcard mania.
The craze for collecting postcards gained momentum after 1905 when
the Australian Postal Service permitted postcards to be divided on the
back, allowing the address and message to be put on one side and the
pictorial image to take up the whole of the other side. The Raphael
Tuck and Sons range was highly collectable and incredibly varied, and
included many postcards of war scenes, British and foreign military men,
and idyllic Japanese village scenes and landscapes. Such postcards, like
photographs acquired and produced through travel, helped Australians
to reimagine their own place in relation to Britain and Japan. Postcards
trigger a form of imaginative travel and help to maintain connections
with loved ones overseas.40 However, postcards like these had another
important function. As they were collected, handled, posted or arranged
in scrapbooks, they allowed these international political relationships
to become part of the social space in the home. These objects helped

39 ‘The Japanese Navy. The Child of Great Britain’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 February 1904, 11.
40 Konstantinos Andriotis and Misela Mavric, ‘Postcard Mobility: Going Beyond Image and
Text’, Annals of Tourism Research 40 (2013): 21; Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall, ‘The Edwardian
Postcard: A Revolutionary Moment in Rapid Multimodal Communications’, paper presented at
the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Manchester, 2–5
September 2009; Julia Gillen and Nigel Hall, ‘Any Mermaids? Early Postcard Mobilities’, in Mobile
Methods, ed. Monika Buscher, John Urry and Katian Witchger (London and New York: Routledge,
2010), 20–35.
29

Pacific Exposures

collectors to feel connected to a world beyond Australian shores, to locate
their own identities within that world and to affirm their individual
positions in relation to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.
Although Australia was imagined and imaged as a child in its colonial
relationship to the British motherland, it was noticeably absent from
Morton’s Young Japan and Friends. Here, Australia was implicitly cast
as a passive onlooker to and consumer of the Alliance forged by the
‘big boys’ on the other side of the world. This perception of Australia’s
position (or lack thereof) in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was a source
of frustration.41 A contributor to the Freeman’s Journal complained in
1902 that the treaty was ‘made without any reference to, or consultation
with, the Commonwealth Government. Australia was ignored—though
Australian interests are gravely touched by the terms of the treaty’.42 At
the heart of the issue were two main concerns: that the Anglo-Japanese
Alliance undermined Australia’s exclusionary immigration laws and that
it posed a threat to Australian security. The Immigration Restriction Act
1901, commonly known as the ‘White Australia’ policy, was one of the
first pieces of legislation to pass the newly formed federal government.
Although it was written in response to a desire to protect the nation’s
labour market, the Act was informed by racial ideologies. It placed
restrictions on the immigration of ‘coloured races’ to Australia by requiring
non–Anglo Europeans to sit a convoluted dictation test in any European
language. Restrictions on Japanese immigration were eased in 1904 when
laws were changed to allow tourists, students and merchants from Japan to
enter for one year on passports without being subject to the dictation test.
By this time, substantial communities of Japanese workers had already
developed around the pearl shell industries in Queensland and Western
Australia. The abovementioned contributor to the Freeman’s Journal found
cause for concern in the presence of Japanese labourers in Queensland.
After commenting on the exceptional ‘precocity’ of Japan as the ‘child
of the world’s old age’, the author complained that the Anglo-Japanese
Alliance resulted in a ‘clash’ of competing interests.43 The ‘phases of
the Japanese civilization which charmed the world’ were contrasted
with the presence of labourers and prostitutes in Queensland, which
41 Peter Lowe, ‘The British Empire and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance 1911–1915’, History 54,
no.  181 (1969): 212–25; I.H. Nish, ‘Australia and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1901–1911’,
Australian Journal of Politics and History 9, no. 2 (1963): 201–12.
42 ‘The Anglo-Japanese Treaty’, Freeman’s Journal, 22 February 1902, 21.
43 Ibid.
30

Figure 1.9. Anon., The Motherland’s Misalliance.
Source: Bulletin, 1 March 1902.

Pacific Exposures

were seen as ‘inimical to European labour, and inimical to Australian
morality’. It was feared that Australia may ‘pay the price of the treaty
in the admission of the Japanese hordes, and the establishment and
maintenance of Japanese morals on Australian shores’.44 Reflecting this
anxiety, a cartoon published the following week in the political magazine
the Bulletin personified Australia as a frightened young boy, clearly
nervous about the ‘marriage’ between Britannia and her new Japanese
groom (see Figure 1.9). Defined here by its relationship to Australia,
Britain is no longer personified as a child but as a very large, imposing,
matronly mother. Titled The Motherland’s Misalliance, the cartoon shows
Britannia knocking on the door of ‘White Australia’ announcing: ‘Now
my good little son. I’ve married again. This is your new father. You must
be very fond of him’. The stooped, ancient Japanese groom is dwarfed by
his bride and presented in ill-fitting European clothing including a top
hat, monocle and oversized tail coat. This representation of the Japanese
groom ultimately places him in a subservient position to the enormous
Britannia and young Australia—his imperialist ambitions have been
symbolically cut short. Despite the Motherland’s instructions to young
Australia, who is himself too immature to marry, the boy is still able to
stand guard at his very high, exclusionary fence and gate.
Unsurprisingly, Australia’s immigration policy caused diplomatic offence
in Japan and was a source of ongoing dispute between the two countries.
Alison Broinowski noted that ‘eminent Japanese described Australian
migration policy as “selfish and impolitic”, “an offence against humanity”,
and “an insulting piece of legislation”’.45 The Japanese Government was
affronted by Japan’s categorisation as a ‘coloured race’, rather than the
racial ideology underpinning the legislation itself. Hisakichi Eitaki, the
Japanese consul in Sydney, explained his country’s position in a letter to
Edmund Barton, Australia’s first prime minister, in 1901:

44 Ibid.
45 Alison Broinowski, ‘About Face: Asian Representation of Australia’ (PhD diss., The Australian
National University, 2001), 107.
32

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

The Japanese belong to an Empire whose standard of civilization is so
much higher than that of kanakas, negroes, Pacific Islanders, Indians, or
other Eastern peoples, that to refer to them in the same terms cannot
but be regarded in the light of a reproach, which is hardly warranted by
the fact of the shade of the national complexion.46

Japan did not disagree with the broader racial hierarchy that it identified
with the policy, but challenged where Japan should sit within it.
Japanese officials also remarked that Australia had caught kyōnichibyō
(fear  of Japan illness) in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War.47
The Japanese Navy’s defeat of the Russians at Tsushima received extensive
attention in the Australian press in 1905.48 A Sydney paperboy in his
youth, Frank Clune, recalled earning four times his usual profit from
sales of the Evening News and the Star on the day of Japan’s victory at
Tsushima.49 Three weeks after the Battle of Tsushima, soon-to-be Prime
Minister Alfred Deakin expressed his concern that Australia was within
‘striking distance of no less than sixteen foreign naval stations’, noting
that the strongest was Yokohama.50 Deputy Prime Minister in the Reid
Government, Allan McLean, similarly warned:
It must be apparent to every thinking man, that sense of security we
have always considered we derived from our great distance from the
bases of all the great military or naval powers of the world has now been
removed. We now find one of the great naval and military powers of the
earth within a very short distance of our shores … It is fortunate for us
that the great Power that has recently arisen in the East is an ally of the
Empire. Of course, that condition of things might not always continue,
and we must be prepared for what might happen.51

In this context, representations of Japan-as-child took on new
connotations. Imagery invoking Japan as a precocious military force and
bottomless source of aspiring young soldiers began to emerge.
46 H. Eitaki, ‘Japanese Invasion: View of the Consul’, Brisbane Courier, 3 July 1901, 7. For
more on the Japanese response to the White Australia policy see Yuichi Murakami, ‘Australia’s
Immigration Legislation, 1893–1901: The Japanese Response’, in Relationships: Australia and Japan,
ed. Vera Mackie and Paul Jones (Parkville: University of Melbourne, 2001), 45–70.
47 Broinowski, ‘About Face: Asian Representation of Australia’, 107.
48 See for example ‘The Battle of Tsushima’, Morning Bulletin, 30 June 1905, 3; ‘Togo’s Tsu‑Shima
Triumph’, Mercury, 24 June 1905, 11; ‘Tsushima and Its Lessons’, Brisbane Courier, 1 June 1905, 4.
49 Robin Gerster, Travels in Atomic Sunshine (Melbourne: Scribe, 2008), 37.
50 ‘Important Statement by Mr Deakin. A Call to Action’, Daily Telegraph, 15 June 1905, 5.
51 ‘Mr Mclean’s View. Old Sense of Security. It Exists No Longer. A Serious Situation’, Herald,
13 June 1905, 3.
33

Pacific Exposures

Figure 1.10. George Rose, Japanese schoolboys waiting to see soldiers
bound for war. When the train arrives they all sing a war song and shout
‘Bonzai’ (good luck), c. 1904.
Source: State Library of Victoria. Accession no. H96.160/941.

Boy Soldiers
Rose’s catalogue of Japanese stereographs acknowledged the market
for this military-inspired child imagery. One stereograph shows a large
group of Japanese school children waiting on a train platform to
farewell soldiers leaving for the Russo-Japanese War (see Figure 1.10).
Many of the children are looking at the camera and the child wearing
a hat in the centre front is standing sharply to attention as though
expressing his own military aspirations. Although there are also girls on
the crowded platform, it is telling that the caption refers only to boys:
‘Japanese schoolboys waiting to see soldiers bound for war. When the
train arrives they all sing a war song and shout “Bonzai” (good luck)’.
This marginalisation of the girls reflects the gendered character of
representations of Japanese children—diplomatic and military relations
were the domain of boys.
Rose’s visit to Japan coincided with the Russo-Japanese War, but his
photograph responded to an older Australian interest in the young age at
which military training began for Japanese boys. Australian newspapers
linked Japan’s success in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) in part
34

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

to the military training of Meiji-era children.52 Comparable reports
proliferated during the Russo-Japanese War. An article in the Geelong
Advertiser in 1905 attributed the stamina, strength and courage shown
by the Japanese in the ‘recent war’ to the discipline that boys acquire
in school: ‘A portion of the school gymnastics consists of military drill.
The school boys desirous of showing they can be more than toy soldiers,
practice long marches. The Government encourages them by providing
them with real rifles and bayonets’.53 Another article on Japan’s military
strength, with strong xenophobic overtones, emphasised the nation’s
boundless young human resources:
Japan is in no danger of race suicide. The mothers are not shirking
maternity as in other lands, and the result is that we can spare half a
million men a year for an indefinite number of years and not miss them
… When the time comes Japan will guide the yellow whirlwind and
direct the yellow storm, and I am prone to think that certain nations
will find it a veritable sirocco … The spirit which won the world’s great
battles is the spirit with which modern Japan, the Child of the World’s
Old Age, will go into action on sea and on land.54

The reference to ‘race suicide’ alludes to contemporary concerns about
Australia’s own declining birth rate, which was the subject of a New
South Wales royal commission in 1903–04. Fears of military defeat
to growing Asian armies merged with anxieties about race suicide in
the mind of the bishop of the Riverina, who described the declining
birth rate in Australia as a ‘wilful shirking of responsibilities’. To the
bishop, the increasing birth rates in China and Japan meant that the
‘East’ was growing ‘stronger and stronger, and is becoming conscious of
her strength. Are the Christian nations refusing their inheritance, and by
a wanton race suicide surrendering the sceptre to the East?’55
Rose’s stereograph gave such anxieties visual form. Through the
stereoscope, Australian viewers could study the faces of the school
children gathered to support the Japanese army. The children wait

52 ‘The China-Japan War’, Capricornian, 3 November 1894, 18; ‘The War in China’, Scone
Advocate, 31 December 1894, 2.
53 ‘Japan’s Secret. How Her Victories Were Won. Training the Child. Interesting Details of
Japanese School Life and Methods’, Geelong Advertiser, 18 November 1905, 8; ‘Japan’s Secret.
How Her Victories Were Won. Training the Child. Interesting Details of Japanese School Life and
Methods’, Sunday Times, 12 November 1905, 4.
54 ‘Japan. The Child of the World’s Old Age’, 4.
55 ‘Race Suicide’, Daily Standard, 17 September 1913, 4.
35

Pacific Exposures

under the watchful eye of a stationmaster and a male teacher dressed
impeccably in a three-piece suit, hat and bow tie. Unlike the child in
Cotton’s lantern slide, whose expression of glee undermines the potential
threat posed by the war flag that he waves, none of the children in Rose’s
photograph are smiling. Many of the boys frown at the camera, while
others look at it sideways, as though out of suspicion. Although they all
wear kimonos, many also wear the military-style school caps adopted
in the Meiji era that reinforce the sense that these children were being
prepared to take over from the previous generation of soldiers.
Importantly, the circulation of this type of commercial imagery in
Australian homes not only shaped perceptions of Japan in Australia but
also informed the perceptions and photographic practices of Australians
who had the means to travel through Japan. The travel photographs of
Mark Foy and his family are indicative of this process. Foy was an owner
of the family-run Foy’s department store in Sydney, which traded between
1885 and 1980. The Foys were regular visitors to Japan and frequently
commented on Japanese issues in the Australian press.56 On their trips,
the family collected commercially produced photographs of scenery
and tourist sites and produced their own photographs capturing their
encounters with Japanese people. Individually sold, mass-produced
photographs were commonly placed alongside family photographs
in personal travel albums, which became sites in which commercial
visions of Japan were merged with personal imagery and memories.57
Photographs from a Foy family trip in 1902 feature several photographs
of local children that reflect prevailing Australian impressions of Japan,
including a photograph of three children pumping water from a well
with babies strapped to their backs.
A particularly striking group of photographs focus on militarised
schoolboys. One of these photographs centres on a group of boys
emerging from long grass on a hillside (see Figure 1.11). Their militaryinspired attire reflects the interrelationships between citizen making,
education and military training in the Meiji era. Originally designed as
a junior version of the late nineteenth-century Japanese army uniform—
56 ‘Back from Japan’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 January 1918, 8; ‘War Items’, Armidale Express
and New England General Advertiser, 15 January 1918, 4; ‘Eleven Trips to Japan’, Daily Standard,
11  February 1936, 2; ‘Japan More Progressive Than Australia, Says Businessman’, Telegraph,
1 March 1938, 3.
57 See for example Margaret Preston’s photograph album held in the Powerhouse Museum,
registration number 2009/104/5.
36

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

modelled on French and Prussian military dress—these school uniforms
were widely adopted from 1879. The overexposure at the top right
of Foy’s photograph creates the impression that these schoolboys are
moving en masse towards the camera from outside its frame. Some boys
in the distance can be seen walking towards the camera, while others in
the mid ground stand still with startled or quizzical expressions on their
faces. The photograph is composed to focus attention on a  particular
boy seen slightly left of the centre grimacing fiercely at the camera.
His feet are spread in a firm stance as he pretends to point a gun at

Figure 1.11. Photographs of Mark Foy and family, including a trip to Japan
in 1902.
Source: State Library of New South Wales. Accession no. PXD 1199.

37

Pacific Exposures

Figure 1.12. Photographs of Mark Foy and family, including a trip to Japan
in 1902.
Source: State Library of New South Wales. Accession no. PXD 1199.

the photographer, while a younger boy crouches at his feet as though
enjoying his protection. Although the absence of a weapon makes it clear
that the child is just miming an attack, to Australian viewers familiar
with newspaper reports about Japan’s training of young soldiers the
photographs may have assumed more menacing qualities. Such military
associations may have been implicit when the Foys viewed their travel
photographs at home or showed them to family and friends, but no
doubt merged with commentaries describing their personal recollections
of this encounter with the children.
This crossover between the world of international relations and
personal or familial recollections is also strongly suggested in another
Foy photograph that shows militarised Japanese children standing with
a young blonde Australian boy (see Figure 1.12). The blonde boy is most
likely Mark Francis Foy, who accompanied his parents to Japan along
with his baby sister Elizabeth. In this photograph, the three Japanese
boys wear Japanese dress with military-style school caps. They stand to
attention in a neat row, holding rods over their shoulders like rifles, while
adult members of the Foy party and a Japanese man in a European suit
38

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

look on. Two of the boys have very serious expressions and the other looks
at the camera with curiosity and a slightly cocked head. The three boys
mark a sharp contrast to the much younger Australian boy who stands
in front of them attempting to mimic their stance with what appears to
be an umbrella over his shoulder. While the Japanese boys represent the
epitome of Meiji military boyhood—disciplined, orderly and strong—
the soft blonde curls of the Foy child, his bonnet, pleated tunic and large
lace collar reflect remnants of the Victorian ideals of the ‘innocent saintly
child’ embodied popularly by Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy
(1886).58 Ideologies of the ‘saintly child’ drew on Christian iconography
and Enlightenment and Romantic philosophies to perpetuate belief in
the supposedly ‘natural’ goodness of children in nineteenth-century
England. Although the image was also popular in Australia during
the late nineteenth century and informed representations of ‘The Boy
from Manly’, by the early twentieth century, ‘Fauntleroy-like “cissies”’
were being overpowered in popular culture with representations of the
‘hardy little mischief maker’, later embodied in the comic book character
Ginger Meggs.59 The Foy photograph seemingly stages a meeting of
Young Australia and the ‘child of the world’s old age’ in a humorous
photograph for the family travel album.
Such patterns of recycling, layering and building representations of
Japan resonate with Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Michael Haldrup, Jonas
Larsen and John Urry’s discussion of the ‘imaginative mobilities’
of tourism. Although their focus is on contemporary tourism, the
authors’ analysis may be extended to the Foy photograph. Imaginative
mobilities acknowledge that tourism does not occur in a vacuum but,
instead, involves the anticipation, performance and remembrance of
travel at home and abroad.60 As the children in the Foy photograph
pose for the camera, they enact a performance that has already been
refined and scripted in commercial photographs, cartoons, news articles,
international diplomacy and meanings of childhood. This performance
of Australian–Japanese relations may have continued when the Foys
returned home, as they used their photographs to repeat narratives of
their Japanese encounters among family and friends. The Foy’s famous
department store became yet another forum for staging encounters
58 Jan Kociumbas, ‘The Spiritual Child: Child Death and Angelic Motherhood in Colonial
Women’s Writing’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 85, no. 2 (1999): 86.
59 Ibid., 92; Inglis, ‘Young Australia 1870–1900’, 1–24.
60 Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt et al., Performing Tourist Places (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 10, 70.
39

Figure 1.13. Ruth Hollick, Untitled [Child in Kimono], c. 1910–30.
Source: State Library of Victoria. Accession no. H2004.61/418.

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

between Australia and Japan, this time for Sydney’s public. The store
not only stocked Japanese goods such as silks and flower pots, its official
publication, the Magnet, included a full page dedicated to photographs
of a Japanese teahouse in its June 1910 issue. Through the purchase
of Japanese goods, Australian consumers could also participate in these
patterns of anticipating and performing encounters with Japan without
leaving home.

From Japan-as-Child to
Australian-Child-as-Japan
Japanese goods were used in other photographic representations of
Australian–Japanese encounters during the early twentieth century.
Here, notions of Japan-as-child were transformed into the AustralianChild-as-Japan. Across the country, in school performances, backyard
plays, photographers’ studios and fancy dress parties, Anglo-Australian
children adopted Japanese costumes and posed for the camera. Reflecting
the popularity of this practice, Australian state library collections
feature many photographs of Anglo-Australian children in Japanese
costume and newspaper social pages regularly published photographs
of children posing in Japanese costume for fancy dress parties.61 Other
photographs, like Ruth Hollick’s portrait of an unnamed curly haired
child (see Figure  1.13), were produced professionally in the studio.
This Melbourne-based photographer is best known for her portraits of
women and children, many of which were made at her home studio in
Moonee Ponds and, later, in her Collins Street studio. Hollick’s high
society portraits featured in newspapers and The Home magazine in the
early 1920s, making her a highly sought after portraitist. We can only
speculate why the parents of this child dressed her in a kimono for her
portrait session. The girl also wears a tiny bead necklace with a manji
pendant—a symbol associated with Japanese Buddhism—and a silver
bracelet. Although kimonos were readily available in Australia, it is likely
that the pendant was bought in Japan, perhaps by the girl’s parents.
The girl’s bare feet also allude to conceptions of the feminine Japanese
child as innocent and close to nature.

61 ‘Children’s Fancy Dress Ball at the Sydney Town Hall’, Sydney Mail, 7 October 1899, 864;
‘At the Children’s Hospital Ball’, Queenslander, 15 August 1903, 23.
41

Pacific Exposures

An admiration for Japanese children, along with the concurrent fashion
for Japanese goods, no doubt helped to foster the trend for photographing
Anglo-Australian children in Japanese-inspired dress. Throughout the
first two decades of the twentieth century, Australian newspapers regularly
published articles about idealised Japanese children. Japanese children,
it was argued, were experts of self-control, rarely crying or throwing
temper tantrums, and were always quiet, gentle, polite and obedient.62
Such reports about the behaviour of children must be distinguished
from symbolic references to an unmanageable enfant terrible to describe
the imperialist nation. One reporter noted:
Travellers in Japan are unanimous in their praise of the gentleness,
courtesy, and charm of the Japanese child, whose quaint, old-fashioned
manners, curious garb, and still more curious play, is an unfailing
source of interest to all lovers of children who visit the Land of the
Chrysanthemum and the Cherry Blossom.63

Another article praising the extraordinarily good behaviour of Japanese
children was republished across the country repeatedly between 1905 and
1919.64 It seemed as though Australians did not tire of hearing about wellbehaved Japanese children. Piel has suggested that Western perceptions
of Japanese children as universally polite and well behaved may be as
much to do with the fact that Westerners encountered children typically
as outsiders to the family, or as guests, strangers or customers in Japanese
businesses. The Japanese custom of keeping up appearances in front of
strangers and reserving their true feelings for members of their inner circle
may have given many Westerners a distorted view of Japanese family life.65
Likewise, women’s magazines published photographs and articles about
selfless Japanese mothers and their angelic children. An issue of New Idea
accompanied an article by Pierre Loti with a full-page montage of five
photographs taken by Miss Nell Brownlow Cole from Brisbane of a little
Anglo-Australian girl dressed in a kimono. The girl was photographed
variously posing cross-legged, holding a fan and making tea in front of
a Japanese screen. She is seemingly composed, innocent and disciplined,
62 Sladen, ‘Child Life in Japan’, 13.
63 ‘The Boys and Girls of Japan’, Geelong Advertiser, 28 November 1908, 9.
64 See for example ‘Japanese Child Life’, Benalla Standard, 26 June 1917, 1; ‘Japanese Child Life’,
St Arnaud Mercury, 9 February 1916, 1; ‘Japanese Child-Life’, Burrowa News, 3 March 1905, 1;
‘Japanese Child-Life’, Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 15 July 1905, 5; ‘Japanese Child-Life’, Fitzroy
City Press, 12 July 1919, 2.
65 Piel, ‘The Ideology of the Child in Japan 1600–1945’, 50.
42

1. ‘The Child of the World’s Old Age’

suggesting that Australian mothers could similarly align these qualities
with their own children by staging such photographs. Several scholars
have addressed the adoption of Japanese dress by adults in the US, Britain
and Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.66 This
body of work has tended to frame cross-cultural dressing as a symptom of
Western Orientalism, fantasies of power and a combination of fear and
desire for the ‘other’.67 However, rather than simply reflecting fantasies of
the distant and exotic East, photographs of Anglo-Australian children in
Japanese costume may be better understood as practices that responded
to complex and contradictory conceptions of childhood and both
countries’ places as emerging nations in the Asia-Pacific. Underpinning
these photographs are decades of discussion about Japanese children and
Japan-as-child, informed by concerns about international diplomacy,
immigration, industry and perceptions of Japan’s imperialist ambitions.
These and the other photographs examined in this chapter represent
the accumulation of many years of anticipation, performance and
remembrance of Australian encounters with Japan through newspapers,
commercial photographs and tourist photographs. The apparent
innocence of these images of children and their circulation in homes
belies the important political role that conceptions of Japan-as-child
played. Australian experiences of modernity and impressions of Japanese
children were shaped by a variety of debates about industrialisation,
modernisation, immigration and security. By staging, seeking out or
purchasing these visions of Japanese childhood, Australians consumed
and reproduced a series of conflicting views of Japan as a naïve artistic
child and enfant terrible. As the twentieth century wore on, photography
was to become an increasingly significant medium for reproducing and
reconciling antithetical perceptions of both Japan and the Japanese.
66 Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003); Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in
Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Christine
M.E. Guth, ‘Charles Longfellow and Okakura Kakuzo: Cultural Cross-Dressing in the Colonial
Context’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 3 (2000): 605–35; Mary Roberts, ‘Cultural
Crossings: Sartorial Adventures, Satiric Narratives, and the Question of Indigenous Agency in
Nineteenth-Century Europe and the near East’, in Edges of Empire, ed. Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones
(Malden: Blackwell, 2005); Tara Mayer, ‘Cultural Cross-Dressing: Posing and Performance in
Orientalist Portraits’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 22, no. 2 (2012); Marie-Cecile Thoral,
‘Sartorial Orientalism: Cross-Cultural Dressing in Colonial Algeria and Metropolitan France in the
Nineteenth Century’, European History Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2015).
67 Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 62. See also Mayer, ‘Cultural Cross-Dressing’, 281–98;
Christine Riding, ‘Travellers and Sitters: The Orientalist Portrait’, in The Lure of the East, ed.
Nicholas Tromans (London: Tate Gallery, 2008), 48–81.
43

2
‘WHITE AUSTRALIA’ IN THE
DARKROOM: 1915–41
In his review of the 1922 Photographic Society of New South Wales
(NSW) exhibition for the Australasian Photo Review, critic Alek Sass
alluded to some of the incongruities associated with Australian–Japanese
photographic relations in the interwar period. While praising the two
Japanese exhibitors, Sass commented wryly that their participation in the
local photography scene ran counter to the racially exclusionary aims of
Australian immigration policy:
By way of diversion, the White Australia policy in the dark-room seems
to be in danger; I refer to the work of Messrs. K. Ishida and K. Yama.
They have eyes to see and things to say, those men … Very thoughtful
work, gentlemen.1

Kiichiro Ishida and Ichiro Kagiyama were among the approximately 300
Japanese living in NSW during this period.2 These two men were active
members of the Photographic Society of NSW and regularly exhibited and
published their work alongside leading Australian photographers at a time
when the ‘White Australia’ policy was testing diplomatic relations with
Japan. Sass’s review and the exhibition itself highlight how the political
and personal photographic relations between Australia and Japan tell quite

1 Alek Sass, ‘Old Friends and New: A Ramble through the Exhibition of Camera Pictures by the
Photographic Society of New South Wales’, Australasian Photo Review 29, no. 11 (1922): 356.
2 There was an increase in Japanese residents in NSW from 126 (118 male and seven female) in
1911 to 308 (289 male and 19 female) in 1921, largely due to the growth of Japanese merchants
in Sydney (H.A. Smith, The Official Year Book of New South Wales 1922 (Sydney: NSW State
Government, 1924), 246). For more on Kagiyama see Melissa Miles, ‘Through Japanese Eyes:
Ichiro Kagiyama and Australian-Japanese Relations in the 1920s and 1930s’, History of Photography
38, no. 4 (2014): 356–58.
45

Pacific Exposures

distinct, even incompatible stories. While Australian politicians concerned
about perceived Japanese military and economic threats sought to limit
Japanese immigration and photographic activity, Japanese photographers
developed thriving practices and social relationships in Australia.
Extending the previous chapter’s discussion of how Australians interpreted
the Australia–Japan relationship symbolically in photographs, this chapter
examines how conflicting aspects of this relationship were negotiated up
close through interpersonal relations and the creative practices of AngloAustralian and Japanese photographers in the pre–World War I (WWI)
and interwar period. Several Japanese photographers developed thriving
businesses and practices in different parts of the country from the late
nineteenth century to WWII, including in the remote West Australian
town of Broome.3 By focusing largely on the work of two Japanese
photographers in Sydney, this chapter examines how their commercial,
personal and artistic practices were also entangled with international
trade, diplomacy and fashion.

Japanese Photographers and ‘White Australia’
Kagiyama’s and Ishida’s entries into ‘White Australia’ differed
significantly. The absence of arrival documents for Kagiyama clouds his
early years in Australia in mystery. Although some historians suspect
that Kagiyama landed in Sydney illegally as a teenager in 1906 or
1907,4 Kagiyama provided a very different story to immigration officials
in 1934. In a statutory declaration, Kagiyama noted that he was born in
Gifu Prefecture in 1890 and that he came to Thursday Island as an infant
when his father took work in the pearl shell industry.5 Kagiyama described
being taken to live with family friends in Mackay on the eastern coast of
Queensland after his father’s death in 1897 or 1898. At this time, many
of Queensland’s 3,247 resident Japanese were encouraged to move south
from Thursday Island to Queensland’s sugar growing regions, including
3 Melissa Miles and Kate Warren, ‘The Japanese Photographers of Broome: Photography and
Cross-Cultural Encounter’, History of Photography 41, no. 1 (2016): 3–24.
4 Pam Oliver, ‘Japanese Relationships in White Australia’, History Australia 4, no. 1 (2007): 5.6;
Yuri Mitsuda, Modernism/Japonism in Photography 1920s–40s. Kiichiro Ishida and Sydney Camera
Circle (Tokyo: Shoto Museum of Art, 2002), 21; Beth Hise and Pam Oliver, ‘Kiichiro Ishida’,
Insites, Summer 2003, 4.
5 NSW Branch Department of Immigration, ‘Ichiro Kagiyama [Applicant for Exemption
from the Dictation Test under the Immigration Act and for Admission of His Wife into the
Commonwealth], 1934–5’, National Archives of Australia (NAA) SP42/1 C1934/4618.
46

2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom

around Townsville and MacKay, where employment opportunities
were more plentiful.6 It is telling that, when Japan established its first
consulate in Australia in March 1896, it chose to locate it in Townsville
in the region favoured by Japanese immigrants and indentured labourers.
Kagiyama claimed that he spent 14 years in Mackay before moving to
Adelaide for one year, and then Sydney around 1913, where he remained
resident until he returned to Japan in 1941 amid rising tensions between
his homeland and the Allies.
The disparity in arrival dates between those suggested by historians and
that described by Kagiyama is significant; Japanese people were subject
to a very different set of immigration laws in Australia in the mid-1890s
and 1907. The time that Kagiyama claimed he and his father arrived
at Thursday Island coincided with a period of relatively relaxed travel
requirements, when the movement of individual indentured labourers
was not well documented. During the mid to late 1890s, anxieties about
Japanese control over the pearl shelling industry were growing and some
Queenslanders feared that Thursday Island was in danger of becoming
a Japanese colony.7 After 1898, no Japanese were permitted to land
in Queensland without a passport. The Immigration Restriction Act
imposed more stringent restrictions on Japanese immigration, described
in the previous chapter, including requiring non–Anglo Europeans to
sit a complicated European language dictation test. Further changes in
the law in 1904 allowed Japanese tourists, students and merchants to
enter for one year on passports without being subject to the dictation
test. Applications could be made for a Certificate of Exemption from
the Dictation Test (CEDT), which allowed Japanese people to stay in
Australia for up to three years.8 Kagiyama’s 1934 interview and statutory
declaration were part of his application for a CEDT—the first such
application from him on record—which coincided with his first return
trip to Japan.
The absence of immigration documents for Kagiyama’s initial arrival
in  Australia, and current restrictions on accessing personal family
records  in Japan that could verify the time and place of death of
6 J. Armstrong, ‘Aspects of Japanese Immigration to Queensland before 1900’, Queensland
Heritage 2, no. 9 (1979): 4.
7 Henry Frei, Japan’s Southward Advance and Australia (Carlton: Melbourne University Press,
1991), 80–81; ‘Pearlshell and Beche-De-Mer. Report on the Fishers’, Brisbane Courier, 24 November
1897, 5.
8 George Reid, ‘Japanese Tourists and Merchants’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 September 1904, 6.
47

Pacific Exposures

Kagiyama’s father, make it impossible to confirm the veracity of his
story. A descendant of one of Kagiyama’s friends in Takayama, where he
returned after WWII, suggested that he arrived in Australia illegally as
a young man. Whether it was a carefully planned fabrication designed
to obscure his illegal entry into Australia or the truth, Kagiyama’s
explanation of his time in Australia satisfied immigration officials
enough to allow him to remain resident.9
Ishida had a very different experience, arriving in Sydney in 1919. As an
employee of the Okura Trading Company (a subsidiary of the large
Okura-gumi), Ishida was one of a ‘new breed of company men’ who were
sent to work in branch offices in ports around the Asia-Pacific.10 Japanese
firms such as Kuwahata, Kanematsu, Nakamura and Iida all had offices in
Sydney, and their senior merchants were well connected with the Japanese
consul and Sydney society. The nature of Ishida’s work meant that he lived
in Sydney for a relatively short period between 1919 and 1923. Cremorne
and the adjoining north shore suburb of Mosman became popular homes
for Japanese merchant families. Kagiyama’s environment was not as
salubrious as that enjoyed by Ishida and his fellow merchants. During the
mid-1910s, he worked as a laundry worker, presser and dyer in Cowper
Street, Waverley, later starting his own commercial photography studio in
Woollahra. Yet, the two men found common ground through their shared
love of photography and became valued members of the Photographic
Society of NSW. Although neither man left behind written accounts of
their perspectives on Australia and its photography, their photographs
and those of their peers offer valuable insight into the complexity of the
Australia–Japan relationship in this era.

Personal Photographic Encounters
As a member of the Photographic Society of NSW from around 1914,
Kagiyama refined his skills by working with some of Sydney’s most
accomplished practitioners, including Harold Cazneaux and Monte
Luke. The society was established in 1872 in response to the growing
popularity of photography among amateurs. As its name suggests, it was
driven by social interaction between photographers. Members exchanged
photographs, gained feedback on their work and attended monthly
meetings at which they would ‘receive hints and otherwise improve
9 NAA SP42/1 C1934/4618.
10 Frei, Japan’s Southward Advance and Australia, 118.
48

2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom

their knowledge of the art’.11 At this time, the Photographic Society of
NSW was heavily focused on pictorialism. This mode of photography
was popularised in Europe, the US and Britain in the 1890s and soon
gained a wide following in Australia. Motivated by the desire to fulfil
the artistic potential of photography, pictorialists used control processes
including bromoil, carbon pigment, oil prints or gum bichromate to
subdue details, lower or raise tone and strengthen highlights in their
photographs. Although pictorialism has now become synonymous with
aesthetic qualities such as low-tone and soft, romantic ‘fuzzy’ effects, in
early twentieth-century Australia the term referred more broadly to the
art of photography.12
The society also organised social gatherings and excursions to the
beaches, parks and bush surrounding Sydney so that members could
practice their craft and consider questions of lighting, subject matter
and composition together. A photograph taken by Cazneaux on one of
these excursions around 1915 shows a young, dapper Kagiyama posing
among a large group of members with their photographic equipment
in tow (see Figure 2.1). Kagiyama also took photographs of his fellow
photographers during these outings and kept these photographs in his
(recently rediscovered) personal album, indicating that the social aspect
of such excursions was as important to him as the opportunities they
afforded to photograph new subjects.13 Other photographs assembled in
this rare album capture Sydney’s York Street, the Queen Victoria Market,
the Art Gallery of NSW, the Domain, Hyde Park, the University of
Sydney and St Mary’s Cathedral, and collectively create the impression
of  a roving photographer eagerly exploring the city. These  city views
stand in contrast to the ‘tourist gaze’ described by John Urry as
a means of controlling the unfamiliar world from afar and ‘combining
detachment and mystery’.14 As a resident of Sydney, Kagiyama was no
tourist. His photographs demonstrate that he was thoroughly immersed
in the city, part of the crowd on a curbside, in a park or amid the throngs
in Central Station.
11 ‘Amateur Photographic Society of NSW’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 July 1872, 7.
12 Francis Ebury, ‘Making Pictures: Australian Pictorial Photography as Art 1897–1957’ (PhD
diss., University of Melbourne, 2001); Gael Newton, Silver and Grey: Fifty Years of Australian
Photography 1900–1950 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1980); Melissa Miles, The Language of
Light and Dark: Light and Place in Australian Photography (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University
Press, 2015).
13 The album was found by the authors in Takayama, Japan in the possession of a descendant
of one of Kagiyama’s friends, who inherited it upon Kagiyama’s death.
14 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2002), 147.
49

Pacific Exposures

Figure 2.1. Harold Cazneaux, Photographic Society Outing, Sydney, c. 1915.
Source: National Library of Australia, PIC P1067/209 LOC Cold Store PIC HCF.
Printed from a negative.

Kagiyama’s personal photographs also capture the intercultural friendships
and relationships that flourished in Sydney and highlight the way that
photography operated as a medium for building social connections.15
Relationships between Anglo-Australian women and Japanese men
were not uncommon in Sydney in the early to mid-twentieth century.16
Kagiyama himself married an Anglo-Australian woman named Cicelia
Howard Walker in 1916. Cicelia was 19 years old and Kagiyama was still
working as a cleaner and presser at the time of their marriage. The couple
had a daughter who died in infancy and then a son, Harno, who was
born in 1920. Some of Kagiyama’s photographs depict other unnamed
Japanese men, their Australian wives and their children (see Figure 2.2),
or show Anglo-Australian and Japanese people picnicking together in
a national park. The act of huddling together as a social or familial unit
and posing for the camera was part of the social activities that connected
Kagiyama to his sitters.
15 Melissa Miles, ‘Ichiro Kagiyama in Early Twentieth Century Sydney’, Japanese Studies 37, no. 1
(2017): 89–116.
16 Oliver, ‘Japanese Relationships in White Australia’, 5.16.
50

Figure 2.2. Attributed to Ichiro Kagiyama, Untitled [Portrait of JapaneseAustralian Family], c. 1915.
Source: Private Collection.

51

Pacific Exposures

In 1915, Kagiyama photographed Hideo Kuwahata, his English-born
Australian wife Mary, their sons Thomas and Frederick, and other
unknown Japanese guests at the family home, Mikado Farm. After
Kuwahata came to Australia in 1888, he established a small import
business in Sydney. He soon expanded the business to supply shipping
companies Nippon Yusen Kaisha and Osaka Shosen Kaisha and the
Japanese Navy. Mikado Farm in Guildford, NSW, became Kuwahata’s
home in 1908. It also operated as a nursery specialising in Japanese
plants. The farm was an important social space for Japanese residents
and visitors to Sydney who would visit Kuwahata’s home for weekends
of fishing, photography and picnics. According to Pam Oliver, ‘over
80 per cent of sailors off Japanese ships at Sydney and Newcastle before
1920 gave this farm as their shore address’.17 As well as being behind
the lens, Kagiyama appears with the family in some of his photographs
of Mikado Farm, suggesting a personal relationship. One photograph
featuring Kagiyama, Hideo and Mary Kuwahata and an unidentified
guest has been hand coloured in an effort to communicate some of the
vibrancy of Kuwahata’s gardens (see Figure 2.3). Although the result is
somewhat crude, the use of this time-consuming process to colour the
flowers, grass, trees, bridge, greenhouse and clothing worn by the sitters
speaks to the value that this place held for Kagiyama.

Photography and Japonisme
Compellingly, these cross-cultural social relationships flourished amid
a public culture in which Japanese racial stereotypes ran deep. Kagiyama
lived and worked in a city enamoured of things Japanese. Described
today as part of a European trend known as Japonisme,18 the fashionable
presence of Japanese-inspired decorative arts, kimono, floral arrangements
and silks in Sydney’s shops and visual culture provided inspiration to
several local photographers and shaped the reception of Kagiyama’s
work. The popularity of Japanese art and goods from the mid-1910s to
the mid-1930s followed an earlier wave of Japonisme, which was fostered
by the enthusiastic reception of the Japanese courts and products at the

17 Pam Oliver, ‘Interpreting “Japanese Activities” in Australia, 1888–1945’, Journal of the
Australian War Memorial (online), no. 36 (May 2002), unpaginated.
18 For more on Japonisme see Lionel Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan
and the West (London and New York: Phaidon, 2005); Toshio Watanabe, High Victorian Japonisme
(Berlin and New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
52

2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom

Figure 2.3. Photographer unknown, Mikado Farm, Guildford, 1915.
Source: Private Collection.

Sydney and Melbourne International and Intercolonial exhibitions of
1875, 1877, 1879 and 1880. The ready availability of Japanese goods in
Australian stores further fed this burgeoning market, and Japanese motifs
and aesthetics soon found their way into Australian art, such as Charles
Condor’s paintings Bronte Beach (1888) and A Holiday at Mentone
(1888), and Tom Roberts’s portrait Mrs L. A. Abrahams (1888). The
second wave of Japonisme in the early twentieth century was the product
of several additional factors including increased Australian tourism to
Japan and strengthening political, military and trade relations.
This trend was strongly evident in Sydney’s photography culture. From
1911, the Sydney-based publication Harrington’s Photographic Journal
often included illustrated articles on the delights promised by Japan
as a travel destination for the photographer and the latest Japanese
photography journals and books that could be purchased.19 The British
19 See for example ‘From all Quarters’, Harrington’s Photographic Journal, 22 February 1911, 59;
Rita Broughton, ‘Snapshots in Japan’, Harrington’s Photographic Journal, 22 April 1911, 110; Neville
A. Tooth, ‘A Camera in Japan’, Harrington’s Photographic Journal, 22 December 1911, 380–81;
‘New Books’, Harrington’s Photographic Journal, 22 August 1919, 258; C. Taylor, ‘Snapshots on
Japan’, Harrington’s Photographic Journal, 22 April 1914, 119, 132; ‘Our Illustrations’, Harrington’s
Photographic Journal, 20 August 1919, 242, 249.
53

Pacific Exposures

annual Photograms of the Year disseminated the work of Japanese
photographers internationally from 1914. Read eagerly in Australia, this
publication also routinely featured the work of Australian pictorialists
including members of the Photographic Society of NSW. The Japanese
photographs selected for publication were dominated overwhelmingly
by imagery of bathhouses, pagodas, geishas, bamboo and idyllic rural
scenes. These clichés were so entrenched that in 1915 they inspired
a protest by photographer H. Yahagi in one of his regular written
contributions to Photograms of the Year:
I would like to preface my remarks about the pictorial photography of
Japan by drawing attention to the fact that we, as a nation, deeply regret
the misunderstanding that exists with regard to Japan and its people.
It seems strange that in these days of travel, when the nations of the
world are linked together by steamboats and Continental railways,
there should still be a lingering idea in the world that Japan is only
a half-civilised land, the principal attraction of which is the questionable
Geisha, the old dreamy pagoda rearing its head above the pines, the
Ronin of a bygone age, and the feathery bamboo groves—sure symbols
of a primitive people. Such are to be seen, but they do not constitute the
things that enable one to get to the heart of modern Japan.20

Yahagi went on to cite the many admirable qualities of modern Japan,
including its education system, respect for modern science and interest
in international affairs. However, his plea fell on deaf ears, as Photograms
of the Year continued to publish photographs based on a very limited
range of stereotypes for decades to come.
Not only did Kagiyama encounter such stereotypes on spectacular display
in Sydney, he also turned them into subjects for his own photographs.
In 1915, Kagiyama took three photographs of the Japanese Village in
the White City amusement park, which operated in the Sydney suburb
of Rushcutters Bay between 1913 and 1917 (see Figures 2.4 and 2.5).
Sydney’s White City was one of dozens of similarly named amusement
parks established in the US, Britain and Australia. Inspired by the White
City and Midway Plaisance sections of Chicago’s World’s Columbian
Exhibition of 1893, White Cities typically combined entertainment
with ‘educational’ displays and experiences such as a  ‘native village’.

20 H. Yahagi, ‘Pictorial Photography in Japan’, Photograms of the Year 1915 (London: Dawbarn
& Ward, 1916), 27.
54

Figure 2.4. Attributed to Ichiro Kagiyama, Untitled [White City], c. 1915.
Source: Private Collection.

Figure 2.5. Attributed to Ichiro Kagiyama, Untitled [White City], c. 1915.
Source: Private Collection.

55

Pacific Exposures

The promise of a ‘real’ Japanese encounter recurred in press coverage of
Sydney’s White City. The Truth promoted the Japanese Village as one of
the most interesting attractions:
There has been no attempt at artifice in the creation of this model
village—everything is real and directly imported. Real Japanese houses,
flower gardens, museums, temples, workshops, lily ponds, and the
innumerable crazy, curved, and twisted bridges, without which no
Japanese picture would be correct.21

The presence of acrobats, contortionists, sword swallowers and ‘Samurai
sword-dualists’ did not dampen enthusiasm for the supposed realism of
the village.22
Kagiyama’s photographs of the Japanese Village suggest that this
supposedly  ‘authentic’ cultural encounter was underpinned by
familiar stereotypes. The photographs show the large crowds of
Anglo‑Australians  who flocked to the Japanese Village, its teahouse,
kimono-wearing women attendants, Japanese garden and pond,
decorative bridge, and buildings adorned with flags and lanterns. Murals
crudely interpreting Japanese prints, and screens depicting a sailboat
and a figure with irises, form evocative backdrops. It is intriguing to
imagine how Kagiyama made sense of this spectacle. His photographs
seem to treat the village and its hordes of visitors as a curiosity; they
are photographed in a somewhat stark manner, rather than as a subject
for creative expression to be artfully composed. One photograph
(Figure 2.5) centres on a house in which kimono-clad Japanese women
sell fans, bowls and mobiles to visitors. Kagiyama deliberately includes
the large sign proclaiming ‘this is an actual Japanese House built in
Tokio’, which could have easily been cropped out of the photograph.
He perhaps found these claims for authenticity amusing.
Australian stereotypes of a feminine, artistic and childlike Japan were
perpetuated in the press, and in turn shaped the experiences of other
visitors to the village. In the ‘Woman’s Page’ in the Freeman’s Journal,
a writer described the village as ‘very fascinating’ and ‘truly Japanese’:

21 ‘The White City’, Truth, 28 December 1913, 3. See also ‘A New Amusement Centre for
Sydney’, Sunday Times, 19 October 1913, 6.
22 ‘The White City’, Freeman’s Journal, 18 December 1913, 25.
56

2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom

Several Japanese families are in actual residence there, and one may
wander through the quaint little houses and carry on a conversation
with the inmates … There is a tea-house where a charming Madame
Butterfly dispenses tea in truly Japanese fashion, whilst her little son, six
or even seven years old, talks to the visitors and begs them to come again
with a perfectly delightful accent.23

The author’s reference to Madame Butterfly underscores the importance
of theatre in propagating impressions of Japan. David Belasco’s play
Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan toured Australia early in the
century, while Puccini’s opera, which was based on the same story, made
its Australian debut in 1910. Other immensely popular Japanese-inspired
performances of this period include The Mikado, The Geisha, Moonlight
Blossom, The Japanese Nightingale and The Darling of the Gods.24 These
performances helped to cement romantic notions of Japan as a feminine
and artistic land in the minds of many Australians.
Some of these stereotypes informed the work of Kagiyama’s peers in
the Photographic Society of NSW. Monte Luke’s photograph The Girl
in the Kimona (c. 1919) was published in Harringtons’ Photographic
Journal in 1919 (see Figure 2.6). Now known only through this
magazine reproduction, this full-length portrait of an Anglo-European
woman wearing a sumptuous embroidered kimono diverges from
Luke’s more well-known landscape photographs and portraits.
Wearing chrysanthemums in her hair and clutching an arrangement
of chrysanthemums and wheat, The Girl in the Kimona embodies
contemporary perceptions of Japan as the delicate, feminine and
exotic ‘Land of the Chrysanthemum’, made famous decades earlier
in Pierre Loti’s book Madame Chrysanthème (1888). The dramatic
stance of Luke’s model mirrors the posture of popular Japanese dolls
sold as tourist souvenirs and collectables, and photographed later by
Kagiyama (see Figure 2.7). So familiar were audiences with these highly
stylised signifiers of Japan that they crystallised as truth; the editors of
Harringtons’ Photographic Journal proclaimed that Luke’s model’s ‘bend
of the knees gives the true Japanese effect’.25

23 ‘Woman’s Page’, Freeman’s Journal, 1 January 1914, 29.
24 Darryl Collins, ‘Emperors and Musume: China and Japan “on the Boards” in Australia,
1850s–1920s’, East Asian History 7 (June 1994): 67–92.
25 ‘Our Illustrations’, 242.
57

Pacific Exposures

Figure 2.6. Monte Luke,
The Girl in the Kimona.

Source: Harrington’s Photographic Journal,
20 August 1919, 249.

Figure 2.7. Ichiro Kagiyama,
Untitled [Japanese Dancing Doll].
Source: The Home, July 1940, 46.

Wartime Ambivalences
While these Japanese-inspired photographs and the enthusiastic
public reception of White City’s Japanese Village suggest broad
public support for Japan, behind the scenes Japan’s growing military
might and participation in WWI generated significant political anxiety
and diplomatic tension. Kagiyama was a keen observer at Sydney’s public
celebrations of Japan’s military capacity. Six photographs in his personal
album focus on military parades in which Japanese flags decorate the
city among the flags of other Allied nations. One of these captures
the celebrations as crowds watch a passing convoy of cars decorated
with Japanese national flags, naval flags and flowers (see Figure 2.8).
Kagiyama stood in the thick of the parade, at street level between the
procession and long line of spectators. The exaggerated perspective that
results heightens the atmosphere so that we can almost hear the cars
rattle and rumble past the cheering crowd.
58

2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom

Figure 2.8. Attributed to Ichiro Kagiyama, Untitled [Parade], c. 1915.
Source: Private Collection.

However, news reports in the Japanese press about its future southward
expansion and ongoing diplomatic disputes about Australia’s efforts to
limit Japanese immigration fuelled official concerns about Japan’s motives
for supporting Britain during WWI.26 One fear was that Japan would
seek rewards for its wartime service and pressure the Commonwealth
to allow its citizens to enter Australia freely. The Australian government
was also troubled that Japan could secure former German territories in
the Pacific, leaving Australia vulnerable to future attacks from the north.
Japanese Consul General Shimizu urged his audience at a gathering in
Sydney in 1915 to ‘most earnestly disabuse your minds of the suspicion
that we have an ulterior or sinister objective in view’.27 However, those
suspicions continued to rise, and were reinforced by a  major Naval

26 L.F. Fitzhardinge, ‘Australia, Japan and Great Britain, 1914–18: A Study in Triangular
Diplomacy’, Historical Studies 14, no. 54 (1970): 250–59; Neville Meaney, Australia and World
Crisis 1914–1923 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009), 124–30.
27 ‘Japan’s Loyalty’, Western Champion, 29 April 1915, 29.
59

Pacific Exposures

Board survey of Japan’s status as a strategic threat.28 One Japanese
diplomat commented on the effects of this atmosphere on Japanese
photographers: ‘If they see our tourists taking photographs in the streets,
they immediately think that they are spies. They fear Japan in the way
you fear a bogeyman in the dark’.29
In the aftermath of WWI, the cumulative success of Japan’s military
and its seemingly inevitable place as one of the world’s great powers
exacerbated anxieties about maintaining a ‘White Australia’. Japanese
photographers were again placed under suspicion. Captain Longfield
Lloyd, a member of Army Intelligence commented:
The use of cameras by Japanese ship officers is proverbial, and indicates
either a most remarkable liking for photography on the part of the
Japanese, or a careful and consistent encouragement in the use of the
camera by their Government.

Lloyd described how, at the end of the war, there was ‘an epidemic
of photography by the officers of Japanese vessels in Sydney’. These
officers were typically placed under surveillance, and if they were seen
photographing within the Port of Sydney the War Precautions Act 1914
was invoked to seize their cameras, destroy their negatives and forward
their empty cameras to the Japanese consul general with a written
reprimand for the captain and crew. Lloyd was concerned that:
With constant photography on the part of almost every Japanese officer
who comes to the port, some negatives at least would be valuable to an
Intelligence Bureau engaged in building up a complete system of local
knowledge.30

According to Henry Frei, ‘Australian Japanophobia rose to a crescendo’
at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the year that Ishida arrived in
Sydney.31 Prime Minster Hughes fought to quash Japan’s proposed racial
equality clause in the League of Nations preamble, resist Japan’s claims
to the German possessions in the south-west Pacific and secure those
islands as what the Weekly Times described as ‘White Australia’s Bulwarks’
28 See Navy Department Reports ‘The Japanese Danger’, ‘Problems of Pacific Defence’ and ‘PostBellum Naval Policy for the Pacific’, October 1915, Papers of William Morris Hughes, National
Library of Australia MS 1538/156/7 and AAMP1049/1 file 14/0285.
29 D.C.S. Sissons, ‘Australian Fears of Japan as a Defence Threat 1895–1971’, Papers of D.C.S.
Sissons, National Library of Australia MS 3092, Series 1, Box I, Folder 2.
30 Longfield Lloyd, ‘Japan Espionage – General’, NAA A981/1, JAP 55, 137–39.
31 Frei, Japan’s Southward Advance and Australia, 109.
60

2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom

against Japan.32 Suspicion of Japanese intentions towards Australia
escalated, so much so that during celebrations for the emperor’s birthday
at the Japanese Consulate in Sydney in 1920 a senior political dignitary,
R.W. Caldwell, made an apology to the acting consul general in front
of the assembled politicians, diplomats, businessmen and military men:
I avail myself of this opportunity to express my deep regret and shame
at the recrudescence of anti-Japanese prejudice, which has taken
place in Australia since the conclusion of the late war. So many of
the prognostications of anti-Japanese prophets were disproved by the
faithful performance of her treaty obligations by Japan during the great
struggle that her detractors have had to take a new position. They deny
that Japan did anything at all during the war, or assert that, if she did,
she did it from interested motives.33

Tensions were exacerbated by a postwar naval arms race between the
US and Japan that raised renewed fears of war on Australia’s doorstep.
However, the situation changed at the Washington Conference of
1921–22. The resultant Four Power Treaty between the US, Japan,
the British Empire and France involved an agreement to respect one
another’s possessions and dominions in the Pacific, while the Five Power
Treaty eased the pressure of the arms race by limiting naval construction
until 1936. The conference ushered in a new period of optimism and
confidence towards Japan.34 In the wake of this event, Defence Minister
George Pearce declared in parliament that Australia was beginning a new
era of peaceful relations with the ‘Far North’. Pearce noted that while
‘Australians were Europeans in race they were geographically in Asia’, and
that it was therefore critical that peace in the Pacific was maintained.35

Aesthetic Relations Between the Wars
Despite the tensions of the Peace Conference, Ishida received a warm
welcome into Sydney’s photography community after arriving in 1919.
Ishida brought a camera with him so that he could send snapshots home
to his parents, but took up photography seriously after meeting Kagiyama
32 ‘White Australia’s Bulwarks’, Weekly Times, 8 February 1919, 29.
33 ‘Japan. The Emperor’s Birthday. Relations with Britain’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 November
1920, 8.
34 D.C.S. Sissons, ‘Attitudes to Japan and Defence, 1890–1923’ (MA thesis, University of
Melbourne, 1956), 101–24.
35 ‘Washington Conference. Speech by Senator’, West Australian, 28 July 1922.
61

Pacific Exposures

and receiving some lessons from his new friend. Kagiyama invited
Ishida to join the Photographic Society of NSW and by 1920 Ishida
was successfully entering his photographs in national and international
competitions, exhibitions and salons including the 1920 London
Salon. President of the Photographic Society of NSW, D.J. Webster,
encapsulated Ishida’s dramatic rise to prominence when he described
him in 1922 as ‘that photographic meteorite from the East that swooped
down in our midst with hurricane suddenness’.36 In another article
dedicated to Ishida, published the same year in Harrington’s Photographic
Journal, Webster wrote glowingly of the photographer:
I do not know of one who is more versatile or more consistently prolific
… He is keen, enthusiastic and receptive, with an aesthetic temperament,
that I am sure will carry him even higher up the pictorial ladder.37

Ishida quickly mastered the control processes that the pictorialists
admired, especially bromoil. This technique allowed practitioners to
limit their photographs’ tonal range and eliminate detail, leaving a soft,
matt surface. Ishida’s work so impressed Sydney’s leading photographers
that in 1921 he was invited to become a member of the exclusive Sydney
Camera Circle. It is telling that Australian journalists covering the 1922
and 1923 London Salons of Photography described Ishida as one of the
Australian exhibitors.38 Practically and aesthetically, he was an Australian
photographer. Ishida learned about composition and lighting from
members of the Photographic Society and Sydney Camera Circle, and on
group outings they photographed beach scenes, pastoral idylls and bush
landscapes. Ishida’s photographs unsurprisingly bear similarities to the
work of his peers. A White Gum (c. 1922) (see Figure 2.9), which Ishida
presented in the 1922 Photographic Society of NSW exhibition, reflects
the popularity of photographing single, majestic gum trees in Australian
pictorialism. Such photographs were often given patriotic titles, such as
John Kauffmann’s The Battler, The Survivor and Victory (all published in
his 1919 monograph The Art of John Kauffmann), Eutrope’s Guardian
Gum (c. 1920–30) and Eaton’s In Stately Splendor (1929). Although
Ishida did not opt for such a title, he similarly framed A White Gum in

36 D.J. Webster, ‘Photographic Society of New South Wales’, Harrington’s Photographic Journal,
1 November 1922, 14.
37 D.J. Webster, ‘Mr K. Ishida’, Harrington’s Photographic Journal, 1 September 1922, 23.
38 ‘Salon of Photography’, Northern Star, 10 September 1923, 5; ‘Salon of Photography’,
Examiner, 10 September 1923, 4; ‘General Cable News’, West Australian, 10 September 1923, 7;
‘Photography. Australians’ Good Work’, Daily Herald, 16 September 1922, 5.
62

2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom

Figure 2.9. Kiichiro Ishida, A White Gum.

Source: Catalogue of an Exhibition Camera Pictures by the Photographic Society of N.S.W.,
1922 (Sydney: Photographic Society of New South Wales, 1922), plate V.

Pacific Exposures

a manner that monumentalises the tree. The use of bromoil to soften the
scrubby undergrowth accentuates the pictorial authority of the tree and
emphasises its thick trunk and enormous branches.
Looking at the variety of Ishida’s work from this period, which included
photographs of industrial workers, city scenes, portraits, landscapes
and still life, it is not surprising that Webster described him as ‘one of
Australia’s leading Pictorialists’. Webster continued, ‘when we consider
that Australia has such camera artists as Cazneaux and Smith, of Sydney,
Kauffman and Temple Stephens, of Adelaide, this is a great compliment
to our little friend from Japan’.39 Webster’s description of Ishida as
‘our little friend from Japan’ will likely be jarring to contemporary
readers. Although Ishida was respected by the photography community
in Sydney as one of its own, Webster’s allusion to stereotypes of the
childlike Japanese highlights how old, entrenched racial prejudices can
nonetheless seep into supposedly positive, personal and artistic relations.
As well as sharing characteristics of Australian pictorialism, the work of
Ishida and some his Anglo-Australian peers reveal evidence of a common
interest in Japanese compositional devices. As seen in ukiyo-e woodblock
prints, Ishida’s Mountain Decoration (see Figure 2.10) features branches
and foliage that act as a screen through which the distant landscape is
viewed. Ishida’s use of light, shade and contrast also works to reduce
the Australian mountain range to a series of imbricated planes in
a manner that recalls Japanese sumi-e black ink scroll paintings. It is not
clear whether Ishida was consciously imaging the Australian landscape
using Japanese composition or applying photography lessons that he
learned in Australia. Cazneaux’s landscape The Bidding of Spring (later
retitled Spring Time) (c. 1919), Kauffmann’s Thro’ the Fog (c. 1919) and
Stanley Eutrope’s Winter’s Curtain (c. 1922) (see Figure 2.11) affirm
that Australians were experimenting with the Japanese ‘photography of
hanging branches’40 before and after Ishida’s arrival in Australia. Eutrope
used bromoil in Winter’s Curtain to dissolve some of the detail of the
distant river and bridge, and flatten and radically simplify the pictorial
plane. Seen through the ‘curtain’ of weeping winter foliage, the view
and its watery reflection seem to merge into one space. Ishida may

39 Webster, ‘Photographic Society of New South Wales’, 14.
40 F.C. Tilney, ‘American Work at the London Exhibitions’, American Photography 21, no. 12
(December 1927): 666.
64

Figure 2.10. Kiichiro Ishida, Mountain Decoration.

Source: Photograms of the Year 1923 (London: Iliffe & Sons Ltd, 1924).

65

Figure 2.11. Stanley Eutrope, Winter’s Curtain, c. 1922.
Source: Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.

2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom

have also seen these techniques in Photograms of the Year, particularly in
US photographer Rupert Lovejoy’s own Mountain Decoration published
in 1919.
Although today’s curators and commentators have noted these links
between modernist Australian photographs and Japanese prints, when
Cazneaux’s and Eutrope’s photographs were originally published and
exhibited in Australia their nods to Japanese art went unmentioned.41
J.T. Farrell, editor of Harringtons’ Photographic Journal, described
Cazneaux’s The Bidding of Spring in 1919 as ‘a creation of the fancy, with
delicate tone values and light tracery symbolical of the artist’s conception
of the impression of Spring’.42 Similarly, when Eutrope’s photograph
was published in Cameragraphs of the Year 1924, Cazneaux praised the
bromoil for its rendition of the ‘tender passage of light’ and made no
mention of a Japanese influence.43 The fact that this two-way exchange
of Australian and Japanese compositional devices was unremarkable
at the time suggests they were part of a relaxed and open exchange of
pictorial ideas and images that were not necessarily fixed to national
identities or clearly delineated patterns of cross-cultural appropriation.
The creative and interpersonal exchange between Ishida, Kagiyama and
Sydney’s leading photographers continued after Ishida’s departure in
December 1923. Before he left, Ishida donated 10 pounds to the Sydney
Camera Circle and asked that in return each of its members give him
some prints as a memento. Ishida took 25 of their prints back to Japan,
along with prints by Kagiyama, and exhibited 15 of them at the Shiseido
Gallery in Ginza in March 1924 with 31 of his own photographs.
The exhibition was highly praised and works by Sydney Camera Circle
members were subsequently published in the Japanese periodical Asahi
Camera in 1926 and 1927. A Japanese translation of a profile on Monte
Luke written by US photographer and critic Sigismund Blumann was
also published in Asahi Camera alongside examples of Luke’s work in
May 1926, exposing Japanese audiences to the work and reputation
of this Australian.44
41 For example, see the discussion of Cazneaux’s Spring Time in Judy Annear, ‘Kiichiro Ishida and
the Sydney Camera Circle’, Look, December 2003, 19.
42 J.T. Farrell, ‘Our Illustrations’, Harrington’s Photographic Journal, 15 October 1919, 312.
43 Harold Cazneaux, ‘A Review of the Pictures’, in Cameragraphs of the Year 1924, ed. Cecil W.
Bostock (Sydney: Harringtons, 1924).
44 Sigismund Blumann, ‘Monte Luke. An Artist Who Illuminates Australia’s Fame’, Asahi
Camera, May 1926, 120.
67

Pacific Exposures

The Home and the 1930s
The open exchange between Kagiyama, Ishida and the amateur
photographic society in the 1920s contrasts with the fetishisation of
Kagiyama’s Japanese vision in his early contributions to The Home. Before
Kagiyama took work with The Home in 1935, the magazine developed
an established record for promoting Japanese-inspired art and design
to its readers as the height of modern fashion. Produced in Sydney by
the artist, publisher and high profile figure in the Australian art world,
Sydney Ure Smith,45 The Home aimed to raise the tastes of Australians
by presenting the best products and people using the best production
values.46 The cover of the first issue of The Home in 1920 featured a
woman holding a Japanese umbrella, and was followed by several cover
designs in the coming years inspired by Japanese woodblock prints.47 The
cover of the summer 1921 issue, designed by Bertha Sloane, draws on
the simplicity, crisp outlines and bright colours of Japanese woodblocks
to image a stylishly dressed Australian woman enjoying time at the beach
with her children (see Figure 2.12). She sits beneath a bamboo-framed
Japanese umbrella decorated with colourful blossoms, which occupies
the central focal point of the composition. Readers of The Home were
also able to witness the impact of Japanese woodcuts on Thea Proctor’s
fashion illustrations and fan designs, and on Margaret Preston’s still life
paintings.48
Other issues throughout the 1920s and 1930s featured photographs by
Max Dupain and Spencer Shier of Australian society ladies and models
wearing kimonos or clutching sprigs of cherry blossom, and articles
promoting the art of Japanese floral arrangement or design.49 Cazneaux
took a number of jobs for The Home in the 1920s and 1930s in which
he photographed the homes of significant figures in Australia–Japan
relations. In the late 1920s, he travelled to Mikado Farm to photograph
Hideo Kuwahata’s gardens. Cazneaux’s photographs of Kuwahata’s
bonsais featured in the same issue as his photograph of the iris pond

45 Although Ure Smith sold The Home to John Fairfax & Sons Ltd in 1934, he continued to act
as editor until 1938.
46 Sydney Ure Smith, ‘The Story of the Home’, The Home, March 1930, 60.
47 Other Japanese-inspired covers were featured in the February 1920, December 1921, December
1922 and January 1932 issues of The Home.
48 See The Home, March 1923; June 1934; December 1934.
49 The Home February 1926; July 1935; April 1937; May 1932.
68

Figure 2.12. Cover design for The Home, December 1921.

69

Pacific Exposures

at ‘Rivenhall’, the Japanese-inspired home and garden of Arthur Sadler
in the upper north shore suburb of Warrawee.50 Sadler was professor of
Oriental Studies at the University of Sydney between 1922 and 1947,
and known for his collection of Japanese art.51
The prevalence of Japanese motifs in The Home was complemented by
articles and photographic portraits of Japanese dignitaries, including
Madame K. Inoue, the wife of the former Japanese consul general in
Australia; Count Kato, the prime minister of Japan; Japan’s new princess
Shigeko, Teru-no-Miya; and Iemasa Tokugawa, the first Japanese minister
to Canada and his family.52 This promotion of Japan reflects Ure Smith’s
longstanding interest in Japanese culture. The publisher was a supporter
of the Australia-Japan Society and socialised with Sydney’s Japanese
merchants, diplomats and Japanophiles.53 As a guest at Japanese consul
events, including official celebrations of the emperor’s birthday in 1930,
1931 and 1932, Ure Smith mixed with the consul general and senior
Japanese merchants of Sydney, as well as figures like Sadler. In 1935, Ure
Smith also undertook discussions ‘with a Japanese authority’ in the hope
of leading to an exchange of Japanese and Australian art exhibitions.54
It is likely that Ure Smith’s interest in Japan led him to hire Kagiyama
as a photographer for The Home. By this stage, Kagiyama had opened
his own studio, counting as clients the Sydney Morning Herald and the
Atlantic Union Oil Company among other firms. Although Kagiyama’s
photographs of contemporary Sydney contrasted with the Japaneseinspired imagery that pervaded The Home, the fashionable interest
in Japan initially framed the publication of his work. A spread of
photographs of shrines, temples and bustling streets in contemporary
Tokyo—taken in 1934 during Kagiyama’s first return trip to Japan since
arriving in Australia—was included in the May 1935 issue. Kagiyama’s
first contribution of photographs of Sydney was published in November
that year. Despite living and working in Sydney for well over 20 years,
Kagiyama’s photographs were presented as a foreign encounter under
the headline ‘Sydney—Seen Through Japanese Eyes’ (see Figure 2.13).55
50 Cazneaux’s photographs of Sadler and his wife in their Japanese home and garden appeared
in the February 1928 and July 1932 issues.
51 ‘Reception by the Japanese Consul’, Sunday Times, 4 May 1930, 16; ‘Emperor of Japan’,
Sydney Morning Herald, 30 April 1932, 14.
52 The Home, August 1922; May 1926; June 1926; November 1931.
53 ‘Relations with Japan. New Society Formed’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 October 1928, 12.
54 ‘National Art Gallery’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 September 1935, 4.
55 Ichiro Kagiyama, ‘Sydney Through Japanese Eyes’, The Home, November 1935, 38–39.
70

Figure 2.13. Ichiro Kagiyama, ‘Sydney—Seen Through Japanese Eyes’.
Source: The Home, November 1935, 38–39.

71

Pacific Exposures

Apart from the spread’s attention-grabbing headline, the brief
introductory text made no mention of Kagiyama’s Japanese heritage
or its potential impact on his view of Sydney. Kagiyama’s photographs
were praised for capturing the true ‘character of Sydney’ and described
as the result of ‘the discriminating eye of the artist and each picture
is a perfect little composition’.56 The phrase ‘perfect little composition’
recalls the tendency to describe the Japanese and Japanese culture as
little, dainty, artistic or delicate, as in the description of Ishida as our
‘little friend from Japan’. Other allusions to stereotyped visions of Japan
were evident in the selection and placement of Kagiyama’s photographs.
The  largest photograph at the bottom of the first page and another
placed prominently at the centre top offer views of the city framed by
hanging branches from a Morton Bay fig tree. This compositional device
would have been familiar to readers as a signifier of quintessential Japan
seen in tourist advertising and contemporary photographs inspired
by Japan. Indeed, there is a striking compositional similarity between
Kagiyama’s photograph of Sydney Harbour Bridge and the image of
‘Japan the Fascinating’ in an NYK Line travel advertisement published
in The Home earlier the same year (see Figure 2.14).
There is nothing particularly Japanese about Kagiyama’s vision of Sydney
in the other 12 crisp, sharply focused black and white photographs
included in the spread. The photographs are a salute to modern Sydney,
its iconic Harbour Bridge, shipping industry and bustling city. There
is dynamism and energy in these images. Cars rush through busy
streets lined with high-rise buildings, while electric tramlines mirror
the sweep of the road overhead. The most dramatic photograph is on
the second page: Kagiyama’s study of the British Medical Association
building on Macquarie Street, completed in 1930 (see Figure 2.15).
Kagiyama accentuates the soaring vertical lines and geometric finishes
of the Art Deco architecture by framing it at a diagonal, which creates
the impression of the building surging skywards. A window washer
dangles precariously from a rope midway down as though the building
is dragging him along for the ride. It seems as though the views through
hanging branches were selected by the editors for the first page of the
spread to accentuate the impression of an essentially Japanese vision.

56 Ibid., 38.
72

Figure 2.14. Advertisement for NYK Line.
Source: The Home, July 1935.

73

Pacific Exposures

Figure 2.15. Ichiro Kagiyama, B.M.A Macquarie Street, from ‘Sydney—
Seen Through Japanese Eyes’.
Source: The Home, November 1935, 38–39.

However, soon after Kagiyama appears to be treated like any other
photographer. Over the following three years, The Home published many
of Kagiyama’s photographs of Sydney and its suburbs, the Australian
bush and the properties of well-known graziers without mention of his
‘Japanese vision’. The soft pictorialism seen in Kagiyama’s work from
the 1920s had been replaced with crisp, clear photographs of Sydney
and its people. In several photo essays, Kagiyama represented wellknown Australian myths including the landscape tradition and the role
of the bronzed lifesaver as a symbol of masculine, albeit Sydney-centric,

74

2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom

nationhood in the 1930s.57 A survey of 16 of Kagiyama’s photographs of
Sydney’s modernist apartment buildings, which accompanied the article
‘Modernity in Flats’, reveal Kagiyama’s interest in working with different
viewpoints, cropping and unusual angles in architectural photography.58
Night-time photography is his subject in ‘The Night Falls on King’s
Cross Sydney’, in which he used car headlights snaking along wide
city streets lined with neon signs, and the glow emanating from Art
Deco shop fronts, bars and cafes to create the impression of an exciting,
vibrant capital.59 Together, these photographs document a vibrant time
in Sydney’s development.
As well as being a time for developing his profile as a photographer, the
1930s was a period of personal change for Kagiyama. His marriage to
Cicelia ended in 1932 and their divorce was finalised in 1934.60 During
his seven-month trip to Japan in 1934, Kagiyama married a woman
from Takayama named in Australian immigration documents as both
Sadako and Sata.61 Immigration restrictions meant that she was not
permitted to accompany her husband on his trip back to Australia or to
stay indefinitely. A 1905 amendment to the Immigration Restriction Act
removed the provision for wives and children of non-Europeans residing
in Australia to join their spouses, but exceptions could be made on a caseby-case basis for Japanese people who applied through the consulate.62
Upon Kagiyama’s return to Australia, the Japanese consul applied on
Kagiyama’s behalf to have his new wife exempted from the dictation test.
The request was granted in 1935. Kagiyama paid a substantial bond of
100 pounds as part of this process and, thanks to his connections to the
Japanese trading networks, an unnamed ‘reputable Japanese merchant of
Sydney’ accepted surety for that bond.63 His new wife eventually landed
in Australia in August 1939, just two weeks before Great Britain declared
war on Germany, bringing Australia as a British nation into WWII.64

57 ‘The March to Nationhood’, The Home, March 1938, 33, 36.
58 ‘Modernity in Flats’, The Home, February 1936, 22–25.
59 ‘The Night Falls on King’s Cross Sydney’, The Home, August 1936, 37–40.
60 ‘In Divorce’ 1932, 10; ‘In Divorce’, 1933, 5; ‘In Divorce’, 1934, 8, NSW State Archives and
Records 1127/1932 and 73/1933.
61 NAA A12508 32/128 and NAA C123 9904.
62 Immigration Restriction Amendment 1905 s 4c; Oliver, ‘Japanese Relationships in White
Australia’, 5.5.
63 NAA SP42/1 C1934/4618.
64 NAA A12508 32/128.
75

Pacific Exposures

The Home featured fewer articles and editorials about Japan from
late 1937. As news reports of Japanese atrocities in the Second SinoJapanese War spread throughout Australia from late September 1937,
anti-Japanese sentiment began to rise. Torao Wakamatsu, the consul
general of Japan who arrived in Australia in February 1937 to help
finalise the details of the Japan–Australia trade arrangement, discussed
his disappointment at Australia’s reaction to ‘the unfortunate China
Incident’. He took issue with what he described as propaganda, false
reports and misunderstandings published in the Australian press,
including notorious photographs reportedly showing Japanese soldiers
using the bodies of Chinese prisoners for bayonet practice. These
photographs were discussed in Australian newspapers in late September
1937 and published around the world including in London’s Daily
Mirror. In his farewell speech to the Japan-Australia Society, Wakamatsu
was critical of how this coverage resulted in ‘public movements to boycott
Japanese goods, in refusals by wharf labourers to load Japanese ships, and
in other forms that threatened to disturb the friendship between the
two countries’.65
While the Sino-Japanese War continued, Japan went on the offensive.
In June and July 1940, an exhibition of Japanese decorative arts toured
Sydney and Melbourne, organised by the Australia-Japan Society, the
Society of International Cultural Relations and the Japan Foreign Trade
Federation. The exhibition was opened in Sydney by the Japanese consul
general, Akiyama. Media coverage of the exhibition emphasised the
‘ancient crafts’, pretty dolls, ‘exquisite’ tea sets, fabrics, bonsai, kimonos
and cultured pearls.66 Also featured was a large map of Japanese tourist
sites including those in Japanese territories in China occupied as a
result of the Sino-Japanese War. Kagiyama covered this exhibition for
The Home as his final contribution in July 1940. His photographs of an
ancient Japanese warrior figurine, dancing geisha doll, bamboo hand bag
and shell-shaped cooking pot reinforced the message of the exhibition
of Japan as ancient, doll-like, artistic and therefore non‑threatening.
Two months later, in late September 1940, Japan joined the enemy Axis
Powers, Italy and Germany, in a formal Tripartite Pact.

65 Torao Wakamatsu, Farewell Message to Australian People (Sydney: New Century Press, c. 1938),
2–12.
66 ‘Japanese Industrial Arts Show in Sydney’, Telegraph, 4 June 1940, 15.
76

2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom

Rising Suspicions and Looming War
By the late 1930s, the Australian Department of Defence was keeping
a close eye on Japanese activities in Australia. Surveillance activities
increased exponentially from 1937. The names of Japanese residents of
NSW were collected; Japanese social groups, clubs and businesses were
scrutinised; and individuals were increasingly shadowed. Department
of Defence documents reveal how Japanese photographers were of
particular interest.67 Kagiyama was placed under surveillance in 1938.
Although Kagiyama had photographed several sites that were later
to become especially sensitive, including the Port at Newcastle, Fort
Denison, Bradley’s Head and the navy base at Garden Island—the site
where the HMAS Kuttabul was sunk by a Japanese submarine in May
1942—it was not his photography that attracted the attention of security
officials. Instead, Kagiyama became the focus of an investigation after
a neighbour who operated a tobacco kiosk under Kagiyama’s Kings Cross
flat reported some unusual activities. Between October and December
1938, Kagiyama reportedly left a parcel on his doorstep each morning
between 8 and 8.10 am. Another man collected that parcel between 8.45
and 9 am the same day. Containing wax cylinders for sound recordings
supposedly of radio broadcasts from Tokyo, the contents were deemed to
be cause for no further action. The Australian security report conceded
that there was a possibility that coded messages were being exchanged
through the cylinders, but noted that they were powerless to prevent
it.68 There is anecdotal evidence that Kagiyama was ‘approached by the
Japanese army to work as a spy and this he did’.69 However, gaining
access to additional evidence that could either confirm or refute this
assertion is currently impossible.
As tensions between Japan and the Allies escalated, including the US
Government’s freezing of Japanese assets in retaliation for Japanese
incursions into French Indochina, many Japanese merchants and
diplomats returned to Japan. Kagiyama left Australia with his new wife

67 See ‘NSW Security Service file – Pre war Activities of Japanese and training of Interpreters’,
NAA C320 J240; ‘NSW Security Service file – Police Observation of Japanese Movements in the
City’, NAA C320 J70; ‘NSW Security Service file – Japanese firms in Australia’, NAA C320 J78;
‘NSW Security Service file – Japanese Society of Sydney’, NAA C320 J79; ‘NSW Security Service
file – Japanese Organization in Sydney’, NAA C320 J208.
68 NAA SP42/1 C1934/4618.
69 Mitsuda, Modernism/Japonism in Photography 1920s–40s, 31.
77

Pacific Exposures

on 15 August 1941 on board the Japanese repatriation ship the Kashima
Maru, taking his photographs with him.70 Had the couple remained in
Australia, they would have been arrested and interned in one of several
internment camps where those classified as ‘enemy aliens’, including
thousands of men, women and children of Japanese, German and Italian
origin, where detained until the end of the war.71 Back in Takayama,
Kagiyama was able to capitalise on the language and photography skills
that he had developed in Australia. He worked as an interpreter for the
forces of the American-led military Occupation of postwar Japan, in
which Australia played a substantial role. The former mayor of Takayama,
Shūzō Tsuchikawa, described Kagiyama as a significant support during
these years:
He was a gentle, earnest person with a strong sense of responsibility. The
fact that the city of Takayama was well-liked by the Occupying Forces,
and got by with no problems, was entirely thanks to this one man’s
beautiful, passionate interpreting. I will never forget him.72

Kagiyama also gave a presentation to the city council, presidents of
neighbourhood associations, school staff and the head of the Ladies’
Association in Takayama regarding what to expect from the Allied
occupying forces and how to interact with them, given their cultural
differences.
The work of Kagiyama and Ishida in Sydney, and the cultural interest
in Japan among their Anglo-Australian contemporaries, highlight
some of the complexities of Australia–Japan relations in the interwar
period. Australia’s relative proximity to Japan, and the ebbs and flows
of international politics and diplomacy, ensured that Australian
representations of Japan and responses to the work of these Japanese
photographers were nuanced and transcended Orientalist clichés.
Although stereotypes of diminutive, feminine, ancient and artistic Japan
endured over time, they were reinvented and adapted continually with
reference to specific political events, changing cultural values and the
interpersonal relations among photographers. The dramatic fluctuations
in Australian attitudes to Japan—from perceived threat to WWI ally,
70 NAA SP1148/2. In this ‘Passenger List – Outgoing Passengers’ document, the ship’s name is
misspelled as Kasima Maru.
71 Yuriko Nagata, Unwanted Aliens: Japanese Internment in Australia (St Lucia, Brisbane:
University of Queensland Press, 1996).
72 Shūzō Tsuchikawa, ‘Episodes from the War’s End (Shusen Kobanashi)’, Hida Shunju, August
1978, 434.
78

2. ‘White Australia’ in the Darkroom

trading partner to bitter battlefield enemy—meant that these stereotypes
took on divergent meanings in the first decades of the twentieth century.
The belittling caricatures of Japanese men, used to infantilise Japan
in conservative defences of ‘White Australia’, were just as likely to be
invoked as a term of endearment to describe ‘our little friend’ Ishida,
or to praise Kagiyama’s ‘perfect little compositions’. This process of
reinterpreting and adapting familiar stereotypes gave Australian national
identities a degree of porosity, allowing aspects of Japanese visual culture,
and these two Japanese photographers themselves, to be viewed as both
Australian and foreign. Yet, such simplistic ways of understanding racial
and cultural differences also amounted to a form of symbolic violence
that misrecognised the dynamic and complex character of individuals,
societies and their modes of representation. Whether they were linked to
friendship or enmity, the very persistence of these stereotypes ultimately
gave them a longevity that continued through WWII and well beyond.

79

3
SHOOTING JAPANESE:
PHOTOGRAPHING THE
PACIFIC WAR
Anonymous Japanese lie dead in the kunai grass at Gona in Papua
New Guinea in December 1942, sprawled before a semi-circle of
10 Australian ‘diggers’ brandishing their weapons for the camera
(see Figure 3.1). One of the Australians looks away, grinning sheepishly.
Three-quarters of a century later, George Silk’s photograph is one of
the signature photographs of a remorseless war fought with a racially
charged viciousness. It first came to public notice in the overheated
atmosphere of the conflict itself, in War in New Guinea (1943), an official
photographic collection published by the Australian Government’s chief
propaganda agency, the Department of Information (DOI). Over the
years since, it has often appeared in both popular and scholarly histories
of the Pacific War.
The image partakes of a long tradition of wartime ‘trophy pictures’,
of victors displaying their dead or humiliating their captive
enemy—a tradition that reached its nadir in 2004, with the publication
of digital images of American military personnel mockingly torturing
Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.1 The diggers in
the photograph resemble big game hunters, posing proudly with their
kill. In a struggle often described in the press of the day as a kind of hunt,
1 It is strongly reminiscent, for instance, of the grainy photographs of heavily armed American
soldiers clustered around the corpses of Lakota Indians in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee
massacre in South Dakota in 1890. Burial of the dead after the massacre of Wounded Knee, 17 January
1891. Northwestern Photo Co. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction
Number: LC-USZ62-44458. For an account of military trophy pictures, see Janina Struck, Private
Pictures: Soldiers’ Inside View of War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 18.
81

Figure 3.1. George Silk, Australian Soldiers with Japanese Dead after
the Final Assault on Gona, Papua, 17 December 1942.
Source: Australian War Memorial (AWM) 013881.

3. Shooting Japanese

with the Japanese as the quarry, perhaps this is not surprising. In January
1943, reporter for the Argus Geoffrey Hutton wrote of remnants of
retreating enemy being ‘hunted down’ by Australian patrols. Later
that year, Hutton gave a verbal picture of the intense fighting taking
place in thick, trackless jungle. This, he wrote, was ‘rather a manhunt
than a battle’, with the Japanese ‘in full flight’. Ironically, given that
Australian reportage customarily emphasised the superior virtuosity of
Australian troops in their confrontation with the enemy, the caption to
the photograph in War in New Guinea reports that the five Japanese had
been killed by a single grenade. The diggers so flamboyantly parading
their kill were enjoying a little vicarious fame.2
The ‘Pacific War’ is oxymoronic enough, without taking into account
the mutual loathing of the antagonists. It was a deeply racialised
encounter, which both suspended notions of common humanity and
pitted contrasting modes of male military behaviour in and out of
battle. In his study of the nexus of race and power that characterised
the conflict, War Without Mercy, John Dower noted that both Allied
commanders and common soldiers routinely used ‘exceedingly graphic
and contemptuous’ imagery to denigrate a ‘uniquely contemptible’
foe. The revered American war correspondent Ernie Pyle expressed
the common view that, while the European enemies were ‘people’, the
Japanese were ‘something subhuman and repulsive’, likening them to
cockroaches and mice.3
The Australians could be at least as brutal in expressing their aversion.
In his study of their responses to their adversaries, Fighting the Enemy,
Mark Johnston quoted the diary of a veteran of the fighting in North
Africa, who exhibited ‘very humane’ attitudes to his Axis opponents in
that theatre. Killing Japanese was different. To destroy ‘such repulsive
looking animals’, he asserted, ‘was not murder’.4 This was a view
encouraged by the military leadership. In an interview carried on the
front page of the New York Times in January 1943, the commander of

2 Department of Information, War in New Guinea (Sydney: F.H. Johnston Publishing, 1943),
n.p. Hunt references Geoffrey Hutton, ‘Papuan Fight Drawing to a Close’, Argus, 21 January 1943,
1; Geoffrey Hutton, ‘Hunting Japs in the Jungle’, Argus, 14 October 1943, 2; See also Geoffrey
Hutton, ‘Hunting Japs on slopes of Satelberg’, Argus, 16 November 1943, 4.
3 Ernie Pyle, The Last Chapter (New York: Henry Holt, 1945), 5, quoted in John Dower,
War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 9, 78.
4 Mark Johnston, Fighting the Enemy: Australian Soldiers and their Adversaries in World War II
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 87.
83

Pacific Exposures

the Australian forces, General Sir Thomas Blamey, observed: ‘We are not
dealing with humans as we know them … Our troops have the right
view of the Japs. They regard them as vermin’. A few months earlier,
giving a pep talk to his exhausted troops at the base camp outside Port
Moresby, Blamey reportedly described the enemy as a ‘subhuman beast’
who was ‘a cross between the human being and the ape’. Warming
to his theme, Blamey invited his men to take a journey deep into the
‘miasmic’ jungle and into the heart of darkness: ‘We must exterminate
the Japanese’, he exhorted.5
This ethos of extermination seems to have permeated the corps of
cameramen covering the Australian campaigns in the sweltering
jungles and beachheads of New Guinea and neighbouring islands such
as Borneo, Bougainville and the Bismarck Archipelago. A large corps
of official photographers shooting for both government and military
agencies expanded on an established frame of cultural reference
created by longstanding national anxieties over the prospect of ‘White
Australia’s’ vulnerability to Asian invasion. These anxieties were cultural
and psychological as much as military and geopolitical. The Pacific War
realised the racial fears that had for decades marked Australian responses
to Japan. The late nineteenth-century male stereotypes of the quaintly
charming Mikado and the self-sacrificing samurai, followed by the
ambitious imperialist on a prolonged campaign of regional annexation
in the first three decades of the new century, evolved into a terrifying
new hybrid: the homicidal maniac of the 1940s.
Institutional resources were ploughed into photographing a threat to
Australia itself after the fall of Singapore voided the region of British
power and turned the isolated nation into a ‘bastion of the white race’.6
A new military Directorate of Public Relations (DPR) was formed in
February 1942, augmenting and at times competing with the DOI,
whose photographic teams comprised accredited civilians such as
George Silk. A rebadged Military History Section (MHS) comprised
photographers who were attested members of the armed services to
provide an official pictorial record of what was an immense national
5 New York Times, 9 January 1943, 1; Blamey quoted in George H. Johnston, The Toughest
Fighting in the World (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943), 207, 227–28.
6 ‘Lesson of Singapore’, Argus, 13 February 1942, 2. In seeking parliamentary approval for
declaring war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, Prime Minister John Curtin invoked upholding the
‘principle of a White Australia’ (quoted in Peter Dennis et al., The Oxford Companion to Australian
Military History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), 323).
84

3. Shooting Japanese

crisis. By the end of 1944, the New Guinea–based MHS had no fewer
than nine teams shooting the war with Japan. Official photography
was integral to the operations and public relations of other branches
of the armed forces as well. A corps of up to 200 officially accredited
photographers and cinematographers, supplemented by internally
appointed unit photographers, covered the war.7
The Australian photographers were unequivocally ‘official’, with an
identity intrinsically bound up with the national armed forces. Their
affiliation came at a cost. Australian military and civilian agencies had
fixed ideas about which of their pictures were deemed suitable for
distribution; it was as if nothing life-threatening could be seen to have
happened to Australians on the battlefield. The autocratic policies of
the DOI were largely instrumental in the departure of the two most
famous members of its photographic cohort, the New Zealand–born
Silk and the celebrated, ill-fated Damien Parer, to work for independent
American outlets. In Silk’s case, the move was prompted in part by the
suppression of his Christmas Day 1942 photograph of a wounded,
blindfolded Australian being tenderly escorted by a ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel’,
the Kiplingesque term applied to the Papua New Guineans who aided
the Australians. The DOI apparently considered the picture a touch too
distressing; snapped up by Life magazine and published in March 1943,
it became one of the most famous images of the war.8

7 Shaune Lakin, Contact: Photographs from the Australian War Memorial Collection (Canberra:
Australian War Memorial, 2006), 105, 137, 140. Lakin noted that some MHS photographs were
misattributed to the DOI when published in Australian newspapers. The MHS was formed from the
existing Military History and Information Service. On the institutional complexities surrounding
the photography of the war, including conflict between the DPR and the DOI, and more broadly
between the army, government and agencies themselves, see Ian Jackson, ‘“Duplication, Rivalry
and Friction”: The Australian Army, the Government and the Press during the Second World War’,
in The Information Battlefield: Representing Australians at War, ed. Kevin Foster (North Melbourne:
Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011), 74–85.
8 George Silk’s photograph of the Australian soldier ‘Dick’ Whittington being helped by the
Papuan Raphael Oimbari at Buna, Papua New Guinea, 25 December 1942: AWM 014028.
Subsequently, Silk resigned from the DOI to photograph for Life full-time. Out of solidarity with
his colleague and disenchanted with the department over what he perceived as its parsimonious
attitude to the payment of expenses, Parer soon followed suit, joining the US news organisation
Paramount News. On the issue of censorship and Silk’s frustration at the department’s opposition
to releasing his photographs of Australian casualties at Buna in New Guinea in late 1942, see also
Lakin, Contact, 144, 156. For an account of the Silk/Parer resignations, see Niall Brennan, Damien
Parer: Cameraman (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 144–56.
85

Pacific Exposures

Frustration with bureaucratic interference did not prevent the Australian
photographers, Silk and Parer included, from expressing the animus
of the battlefield to a degree that went well beyond the obligation to
produce effective propaganda. Reviewing War in New Guinea, the Sydney
Morning Herald significantly complimented his courage in moving to the
‘vanguard’ of the fighting, ‘heedless of danger’, to record ‘with sympathy’
the ‘heroic performance’ of the soldiers. The photographers shared the
soldiers’ travails as well as their triumphs. In 1943, Damien Parer wrote
that the Australians showed ‘no beg-pardons’ to an enemy increasingly
loathed as reports of battlefield savagery and treatment of prisoners
spread throughout both the war zones and the home front. ‘The Jap’,
Parer opined, ‘is a fanatic with a subnormal, animal cunning’, who was
no match for the Australian ‘diggers’, whose ‘greatness as infantrymen’
was confirmed each time he went into battle to film them.9 Bloodied,
spreadeagled or quietly decomposing, the Japanese was considered fair
photographic game.

Capturing the Japanese Dead
Some 6,000 Australian soldiers are known to have died fighting the
Japanese in the Pacific campaign. However, there is very little evidence of
this heavy toll in the published oeuvre of official Australian photography.
In the US, the censors working for the American counterpart of the DOI,
the Office of War Information, at first also routinely suppressed pictures
of men killed in action, on the grounds that they would sap national
morale. However, in 1943, the American administration decided that
complacency was even more dangerous than demoralisation, and images
of the national dead began to emerge, beginning with George Strock’s
famous picture of American marines washed up on Buna Beach in New
Guinea, published in Life in September 1943. By contrast, the DOI’s
intransigence on this issue lasted right through to the end of the war, and
the policy has continued up to and including the war in Afghanistan.10

9 ‘Silk is not soft’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 May 1943, 6; Damien Parer, typed manuscript,
Australian War Memorial PR84/389, published as ‘The Cameraman Looks at the Digger’, Foreword
to Neil McDonald and Peter Brune, 200 Shots: Damien Parer, George Silk and the Australians at War
in New Guinea (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998), ix.
10 See Kevin Foster, ‘Deploying the Dead: Combat Photography, Death and the Second World
War in the USA and the Soviet Union’, WLA: An International Journal of the Humanities 26 (2014):
7; Fay Anderson, ‘Chasing the Pictures: Press and Magazine Photography’, Media International
Australia 150, no. 1 (February 2014): 50.
86

3. Shooting Japanese

Squeamish about the publication of images of dead Australians, the
censors were far less fussy when it came to the taking and distribution
of pictures of dead Japanese. Military photography has long sought to
boost morale by circulating pictures of enemy casualties. In Regarding the
Pain of Others, Sontag cited the case of a photograph of unburied British
dead taken after the Boers’ victory at Skion Kop in 1900, published to
great British indignation. ‘To display the dead’, she wrote, ‘is what the
enemy does’.11 Yet the preponderance of photographs of dead Japanese
is striking. As Shaune Lakin noted in his superbly detailed study of
Australian military photography, Contact, this is at odds with the relative
scarcity of pictures of European casualties in campaigns against the
Germans and Italians in North Africa.12 This revealing disparity can be
attributed to the increasingly poisonous hatred of the Japanese as the
Pacific War dragged on, which exacerbated cultural views of them as
somehow less than fully human.
Certainly, the intensity of the fighting contributed to the representational
contempt for the Japanese. In a late 1942 report on the Allied offensive
on the Japanese beachheads of Buna-Gona on the north coast of New
Guinea, the leading reporter (and future novelist) George Johnston
described the encounter as ‘coldly animal’. When machine guns and
mortars did not do the job, the fighting became personal. Men wrestled
to the ground, strangling or stabbing each other to death. After several
terrible days the Australians were emerging the stronger, and ‘the piles of
Japanese dead’ were ‘mounting higher’.13
The omnipresence of death hardened hearts and minds in soldier and
photographer alike. Melbourne-born Norman Stuckey, a member of the
MHS, was a brave and fastidious photographer. Shooting the Australian
advance on Shaggy Ridge in New Guinea in December 1943, he got so
close to the action that a blast shattered the glass in his camera. In the
aftermath of this successful assault, Stuckey photographed Australians
unearthing and examining enemy dead. A bloodied Japanese corpse
is dragged out of what looks like some kind of dugout or ‘foxhole’ as
such defensive positions were called (see Figure 3.2). As Shaune Lakin
observed, the ‘shocking’ frankness of the photograph is accentuated by

11 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2003), 57.
12 Lakin, Contact, 143.
13 George H. Johnston, ‘Kill or Be Killed at Buna’, Argus, 9 December 1942, 2.
87

Pacific Exposures

Figure 3.2. Norman Stuckey, Troops of the 2/16th Australian Infantry
Battalion Unearth a Dead Japanese Soldier, Shaggy Ridge area,
New Guinea, 27 December 1943.
Source: AWM 062305.

3. Shooting Japanese

Stuckey’s point of view, looking down on the dead man from the edge of
the trench.14 Perhaps more shocking is that this is actually one of at least
two pictures Stuckey took of the scene; another, taken a little further
away, shows the Australian dragging the body by his other hand and the
onlookers are positioned slightly differently. The grisly ritual had been
repeated for the photographer’s benefit.
Taking evidence of Nazi depravity at newly liberated Bergen-Belsen in
April 1945, the English photographer George Rodger was so ashamed
at arranging the chaos of dreadful carnage into a pleasing composition
in the viewfinder that he temporarily gave up photographing war
altogether.15 Yet, it would be unfair to attribute callousness to Stuckey
or indeed any of the Australian cameramen. As an MHS operative,
it was his professional duty to document the process of frisking enemy
casualties for whatever information they might hold. As John Taylor
noted in Body Horror, the camera itself and the process of framing
pictures distances the photographer from the subject matter, however
horrifying.16 Nonetheless, Stuckey’s recomposition of the scene, and the
scant respect for the identity of the dead soldier, reveals the deliberateness
with which the Australian photographers went about their business—
and their attitude towards the Japanese.
Little respect was afforded to the corpses by either their adversary or their
photographer. In one photograph, Australian troops in Bougainville in
January 1945 are pictured with a mutilated Japanese corpse, with one
of the Australians about to enjoy a celebratory cigarette (see Figure 3.3).
Perhaps the men were directed by the anonymous photographer to
point their weapons so melodramatically at the body, but their gesture is
gratuitous, for he is well dead. Yet, at least the casualty, lying face down
on the jungle floor, is unidentifiable. Anonymity, as Paul Fussell has
remarked, is a convention in Allied photography of the war; in Strock’s
picture of the dismal scene at Buna Beach, the corpses lie ‘ostentatiously’
14 Lakin, Contact, 143. See F.R. Peterson, ‘Cameraman in Thick of Fight’, Herald, 8 February
1944, 8. See Stuckey photograph, AWM 062304.
15 See interview with George Rodger in Dialogue with Photography, eds. Paul Hill and Thomas
Cooper (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 59–60; quoted in Zelizer, Remembering to
Forget, 88–89.
16 John Taylor, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (New York: New York
University Press, 1998), 13. The Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who accompanied
the forces into the murder camps, has written of a ‘protective veil’ that came over her while
photographing the carnage. Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1963), 160, quoted in Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 88.
89

Pacific Exposures

face down in the wet sand. By the time of the D-day landings in June
1944, photographs of dead GIs appeared regularly in American news
magazines, but always prone, shrouded or with their heads turned away
from the camera. ‘This is a dignity’, Sontag observed of the brazen
photographic display of the dead from ‘exotic’ places, ‘not thought
necessary to accord to others’.17
Certainly, respect for the enemy’s basic human dignity is not one the
Australians routinely afforded the Japanese. In June 1945, on Labuan
Island off the coast of Borneo, a Japanese sniper was shot by Australian
troops while senior officers, including Allied Supreme Commander
General Douglas MacArthur, were touring the area. A photographer
took several pictures of the body from different angles and distances,
including one of the general himself by the corpse. The final photograph
is a disturbingly intimate portrait of the bloodied death face of a
young man perhaps no more than 20 years old. On occasion, the
photographers went out of their way to highlight the identity of the
fallen opponent. In one photograph, two Australian soldiers—brothers
from Sydney—search the bodies of dead Japanese in Brunei, North
Borneo (see Figure 3.4). One of them roughly holds up the head of one
of them to face the photographer. This brutal image does not reflect well
on the official photographer, who would have directed the soldier to lift
the limp head of the deceased for the benefit of the camera.18
The cumulative impression provided by the host of images of Japanese
war dead is that they had been overwhelmed by a superior opponent.
Clearly that was the perception of the popular Sydney-based weekly
photo magazine Pix, an important outlet for the official photographs.

17 See Paul Fussell, ‘The War in Black and White’, in The Boy Scout’s Handbook and Other
Observations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 234, 235; Sontag, Regarding the Pain
of Others, 70.
18 Anonymous photographs, Labuan, 10 June 1945, AWM 109148. See also AWM 109145,
AWM 109146, AWM 109147. The two Australians in the picture are identified as Private
G.B. Creber and Lance Corporal J.H. Creber. The WWII Nominal Roll lists their birthdates as
2 December 1921 and 3 November 1921 respectively, but both with the same mother. It is likely
that the former put up his age upon enlistment in June 1941 (to be able to do so); the inscription on
his gravestone in the cemetery at Bellingen, New South Wales, indicates that he was born in 1924.
The contemptuous close-up of Japanese corpses was not confined to the still photographers. In her
discussion of Damien Parer’s newsreel Assault on Salamua (1943), Keiko Tamura remarked how his
‘close and steady shots’ of dead Japanese, contrasted with his ‘fast and moving’ footage of the actual
fighting, expresses Parer’s ‘unforgiving’ attitude towards the enemy. See Keiko Tamura, ‘Shooting an
Invisible Enemy: Images of Japanese Soldiers in Damien Parer’s New Guinea Newsreels’, The Journal
of Pacific History 45, no. 1 (2010): 130.
90

3. Shooting Japanese

Figure 3.3. Unknown photographer, Troops of 47th Australian Infantry Battalion
with Dead Japanese by Enemy Pillbox, Bougainville, 16 January 1945.
Source: AWM 078485.

Figure 3.4. Unknown photographer, Troops of the 2/17th Australian Infantry
Battalion Search Japanese Bodies, Brunei, North Borneo, 13 June 1945.
Source: AWM 109317.

Pacific Exposures

‘Aussies Beat Japs in Jungle Fight’, published in October 1943, was
illustrated with images of Australians assisting wounded comrades,
along with the testimonial of US paratroopers said to be ‘amazed’ by
their courage. Supplied by the DOI, these pictures include a photograph
of an identifiable Japanese corpse. He had been killed near Lae, in
a  bloody skirmish in which Australian casualties were claimed to be
‘extraordinarily light’.19
Not all photographs of dead Japanese were considered suitable for
circulation. One such case is the MHS photographer Ronald Keam’s
image of a mass grave dug for Japanese casualties after an unsuccessful
assault on an Australian position in Bougainville in April 1945
(see Figure 3.5). In its digitised archive of photographs, the Australian
War Memorial captions the image by suggesting that Australian troops
were ‘placing’ the Japanese into the grave, but the image reveals that
the troops were simply hurling the bodies into the trench. Of course
they were engaged in a ghastly task, not one to dither over, and the
Australians were performing a humane service by not leaving the corpses
to rot in the jungle, to be consumed by rats and bugs. Nonetheless, it
was not an image that invited public exposure at the very time when
the liberation of the Nazi death camps had brought to public notice
scences of mass killings. Australian newspapers were full of Holocaust
horror stories, but photographs from the camps were used sparingly.20
However, in May 1945 Life magazine published selected work by the
posse of photographers accompanying the invading Allied armies into the
concentration camps, dreadful images of decomposing corpses and other
horrors that created an outcry. Thus, there was a powerful impediment to
the dissemination of photographs revealing the Allies’ own hand in mass
death. Agonising over the relentless firebombing of Japanese cities in the
early months of 1945—but just a matter of weeks before the nuclear
destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—US Secretary of War Henry
Stimson had worried about ‘the United States getting the reputation for
outdoing Hitler in atrocities’.21 For their part, the Australians did not
want to appear to be heartless mass killers, even of the Japanese military.
Victory had to be seen as moral as well as military.

19 Pix, 30 October 1943, 5.
20 Anderson, ‘Chasing the Pictures’, 50.
21 ‘Atrocities’, Life, 7 May 1945, 32–37; Stimson quoted in Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb
Suppressed: American Censorship in Japan 1945–1949 (Tokyo: Liber Forlag, 1986), 141.
92

3. Shooting Japanese

Figure 3.5. Ronald Keam, Australian Infantry Filling a Mass Grave
with Japanese Dead, Bougainville, 6 April 1945.
Source: AWM 090380.

Man to Man
The Australian photographers were capturing not only the ‘battle for
Australia’, but also a contest of competing races. More specifically,
the acute hostility to the Japanese in the official photography suggests
that the war was envisaged as a battle of rival codes of manhood,
conceptualised over decades of Australian trepidation at the military
ambitions of Japan. Punning on the language of photography, with its
jargon of ‘loading’, ‘aiming’ and ‘shooting’, Sontag long ago described
the camera as a phallic ‘sublimation of the gun’.22 This is an assertion
that can be usefully applied to the photographic representation of the
ferocious conflict in the Pacific.

22 Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; repr., New York: Anchor Books Doubleday 1990), 13–14.
93

Pacific Exposures

The history of Australian fear of the Japanese bogeyman needs to be
understood if, in turn, the photography of the war is to be appreciated.
In March 1942, the DOI sought to stiffen Australian resolve in the
face of the unnervingly rapid Japanese southward thrust by mounting
a propaganda campaign titled ‘Know Your Enemy’. The campaign was
short lived but virulent: a two-week flurry of posters, articles and news
releases, supported by radio broadcasts on the national broadcaster
each evening, advertised by provocative two-minute messages broadcast
throughout the day. The principal aim was to debunk the opponent’s
reputation as a ‘super-fighter’, largely through volleys of racial abuse. The
Japanese were variously ‘little monkey-men of the North’; a ‘bespectacled
ape-like race that lent colour to the theory of evolution’; and ‘semicivilised savages, ready to aid and abet the grossest indecencies and the
most bestial animalism’. A series of newspaper advertisements concluded
with the words ‘We’ve always despised them—NOW WE MUST
SMASH THEM!’ The ‘we’ is identified as ‘every White Australian’.23
In fact, Australians had not ‘always despised’ the Japanese. The capricious
cruelty of Japan’s military during the war exposed the ‘glorious chivalric
code’ of bushido as a self-serving myth, wrote the war correspondent
Rohan Rivett, a survivor of the Burma-Siam Railway, in the Argus in
September 1945.24 Yet there was a time, around the turn of the century as
Japan began its rise to regional military pre-eminence, when bushido was
viewed with admiration in Australia. In 1904, an Adelaide newspaper,
the Register, praised the precepts of the code as ‘a powerful moral force’
akin to chivalry, though the analogy was ‘inadequate, for bushido rises to
a loftier moral elevation’.25 In the wake of the Japanese Navy’s impressive
defeat of Tsarist Russia’s fleet at Tsushima in 1905, a Melbourne
politician, George Swinburne, recommended the implementation of
a local version of the Japanese warrior code, and the Melbourne Punch
published a jaunty verse comparing the trivial pursuits of sports-mad
urban Australians with the sterner disciplines on display from martial
Japan: ‘There’s common sense and wisdom, as the Japanese can show/In
Ju Jitsu and straight shooting and hard-hitting “Bushido”’.26
23 See Lynette Finch, ‘Knowing the Enemy: Australian Psychological Warfare and the Business of
Influencing Minds in the Second World War’, War & Society 16, no. 2 (October 1998): 80; ‘Every
One a Spy…Every One a Killer…’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 March 1942, 10.
24 Rohan D. Rivett, ‘It is Bushido to Torture the Sick’, Argus, 20 September 1945, 2.
25 ‘Bushido’, Register, 22 November 1904, 4. See also W.A.M., ‘Bushido’, Morning Post (Cairns),
16 February 1905, 4.
26 ‘Bushido’, Punch, 17 May 1906, 7.
94

3. Shooting Japanese

Meiji Japan was a new imperial power that Australia could relate to and
learn from. Overlooking the oppression that attended Japan’s annexation
of Formosa and Korea, the Register in 1905 lauded its ‘entirely peaceful
and beneficent’ influence on the ‘decadent communities’ of the Far East.
Japanese colonialism was paid the ultimate compliment by being said
to exhibit ‘the virtues of Anglo-Saxondom’. Referencing the Gilbert
and Sullivan light opera that had popularised Japan in Western culture,
the Register described ‘The Mikado’ as ‘a highly civilized monarch’.
The  conduct of his military garrisons was exemplary and there were
‘no signs’ that his subjects ‘have the slightest ambition to become
bloodthirsty despoilers of foreign territories’.27
Not all Australians took such a sanguine view. Japan’s muscle flexing was
met with foreboding in a country that had for several decades grappled
with the spectre of being swamped by Asian migration. In the years
before WWI, several fictions fantasised about the prospect of Japanese
invasion, and in terms that saw the coming war as a test of national
manhood. Discussing works such as C.H. Kirmess’s novel The Australian
Crisis (1909), David Walker wrote: ‘Japan had an elaborately codified
warrior tradition in bushido. Warrior Japan created a powerful case
for an answering tradition of defiant masculinity in Australia’. In these
imaginary wars, ‘the man-to-man encounter with the Japanese was
presented as central to Australia’s future’.28 In  The  Australian Crisis,
a Japanese invasion of the nation’s vulnerable, sparsely populated north
is challenged by a volunteer ‘White Guard’ of hardy pioneering types—
‘typical Australians’ who were fighting for ‘Aryan ideals’. Outnumbered,
these ‘sturdy sons of the Bush’ have to fall back and the government
grudgingly cedes the Japanese-occupied territory to the nominal control
of the British.29
Invasion novels such as The Australian Crisis reflect a sense that urbanising
Australia was losing its rural-derived virility, the source of so much of
its national myth making. Kirmess suggested that Japanese merchants
and travellers to Australia, including the naval squadrons that visited
major Australian ports in the first decade of the new century after Japan’s
27 ‘Japan as a Civilizing Agent’, Register, 14 June 1905, 4.
28 David Walker, ‘Shooting Mabel: Warrior Masculinity and Asian Invasion’, History Australia 2,
no. 3 (December 2005): 89.9.
29 C.H. Kirmess, The Australian Crisis (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1909), 146, 149–50.
The novel originally appeared in serial form in 1908 in the magazine Lone Hand, with the title
The Commonwealth Crisis.
95

Pacific Exposures

signing of an alliance with Britain, must have observed ‘all the symptoms
of indolent culture, love of play, indulgences in luxuries and careless
national pride’.30 Belligerently committed to the maintenance of ‘White
Australia’, the nationalist journal the Bulletin had supported Russians in
the war with Japan. When a Japanese naval training squadron called on
Australian ports in 1906, a Bulletin editorialist lampooned the enthusiasm
created by the visit of the ‘Jap sailor-men’, derisively labelling it ‘a circus’.
After all, what was Japan but a comic opera of a country, whose soldiers
‘fought with curios’ and with ‘fans for shields’?31
The Bulletin’s disdain for the ‘feminine fuss’ surrounding the visitors goes
beyond instinctive racism. The Japanese were a sexual threat and sexual
competitor. David Walker referred to T.R. Roydhouse’s obscure 1903
novel The Coloured Conquest in which an Australian strikes a Japanese
naval officer who had undiplomatically made advances to his fiancée at
a civic reception in honour of a training squadron’s visit to Sydney in
May 1903.32 The Australian’s gesture is futile; the Japanese eventually
invade Sydney and take possession of the women as well. Significantly,
the Japanese aggression in China in the 1930s and, in particular, what
soon became known as the Rape of Nanking, was widely reported in
Australia as a welter of sexual violence and sadism. In February 1938,
the Argus specified ‘outrageous brutalities’ committed against Chinese
nurses and nuns in Nanking hospital, and elsewhere of drunken rape
and murder at a girls’ school and the beheading of catechists at Roman
Catholic missions.33 Later that year, Pix ran a photo spread of Japanese
atrocities in Nanking and elsewhere, pictures purportedly taken for
pleasure by Japanese soldiers and secretly developed and circulated by
Chinese printers. The article was titled ‘Killing For Fun!’34
Therefore, in the dark days of early 1942, when Japanese invasion
seemed a distinct possibility, it was predictable that such a nightmare
invoked the havoc that would be wrought on Australian women as
a result.35 As the nation braced itself for battle, cartoons ironically titled

30 Ibid., 148–49.
31 ‘The Japanese Welcome’, Bulletin, 24 May 1906, 6.
32 Walker, ‘Shooting Mable’, 89.3.
33 ‘Outrages by Japanese’, Argus, 23 February 1938, 1.
34 Pix, 10 December 1938, 3–5.
35 Recent scholarship has revealed that the upper echelons of the Japanese military never seriously
contemplated an invasion of Australia. See for example Steven Bullard, ‘A Japanese Invasion?’,
Wartime, no. 77 (Summer 2017): 44–49.
96

3. Shooting Japanese

‘Bushido’ in  Melbourne’s Argus and Sydney’s World’s News showed
monstrous  Japanese ogres having their way with white womanhood.36
The  war was a  definitive challenge to Australian manhood.
In  The  Australian Crisis, a  truce is called until ‘1940 A.D.’, by which
time the nation had to ‘get ready’ to reclaim the land in the country’s
north lost to the marauding Japanese and so ‘save the purity of the race
by sweeping the brown invaders back over the coral sea’.37 History laced
with Australian military mythology was to prove the novel prescient.
A nation under siege was to be defended by racial stock reinvigorated
by the experience of WWI. The men of the Second Australian Imperial
Force (AIF) were following in the footsteps of their fathers in the earlier
war. They were the ‘Anzacs’—the acronym ascribed the men of the
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps—whose elan at Gallipoli
in Turkey in 1915 seemed to partake of the legendary heroism of the
Homeric warriors at nearby Troy. In January 1940, the Argus juxtaposed
a photograph of the men of the new AIF marching off to war through
Melbourne streets with a similar one of its famous predecessor parading
through the same streets in 1914. ‘A generation separates the two forces’,
the caption stated, ‘but the race remains the same’.38 The analogy was
made not merely through juxtaposition but also through an intertextual
referencing of pictures of the fresh generation of Anzacs to well-known
images from WWI.
Many photographs of the Pacific campaign present distinctive Australian
military types who bear the Anzac imprint—amiable rogues who pose
cheerfully for the camera without self-consciousness or arrogance.
However, sometimes the priorities of DOI propaganda overrode
professional good sense. In 1941, Silk’s picture of a trio of smiling diggers
(evacuees from Crete photographed in Alexandria) featured prominently
in army recruitment posters. In a colloquial tribute to a late nineteenthcentury bushranger, the photograph is captioned ‘They’re still as game
as Ned Kelly’. Yet Silk’s publicity photograph of Lieutenant  John R.
Greenwood, taken in the Kokoda area in November 1942, owes more to
the imagery of the Wild West in popular Hollywood films than to anything
peculiarly Australian (see Figure 3.6). With his elegant moustache, bare
chest, headband and firm hand upon his Tommy gun, the figure’s stance
36 Mick Armstrong, cartoon, Argus, 12 March 1942, 2; Stuart Peterson, ‘Bushido’, cartoon,
World’s News, 28 March 1942, 3.
37 Kirmess, Australian Crisis, 335.
38 ‘To-day Echoes the Marching of Anzac Feet’, Argus, 16 January 1940, 1; see Lakin, Contact, 102.
97

Pacific Exposures

Figure 3.6. George Silk, Lieutenant John R. Greenwood, 2/14th Australian
Infantry Battalion, New Guinea, 23 November 1942.
Source: AWM 013622.

is of a movie star more than a soldier engaged in the ugly flesh-andblood saga being enacted in New Guinea.. Facially, the soldier looks
uncannily like the publicity photographs of the character played by the
Australian-born Errol Flynn in the popular 1939 western Dodge City.39
There is something desperate about the photograph. In addition to its
surely unintended tincture of homoeroticism, the photograph betrays
a certain insecurity, of the kind detected by the enormously respected
39 See Silk photograph, June 1941, AWM 007786; Recruitment poster, AWM ARTV04332.
Hollywood’s Wild West seemed to have been on Australian minds in New Guinea. George Johnston
likened a Papuan comrade’s habit of collecting military insignia of Japanese he had personally
killed to ‘gunmen of the Wild West’ putting notches in the revolver butts to signify their victims.
See Johnston, Toughest Fighting in the World, 143.
98

3. Shooting Japanese

Figure 3.7. Unknown photographer, Japanese Prisoner Known as ‘Mickey
Mouse’, with Two Australians, Morotai, c. 1945.
Source: AWM 019049.

official historian of WWI, C.E.W. Bean. In a March 1942 letter to the
Sydney Morning Herald, Bean complained about the excessive tone of
the DOI propaganda. The ‘hate campaign’, he wrote, reminded him
‘of nothing so much as a small frightened boy loudly bragging to keep
his spirits up’.40
How could the Japanese possibly compete with the antipodean
demigod? That was the intended message. Man to man, he just could
not hope to measure up. As if to reinforce this point, photographs of
captured Japanese soldiers were habitually framed to emphasise and
exaggerate the physical disparity in the two competing bodies of men.
On the island of Morotai near the end of the war, a diminutive Japanese
internee is pictured between two Australians derisively looking down on
him (see Figure 3.7). Possibly a member of the corps of photographers,
one of the Australians has a camera hanging around his neck and wears
a  mocking grin. The caption comments that the Japanese, a member
of a commando unit, ‘answers to the name of “Mickey Mouse”’.
40 Bean, letter, Sydney Morning Herald, 31 March 1942, 3. See also an earlier Bean, letter, Sydney
Morning Herald, 27 March 1942, 3.
99

Pacific Exposures

It was necessary for the Australians to be pictured as more than superior
fighters. They had to display ‘virtue’ in both its senses—the virtuosity
etymologically associated with male skill in battle and the virtuous
morality of just victors. Belittling disempowered Japanese like ‘Mickey
Mouse’ does not make for an attractive image of the Australian captor.
However, it was an improvement on Japan’s disgraceful treatment of its
prisoners. Ironically, the most arresting photograph of the prisoner of
war (POW) ordeal, and the one which most hardened Australian resolve
to track down and punish Japanese war criminals, was in all probability
taken by a Japanese. Still, after countless viewings, the well-known
photograph of the beheading of the Australian commando Len Siffleet—
executed along with two Ambonese privates on a beach at Aitape in
northern New Guinea in October 1943—manages to send a chill up the
spine. A captured Western soldier, blindfolded, bound and bedraggled,
kneels by a hastily dug grave. Above him stands his Japanese executioner,
sword raised, while in the background a crowd of local people and armed
soldiers looks on. One Japanese soldier, centre picture, appears to be
grinning in anticipation. American soldiers found the picture on the
corpse of a Japanese soldier in 1944. Part of a collection of some 22,
it was first published in Life magazine in May 1945.
At the time and for some years afterward, Len Siffleet was incorrectly
identified as the decorated Australian airman William Newman,
beheaded in Salamaua New Guinea in March 1943; Newton’s body
was never found, nor was Siffleet’s.41 Nonetheless, this photograph of
uncertain provenance became part of a bulging body of documentary
evidence used to prosecute Japanese war criminals at the military trials
that took place throughout the region after the surrender. The biggest
trial of all, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo,
was presided over by an Australian judge, Sir William Webb, whose
report detailing a litany of Japanese crimes, including cannibalism and
the rape and mutilation of both native and white women, horrified the
public when circulated in Australian newspapers soon after the surrender
in September 1945.42 Handwritten notes scribbled onto a copy of the
41 ‘A Japanese Atrocity’, Life, 14 May 1945, 96. Newton’s beheading was met with outrage,
especially after the publication of the captured diary of an observer of the execution who proudly
described the event as ‘a manifestation of the magnanimity that becomes a chivalrous Samurai’. See
‘Barbaric Act by Japanese: Diary’s Story of an Execution’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 October 1943,
9. On the misidentification of the photograph, see Don Dick, ‘Jap beheaded Australian’, Sunday
Telegraph, 2 September 1945, 3.
42 ‘Webb Report on Japanese Atrocities’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 September 1945, 1.
100

3. Shooting Japanese

Figure 3.8. Unknown photographer, Suspected Japanese War Criminals
on Trial in Darwin, March 1945.
Source: Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.
Accession no. H99.203/418.

Siffleet photograph as published in Life labels it ‘Exhibit No. 5’ and lists
the name of a member of the Australian Army’s corps of war crimes’
investigators, Captain V.A.R. Chapple.
Evidentiary photographs produced, authorised and circulated by the
DOI also found their way into the press at the time. One of the most
notable, of men released from a hospital in Singapore’s Changi, was
published in Sydney Morning Herald under the unequivocal heading
‘Evidence of Suffering in Prison Camp’.43 In March 1946, the Argus
published photographs of a military trial taking place in Darwin
(see  Figure 3.8). The stern-faced Australian members of the court are
juxtaposed against an image of the Japanese accused of atrocities against
their countrymen. Listening intently or diligently taking notes while
the charges against them are read, the accused do not look particularly
humbled and contrite. Nonetheless it must have been consoling to see
the Japanese being brought to account. Yet the image would hardly have
quelled the public outrage created by the photographs of the brutalised
Australian survivors in internment camps that regularly appeared in
national newspapers in the weeks and months after the war’s end. These

43 Sydney Morning Herald, 14 September 1945, 4.
101

Pacific Exposures

illustrated accounts of the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese military
throughout the Pacific as journalists and photographers entered camps
from Singapore to Yokohama and documented the stories of the men.44
The Australian treatment of captured Japanese was presented by contrast
as a model of humanity. An anti-Japan diatribe filed from Tokyo by the
Sydney Morning Herald journalist William Marien in early September
1945 is accompanied by a photograph of Japanese POW hospital patients
in the Australian compound at Morotai, as they enjoy an unlikely lunch of
‘chicken, potatoes and salad, followed by rice and cream custard’. In case
readers miss the point, the caption stresses how well cared for they are,
‘in contrast to the brutality of the Japanese in their treatment of war
prisoners’.45 The DOI collection War in New Guinea juxtaposes images of
Japanese dead after the bloody fighting at Gona with pictures of wounded
or exhausted prisoners being tended by the Australian victors.
The DOI was determined to promote the image of the humane victor
and the magnificently effective antagonist. Numerous photographs
were taken of Australians providing succour to injured or starving
Japanese. Put simply, they were ‘good propaganda’, in the phrase
used by George Silk to describe his image of a Queensland private
piggybacking a  stricken Japanese back to camp, to be treated and
tended (see Figure 3.9).46 Use was made of such uplifting photographs
during the war in the Australian Military Forces’ frankly propagandist
(published by the Australian War Memorial) Jungle Warfare: With the
Australian Army in the South-west Pacific (1944). Tellingly, they continue
to illustrate contemporary accounts of the Pacific campaign as appealing
testimony to Australian humanity—photographs of Japanese prisoners
drinking from an Australian’s water bottle appear in two identically
titled popular blockbusters published in 2005, Peter FitzSimons’ Kokoda
and Paul Ham’s Kokoda.47
44 Argus, 5 March 1946, 1. For horrifying stories see, for example, George H. Johnston, ‘Brutality of
Jap Guards: Pathetic Stories Told by Australian POW’s’, Argus, 1 September 1945, 1; ‘Japanese Hands
Sword to Australian General’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 September 1945, 1; Jack Percival, ‘Prisoners
Beaten to Death: Grim Accounts from Japan’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 September 1945, 1; Graham
Jenkins, ‘Six Australians of 1800 Survive Borneo Horror’, Argus, 22 September 1945, 1.
45 William Marien, ‘The Barbarian of Last Week Is the Shy, Smiling Jap To-day’, Sydney Morning
Herald, 3 September 1945, 2.
46 Silk quoted in McDonald and Brune, 200 Shots, 118. See the sequence of a distressed Japanese
prisoner being cared for by Australian stretcher bearers: AWM 026822, AWM 026824, AWM
026825, AWM 026827; see also AWM 026839, AWM 013455.
47 Peter FitzSimons, Kokoda (Sydney: Hodder Headline, 2005), 368–69; Paul Ham, Kokoda
(Sydney: Harper Collins, 2005), 318–19.
102

3. Shooting Japanese

At times, the Australians overplayed
their hand in presenting themselves
as beneficent captors. In early July
1944, a photographer working
for the propaganda and field
intelligence unit, the Far Eastern
Liaison Office (FELO), took a series
of photographs of robust Japanese
prisoners playing baseball at the
POW camp in Cowra, New South
Wales.48 Part of FELO’s brief was
to undermine morale in Japaneseheld parts of the south-west Pacific
theatre by producing leaflets that
were printed and air dropped by the
million. It was for this purpose that
the scenes of the Cowra idyll were
taken. The camp buildings are neat
and evidently commodious and the
playing fields wide and inviting.
Surely this was an attractive option
to starvation and probable death in
a fetid, claustrophobic jungle.
This was wishful thinking that did
not take into account the acute
sense of dishonour attached to
surrender by the Japanese. Though
there had been rumours of trouble
brewing at the Cowra camp, the
FELO photographer could not have
anticipated the mass escape of more
than a thousand Japanese POWs in
the early hours of 5 August 1944.
In what has become known as the
‘Cowra Breakout’, four Australians
and well over 200 Japanese died,

Figure 3.9. George Silk, Wounded
Japanese Carried by Australian
Soldier, c. 1942.
Source: Argus Newspaper Collection
of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.
Accession no. H98.103/4006.

48 Cowra camp photographs, 1 July 1944: AWM 06717; AWM 067179; AWM 067187; AWM
067188.
103

Pacific Exposures

many shot dead while armed only with primitive weapons, including
baseball bats. Disturbed by the implications of the breakout, Australian
Government censors imposed severe restrictions on media reports of
the episode. The Cowra camp principally housed Japanese and Italian
POWs, but no specific identification of the nationality of the escapees
was to be made. Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph was deemed to have defied the
ban by mentioning that some escapees had been discovered in ‘foxholes’,
thereby alerting a readership familiar with reportage of the New Guinea
campaign that they were Japanese. The newspaper’s editor was rebuked by
both the wartime Minister for Information Calwell and Prime Minister
Curtin for putting the lives of Australians then in Japanese hands at
risk.49 Such was the fear of an enemy that did not play by the rules (and
had not signed the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs). Of
the Japanese dead, over 30 committed suicide, many by hanging. Two
escapees lay on the train tracks and were run over by the morning train
from Sydney. A cornered escapee was photographed still clutching the
knife he had used to sever his own throat so deeply that he had nearly
succeeded in decapitating himself. The picture, a disturbing revelation of
the kind of enemy who would do anything to win and anything to avoid
capture, was never published.50
The Japanese may have had other reasons for refusing to surrender
on the battlefield, for despite their own projected image as kindly captors,
the  Australians had acquired a reputation for mercilessness. Prisoners
were a burden, and many did not make it to camp or compound.
The  summary shooting of wounded Japanese (and some who were
not wounded) was not uncommon, if conspicuously unpublicised.
The official war artist Ivor Hele’s charcoal drawing of the calm execution
of stricken Japanese at Timbered Knoll in New Guinea in 1943 was
long suppressed. Daien Parer, who was in the area at the time, chose
not to film these episodes, though he did take some photographs of
dead Japanese in their foxholes.51 While the Australian treatment of
its surviving captives was generally in accordance with regulations, it
49 See letters from Calwell and Curtin, quoted in John Hilvert, Blue Pencil Warriors: Censorship
and Propaganda in World War II (St Lucia, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1984) 189–90;
Cowra breakout files in the National Archives of Australia, NAA SP195/1 73/23/32.
50 See AWM P02567.006. For a detailed account of the breakout see Steve Bullard, Blankets on
the Wire: The Cowra Breakout and its Aftermath (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2006).
51 Neil McDonald, The Story of Damien Parer (Port Melbourne: Lothian 1994), 210–11. On the
killing of Japanese captives see Tom O’Lincoln, Australia’s Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth
(Melbourne: Interventions, 2011), 84–86.
104

3. Shooting Japanese

Figure 3.10. Unknown photographer, Two Japanese Prisoners Being
Conveyed to Casualty Clearing Station, c. 1944.
Source: Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.
Accession no. H98.103/4005.

was touched by an ugly triumphalism that sought to humiliate and
demean. A picture supplied to the Argus captures two injured and ailing
Japanese being brought into camp on the back of a jeep driven by two
diggers—teeth bared in jubilation—looking like they have been out on
a particularly productive kangaroo shoot (see Figure 3.10).
Photographing the process of capture became an exercise in ritual
humiliation. In a sequence of pictures of the capture of an unnamed
Japanese prisoner in New Guinea in May 1943, Norman Stuckey
himself participated in the documentation of the prisoner’s degradation.
Stuckey photographed the prisoner being brought into camp. Later,
several photographs taken by both himself and two colleagues working
for the DOI show the Japanese alongside his smirking captors. Finally,
Stuckey had a photo taken of himself with the prisoner and an Australian
guard, holding a drawn bayonet menacingly by the captive’s face (see
Figure 3.11). The sequence hardly plumbs the debased level of digital
105

Pacific Exposures

Figure 3.11. Unknown photographer, Military History Section Photographer Lance
Sergeant Norman Stuckey (left) and an Australian Soldier with Japanese Prisoner,
New Guinea, 10 October 1943.
Source: AWM 058653.

images (made by amateurs) of vile abuse inflicted on Iraqi prisoners
at Abu Ghraib, taken in late 2003. Nonetheless, it transgresses the
specifications of the MHS photographer’s professional requirement to
document with objectivity. The MHS director John Treloar was a firm
advocate for impersonality in the creation of photographic records,
believing that the identity of the photographer should be lost in the
photograph’s factual historicity. Indeed, when MHS photographs were
published, the specific photographer’s identity (and even the section
itself ) was usually concealed. One wonders whether the presence of the
camera encouraged Stuckey’s exhibitionism and, thus, contributed to
the prisoner’s mistreatment. Here, the Japanese prisoner’s face bears the
imprint of humiliation and abject disgrace—having his picture taken,
with the possibility the image might be seen by his family back home,
is itself a form of torture.52
52 On the MHS strictures of impersonality and impartiality, see Lakin, Contact, 113, 140.
Photographs, Dumpu New Guinea, 5 May 1943, AWM 058654; AWM 058651; AWM 016310;
AWM 016314. The two colleagues were the photographers Gordon Short and Harold Dick. (Dick
was later killed in an air accident in Queensland.) See also a George Silk sequence of photographs
of the capture process, taken in the Oivi-Kokoda area in November 1942: AWM 151093; AWM
151094; AWM 151095.
106

3. Shooting Japanese

The greater misery of national defeat was one that every Japanese
serviceman had to bear. Many took it personally. Looking back at
1945, one middle-aged veteran recalled that losing the war for Japanese
men meant ‘losing their balls’.53 Defeat was exacerbated by returning
home to a country taken over and occupied by their antagonists, and
a booming sexual commerce between Japanese women and foreigners.
Approximately 8 million Japanese military personnel were either
repatriated from overseas theatres or demobilised from the Japanese
Home Forces. Having joined the American-led Occupation of Japan
as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF),
Australian military personnel had already processed several hundred
thousand Japanese repatriates by mid-1946. Much of this activity took
place in Hiroshima Prefecture, where the Australian forces were largely
based. One of the centres for the reception and demobilisation of
returning Japanese was located at Hiroshima’s port, Ujina. From 1894,
when Japan’s Supreme Imperial Headquarters moved to the Hiroshima
Castle compound, the city was a major staging base, and soldiers were
sent off from Ujina to the various military ventures that Japan embarked
on over the ensuing decades. Ujina also housed the Gaisenkan, ‘The Hall
of Victorious Return’, built to welcome home the nation’s all-conquering
armies, outside of which stood two ancient stone lions plundered from
China. The defeated Japanese returnees from the Pacific had to re-enter
Japan through it—a bitter irony that would not have been lost on them.
Australian military photographers were waiting in Occupied Japan to
capture the dejected homecoming. Allan Cuthbert, the first photographer
appointed to MHS BCOF, photographed schoolgirls dutifully greeting
a returning POW upon his belated arrival in June 1946 as he casts
a rueful, almost furtive sideways glance at the camera (see Figure 3.12).
It is a moment of supreme bathos. The decades of Japanese militarism—
so damaging to untold peoples in the region and so catastrophically selfdestructive—had come to an ignominious end. The Japanese were still
wending their way home in August 1947, two years after the surrender,

53 Koga Takeshi, ‘Rikugan danshoku monogatari’ (‘A Tale of Male Eroticism in the Army’),
published in the homoerotic pulp magazine Fuzoku kitan, November 1973, 168, quoted in Mark
McLelland, Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2005), 61–62. For an incisive account of this issue see Christine de Matos, ‘Occupation
Masculinities: The Residues of Colonial Power in Australian Occupied Japan’, in Gender, Power
and Military Occupations: Asia Pacific and the Middle East since 1945, ed. Christine de Matos and
Rowena Ward (New York: Routledge, 2012), 23–42.
107

Figure 3.12. Allan Cuthbert, Japanese Schoolgirls Welcome Home Repatriated
Prisoners-of-War, Ujina (Hiroshima), 27 June 1946.
Source: AWM 131647.

when Pix ran a photo spread of Australian troops processing the
stragglers. Pix could not help itself. A picture of soldiers being deloused
was captioned ‘Big Vermin have Little Vermin’.54

Photographic Overkill
Australia can be proud of the achievements of its photographers of the
war against the Japanese in the Pacific. In an environment bristling
with danger, they faced the formidable challenge of transporting and
maintaining photographic equipment in a tangled, boggy and humid
landscape, and shooting in the dim light of the jungle.55 Characterised
by their determination to get close to the action, the Australian combat

54 ‘Jap Troops Go Home’, Pix, 16 August 1947, 24.
55 ‘Until a photographer has tried to work in the jungle’, Damien Parer remarked in September
1943, ‘he can have no idea how greedily the heavy foliage of the tropics eats up light’. As told to
A.H. Chisholm, ‘Frontline Cameraman’, Herald, 23 September 1943, 7.
108

3. Shooting Japanese

cameramen of WWII made a significant contribution to the evolution
of the war photographer into the dynamic figure so familiar in the
contemporary media landscape—the heroic warrior photojournalist,
embedded in the military and dodging the same bullets. The signed
photograph of the MHS’s William ‘Harry’ Freeman, bestriding the
rubble of Hiroshima with his trusty camera, is palpably grandiloquent—
it is almost he who had laid waste to the enemy, and not the atomic
bomb (see Figure 3.13). Here, we see the camera’s increasing importance
as a  destructive tool of war, in a sense complicit in the violence it
documents.
This triumphant image also suggests the enduring importance of
photography to Australian representation and remembrance of the war
against the Japanese. The persistent republication of tendentious official
pictures in essentially nationalistic retrospectives of the Pacific War
supports a discourse that propagates anachronistic myths of Australian
military potency and diminishes the Japanese as degraded as well as
defeated. Damien Parer’s staged publicity picture of a dashing digger
posing with a Bren machine gun appears in a photomontage on the
front cover of Kokoda, produced by the Australian Government in
2012 to mark the seventieth anniversary of the New Guinea campaign.
This publication was specifically intended for the teaching of history
in Australian secondary schools.56 Fiction is being taught as fact.
The strategic public use of photographs perpetuates wartime animosities
beyond their historical context. Seventy years after the event, the
picture of Len Siffleet’s execution lives on as a memorialised reminder
of Australian suffering and Japanese fanaticism. In Canberra’s Australian
War Memorial, the photograph is on permanent display in its own glass
cabinet right by the entrance to the gallery dedicated to the Australian
New Guinea offensives of 1943 and 1944, which helped turn the tide of
the Pacific War. The repugnant image of the Japanese executioner is the
first thing visitors see, providing a kind of moral as well as circumstantial
context for the subduing of the Japanese threat. Moreover, it provides
a potent personification of the threat itself. In the age of ISIS terror and

56 Kokoda: Exploring the Second World War Campaign in Papua New Guinea (Canberra:
Commonwealth of Australia Department of Veterans’ Affairs, 2012). See AWM 013285. McDonald
and Brune described the staging of the incident from which this widely circulated photograph was
taken, see 200 Shots, 23.
109

Pacific Exposures

Figure 3.13. Unknown photographer, Portrait of Lieutenant William Harry
Freeman, Official photographer, Hiroshima, 1947.
Source: AWM P10753.001.

3. Shooting Japanese

the digitised mass circulation of gruesome executions and beheadings
produced and disseminated by murderous jihadists, it is a highly
emotive image.57
The Japanese character was fixed in the national consciousness for
decades by the Australian military photographs taken in the Pacific in
the early 1940s. The war remained a constant visual reference point,
against which the Japanese people were continually assessed and, as
old enmities faded, reassessed and reimaged. The long road to postwar
reconciliation was signposted by photography. It began in Japan itself,
with the several thousand Australian soldiers—many of them festooned
with their cameras, feasting on the foreign spectacle—who journeyed to
Japan to participate in a military occupation that lasted longer than the
bloody conflict that preceded it.

57 Photograph of execution of Private Reharin, 24 October 1943, AWM 101100.
111

4
JAPAN FOR THE TAKING:
IMAGES OF THE OCCUPATION
The public perception of Japan’s place in the postwar world, observed
Karen M. Fraser in Photography and Japan, was informed by a ‘single
photograph’.1 Six weeks after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, the totality of Japan’s defeat was signalled by an image taken
in late September 1945 by Lieutenant Gaetano Faillace, a member of
the American Camera Corps. The occasion was the historic first meeting
of General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of the Allied
Occupation, with Emperor Hirohito. According to MacArthur’s
biographer, Hirohito was ‘trembling’ when he arrived at the US Embassy
in Tokyo, close by the imperial palace; the general tried to calm him
by proffering an American cigarette, which was accepted with a shaky
hand.2 The diminutive emperor, swaddled in formal frock coat, cravat
and striped pants, stands stiffly by the American, just two feet to his right
but a good foot taller (see Figure 4.1). By contrast, McArthur is the athome host, unsmiling but disarmingly relaxed, nonchalant even, dressed
casually in khaki, hands in his pockets. It was the only time during the
six years of the Occupation that MacArthur deigned to be photographed
with any Japanese, let alone the emperor. He made sure Faillace’s
photograph was published in Japanese newspapers the next day. One
devastating image had reduced Japan’s living god to a nervous, slightly
absurd visitor in his own country—a country now ruled by the US with

1 Karen M. Fraser, Photography and Japan (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 68.
2 William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964 (New York: Dell
Publishing, 1978), 577.
113

Pacific Exposures

Figure 4.1. Lt Gaetano Faillace, Emperor Hirohito and General MacArthur,
at Their First Meeting, at the U.S. Embassy, Tokyo, 27 September 1945.
Source: United States Army Photograph.

4. Japan for the Taking

help from the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF), made
up of Australians, British, New Zealanders and Indians, of which the
Australians provided the leadership and the largest contingent.
Perhaps Fraser is overstating the influence of one purportedly definitive
image; nevertheless, it is true to say that few military events have
been as marked by photography as the Occupation of Japan. Just as
the predatory ‘chopper’ is a symbol of the Vietnam War, the essence
of the Occupation is represented by an iconic material object, the
camera. As an observer quipped in 1949, ‘the Army of Occupation is
extensively armed—with Kodaks, Leicas and Speed Graphics’.3 Perhaps
this was especially true of the Australians, many of whom were on their
first overseas trip and determined to document the experience. In the
permanent display dedicated to the Occupation in the Australian War
Memorial, the event is fittingly represented by the iconography of
tourism, including a  suitcase, a leave pass, a battered booklet entitled
Japanese in 3 Weeks and a few conventional Japanese souvenirs such as
a black-ribbed Agfa Box 45, used in Japan by the Australian BCOF
serviceman Frank Lawrence. It is an appropriate collection of relics, for
the Australians were relentless sightseers and ardent photographers. Off
duty (and sometimes on it), they rarely ventured anywhere without a
camera slung over their shoulders.
As the Occupation wore on, the chances were that more and more of
their cameras were made locally. Photography was a booming enterprise
in Occupied Japan. The local camera and optical industries grew quickly,
catering in the main to the influx of foreigners—the Americans alone
numbered up to 350,000. At up to 20,000, the Australian contingent
was tiny by comparison, though still a significant number. Germany,
the previous dominant power in photographic equipment, was in ruins,
with much of what was left of its industry located in the eastern zone,
dominated by Russia. Established Japanese camera companies such as
Nikon and Canon took advantage of financial and technical support by
the Americans to meet the market for locally made copies of German
models, a market boosted in 1950 by the arrival of a large press corps
stopping off in Japan en route to the new war that had broken out in

3 Lucy Herndon Crockett, Popcorn on the Ginza: An Informal Portrait of Postwar Japan
(London:  Victor Gollancz, 1949), 99. Quoted in Morris Low, ‘American Photography during
the Allied Occupation of Japan: The Work of John W. Bennett’, History of Photography 39, no. 3
(August 2015): 265.
115

Figure 4.2. William Harry Freeman, Members of BCOF Taking Photographs
of ‘Geisha Girls’, Kyoto, August 1947.
Source: AWM 133125.

4. Japan for the Taking

Korea.4 Sightseeing and photography became inextricably intertwined,
one activity feeding off the other. The dedication to taking pictures was
habitual and, in many cases, slightly obsessive. One Australian paid
homage to the activity by taking an image of a Kodak processing store
in the town of Bofu, a major BCOF air force station.5 Many servicemen
took photographs of their comrades and were themselves caught in the
act of taking pictures, or awaiting the next shot.6
The flurry of photographic activity in Occupied Japan became a subject
of choice for the official cohort of photographers assigned to cover what
was a unique episode in Australian military history—the first time
Australia had formally occupied a nation defeated in war. Photographers
working for the Directorate of Public Relations (DPR) attached to both
the army and the air force made attractive images designed to appeal
to a sometimes sceptical public back home, while the Military History
Section (MHS) documented the Occupation for posterity, with an eye to
the historical record and an official history that never saw the light of day.
Together, their pictures often reveal a kind of professional self-reflexivity,
as in the DPR’s Douglas Lee’s image of army photographers shooting
the farewell parade for the Australian commander of BCOF, Lieutenant
General Robertson, in Kure in November 1951.7 In August 1947, Harry
Freeman of the MHS photographed soldiers in turn photographing
‘geisha girls’ (so says the caption) in Kyoto (see Figure 4.2).8 The image is
telling, for in a sense the Occupation was not only officially documented
by photography, but also by the presentation of an almost absurdly
redundant view of an untouched, timeless Japan that deflected from the
damage the pitiless Allied bombing had wrought on the country.
Most members of the official Australian photographic cohort, including
leading practitioners such as Alan Queale of the MHS and Phillip
Hobson of the DPR, came fresh from the military that had just fought
in the conflict. Several were still on active service and answerable to
4 See Robert White, Discovering Cameras, 1945–1965 (London: Shire Discovering, 1968), 13.
Marked ‘Made in Occupied Japan’, cameras figured prominently in the nation’s export trade in the
immediate postwar period, garnering foreign currency and stimulating the economy. The importance
of the camera industry to Japan’s economic recovery is illustrated by the section dedicated to postwar
Japan in Tokyo’s Edo-Tokyo Museum prominently featuring a Konica 35 mm camera.
5 Frank Lees, photograph of Kodak store, Bofu. AWM P06206.012.
6 See for example Lindsay Poore, Grandmummasan, c. 1947–1949, State Library of Victoria
H2009.14/165.
7 Lee AWM LEEJ0013.
8 Freeman AWM133125.
117

Pacific Exposures

a command that tended to see the Occupation as the last phase of a long
military campaign, they maintained a deep dislike of the Japanese.9
Their professional obligations did not easily accommodate a  nuanced
personal response to Japan or new ways of picturing the country, despite
the process of radical transformation they were there to record. They
remained tied to the framing of a traditional Japan that was both bucolic
and ultra-refined, and above all photogenically alluring—the Japan,
indeed, of postcards of geisha and teahouses. This was ‘the land of the
picturesque’ delighted in by the Australian traveller James Hingston in
the 1870s, who likened the place to a pre-modern version of Britain ‘in
the days of old, when there were maypoles and morris-dancers, and caps
with bells to them’.10 It was a fanciful vision way back then, in the initial
phases of Japan’s process of modernisation in the early Meiji era; it was
even more outmoded after the ravages of the recent war, which scarred
the country physically and affected it socially and culturally.
The dependence on redundant imagery of a pristine Japan derived, in
part, from the established institutions of Australian war photography.
The DPR had sprung from the wartime Department of Information,
whose pictures of soldiers on leave or training in the Middle East had
drawn on the tourist and ethnographic aspects of photographs of their
predecessors in Oriental locales in WWI.11 However, it also reveals the
persistent influence of the decorative Japonisme that swept Australia
in waves from the 1880s to the 1930s, which distinguished the ‘real’,
significantly feminine and childlike Japan, from the modernising and
militaristic nation that Australia went to war against.12 This idealised
Japan emerged most blatantly in the pictorial motifs of tourism. Both
before and after WWI, during which Japan was an Australian ally, the
Sydney shipping and trading company Burns Philp used photographs of
geisha, temples and sumptuous mountainscapes to illustrate its in‑house
publication Picturesque Travel, hoping to lure customers to its cruises to
9 The Treaty of Peace with Japan was not signed until September 1951 and did not come into
force until the following year.
10 James Hingston, from The Australian Abroad (1879–1880), in Hotel Asia, ed. Robin Gerster
(Ringwood: Penguin, 1995), 33.
11 See Shaune Lakin, Contact: Photographs from the Australian War Memorial Collection
(Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2006), 102, 105. The Department of Information originated
in the pre‑WWI Department of External Affairs, one of whose roles was to produce attractive
photographic images of Australia to encourage tourism to the country.
12 On the influence of Japonism in Australia, see Melissa Miles, ‘Through Japanese Eyes: Ichiro
Kagiyama and Australian-Japanese Relations in the 1920s and 1930s’, History of Photography 38,
no. 4 (2014): 368.
118

4. Japan for the Taking

Japan and the Orient aboard the Japanese steamship company Nippon
Yusen Kaisha.13 In this, they anticipated the propaganda of the Japanese
National Board of Tourist Industry in the 1930s, which attempted to
encourage foreign tourism as an aggressively expansionary Japan sought
to convey a sympathetic impression of itself to the world. A ‘carefully
cultivated image of picturesqueness’ marked the promotional booklets
produced by the board and even the sophisticated photo journal Nippon,
produced in several European languages for foreign consumption, which
was anxious to present Japan as a technologically advanced trading
nation the equal of any in the West.14
Many of these tourist trailblazers to Japan would have followed the
advice of the Australian photographer Nevil A. Tooth, in a piece on
Japan published in Harrington’s Photographic Journal in 1911: ‘take a
camera’.15 WWII temporarily halted this early tourist traffic to Japan
and destroyed the idealised country Australian travellers had coveted.
Conditioned to see Japan in certain ways, BCOF photographers
sought to validate a set of images that the war had made obsolete and
that the Occupation was designed to revise. They documented a force
charged with rebuilding Japan, but uncomfortable with the social and
political volatility reconstruction had unleashed. An act of recreation, of
remaking feudal Japan into a self-reliant and pluralistic modern nation,
was visually realised as a regressive exercise in control.
The Allied mission in Japan, led by the imperious MacArthur, lasted
twice as long as the Pacific War that preceded it. For all its benevolent
modernity in facilitating Japan’s transition from militarism to
a functioning democracy, it was an enterprise that was both anachronistic
and neo-colonialist. BCOF was one of the last collective armed gestures
of a moribund empire as Britain began its retreat from Asia. In noting
its historically familiar exercise of the white conqueror’s privilege over
the conquered Asiatic, both American and Japanese historians have
likened the Occupation to the British Raj in India. John Dower, in
Embracing Defeat, applied Rudyard Kipling’s euphemism for imperial
hegemony, labelling it ‘the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit
13 The first issue of Picturesque Travel appeared in 1911 and the last in 1925. Burns Philp
pioneered the Pacific cruise and the packaging of tours in Asia for Australians, monopolising the
trade for decades.
14 See Gennifer S. Weisenfeld, ‘Touring “Japan-As-Museum”: Nippon and Other Japanese
Imperialist Travelogues’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 788.
15 Nevil A. Tooth, ‘A Camera in Japan’, Harrington’s Photographic Journal, 22 December 1911, 381.
119

Pacific Exposures

known as “the white man’s burden”’.16 In Occupied Japan, the ‘white
man’s burden’ was one borne lightly, for the country lay prostrate and
apparently accommodating. The camera became both an instrument
of power and a neo-colonial medium of framing places and peoples,
and the Occupation itself a new paradigm of the historical nexus of
photographic appropriation, tourism and military colonisation.

Atomic Tourists
Japan was in ruins when the first Australian Occupationnaires arrived
in early 1946. Sixty of its cities had been pulverised and incinerated
by a saturation bombing campaign that included the prodigious use of
napalm. Up to 100,000 citizens of Tokyo perished in a single night in
March 1945, ‘scorched and boiled and baked to death’, in the phrase
of the campaign’s chief strategist Major General Curtis (‘Bombs Away’)
Le May.17 The postwar homeless numbered more than 8 million, people
were dying of malnutrition and orphans scrounged in gutted buildings
and blackened streets. Prostitution was the only thing to thrive in the
wreckage. From April 1946, Australians settled into a cluster of camps
in and around the heavily bombed Inland Sea port of Kure, just down
the coast from Hiroshima. The following year saw the arrival of the wives
and children of many servicemen, housed in purpose-built residential
colonies, amply serviced by Japanese domestic staff—a  practice that
reminded the visiting Australian travel writer Frank Clune of the British
garrison towns in Imperial India.18
Yet, the manifest misery and squalor of postwar Japan hardly registers
in the official Australian photography. In 1948, BCOF’s Australian
commander-in-chief, Lieutenant-General Horace Robertson, presented

16 John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 2000), 23. Written in response to the American colonisation of the Philippines, a prize
of the Spanish–American War, Kipling’s landmark poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899) urged
the United States to take up the noble cause of empire formerly borne by European nations, most
notably by the British Raj in Imperial India. The reference is singularly apt, for the first military
governor of American-occupied Manila was none other than General Arthur MacArthur, father of
Douglas. The Japanese historian of the Occupation, Eiji Takemae, drew a similar parallel with the
British Raj. See Eiji Takemae, The Allied Occupation of Japan, trans. Robert Ricketts and Sebastian
Swann (New York: Continuum, 2003), 75.
17 Le May quoted in John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
(Pantheon Books: New York, 1986), 40–41.
18 Frank Clune, Ashes of Hiroshima (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1950), 56.
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4. Japan for the Taking

eight handsome, personally inscribed photograph albums to the serving
Australian Prime Minister, Ben Chifley.19 The albums contained the work
of the photographers attached to the DPR; one can assume that this
was considered a representative collection of its endeavours. Somewhat
alarmingly for the photographic record of a force entrusted with the
serious mission of assisting the Americans in neutering Japan as a future
threat and turning it into a responsible ally, it resembles a highly polished
selection of the prized photographs of a family on its dream trip abroad.
Servicemen are revealed in several stylised touristic poses, such as living
it up in glamorous leave resorts, playing golf with snow-capped Fujisan
looming majestically in the background, and negotiating the famous
stepping stones across the pond at the Heian shrine in Kyoto (trying not
to drop their cameras into the water). The wives and children of BCOF
personnel are also there, picnicking and cavorting on the beaches of the
Inland Sea, having the time of their lives.
One photograph in the collection, less staged than the others, stands
out. It reveals a slouch-hatted young Australian ‘digger’ on leave in
Tokyo’s Ginza, shopping at one of the street markets that cropped up
in Japanese cities in the early postwar years (see Figure 4.3). Trying his
hand at an accordion, the occupying soldier is the tourist consumer selfconsciously partaking of the passing pleasures that come his way, in an
environment in which such things are his for the taking. Meanwhile, the
Japanese bric-a-brac vendor, clothed in military remnants of the late war,
stares vaguely in the direction of the camera, bristling and humiliated,
awaiting, though not indulging, the Australian’s pleasure.20 The DPR
photographer has inadvertently identified the nature of human exchange
in Occupied Japan, in which military domination and control extended
beyond the subjugation of a people defeated in war, penetrating and
corrupting all aspects of human interaction.

19 Photographs of BCOF clubs, churches, leave resorts and hospitals, photographed and compiled
by Public Relations Section, HQ, BCOF, Japan. 30446636 PIC Albums 525–528, 530–533. See esp.
album 528.
20 The photograph anticipates by at least three years Ken Domon’s well-known 1951 picture
of postwar Japanese abjection, ShoiGunjin, Ueno, in which a maimed, cap-wearing Japanese
war veteran turned street beggar dolefully plays a squeezebox. The photograph is discussed in
Julia Adeney Thomas, ‘Power Made Visible: Photography and Postwar Japan’s Elusive Reality’,
The Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 2 (May 2008): 365–94, and features on the cover of the issue.
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Figure 4.3. Unknown photographer, BCOF Public Relations,
Australian Soldier Shopping in Ginza, Tokyo, c. 1946–48.
Source: National Library of Australia, 3044336, Album 528.

The imagery of tourism dominated Australian photography of the
Occupation from virtually the first Australian landfall in Japan. In March
1946, a few weeks after Australian troops had started arriving in Kure,
Australia’s longest-running weekly picture magazine, the Australasian,
published an extensive photo story trumpeting this historic event.
Taken by Neil Town, the staff photographer for the Australasian while
still enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force, the images illustrated
an article with the title ‘Australia Is There’, reminiscent of the jingoistic
bluster that attended national participation in the remote theatres of
WWI.21 In the main photograph, a group of Australian soldiers saunter
out of a destroyed Hiroshima shrine, via the torii, or entrance gate
(see Figure 4.4). Though the caption does not identify it, this was the

21 ‘Australia Will Be There’ was a popular patriotic song written in response to Australia’s entry
into WWI. It was written in 1915 by the songwriter Walter Skipper Francis.
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4. Japan for the Taking

Figure 4.4. Neil Town, ‘Australia Is There—With Our Occupation Force in Japan’,
Australasian, 9 March 1946, 25.
Source: Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria. Accession no.
H98.104/565.

only torii of three local ‘Gokuku’ shrines to survive the blast of 6 August
1945. Gokuku shrines are dedicated as places of worship honouring
those who have died in war; the Hiroshima version commemorated
local victims of the civil war in the late 1860s between the Tokugawa
shogunate and the imperial forces. The torii symbolically marks the
transition from the profane to the sacred—or the other way round if
one is exiting. It would be asking too much for this information to be
conveyed to the unknowing Australian audience. Yet, at the same time,
Town’s image captures the mix of arrogance and blithe ignorance with
which the Australians went to Japan. The diggers had arrived in Japan
and were in command; the sacred torii is turned into a triumphal arch.

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Pacific Exposures

The photograph conjures something else besides military swagger. The
group of soldiers look like tourists in khaki; as the caption states, they
appear to be on a ‘sightseeing tour’. The formal architecture of  the
torii throws the casualness of the Australians into relief; even for
the notoriously ‘unmilitary’ Australian soldiers, they are well out of step.
In the text accompanying the pictures, co-written by the noted war
correspondent (and future eminent novelist) George Johnston, who had
covered the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay the previous September,
Neil Town insisted the Australians were ‘not in Japan as tourists’, but
understood ‘the serious international implications of their tasks’.
Yet, Town also talked about soldiers in Hiroshima ‘scratching through
the debris looking for souvenirs’. This unappealing image is supported
by one of Town’s own photographs showing two Australian soldiers
doing just that (and photographing themselves doing it), published
a couple of weeks earlier in the Melbourne daily broadsheet the Argus,
the stablemate of the Australasian, for whom he also provided pictures.
The day before, the Argus ran what must have been a disconcerting
picture to civilian Australians in 1946—Town’s image of a soldier being
fitted out in a  kimono in a Japanese store, attended by two admiring
Japanese female assistants.22
Neil Town was not alone among newspaper photographers and
journalists in drawing attention to the touristic aspects of the enterprise.
Recruitment literature exploited the imagery of travel to lure men into
the occupying force in the first place, and the press coverage played
up the sightseeing nature of the event.23 The ‘FIRST PICTURES OF
AUSTRALIAN TROOPS IN JAPAN’, unveiled on the front page of
the Sydney Morning Herald in late February 1946, revealed a posse of
smiling soldiers promenading across a Hiroshima bridge and buying
fruit from local vendors.24 Around the same time, the respected journalist
Massey Stanley, writing in the Daily Telegraph, recommended the tour of
duty to members of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) as a chance to
visit ‘fascinating’ Japan, ‘one of the loveliest countries on earth’, where
soldiers could readily access ‘an abundance of supplies and luxuries
beyond the dreams’ of civilian Australia.25 Stanley’s article was titled ‘AIF
22 Neil Town and George H. Johnston, ‘Australia Is There—With Our Occupation Force in Japan’,
Australasian, 9 March 1946, 31; Argus, 20 February 1946, 13; Argus, 19 February 1946, 1.
23 See Prue Torney-Parlicki, Somewhere in Asia: War, Journalism, and Australia’s Neighbours 1941–
75 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000), 139.
24 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 February 1946, 1.
25 Massey Stanley, ‘AIF Should Like Japan’, Daily Telegraph, 17 February 1946, 47.
124

4. Japan for the Taking

Should Like Japan’. As if to prove its validity, a photographic feature
on the Occupation published in July 1946 in Pix—a reliable outlet for
propaganda pictures during the Occupation as in the war—reveals the
female proprietor of a Japanese hotel on the island of Shikoku bowing
deeply before two Australian military visitors. Accompanying pictures
show Australians’ attempts with chopsticks, being entertained by geisha,
disporting themselves in a hot tub and visiting a local castle.26
These pleasures and privileges were enacted in the shadow of Hiroshima.
The city exercised a somewhat perverse fascination for the Australians.
Partly this was due to proximity, for Hiroshima was quite literally
down the road. As well, the city was sensationally topical and many
Australians made a beeline for the place—its nuclear notoriety made
it a must see on the tour of duty. On day trips or family outings, they
went there heedless of the potential risk, for the official guidebook Know
Japan provided to the troops never once mentioned the word ‘radiation’.
By  1946, the fledgling beginnings of a tourism industry were already
in evidence in Hiroshima. Bomb debris was being peddled to tourists,
mostly household items remoulded in the tremendous heat caused by
the explosion. Australians were enthusiastic clients, buying (or looting)
pieces of rubble from around the hypocentre of the explosion on
6 August 1945, ground zero, to take back home.
‘The damage is far greater than any photographs can show’, wrote the
first foreigner to report from the devastated city, the Australian journalist
Wilfred Burchett, in early September 1945. Burchett was trying to
convey the colossal material damage and the suffering of the survivors,
who died ‘mysteriously and horribly’.27 In fact, the photographs taken
by Australians say a great deal about the death of a city and its rebirth.
Equally importantly, they provide a self-reflexive view of the way
Australians perceived postwar Japan. Photographing Hiroshima, more
than any other site in the country, was the means through which they
negotiated the ethical and perceptual confusions of an Occupation
that was part indulgently vengeful and punitive and part an exercise in
reconciliation and reconstruction.
26 Pix, 12 July 1947, 6–9. See also a feature on Australian servicemen enjoying themselves at the
Kawana Hotel, ‘Aussies in Swank Japan Hotel’, Pix, 9 August 1947, 3–5.
27 Wilfred Burchett, ‘The Atomic Plague’, Daily Express, 5 September 1945, 1, quoted in Burchett,
Shadows of Hiroshima (London: Verso, 1983), 34–36. Burchett’s report led to the enforcement of
a cordon sanitaire around Hiroshima by the American occupying authority, enforced as much by the
determination to keep prying eyes away from the city as by concern about visitors being exposed to
radiation.
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In distant Australia, relief at the end of the war was tempered by
inarticulate trepidation at the power the science of mass destruction had
unleashed.28 Photography filled a representational vacuum. Members of
the Australian advance party of BCOF were struck dumb by the sight of
Hiroshima upon their arrival in the country in February 1946. The men
‘had no word to describe it, which is unusual for Australian soldiers’,
stated a brief report published in the Melbourne Argus.29 The Argus article
is dwarfed by photographs taken by the newspaper’s staff photographer.
These include a panorama of the extensive damage in the centre of
the city, highlighting the skeletal structure of what was to become the
iconic symbol of both Hiroshima and the nuclear age itself, the A-Bomb
Dome; another wide-angle shot of the bombed harbour at Kure; and
a carefully contrived counter to the images of destruction—a scene of a
genial Australian soldier interacting with adoring Japanese women and
children. In the publicly circulated photography of the early days of the
Occupation, the military might of the conquering force was balanced
by an imagery of benignity. The Allies had won the war with ruthless
technological efficiency and were now rebuilding Japan, helping it to
mend its militaristic ways and nurturing its future. In one photograph
(see Figure 4.5), a group of crisply uniformed diggers stroll past the
A-Bomb Dome with a conqueror’s cocky self-assurance. The symbol
of the city’s nuclear destruction serves as a decorative backdrop—the
Australians’ eyes are firmly fixed ahead—and the picture suggests a force
free of self-doubt or moral qualms.30
The landscape of devastation surveyed in these early photographs from
Hiroshima is pleasantly free of signs of human suffering. This was both
calculated and shameless.31 Anxious not to disturb what it politely called
‘public tranquillity’, MacArthur’s headquarters imposed a strict code
of press censorship in September 1945 as one of its first disingenuous
acts to democratise totalitarian Japan. This systematically silenced the
hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who had lived to tell

28 A Gallup Poll of Australians taken in September 1945 revealed that 83 per cent thought
their use justified (‘Use of Atom Bomb on Japs Approved’, Australian Gallup Polls, nos 294–303
(September–October 1945)).
29 ‘New Era’, editorial, Courier Mail, 8 August 1945, 2; ‘Atom Bomb Ruin Staggers Australians
in Japan’, Argus, 18 February 1946, 20.
30 See for example Argus Newspaper Collections of Photographs, State Library of Victoria,
H98.104/563, H98.100/172.
31 Wilfred Burchett, ‘The Atomic Plague’, Daily Express, 5 September 1945, 1, quoted in
Burchett, Shadows of Hiroshima, 34–36.
126

4. Japan for the Taking

Figure 4.5. Unknown photographer, Australian Soldiers in Hiroshima,
c. 1947.

Source: Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria. Accession no.
H98.100/282.

the tale. Years later, the Hiroshima poet Sadako Kurihara remembered
her frustration: ‘We were not allowed to write about the atomic bomb
during the Occupation. We were not even allowed to say that we were not
allowed to write about the atomic bomb’.32 The portrayal of the misery
inflicted by the bombings was strictly the privilege of the foreigner and
could only be communicated to foreign audiences. Hiroshima (1946),
by the American news correspondent John Hersey and first published
as a single issue in the New Yorker, was enormously influential and was
extracted in the service newspaper the British Commonwealth Occupation
32 See Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Japan 1945–1948
(Tokyo: Liber Forlag, 1986), 14. Kurihara interviewed in 1978 by the author.
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Pacific Exposures

News (BCON), which subtitled its story ‘A US Writer Tells What Really
Happened at Hiroshima’.33 Of course, Hersey was not himself actually
there; his book is built on interviews. It was forbidden for Japanese
survivors to tell the story in their own words.
The ban applied to photographs and the written word. Ostensibly it
was latent Japanese resentment that the Occupation wanted to contain.
However, there was another, deeper reason; at stake was the prestige of
the US and allies like Australia as a collective beacon of enlightened
humanity. Documentary images of grotesquely burned corpses or
massed remains would not do. Macarthur’s administration prohibited
the publication of ground-level photographs capturing the horror of the
immediate atomic aftermath, including the handful of pictures  of
Hiroshima taken by local photographer Yoshito Matsuhige and those
of Nagasaki taken by Yosuke Yamahata. These harrowing images were
not published in the US until Life magazine presented them in a photo
spread in September 1952, after the implementation of the Peace Treaty
formally ended the Occupation. In their official absence, explicit images
of the destruction circulated on the black market in the form of postcards
(with titles such as ‘Terrible Sight’), many of which were acquired by
BCOF servicemen.34 Photographic imagery of the atomic bomb came
to be monopolised by the uncensored sight of the mushroom cloud
spiralling high into the sky, conveniently camouflaging the horrors
down below.35
The MHS’s Alan Cuthbert produced several panoramic photographs of
Hiroshima that provide an impressive visual register of the immensity
of the nuclear devastation, but which obscure the intimacies of
human suffering that pervaded the city. Soon after arriving in Japan in
33 See ‘Death Came Swiftly With the Atomic Bomb—And Lingers’, BCON, 12 October 946, 5.
34 See ‘When the Atom Bomb Struck—Uncensored’, Life 33, no.13, 29 September 1952, 19–
25. Some images, including those of Yamahata, had been published before the ban was introduced
in September 1945 and a few appeared on rare occasions later, especially after it was relaxed in 1949.
For example, the BCOF newspaper BCON published photographs of radiation and burn victims in
March 1949. The suppression of the colour film footage of US military crews and black and white
Japanese newsreel shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was even more draconian; the American military
footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s and has never been fully aired publicly. See Greg
Mitchell, ‘The Great Hiroshima Cover-up—And the Greatest Movie Never Made’, Japan Focus,
8 August 2011. apjjf.org/2011/9/31/Greg-Mitchell/3581/article.html.
35 See Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, ‘The Iconic Image of the Mushroom Cloud and
the Cold War Optic’, in Picturing Atrocity: Photographs in Crisis, ed. Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley,
Nancy K. Miller and Jay Prosser (London: Reaktion, 2012), 135–45. See also Robin Gerster, ‘Bomb
Sights in Japan: Photographing Australian-occupied Hiroshima’, Meanjin 74, no. 4 (2015): 88–103.
128

4. Japan for the Taking

Figure 4.6. Allan Cuthbert, View South from Central Hiroshima,
28 February 1946.
Source: AWM 131583.

February 1946, he photographed from the roof of the Chugoku Shinbun
building, in which over 100 employees perished on the sunny morning of
6 August (see Figure 4.6). The elevated vantage point reveals a landscape
virtually devoid of people, save a few anonymous figures walking along
the crossroads and two small clusters of uniformed personnel in the
foreground, by the shell of the Jesuit church that served Hiroshima’s
small Christian congregation. Clinical and methodical, Cuthbert’s vista
of absence and annihilation is reminiscent of the photographs taken
by the ‘Physical Damage Division’ of the Strategic Bombing Survey
(1946) commissioned by the US Government after the war to assess
the effectiveness of the aerial campaigns in Germany and Japan, with
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Pacific Exposures

Figure 4.7. Alan Queale, Peace Festival, Hiroshima, 6 August 1948.
Source: AWM 145724.

a view to informing the future civil defence architecture of the US.36
The panorama conveys an impersonal and even sanitised picture of the
atom-bombed city; what it does not reveal is the pervasive misery and
persistent sickness of a traumatised population.
By 1946, as Cuthbert’s image suggests, much of the debris had been
cleaned up and the streets were neat and tidy; only picturesque ruins
remain of what was Hiroshima. Its reconstruction was to be symbolic
as well as pragmatic, and it was on the way to becoming the ‘place of
pilgrimage for pacifists’ anticipated by Frank Clune in his travel book
Ashes of Hiroshima (1950), the product of a trip to BCOF areas in
36 See ‘Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945’, International Center of Photography (New York City),
accessed 14 July 2015, www.icp.org/browse/archive/collections/hiroshima-ground-zero-1945-may20-august-28-2011.
130

4. Japan for the Taking

1948.37 The making of Hiroshima as a self-styled ‘Mecca for World
Peace’ had begun almost immediately, with the formation in January
1946 of the Hiroshima Reconstruction Bureau. The creation of what
we now know as ‘Peace Park’, with its host of commemorative facilities
including Kenzo Tange’s museum, was just a few years away. In 1948
the slogan ‘No More Hiroshimas’ was applied to a local campaign to
make the city a focus for the advocacy of world peace. It has stuck as an
anti‑nuclear catchcry ever since, paradoxically linking the city forever
with the historical fact of its destruction.
‘No More Hiroshima’s’ [sic] made its first appearance on a large banner
at  the second of the official annual Peace Festivals, held on the third
anniversary of the bombing, 6 August 1948. Cuthbert’s colleague Alan
Queale was on hand to document the event (see Figure 4.7). In what
has since become a ritual at this solemn event, doves were sent fluttering
into the summer sky, bells tolled and poets recited commemorative
odes. BCOF Commander Horace Robertson, Gallipoli veteran and
hero of the North African campaign in WWII, then strode to the
podium. In 1946, Robertson had demonstrated his goodwill by offering
the services of Australian engineers and town planners to rehabilitate
Hiroshima as ‘a city dedicated to the idea of Peace’, a gesture vetoed by
MacArthur. However, on this special day, he chose to tell the assembled
citizens, many of them young children who would have lost beloved
family members in the blast, that it was their own fault. The bomb was
a ‘punishment’ handed to the city as ‘retribution’ for Japanese militarism.
To emphasise his point, he had detailed a squadron of Mustang fighters
to fly low over the ceremony—an ear-shattering reminder of the bolt
from the blue exactly three years earlier. Perhaps that is what prompted
the Japanese man standing on the jeep in Queale’s picture to point
skyward.38 So much for ‘Peace’.

37 Frank Clune, Ashes of Hiroshima: A Post-War Trip to Japan and China (Sydney: Angus &
Robertson, 1950), 103.
38 See Clune’s interview with Robertson, Ashes of Hiroshima, 148–49; Donald Richie interview
with Robertson, Pacific Stars and Stripes, c. September 1948, 13–14. See also American criticism
of the speech, ‘Hotfoot in Hiroshima’, Time, 16 August 1948,www.time.com/time/archive/
preview/0,10987,798930,00.html. A short film of the occasion, made by the Military History
Section, is held by the Australian War Memorial, F07474.
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Spoils of War
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in April 1952, soon after the
historic decision to permit the Japanese brides of Australian servicemen
to enter Australia, former BCOF serviceman Stephen Kelen dissociated
these female ‘New Australians’ from the warmongers who had terrorised
the region for years. ‘After all’, he wrote, ‘it is never women who wage
wars—they only suffer, and pay for man’s folly no matter to what race
or country they belong’.39 Kelen echoed the pervasive BCOF view that
Japanese women and men were two distinctively different types, and that
the females suffered unduly in a male-dominated society. To the MHS’s
Alan Queale, the women were ‘shy, demure, very feminine’, the  men
‘vicious, violent, ugly’.40
Yet, sympathy for Japanese women was not entirely disinterested. Japan
was for the taking in every sense. Sexual rapacity was an abiding aspect of
the Occupation, indulged in by members of all the Allied forces. Among
Neil Town’s ‘first pictures’ of the arrival in Japan of the Australians in
February 1946 was an image of two soldiers purchasing souvenirs. Their
eyes are fixed firmly on two comely, sweetly smiling young women
purveying the curios, and they cannot contain their smirks.41 Many
Australian men considered Japan’s vulnerable, desperately penurious
women among the spoils of war. As the BCOF interpreter Allan Clifton
observed in his memoir Time of Fallen Blossoms (1950), most of the
men on the first shipments of Occupationnaires had been fighting in
the tropics, cut off from feminine society for long periods, and some
‘made no secret of what they wanted, or of their readiness, willingness
and ability to recover lost ground’. Their indiscriminate desires are
suggested by the generic name given the women in and around the Kure
encampments—‘moose’, a bastardisation of the Japanese musume, or
girl. The women, Clifton wrote, were ‘quarry in a great game hunt’.42
As the metaphor implies, this mating ritual was an essentially coercive
form of human exchange, even when outright assault was not involved.

39 See Stephen Kelen, ‘New Australians—From Japan’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 April 1952, 6.
40 Alan Queale, ‘Japan Diary’, As You Were: A Cavalcade of Events with the Australian Services from
1788 to 1947 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial 1947), 190.
41 Argus, 19 February 1946, 1.
42 Allan S. Clifton, Time of Fallen Blossoms (London: Cassell, 1950), 21–22.
132

4. Japan for the Taking

Fantasies of the prospect of available Japanese women had inspired some
men to enlist in the first place. Early publicity images of local women
fawning on Australian men were a calculated lure to recruitment into the
force; this was one remove from what would now be called sex tourism.
The DPR saw the sexual possibilities arising from occupying Japan.
Phillip Hobson’s photograph (see Figure 4.8) of an unidentified but
immensely self-satisfied Australian serviceman, draped as was customary
with a camera, surrounded by a bevy of radiant Japanese women in
traditional attire, is testimony to the way the tour of duty came to be
seen and promoted by the military. Seven women for one man—a ratio
guaranteed to make Australian friends back home green with envy.

Figure 4.8. Phillip Hobson, Australian Serviceman with a Group
of Japanese Women, Japan, c. April 1952.
Source: AWM HOBJ2914.

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Pacific Exposures

Yet, Hobson’s photograph is decorous enough; nothing overly suggestive
is portrayed and delicate Australian sensibilities back home would not be
offended. There were dangers in sexualising the Occupation too overtly,
for the DPI’s target audience was female as well as male, domestic as
well as military. Hedonistic imagery did not wash well with the general
Australian community, which considered that nothing good could
come from anything other than an armed encounter with the Japanese.
The Australians were supposed to be in Japan to redeem the country
and make it atone for past sins, not to enjoy themselves. The louche
nightclub scene of ‘burlesque’ that characterised nocturnal Tokyo in
the Occupation years, documented by Japanese photographers such
as Tadahiko Hayashi, was off limits. The DPR’s Douglas Lee captured
a troupe of scantily clad performers at the Ebisu camp in Tokyo, but
pictures of the pervasive sexuality of life in and around the camps were
routinely suppressed.43 Meanwhile, photographs of Japanese female
nudity, often taken privately at striptease parties organised for the troops,
circulated surreptitiously among the servicemen.
Domestic fears that the Australians were in grave moral danger in Japan
seem to be anticipated by Neil Town in the Australasian, for he remarked,
defensively and ungraciously:
None of the Australians seemed to be interested in the girls—and
Japanese girls in the mass, it must be admitted, do not have any particular
attraction or charm [being] small, chunky, bow-legged, flat-faced, and
with protruding teeth.44

Alan Queale was only marginally more chivalrous. Some of the
‘Jap women’, he noted in his ‘Japan Diary’, published by the Australian
War Memorial in 1947, ‘are tolerably good-looking’ and are ‘picturesque
creatures’ with their kimonos and pretty paper umbrellas; ‘however, their
wide moon-like faces often give one the impression that their heads are
too large for their bodies’.45
To the contrary, the prolific photographs of Japanese women that adorn
the often self-published memoirs of BCOF servicemen, albeit safely
appearing years after the event, suggest that Japanese women did hold
great appeal. A favoured photographic subject is the bare-breasted ama, the
famous pearl divers employed at the Mikimoto establishment at Ise near
43 Lee, LEEJ0427.
44 Town and Johnston, ‘Australia Is There’, 25.
45 Queale, ‘Japan Diary’, 189.
134

4. Japan for the Taking

Nagoya, a tourist magnet for the Australians in Japan. These risqué images
could always be justified for their anthropological interest, a little like the
photographs of naked native women that once proliferated in the pages of
the National Geographic.46 Half a century after the Occupation, the BCOF
veteran John Collins looked back at the experience in language free from
humbug: ‘We were young and fit and horny and far from home’.47
The subtext of Australian putdowns of the appearance of Japanese
women is that the men were chastely keeping themselves pure for the
lady folk back home in Australia. Reflecting its conservative female
readership, the Australian’s Women Weekly discreetly avoided any sign
of fraternisation with Japanese women in its photographic feature on
the Occupation, published in May 1946. Rather, the lead photograph
showed an Australian soldier dispensing chocolate to a ‘swarm’ of Japanese
infants. In a long feature article entitled ‘There’s Plenty of Work for Our
Boys in Japan’, the Weekly’s special correspondent in Japan, Dorothy
Drain, reassured readers that ‘your soldier’ is not having a good time in
Japan. ‘Don’t be led astray by the photos they send home’, she advised,
for ‘he is doing a job and is not enjoying the post-war tourist season’.48
Acknowledging sexual relations between occupier and occupied was out
of bounds. Any physical contact was incidental and strictly reserved to
the performance of menial tasks. The Weekly’s staff photographer Bill
Brindle’s picture of a kimono-clad house girl tying the shoe laces of
a senior Australian air force officer, which illustrated another of Drain’s
features on Japan, conveyed the decorum of the relationship.49
The sanitised version of impeccable Australian male behaviour provided
by the Women’s Weekly was confounded by stories of their scandalous
off-duty activities that started circulating in the daily press, feeding
suspicions that the men of BCOF were debauched malingerers on a paid
holiday, and entrenching the impression that the troops were debasing
the heroic standards set by Australian soldiers in battle. Certainly
liaisons between troops and local women were common, even prolific,
and prostitution of varying kinds and degrees flourished. Postwar Japan
was a severely dislocated society. Male breadwinners were in short
46 See, for example, Philip M. Green, Memories of Occupied Japan (Blackheath: Phillip Maxwell
Green, 1987), 128.
47 J.G. Collins, The War of the Veterans (Toowoomba: J.G. Collins, 2001), 33.
48 See Australian Women’s Weekly, 11 May 1946, 18, 19.
49 Dorothy Drain, ‘Air Force Officers Live in Jap Viscount’s House’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 8
May 1946, 17.
135

Pacific Exposures

supply and many Japanese women, including war widows, had hungry
children and elderly relatives to support and were often in dire need.
Having been complicit in the provision of what were euphemistically
called ‘Recreation and Amusement Stations’ for foreign troops at the
beginning of the Occupation, MacArthur’s administration outlawed all
forms of public prostitution in March 1946. However, it continued to
flourish unofficially. In Tokyo, the panpan, the Western-styled nocturnal
streetwalker catering to the prowling Allied soldier, became a symbol of
the Occupation. In Hiroshima Prefecture, prostitution had thrived from
the time the Americans first arrived in late 1945; when the Australians
came early the following year they were greeted by women waiting at
the Kure docks. Inhibitions were shed and scruples were discarded.
In isolated cases, the occupiers’ cameras were put to highly illicit use.
One of the BCOF wives recalls a colleague of her husband’s proudly
displaying his homemade collection of pornography in the officer’s mess
one evening. Included among the usual images of festivals and the like
were nude photographs of his wife, his 18-year-old daughter and his
Japanese house girl.50
The unsavoury outcome of the sexual relations taking place between
Australian men and Japanese women was documented by the MHS,
a unit dedicated to the primacy of ‘evidentiary’ and objective still and
moving images.51 Alan Queale’s photograph of five Japanese women
employed by one of the Australian infantry battalions camped at Hiro
near Kure betrays an unedifying story (see Figure 4.9). It was taken
in September 1946, during an official crackdown on the spread of
venereal disease in the BCOF community that led to the victimisation
of Japanese women, including those who either worked with or in any
way associated with Australian servicemen, such as domestic staff in
BCOF housing. In what one disgusted Australian officer called ‘a panic’,
‘Anti-VD Officers’ rounded up local women found to be suffering from
venereal disease.52 Four such diagnosed women stand shamefaced before
the official photographer, along with one who turns away from the
camera, grinning perhaps through sheer embarrassment (Figure 4.9).
50 See Jennie Woods, Which Way Will the Wind Blow? (North Sydney: Jennie Woods, 1994), 64.
51 See Lakin, Contact, 113, on the MHS’s emphasis on documentary veracity.
52 Major A.W. John, Duty Defined, Duty Done: A Memoir (Cheltenham: The Gen Publishers,
2004), 211. In her Occupation memoir, Jennie Woods recalled her Japanese house girls being
systematically harassed and one removed from her service. See Woods, Which Way Will the Wind
Blow?, 67. The round-ups of Japanese women for VD screening were not confined to BCOF; the
Americans also employed the practice, especially in Tokyo in 1946.
136

4. Japan for the Taking

Figure 4.9. Alan Queale, Venereal Disease Cases Discovered during
a Medical Examination of Japanese Female Employees of BCOF, Hiro,
26 September 1946.
Source: AWM 132118.

This ignominious episode was typical of BCOF’s inability to deal
constructively with the issue of sexual relationships. It refused to
countenance official brothels to regulate the business and monitor
the sexual health of Japanese women and, hence, that of its own men.
Scapegoated, Japanese women did not matter; the good name of the
diggers overrode everything. However, that too was under threat, as
allegations about vaulting rates of venereal disease in the Australian
contingent took effect, and the force came under fire from the federal
president of the Legion of Ex-Servicemen, who described the Australians
in Japan as ‘morally rotting’.53 Having noted the potential pleasures of the
country to young men in February 1946, Massey Stanley found himself
in Japan a little over two years later as a member of an official investigatory
53 ‘“Moral Rot” among BCOF Men’, Daily Telegraph, 13 January 1948. Prue Torney, ‘“Renegades to
Their Country”: The Australian Press and the Allied Occupation of Japan 1946–1950’, War & Society
25, no. 1 (May 2006) provides an excellent account of the press controversies surrounding BCOF.
137

Pacific Exposures

team sent by the army minister
that was dubbed the ‘Sin
Busters’. Press outrage at
Australian hedonism in Japan
was a touch hypocritical. On
assignment in Japan in 1950, the
Age photographer Ron Lovitt—
later famous for capturing
the climactic moment of the
‘tied’ cricket test in Brisbane
in 1960 between Australia and
the West Indies—captured
some unnamed pressmen on a
night out, evidently relishing
the attention of ‘geisha girls’
(see  Figure 4.10). Occupied
Japan was a moveable feast, in
more ways than one.

Figure 4.10. Ron Lovitt, Pressmen
Being Entertained, Japan, date
unknown.
Source: Courtesy of Fairfax Syndication.

In any event, neither the barrage of criticism from home nor the
threatened loss of their precious beer ration stopped the Australians’
liaisons with Japanese women. In one of the Occupation’s most uplifting
developments, these relationships sometimes blossomed into marriage—
over 600 of them—in Japan or back home in Australia. At least two
Australian military photographers, the MHS’s Claude Holzheimer
and the battalion photographer Ian Robertson, wed Japanese women.
For  Japanese men, these foreign relationships were a humiliating
reminder of the completeness of the national defeat in the war.
To the official BCOF photographers, the ‘Japs’ (the sneering
denomination was mostly confined to the males) were automatically
associated with the horrors of the recent war. Accordingly, the
photographers frequently produced images of Japanese men as humbled,
demeaned and emasculated—they were pictured working in a BCOF
typing pool, doing BCOF’s bidding as cooks or servants, or peddling
tourist paraphernalia to BCOF tourists, as in the image of the digger in
Ginza. One image, also taken in downtown Tokyo, shows a Japanese man
shining BCOF boots.54 Some of the photographic putdowns are rather

54 See AWM 147661; AWM BROJ0288; AWM HOBJ5642; AWM SWEJ0029.
138

4. Japan for the Taking

Figure 4.11. Allan Cuthbert, Japanese Shipyards Labourer, Kure, 1948.
Source: AWM 145572.

more subtle. In one of Allan Cuthbert’s photographs (see Figure 4.11), a
Japanese labourer works with an oxyacetylene torch in the shipbreaking
yards. His clothes are virtually rags except for the straw boater—suitably
nautical for a shipyard scene, perhaps, but incongruously jaunty and
ridiculous in the gritty context. Military defeat and occupation had
effected a transformation in fearsome Japanese male stereotypes. The
fanatical Japanese warrior had become something other altogether—
obedient and hardworking, but faintly vaudevillian.
The vigorous sexual life of the Australian Occupation also created
another challenge for the official cohort of photographers, one that was
assiduously shirked. They habitually photographed newborn BCOF
babies with their mothers (it was a fertile force), but Australian children
born to Japanese women were a consensual taboo, on both Australian and
Japanese sides. In 1948, press reports of children of Australian paternity
139

Pacific Exposures

in a Hiroshima orphanage caused a stir, but the extent of this legacy
remained largely unpublicised for decades until the recent investigative
work of Walter Hamilton.55 You will not find photographs of the more
than 100 Australian–Japanese children in the official Occupation oeuvre.
BCOF’s hypocritical response to sexual interactions with Japanese
women marred one of its major achievements in Occupied Japan, its role
in overseeing Japan’s first postwar election in April 1946, in which the
nation’s women were able to vote for the first time. This historic occasion
was enthusiastically supported by the Australian Government, and was
a source of satisfaction to many of the men of BCOF itself. Australian
observer teams visited thousands of polling pools on election day and
the poll was a resounding success. Some 66 per cent of eligible female
voters turned out, 14 million of them, and 39 women were elected to
the Japanese Diet. Ironically and indicatively, one of these newly elected
female members of parliament was a former prostitute.56

An Airbrushed Japan
Despite its ostensible power, BCOF was acutely aware of its vulnerability
in Japan. The Australian military leadership never stopped distrusting
the Japanese. As late as December 1946, after six months in the job,
BCOF Commander Robertson was unwilling to be put into social or
even diplomatic situations in which he would be forced by protocol to
shake hands with a Japanese, even refusing to attend a Tokyo welcome
for the visiting Australian Roman Catholic cardinal, Normon Gilroy,
because one of the hosts was the Japanese archbishop of Tokyo.57 Like
timid travellers, the Australians in Japan feared they were at the locals’
mercy. Gullivers in the land of Lilliput, the Australians suspected that an
intimidating military presence was no guarantee of mastery, and that the
dextrous, determined Japanese still pulled the strings on their own turf.

55 See ‘Hiroshima Orphans’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1948; Walter Hamilton, Children
of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2012). Hamilton wrote
of the social tragedy of the mixed-race children, disowned by Australia and discriminated against
(as were their mothers) in Japan.
56 George Davies, The Occupation of Japan (St Lucia, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press,
2001), 185–86. See also Takemae, Allied Occupied of Japan, 265.
57 See Ball anecdote in Alan Rix, ed., Intermittent Diplomat: The Japan and Batavia Diaries of
W. Macmahon Ball (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1988), 150.
140

4. Japan for the Taking

This anxiety is reflected in the official photographs. Compensating for
the relative lack of active soldiering, and sensitive about its subsidiary
role in an Occupation largely dominated by the Americans, BCOF
strove to keep up appearances with a penchant for ceremonial marchpasts. The MHS was there to capture every salute and every formality
when visiting dignitaries required the Australians to display their skill at
drill.58 Guard duties in symbolic locations, notably outside the imperial
palace in Tokyo, were a favoured photographic subject. The impression
is that of a force determined to keep the emperor within, rather than to
deter intruders. Australians were less forgiving of Hirohito than their
American counterparts, believing he should have been tried as a war
criminal along with General Tojo at the Tokyo war crimes trials that
began in April 1946, under the stern judicial eye of the Queenslander
Sir William Webb.
The Americans had retained Hirohito as a crucial plank in their program
to stabilise Japan and have his subjects accept the process of reform.59
As early as February 1946, Life magazine published a photographic
essay entitled ‘Sunday at Hirohito’s’, showing a reassuringly normal
family man with an improbable interest in American culture—one
photograph shows him purportedly reading ‘the funnies’ from the US
military newspaper the Stars and Stripes to his son, the Crown Prince.60
However, turning the ‘living god’ into a sympathetic human being had
the disconcerting effect of boosting Hirohito’s public appeal. His tour
of Kure and Hiroshima in December 1947—his first visit since the
cataclysm of August 1945—was a source of official anxiety in the upper
echelons of the Australian Mission in Japan.61 The tour occasioned
a  welter of photographic activity. A report compiled by the Japan
expert A.B. Jamieson for the Australian Mission quoted the worrying
remark from a Hiroshima city official, made to Allied pressmen covering
Hirohito’s tour of the city: ‘The Emperor is the source of our atomic
energy for reconstruction, as powerful as the American atomic energy

58 Photographs of ‘spectacular’ parades dominate the final, commemorative edition of the Osakabased broadsheet BCON. See BCON, 6 April 1950, ‘Special Last Supplement’.
59 See Morris Low, Japan on Display: Photography and the Emperor (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006),
112.
60 Life, 4 February 1946, 75–79.
61 See Patrick Shaw, Head of the Australian Mission in Japan, ‘The Emperor’s Visit to Hiroshima’,
despatch no.45/1947, Department of External Affairs, Australian Archives Canberra, CRS A 1838,
item 477/511, 1.
141

Pacific Exposures

is for destruction’.62 Harry Freeman’s photograph of Hirohito’s visit to
Osaka the previous year (see Figure 4.12) reflects Australian fears that
the emperor was a potent source of national devotion to a public unused
to his visibility and accessibility. As American and Japanese police strain
to hold the adoring masses back, Hirohito doffs his hat to a common
countryman in the crowd doing the same, an act of hitherto unknown
humility and mutual respect. Compared with the static staidness,
verging on sterility, of much of the MHS’s work, this image radiates
energy and movement, capturing something new, dangerous and volatile
in Japanese public life.
The official photographers liked to portray the Australians in situations
of mastery, often in the pose of taking in Japanese landscape as they
went about their military tasks. In Allan Cuthbert’s photograph
(see  Figure  4.13), a group of diggers on patrol view the countryside
near Fukuyama in Hiroshima Prefecture in the late summer of 1946
while in search of sequestered stores and weapons. The Australians
occupy the space as well as look down on it, surveying a subordinate
and depopulated landscape that invites inspection, appreciation and,
ultimately, appropriation. Cuthbert provides a reassuring picture of
Occupied Japan, eliciting a calm control that suggests all is well—the
Australians are in cool command of all they survey. The picture taps into
a representational tradition of spectatorship dating back to the halcyon
days of the British Empire, what James R. Ryan has called an ‘imperial
way of seeing’. Along with topographical survey and cartography,
photography was a vital instrument of visual colonisation in the political
and military project of British imperial power. The ‘very idea of Empire’,
Ryan wrote, ‘depended in part on an idea of landscape, as both controlled
space and the means of representing such control’.63 Yet, if Cuthbert’s
photograph reproduces this colonialist aesthetic, it also belies the sense
of a force never fully confident of its place both in Japan, and within the
American-dominated Occupation itself.

62 ‘Emperor’s Visit to Hiroshima’, 9 cited in Low, Japan on Display, 114.
63 James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire
(London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 46, 72.
142

Figure 4.12. William Harry Freeman, Emperor Hirohito on Tour, Osaka, 1947.
Source: AWM 133228.

Figure 4.13. Allan Cuthbert, Soldiers of BCOF 65th Battalion, on Patrol,
Fukuyama Prefecture, 10 September 1946.
Source: AWM 132639.

Pacific Exposures

Significantly, Cuthbert’s image of a rural idyll purges Japan of signs
of the war and its difficult social aftermath. Australian photographers
tended to turn a blind eye to the manifest social problems of postwar
Japan, which were especially evident in its cities. Selective vision also
improved the appearance of a Japan pockmarked with eyesores, caused
by the Allied bombing and by a country improvising and rebuilding at
breakneck speed. While charged with the task of making the Australian
Occupation look good, some of the less flagrantly propagandistic
work of DPR photographers like Hobson and Harold Dunkley reveal
a strong attraction to aspects of Japanese culture and landscape. Hobson
composed a series of studies of Buddhist statues, while Dunkley was
drawn to photographing domestic architecture and gardens.64 However,
the social disturbances evident in the cities, including strikes and mass
demonstrations of support for communism, are largely ignored in favour
of a rustic and essentially docile Japan.65
A representative picture is Phillip Hobson’s photograph of the quiet
communion of a Japanese girl and her grandmother at work in
a  tranquil vegetable garden somewhere in rural Japan in November
1949 (see Figure 4.14). The image is an example of what John Urry and
Jonas Larsen call professional photographic ‘gardening’, in which the
appearance of idealised tourist sites are kept intact by the ‘airbrushing
away’ of unsettling and unsightly evidence of modernity.66 Overtly
a celebration of the decorous formality of Japanese life, it is an implicitly
political picture of a Japan in need of benign nurture. At least Hobson’s
image is a representational advance on the wartime stereotype of the
fanatical Japanese warrior. We see a photographer struggling to balance
the didactic requirements of effective public relations with a visual
sensibility responding to the (conspicuously feminised) cultural spectacle
before him.

64 See for example AWM HOBJ0467; AWM DUKJ3276.
65 In a photomontage depicting the changes in Occupied Japan during 1946, and ‘the new way
of life under democracy’, the Christmas and New Year Souvenir edition of the service newspaper
BCON included an unattributed photograph of demonstrating strikers in Tokyo. In fact, the
Australian Government strongly advocated workplace reform in Japan, including supporting
the organisation of trade unions. Christine de Matos, Encouraging Democracy in a Cold War Climate
(Canberra: Australia-Japan Research Centre, 2001) provides a detailed account of constructive
Australian political policies relating to postwar Japan. These often conflicted with the American
Cold War mentality, especially as the Occupation progressed and the US reprioritised Japan as
a regional bulwark against communism.
66 See John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage, 2012), 174–75, 169.
144

4. Japan for the Taking

Figure 4.14. Phillip Hobson, Grandmother Gardening with Granddaughter,
Kure area, c. Nov 1949.
Source: AWM HOBJ0199.

Individual photographic portraits of the Japanese indicate a preference
for  traditional national types mostly encountered in the waterways,
paddies and mountain valleys outside the cities. When he was not
photographing BCOF routines and activities, Alan Queale sought the
people and places of a Japan that was removed in every sense from the
war. His private albums are dominated by bucolic Japan—by images
of rural women of all ages from matriarchs to musume, and plain
but evocative portraits of artisans and workers, such as his picture of
a Hiroshima oysterman (see Figure 4.15). Modernity is strictly the
privilege of the foreigners. Hobson’s photograph of a BCOF despatch
rider on a motorcycle swiftly passing a Japanese tradesman labouring
with a bullock cart provides a stark example of what is an essentially
imperialising photographic discourse.67

67 Hobson was in full public relations mode, and the photograph was carefully staged (two shots
from different angles were taken) (AWM HOBJ0067; AWM HOBJ0072).
145

Pacific Exposures

Figure 4.15. Alan Queale, Oysterman, Kaitaichi, Hiroshima Prefecture,
c. 1946–48.
Source: AWM 12000.006.001.

4. Japan for the Taking

Figure 4.16. Claude Holzheimer, Japanese Farming Family,
Hiroshima Prefecture, c. 1953.
Source: AWM 148750.

Reminiscent of Victorian-era anthropological images of vanishing
peoples, the official photographs provide a human catalogue of
a  beguilingly backward Japan being preserved by an appreciative
Occupier. Somewhere in Hiroshima Prefecture in the early 1950s,
a farming family obligingly smiles for Claude Holzheimer’s camera
(see Figure 4.16). The Australian Government supported the difficult
process of agrarian reform in postwar Japan, involving the prohibition
of absentee ownership and the transfer of agricultural land to former
tenant farmers.68 Perhaps the photograph is a visual register of this
official support. Certainly, the vivid individuality of father, mother and
child shines through. Yet it is an image in which the processes of history
are absent—the family is frozen in time. It is almost as if the war, and the
atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had never happened.
68 See Davies, The Occupation of Japan, 296.
147

Figure 4.17. Phillip Hobson, Australian Soldier Offering Money to Beggar,
Tokyo, 11 January 1955.
Source: AWM HOBJ5643.

4. Japan for the Taking

The rural emphasis of Australian Occupation photography is strikingly at
odds with Japanese photography of the edgy postwar era. Realist Japanese
photographers such as Ken Domon and Tadahiko Hayashi identified
urban images of social dislocation and degradation. Streetwalkers,
ex-military down-and-outers, and vagrants were identified as the
appropriate visual material for a shattered country contending with the
cultural and psychological pressure of the Occupation itself and the
upheaval created by the war. Shocking images such as Hayashi’s 1946
picture of a filthy young street waif, perhaps 10 years of age, smoking in
the proletarian Ueno station district of downtown Tokyo, are virtually
absent from the photographic archive of the Australian Occupation.69
When Phillip Hobson made a rare, belated visit to a similar milieu, he
bleached the grime and squalor with crisp winter sunlight, and populated
it with a well-dressed and well-fed Japanese family on an outing and an
Australian soldier providing charity in the form of a 10 yen note to
a cheerfully grateful beggar (see Figure 4.17). Japanese postwar social
distress becomes a validation of the Occupation, and testimony to the
radiant beneficence of BCOF itself.

‘No Loitering’
One final image, taken by the prolific Hobson, provides an illuminating
footnote to the story of Australian official photography of the Occupation.
The longest serving member of the Australian photographic cohort in
Japan, Hobson knew the country well; he based himself there from 1950
while making sporadic visits to Korea to cover the war, during which
time he took many fine pictures of Australians in action. He learned the
Japanese language and set up a photographic laboratory in Tokyo, staffed
by Japanese, to facilitate the processing and distribution of his pictures
to Australian and overseas newspapers. As we have seen, Hobson was
highly receptive to the visual seductions of Japan and several of his
pictures express a strong liking for the country.

69 Thomas, ‘Power Made Visible’, esp. 373–79. The Hayashi photograph of the smoking street
waif in Ueno appears in Tadahiko Hayashi, Kastori no jidai (Tokyo: Pie Bukkusu, 2007), 37. BCON
reproduced two unattributed photographs of malnourished orphans in Osaka, in a news story on
the issue of homeless children (BCON, 12 February 1947, 5).
149

Pacific Exposures

Figure 4.18. Phillip Hobson, Australian Soldier and Japanese Stand Guard
at Ebisu Camp, Tokyo, 8 August 1954.
Source: AWM HOBJ5286.

4. Japan for the Taking

However, in August 1954, the year before he left Japan for good,
Hobson took a photograph (see Figure 4.18) of an Australian soldier
named ‘Dasher’ Dean standing guard at the Ebisu barracks in Tokyo.
Beside the lanky Australian and rigidly standing to attention is his fellow
guard, a small-statured Japanese. The scene disconcertingly resembles
that first historic meeting of Hirohito with the towering MacArthur.
The Occupation was well over by 1954. BCOF had officially ceased to
exist two years earlier when the Peace Treaty with Japan came into effect,
although Australia maintained a tiny military presence in Japan until
the mid-1950s—Ebisu had served as rest camp for Commonwealth
forces fighting in Korea. Rapprochement between bitter enemies was
underway, with diplomatic links being forged and trade deals soon to be
signed. The two antagonists were now standing side by side. However,
Hobson’s photograph suggests they were not yet on an equal footing—
one thinks it unnecessary to have Dasher Dean accentuate his height
advantage by standing on a raised platform. Above the Japanese a sign
reads ‘NO LOITERING’.
Such are the humiliating legacies of military occupation; perhaps
Hobson  thought it an amusing visual joke. Yet it was the occupied
people who had the last laugh, for Japan itself was hardly ‘loitering’.
It was on the move, busily engaged in a process of national regeneration
and well on the way to becoming the powerhouse of the 1960s and
beyond, leaving Australia, and virtually the rest of world, lagging in its
wake. It took Australians some years to appreciate the implications of the
Japanese proverb makeru ga kachi (‘losing is winning’).70 Well intentioned
but complacent, the BCOF photographers of the Allied project to
remake Japan had produced a representational absurdity—a  window
into the country’s past, rather than an anticipation of its future.
The melding of travel and military imagery had not so much captured
Japan as revealed the shallowness at the heart of the Orientalist ideology
of the Occupation. In the end, Japan rebuilt and adapted while staying
true to itself.

70 See ‘The Trade War: Winner: Japan, Loser: Australia’, Bulletin, 28 June 1983, cover.
151

5
THROUGH NON-MILITARY EYES:
DEVELOPING THE POSTWAR
BILATERAL RELATIONSHIP
Somewhere in the vast ruin of post-nuclear Hiroshima, two middleaged Japanese men walk towards a stationary camera (see Figure 5.1).
They look purposeful and strangely cheerful. As two Australian diggers
slouch back into the colossal bombsite and towards the vanishing point
beneath a cluster of stripped trees, the conspicuously civilian, Westernattired Japanese duo stride out of it, moving away from the militarism
that led to such wholesale destruction and into a future that would be
independently determined by men such as them. The photograph is
carefully conceived, staged to capture a significant point of departure in
postwar Japanese history—a people leaving war and military occupation
behind and embarking on the task of rebuilding and remaking the nation.
Significantly, this richly allegorical image was not taken by one of the
professional photographers affiliated to the military and official civilian
agencies. Rather, it is the work of an amateur, Hungarian-born Stephen
Kelen, who served with British Commonwealth Occupation Force
(BCOF) Intelligence before joining the military newspaper British
Commonwealth Occupation News (BCON). Kelen was an enthusiastic
and accomplished photographer. Several of the images that illustrate
his memoir, I Remember Hiroshima, have become iconic pictures of the
stricken city in the early stages of its reconstruction. His photographs of
orphans and of an outdoor schoolroom that had sprung up in the rubble
are among the best known pictures of atomic Hiroshima, featuring in

153

Pacific Exposures

Figure 5.1. Stephen Kelen, Hiroshima, c. 1946–48, published in
I Remember Hiroshima (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1983), 18.
Source: Courtesy of S.K. Kelen and Hiroshima Municipal Archives.

online educational material published by the municipal authorities such
as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, to teach the history of the
bombing and to spread the anti-nuclear gospel.1
Their documentary value aside, Kelen’s pictures suggest a shift in
Australian apprehension of its recent enemy and the identification and
recognition of the emerging new (or remodelled) Japan. The camera
was a crucial instrument of rapprochement in the postwar period, as
Australians began to look at Japan with what BCOF serviceman Halton
Stewart called ‘non-military eyes’.2 This is particularly true of the unofficial
pictures taken independently by the legion of amateur photographers
in the occupying force that compose an alternative visual narrative of
postwar Japan. Freed of the obligation to produce a sanitised view of
a Japan dependent on the beneficent presence of the Occupier, they were
1 See ‘Children in Post-War Hiroshima’, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, accessed
11 January 2018, www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/kids/KPSH_E/hiroshima_e/sadako_e/subcontents_e/​
12kids​sengo​_1_e.html.
2 Halton Stewart quoted in Robin Gerster, Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the
Occupation of Japan (Melbourne: Scribe, 2008), 235.
154

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

receptive to the signs of a people regrouping from mass devastation and
mutating into a forward-looking nation while remaining true to their
ancient traditions.
To the Australians, the Occupation was both conquest and cultural
reconnaissance, the first time in history that large numbers of them
were able to explore an Oriental culture and landscape; it was the
precursor of the mass Asian travel of Australians today. As travellers and
as photographers, the Australians of the Occupation pioneered an era
of engagement with the region generally, signified in the years to come
by reoriented travel itineraries and the belated Australian embrace of
Eastern cultures. Camera enthusiasts in the touring BCOF community
such as Kelen, Frederick Frueh and Neville Govett ignored the visual
clichés of picturesque Japan that existed before the war and rejected
the negative stereotypes generated by the war itself. The unofficial
Occupation photography testifies to the unfashionably positive view
of tourist image-making articulated by Jonas Larsen, who posited that
tourist photographers are not passive reproducers of a received imagery
of ‘the exotic’ but producers of new geographies with potentially creative,
personal visions of the world.3
A somewhat more ambiguous picture of Japan emerged in the public
photography produced in the post-Occupation period, during the
fraught process of political reconciliation with the former enemy. From
the 1950s until well into the 1970s, successive Australian governments
remained sensitive to lingering memories of Japanese military turpitude,
and the image of Japan remained largely filtered through the lens of
war. At the same time, they encouraged cultural and economic links to
flourish and ensured that they be conveyed attractively, through official
channels, to the people. Photographers working for the Australian News
and Information Bureau (ANIB) were particularly active in the period,
taking promotional images of cultural as well as diplomatic and political
engagement that collectively signposted the path to a strong bilateral
relationship that remains in place today. The reviled Japanese adversary
of wartime propaganda was humanised as a friend and ally, and Japan
itself reframed into a dynamic, embryonically modern society whose
bright future Australia could share.
3 Jonas Larsen, ‘Geographies of Tourist Photography’, in Geographies of Communication:
The Spatial Turn in Media Studies, ed. J. Falkheimer and A. Jansson (Goteborg: Nordicom, 2006),
250–51.
155

Pacific Exposures

That so many of these official pictures are so blatantly intended to
transmit a message of bilateral amity betrays the artificial element
to  the developing Australia–Japan relationship. As Alan Rix implied
by the pointed title of his study of the politics of postwar trade with
Japan, Coming to Terms (1986), Australia’s compulsion to get on with its
recent antagonist was essentially a mercenary enterprise, for commerce
with economically regenerating Japan provided massive business
opportunities.4 The trade and commerce agreement of 1957, deepened
and extended by the Basic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation
signed in Tokyo in 1976, provided the diplomatic context for a set of
photographic images designed to dignify and formalise a partnership
that once seemed inconceivable.
Yet, ‘coming to terms’ was also about expressing genuine fellow feeling.
As  cultural contact between the two countries accelerated during
this period, facilitated by fairs and exhibitions and by burgeoning
trans‑Pacific  travel, photography became a powerful interpretive
medium, a tool of cultural translation that created sympathetic responses
to a country that both beguiled and bewildered.

New Ways of Seeing Japan: The Amateur
Photographers of BCOF
Australian servicemen in Occupied Japan sometimes used the language
of visual perception and representation to explain the effect the personal
encounter with the country had on them and how it had transformed
their view of the country. Halton Stewart’s remark that he began to see
the Japanese through ‘non-military eyes’ was echoed by BCOF medico
Murray Elliott, who recalled being exposed to a ‘new and great culture’
that provided him with ‘a new perception of the world’. Japan, he
declared, transformed his ‘way of seeing’.5 The principal focus for this
perceptual change was the ordinary people of Japan encountered by the
Australians, and their favoured means of registering it was the camera.

4 Alan Rix, Coming to Terms: The Politics of Australia’s Trade with Japan 1945–1957 (Sydney:
Angus & Robertson, 1986).
5 Murray Elliott, Occupational Hazards: A Doctor in Japan and Elsewhere (Brisbane: Griffith
University, 1995), 80, 91, 93.
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5. Through Non-Military Eyes

Often fatherless or orphaned, the children of Japan attracted an
especially sympathetic lens. The soldiers found them irresistible and they
were instrumental in softening attitudes to the Japanese. The children
could not be lumbered with the misdemeanours of their elders. In Ashes
of Hiroshima (1950), Frank Clune blamed the destruction wrought by
the atomic bomb on the Japanese themselves, for being ‘too stupid and
ignorant to build solidly’. Yet, even Clune had his enmity qualified by
the sight of Japanese children. ‘No man could see the ashes of Hiroshima
and fail to feel qualms’, he wrote. Driving along the perilously narrow
coastal road back to Kure, he saw Japanese kids playing in the water:
‘They at any rate had no war-guilt’, he remarked, ‘we couldn’t honestly
say it served them right’.6
The disarming effect of Japanese children is best illustrated by Albert
Tucker, better known as a modernist painter, who spent three months
on secondment to BCOF in 1947. Tucker was essentially an amateur
photographer, though he became more attracted to the medium later
in his career. Apparently he did not even own a camera in Japan,
using a borrowed Leica to take several hundred photographs, including
a  couple of covert shots at the war crimes trials in Tokyo. Years later,
Tucker reflected that the immensity of Hiroshima’s destruction defeated
him as an artist; just as many writers bemoaned the event’s unprecedented
indescribability, he considered it unpaintable. Nonetheless, the
secondment produced ‘Hiroshima 1947’, a scene of desolation solely
populated by a homeless child standing near a blasted tree whose bare
branches form the unmistakable shape of a swastika.7 Somewhere near
bomb-ravaged Osaka, Tucker selected a more straightforward means of
capturing the face of postwar Japan (see Figure 5.2). In her collection
of his photographs, The Eye of the Beholder, Janine Burke remarked how
the camera liberated the artist, ‘creating a fresh, intimate visual sense not
found in his bleak, socially critical and sexually anxious paintings of the
war years’. Burke noted that his close-ups are emotional and physical,
evidence of photography’s way of ‘saying what is in the heart rather than
the mind’.8 Tucker’s photograph of three boys seems to ask, ‘how could
anyone maintain their hatred of the Japanese?’
6 Clune, Ashes of Hiroshima: A Post-War Trip to Japan and China (Sydney: Angus & Robertson,
1950), 89–90, 93, 108.
7 Albert Tucker on Hiroshima, interview with Robin Hughes, ABC Radio National program
‘Verbatim’, 14 February 1994, www.australianbiography.gov.au/sujects/tucker/intertext3.html;
‘Hiroshima 1947’, Australian War Memorial (AWM) 29483.
8 Janine Burke, The Eye of the Beholder: Albert Tucker’s Photographs (Melbourne: Museum
of Modern Art at Heide, 1998), 18–19, see also 20. Three Boys is reproduced on 68.
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Pacific Exposures

Figure 5.2. Albert Tucker, Three Boys Near Osaka, 1947.
Source: Albert Tucker Collection, State Library of Victoria H2010.72/1.

Figure 5.3. Herbert Cole (‘Nugget’) Coombs, Children in a Tokyo Street, May 1946.
Source: National Archives of Australia (NAA) M2153 5/12.

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

On a visit to Japan in May 1946 accompanying Prime Minister Ben
Chifley, leading bureaucrat H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs was also drawn to
photograph the children. Away from the round of diplomatic business,
he found many subjects that appealed to him, including the customary
shots of Hiroshima’s destruction. His apparently spontaneous photograph
of a group of spirited young school children in a Tokyo street indicates
the postwar Australian take on Japan (see  Figure  5.3). Responsible
for overseeing the national transition to a  peacetime economy as the
director-general of Australia’s Department of Post-War Reconstruction,
Coombs was alert to the potential of Japan’s raw human material and its
capacity for renewal.
Of course, there were strategic and altruistic dimensions to the Australian
participation in the Occupation project, and Japan’s children were useful
in transmitting the message of Japanese acquiescence in the role being
created for it as a reliable ally in the Asia-Pacific. Published in a photo
spread in Pix in March 1946, Neil Town’s image of two Australian soldiers
traipsing through Kure with a crowd of adoring Japanese schoolgirls is
afforded a revealing caption. That the Australians had ‘made friends’
with the children, the caption states, ‘might even be good for the future
generation of Japan’.9 The short propaganda film Watch Over Japan
(1947), directed by Geoffrey Collings for the Australian National Film
Board, takes up this theme. The narrator intones that the men of BCOF
saw the children as ‘the real rays of the Japanese rising sun’; guided by the
Allies, they would shape a democratic Japan, ‘so that one day, perhaps,
she will walk hand-in-hand with the peace-loving nations of the world’.
The final scene shows a long line of diggers walking hand-in-hand with
children through a sunlit village street.10 No longer symbols of ancient
and innocent Japan—‘the child of the world’s old age’—children had
become symbols of its future.
The common soldier-photographer was willing to make the children
themselves the subject of the pictures, unadulterated by the forced
presence of the Occupier. Taking to the streets of Hiroshima with his
Kodak ‘Box Brownie’, Neville Govett, a sergeant in a transport company,
made effective use of the winter sunshine in a photograph of a boy selling
black market cigarettes (see Figure 5.4). The boy confidently poses for
the camera, to the evident amusement of his friends. Hiroshima was full
9 ‘Australia Is There—with our Occupation Force in Japan’, Pix, 9 March 1946, 33.
10 Geoffrey Collings, cinematographer, Watch Over Japan, AWM FO1309.
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Pacific Exposures

Figure 5.4. Neville Govett, Street Scene,
Hiroshima, c. 1947–49.
Source: Mitchell Library, State Library of New
South Wales MLMSS 8755 Box 3.

Figure 5.5. Neville Govett, Smokestack
and Ventilator on the Hokkaido Ferry,
c. 1947–49.
Source: Mitchell Library, State Library of New
South Wales PXE 1498 Box 1.

of uprooted youngsters living rough, supporting themselves as best they
could. Many had lost their fathers to the late war, or one or both parents
in the atomic bombing. The survival instinct was strong, if not always
especially edifying.
The vernacular photography produced by amateurs such as Govett
was receptive to the new Japan emerging from the war and rather less
reliant on anachronistic visual clichés than the work of the professionals.
Govett was an active member of the BCOF Tourist Club (out of which
emerged a Camera Club), enjoying group tours to various locations
throughout the Japanese archipelago. Compiled by Govett himself,
The Story of the B.C.O.F. Tourist Club (1950) records the full itinerary
of some 200 outings, well over 20 of which were to Hiroshima and
environs. The  book is copiously illustrated with photographs of the
club’s activities, but only one of Hiroshima—a run-of-the-mill shot
of the A-Bomb Dome. The club may have thought it in questionable
taste to highlight a voyeuristic interest in a site of mass death. Several
of the photographs are the work of the MHS photographer Claude
160

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

Holzheimer—clichéd pictures of castles, mountain views, tea ceremonies
and the like. This was a wasted opportunity to showcase amateur work,
for Govett’s own pictures possess an immediacy lacking in much of the
official photography and a willingness to take on unusual subject matter.
Taken aboard a ferry plying the northern waters between Honshu and
Hokkaido, his Smokestack and Ventilator (see Figure 5.5) is a heroically
monumental industrial image that conveys a Japan freed from an
inhibiting set of images originating from an earlier century. The oblique
camera angle and dramatic contrasts of light and shade reveal a modernist
photographer’s eye for form that shames much of the professional work
in Japan.
Like Govett, Royal Australian Air Force pilot Frederick Frueh was an
ambitious photographer, alert for signs of modernising Japan. Frueh took
several stylish images in the vicinity of the air base at Iwakuni to the west
of Hiroshima. Iwakuni is the home of the ‘brocade bridge’, Kintaikyo,
a structure built originally in the late seventeenth century. An elegant
emblem of the traditional Japanese aesthetic drawn by the legendary
Edo-era artist Hiroshige and a common feature of tourist paraphernalia,
the bridge was ritually photographed during the Occupation as a
signifier of the ‘Real Japan’. Yet Frueh’s photographer’s eye lingered
elsewhere. In On the Road to the Railway Station, a photograph taken
in 1946, he composed a scene both highly romantic and suggestive of a
Japan leaving its past behind (see Figure 5.6). The picture is a skilfully
arranged blend of opposites—of horizontals and verticals, light and
shade, human interaction and industrial impersonality, and of a rural
Japan transforming itself into a modern powerhouse (suggested by the
chimneys belching smoke emanating from underground factories). To
Hal Porter, articulating the view of the elegiac school of writers and artists
who bemoan the passing into history of picturesque Old Japan, postwar
‘progress’ was a  ‘pestilence’, a desecration of the country’s voluptuous
natural landscape and a corruption of its traditional culture.11 Frueh
saw the country differently, visualising the harmonious coexistence of
male and female; past, present and future; agrarian and industrial; old
and new.

11 Porter, The Actors: An Image of the New Japan (Sydney: Angus Robertson), 45. Works such as
Donald Richie’s The Inland Sea (1971) and Alex Kerr’s Lost Japan (1996) are among the best-known
accounts of Japan’s self-inflicted damage since the war.
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Pacific Exposures

Figure 5.6. Frederick Frueh, On the Road to the Railway Station,
Iwakuni, c. 1946.
Source: Australian War Memorial (AWM) P08640.007.

For many Australians, of course, the camera was simply a means of
taking ‘holiday snaps’, pictures of the fleeting pleasures of people having
the time of their lives. Like most tourist-photographers, they were
drawn to the ‘unspoiled’ Japan that had either escaped the bombing or
showed no evidence of postwar suffering. In The Story of the B.C.O.F.
Tourist Club, Govett wrote that ‘cameras clicked merrily’ at the ‘glorious
sight’ of cherry blossom at the famous viewing site at Mt Yoshino in
Nara Prefecture.12 Further, some of the private images expose tourism’s
propensity to encourage exhibitionism. In Memories of Occupied
Japan, Royal Australian Air Force Flight Lieutenant Philip M. Green
included a photograph of himself receiving a shoeshine in the city of
Takarazuka from two small Japanese boys, for the price (we are told) of
one cigarette per shoe. Such indulgences invoke Sontag’s diatribe against
the photographer as a ‘supertourist’ who uses the camera as ‘a  kind

12 Neville Govett, The Story of the B.C.O.F. Tourist Club (Hiroshima: Hiroshima Publishing Co.,
1950), 25.
162

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

Figure 5.7. Brian and Cecilia McMullan, Street Scene, Kure, c. 1947–52.
Source: AWM P05195.017.

of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions,
freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people
photographed’.13
Yet, if the amateur photography revealed a degree of heedless hedonism,
much of it also sought to connect with Japan itself, and even perhaps
define the country it was in the process of becoming. The extensive
collection of photographs taken by Brian McMullan, the pre-teenage son
of an Australian officer, and his mother Cecilia, is a case in point. Brian
and Cecilia used a ‘Mycro I’, a huge commercial success in 1947 and
1948, on family vacations throughout the length and breadth of Japan.14
They captured a Japan in transition, one that was both vanishing and
in the making. One of their most seemingly innocuous photographs,
of a humdrum commercial area of Kure, is among the most eloquent
(see  Figure 5.7). A group of young Japanese, most likely senior high
13 Philip M. Green, Memories of Occupied Japan (Blackheath: Philip Maxwell Green 1987), 119;
Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; repr., New York: Anchor books Doubleday, 1990), 42–43.
14 The latest model of a nimble little ‘subminiature’ 14 mm camera first developed in Tokyo in
1939, the Mycro I was the chosen medium of the first ever photographic contest in postwar Japan.
See camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Mycro (accessed 14 June 2016). For the Australian War Memorial
record of the McMullin camera, see AWM REL35672. The McMullins were also proud owners
of a  Japanese-made cigarette lighter in the shape of a miniature camera set on a tripod (AWM
REL35673).
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Pacific Exposures

school students, chat unselfconsciously as an anonymous BCOF officer
looks away and a traditionally dressed woman clops out of the picture
in her wooden geta. The well-stocked shops in the background indicate
activity. Old Japan, and the recent past of war and occupation, was
disappearing from view. Japan was open for business.

Photography and Reconciliation: 1952–57
The Occupation of Japan officially ended in 1952, though the Australian
military presence in Japan was temporarily reinvigorated by the fighting
in nearby Korea. With the Korean ceasefire in 1953, it began a terminal
decline. By November 1956, the last remnants of the force departed
Japan. The number of Australians in the country dwindled to virtually
nothing. In 1958, a mere 248 Australians were registered as residing in
Japan, only 17 of whom lived in the Chugoku region in western Honshu
that was once the centre of BCOF activity.15
Back in Australia, the Japanese had not been forgiven for the
misdemeanours committed by their military, especially the heinous
mistreatment of its prisoners in sites of suffering such as the Burma
Railway, and resentment still burned. A Gallup Poll of responses to the
Peace Treaty taken in August 1951—five years after the war’s end—
showed a remarkable 62.5 per cent disapproval and 21.4 per cent in
favour.16 As late as 1956, the year of the Melbourne Olympic Games,
most Australians ‘still tasted bitterness’ when they thought of Japan,
observed the popular travel writer Colin Simpson.17
Australian ambivalence towards fostering a political and economic
relationship with Japan was expressed in the public photography of the
period—Australians still found it hard to ‘see’ the Japanese outside the
frame of war. One of the most memorable images of the Melbourne
Olympics, splashed across the front pages of local newspapers the day
after the event, was the press photographer Bruce Howard’s picture of
the embrace of Australia’s ‘golden boy’, the swimmer Murray Rose, and
his Japanese rival Tsuyoshi Yamanaka after the 400 m freestyle final
(see Figure 5.8). Influenced by the coincidence that the event fell on

15 Figures provided in Australian Society Review (April–September 1958), 3.
16 Australian Public Opinion Polls, Morgan Gallup Poll, nos. 788–90 (August–September 1951).
17 See Colin Simpson, The Country Upstairs (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1956), 5–6.
164

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

Figure 5.8. Bruce Howard, Murray Rose with his Japanese Rival Tsuyoshi
Yamanaka after the 400m Freestyle Final at the 1956 Olympic Games,
Melbourne, 4 December 1956.
Source: Courtesy of News Ltd.

the fifteenth anniversary of Pearl Harbour, Pix used the photograph
to illustrate its story of the Rose/Yamanaka clash later in the games,
the 1,500 m final won more narrowly by the Australian, reported to
have heroically staved off a final thrust from ‘the do-or-die Japanese’.18
The Birmingham-born Rose had migrated with his British parents to
Australia as a baby. Aged three or four, he had appeared in a wartime
savings propaganda poster for the war effort, playing with a toy boat by
the seaside and plaintively posing the question: ‘Will the Japs come here
in their big ships, Daddy?’ A little over a decade later, there he was in the
water pitted against a Japanese. Interviewed in 2011, Rose remembered
the race as ‘symbolic of two kids that’d grown up on opposite sides of
the war’, who had ‘come together in the friendship of the Olympic
18 The photograph featured prominently on front pages the day after the event. See for example
Sydney Morning Herald, 5 December 1956, 1; ‘A Rose in Full Bloom’, Pix, 22 December 1956, 18.
Other publications also referenced the war in their account of the 1,500 m final, see ‘Rose Beats
Japanese in Fighting Final Lap’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 December 1956, 12.
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Pacific Exposures

arena’.19 Appearing in Australian newspapers and reproduced in souvenir
publications as representative of the ‘Friendly Games’, the photograph
radiates male bonding, if gratifyingly once again showing an Australian
proving superior to his Japanese counterpart.
Similarly, the developing commercial competitiveness of the nations was
considered war by another means, but this time with an industrially
revivified Japan emerging the victor. Dependably populist and
increasingly sensationalist, Pix fanned this anxiety in 1957 with ‘Japs
Fight Again—For Trade’, a photo essay documenting the intimidating
pace of Japan’s recovery.20 Disquiet about Australia being swamped
with Japanese goods fed anxiety that Japan might rediscover its martial
propensities. It also inflamed longstanding national fears about Asian
invasion, both literally and via migration. Not only was Japan rebuilding,
it was also repopulating. As early as June 1950, Pix had highlighted its
postwar baby boom, with its population growing by an alarming 5,000
babies per day. Recalling older anxieties about Japan’s ready production
of boy soldiers during the Russo-Japanese War, Pix posed the question,
‘is the swiftly expanding nation to be ally or dangerous problem child?’.
The feature is illustrated by juxtaposed photographs of a massed crowd
in a Tokyo park and a mother with two young infants (as evidence of
local disregard for birth control) and a helpful timeline showing Japanese
military expansion from the late nineteenth century.21
Yet, the photographic image could be turned to Japan’s advantage,
helping soften attitudes and allay fears that the war had never really
ended. The integration of several hundred Japanese war brides into
Australian society in the early 1950s was a deeply symbolic event, the
first significant breach in the fortress of ‘White Australia’. Photographs
of the brides’ arrival and entry into Australian suburban communities
appeared regularly in newspapers in the first years of the decade, notably
featuring in the Australian Women’s Weekly. In July 1952, the Weekly
marked the imminent arrival of the first Japanese wife to arrive, 22-yearold Cherry Parker, with a feature on the ‘warm welcome’ she could

19 Rose and wartime propaganda poster, Australian Women’s Weekly, 17 April 1957, 7; Rose 2011
interview reproduced in ‘A Feeling For the Water—Transcript’, Australian Story (ABC), www.abc.
net.au/austory/a-feeling-for-the-water---part-one/9169846.
20 ‘Japs Fight Again—For Trade’, Pix, 26 October 1957, 7–8.
21 ‘Jap Problem Grows by 5000 Babies a Day’, Pix, 24 June 1950, 5–7.
166

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

expect to receive. The story was illustrated by a picture of the photogenic
family—Cherry, her husband Gordon and two small daughters with the
reassuringly familiar names of Margaret and Kathleen.22
The inconsistent imagery of Japan-as-threat and Japan-as-partner that
circulated during the Cold War period reflected the unease that many
people felt, as a recently hated nation moved into Australia’s defence orbit
as a client state of the US in the global fight against communism. Other
forms of visual culture continued to reflect and exacerbate conflicting
Australian attitudes towards Japan. In 1958, the national tour of the
‘Hiroshima Panels’, a collection of large canvases depicting the diabolical
concoction of blast, fire and radiation inflicted on the Japanese city,
deeply impressed Australian crowds and increased sympathy for the
suffering of scores of thousands.23 This was a time of heightened nuclear
alarm. Nevil Shute’s novel of nuclear apocalypse, On the Beach, set in
and around Melbourne, was published in 1957. At the same time, the
popular Hollywood epic The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) reminded
a mass audience of the horrors perpetrated by the Japanese on the
Burma Railway. In July 1958, Pix mocked a  group of newly released
convicted war criminals photographed holding a  reunion in Tokyo’s
Sugamo Prison. The written text reminded readers that this was the
very place in which Prime Minister Kishi, with whom the Australian
Government had  just  negotiated the Australia–Japanese Commerce
Agreement, had been imprisoned as a member of Tojo’s War Cabinet
after Japan’s surrender.24

22 See Mary Coles, ‘Warm Welcome Arranged for Japanese Wife’, Australian Women’s Weekly,
9 July 1953, 23. The uplifting story of Gordon Parker and his fight to bring his family home
contrasted with one of the Occupation’s most unedifying legacies, the hundreds of mixed-race
children abandoned by their Australian fathers and scorned by Japan. Long ignored, their plight
came to light around the time of the signing of the trade agreement. This was ‘a story of shame’,
announced by Pix in an August 1957 article illustrated with several photographs of children
with unmistakably Western features. One is said to look ‘almost like any Australian schoolboy with
freckled skin and brown eyes’. See ‘A Story of Shame’, Pix, 6 August 1957, 6–10.
23 See ‘The Hiroshima Panels: Showings Draw Hushed Crowds’, Australian Woman’s Weekly,
9 July 1958, 7.
24 ‘Jap Criminals Stage Party’, Pix, 26 July 1958, 5.
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Pacific Exposures

Both the intimate and public role of photography in the negotiation of
the Commerce Agreement attests to the definitive part played by the
camera in defining Australia–Japan bilateralism. The most overt agent of
reconciliation was the prime minister of Australia in the 1950s, Robert
Menzies. For several years, Menzies had sought to persuade Australians
to quell their anger and to adopt a ‘grown-up’ attitude to Japan. ‘The war
is over’, he remarked in a broadcast in March 1954. The communists
posed a greater threat to peace and prosperity than the prospect of
a rejuvenated Japan.25
Menzies was a camera enthusiast who would habitually take his
equipment with him on his overseas tours. Phillip Hobson photographed
him indulging his passion for 16 mm home movie making on an
official visit to Kure, Hiroshima and surrounds in August 1950. Over
the prime minister’s shoulder, a leather camera case is adorned with the
initials ‘R.G.M.’. It is a graphic illustration of political possession—the
Australian leader taking private images of a beaten and humbled nation.26
He had his Kodak with him when he revisited Japan in April 1957,
unashamedly and possibly indecorously filming his hosts during the
rituals of diplomacy. When he was not taking his own pictures, Menzies
was the epitome of diplomatic courtesy, photographed trying his hand
at chopsticks and stoically sampling sushi. In pictures widely circulated
in newspapers, he even had his photograph taken with the formerly
despised Hirohito, who the Australians had a decade earlier wanted to
be held to account as a war criminal.27 Three months after Menzies’s trip,
the Australia–Japan Commerce Agreement was signed, guaranteeing
most favoured nation treatment on tariffs and non-discrimination in
trade. The agreement was to become a key factor in Australia’s economic
growth in the 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Sixty years later, it was
still being lauded for its historic importance by Australian and Japanese
prime ministers.28

25 ‘Menzies Pleads: “Hate the Japs No Longer”’, Argus, 18 March 1954, 1.
26 For Phillip Hobson’s photograph of Menzies in Kure, see AWM HOBJ1190.
27 See ‘P.M. Calls on Emperor’, Sun, 15 April 1957, 9; ‘Prime Ministers Meet in Tokio’, Sun,
13 April 1957, 13.
28 Signing a new trade partnership in Canberra in July 2014, the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe and his Australian counterpart Tony Abbott lauded the signal economic significance of the
1957 commerce agreement and the more general relationship it seemed to indicate. The previous
year, Abbott declared Japan Australia’s ‘closest friend in Asia’. See ‘Putting Meat on the Bones of
a 1957 Agreement’, Australian, 21 July 2014, 10; ‘Tony Abbott Says Japan is Australia’s “Closest
Friend in Asia”’, Australian, 9 October 2013, 1.
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5. Through Non-Military Eyes

Undertaken with tight security in response to negative publicity,
the reciprocal visit to Australia in December 1957 of Japan’s Prime
Minister Nobusuke Kishi was intensively photographed. At a wreathlaying ceremony at the Australian War Memorial, a local businessman
(and ex-serviceman) audibly shouted to the attendant group of press
photographers to ‘shut those cameras up’, calling it ‘an infamous day for
Australia’.29 That May, Pix headlined an article about the forthcoming
trip ‘Should Jap P.M. Visit Australia?’, illustrating it with the barbed
use of well-known photographs from the recent military past, including
George Silk’s famous photograph of a blinded digger in New Guinea
being led by a loyal Papuan helper, as a vivid reminder of Australia’s
wartime travails.30
Kishi’s brief sojourn in Australia, however, was a diplomatic triumph.
At a luncheon held in his honour at Parliament House in Canberra,
Japan’s prime minister offered a formal apology of ‘heartfelt sorrow’ for
what had occurred during the war. Menzies responded with portentous
remarks about Australia and Japan’s mutual ‘destiny in the Pacific’.31
Yet the trip’s significance was more sharply articulated by a photograph
than by fine words. On his initial arrival in Australia, at Melbourne’s
Essendon Airport, Kishi was greeted by Japanese women and children in
traditional dress, and by Prime Minister Menzies, his hand extended in
friendship with a swarm of photographers at the ready (see Figure 5.9).
Menzies’s injunction, ‘We Must Be Friends’, had featured on the front
page of the Melbourne Sun on the morning of Kishi’s arrival and, by
the afternoon, a photograph of the historic handshake dominated
the evening newspaper the Herald.32 The leaders of the two countries
were photographed enacting a definitive political version of burying
the hatchet.
One cannot underestimate the image’s significance. Fifty years on, in
the context of the signing of the Japan–Australia Joint Declaration on
Security Cooperation in 2007, it was recycled in a photomontage to
signify the political partnership of Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—
Kishi’s grandson—with his Australian counterpart John Howard.33
29 ‘Ex-Serviceman Protests at War Memorial’, Canberra Times, 5 December 1957, 1.
30 ‘Should Jap P.M. Visit Australia?’, Pix, 4 May 1957, 4.
31 ‘Kishi Offers Apology for Japanese War’, Canberra Times, 5 December 1957, 1.
32 ‘Menzies: We Must be Friends’, Sun, 29 November 1957, 1; ‘Handshake at Airport’, Herald,
29 November 1957, 1.
33 Michele Mossop photograph, Australian Financial Review, 6 July 2007.
169

Pacific Exposures

Figure 5.9. Photographer unknown, Prime Minister Menzies Greets Japanese
Prime Minster Kishi at Essendon Airport, Melbourne, 2 December 1957.
Source: NAA A1671 JPM1/10.

Kishi’s trip heralded a succession of official visits by Japanese prime
ministers into the 1960s and 1970s. Kishi had flown into Australia with
Japan Air; his smiling successors were usually pictured emerging down
the stairs of a Qantas jet. Diplomacy evidently extended to the choice of
airline carrier.34
Back in Tokyo, a few months before the public demonstration of
bilateralism at the airport in Melbourne, an illustrated story in Pix
revealed the link between photography and rapprochement in defining
the postwar Australia–Japan relationship. It featured E.R. Walker,
Australia’s first postwar ambassador to Japan and an avid photographer.
Entitled ‘Ambassador’s Album’, the story described Walker’s passion for
the medium and his desire to use it positively to take his impressions
of Japan.35 A selection of his images reveals some attractive pictures
of a small girl dressed in her best kimono on her way to a festival,
and a pleasing photograph of the embassy garden under snow. Only
34 For examples see visit to Australia by Prime Minister Ikeda, 1963, NAA A1673 11836719;
visit to Australia by Prime Minister Sato, 1967, NAA, A1200 11837972.
35 ‘Ambassador’s Album’, Pix, 12 January 1957, 42–43. See also Colin Simpson, ‘Diplomat’s
Tokyo Garden’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 7 March 1956, 23.
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5. Through Non-Military Eyes

a  photograph of a  girl burning incense at the tomb of the 47 Ronin,
the legendary samurai who committed harikari to avenge their lord and
master, was a reminder of the uncompromising martial nation that had
so recently threatened to bring Australia to its knees—a newly pacific
nation now Australia’s best friend and partner in the Asia-Pacific.

Photography and Reconciliation: 1957–76
Photography continued to act as a mediator of the formalised
relationship with ‘new’ Japan in the late 1950s into the 1960s, though
in varied and occasionally contradictory ways. Japan had emerged
as a modern industrial juggernaut, but it was packaged for potential
Australian consumption in decidedly traditional terms. ‘Australia’s
Overseas Airline’, Qantas, began advertising its services to Tokyo in the
mid‑1950s. A Qantas shop window display in central Melbourne around
1955 that aroused the interest of the British Australian photographer
Sarah Chinnery contained an image of a kimonoed woman and cherry
blossom, used as a predictable lure. In 1957, an illustrated advertisement
in the Australian Women’s Weekly—later used to inaugurate the popular
‘Cherry Blossom’ cruises to Japan—revealed a Qantas jet flying perilously
close to Mt Fuji.36
A photographic competition sponsored by the Japanese camera
manufacturer Yashica and run by Pix throughout 1961 offered
a ‘millionaire’s holiday’ for two to the country, flying Qantas.37 Yet, while
the growth of commercial air travel promised to bring the two countries
into closer contact, the vast majority of air travel to Japan during this
period was for business and trade purposes, rather than leisure. Moreover,
the numbers remained relatively small. In 1957, the year of the Commerce
Agreement, the total number of Australian ‘short-term’ travellers to Japan
was a meagre 1,153. This increased to some 6,371 in 1964.38 Air travel
36 Sarah Chinnery, Photographic Collection of New Guinea, England and Australia, National
Library of Australia PIC/11131/1692; Qantas advertisement, ‘Fly Qantas to the Orient…’,
Australian Women’s Weekly, 9 October 1957, 6.
37 See Pix, 21 October 1961, 32.
38 For tourism statistics see S.R. Carver, Demography Bulletin, no. 75 (1957); Richard White,
‘The Retreat from Adventure; Popular Travel Writing in the 1950s’, Australian Historical Studies
28, no. 109 (1997): 101–02. See also Jonathan Bollen, ‘Here and There—Travel, Television and
Touring Revues: Internationalism as Entertainment in the 1950s and 1960s’, Popular Entertainment
Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 69, fn 34, 78. On business travel to Asia, see Agnieska Sobocinska, Visiting
the Neighbours: Australians in Asia (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014), 45–46.
171

Pacific Exposures

was still a privilege available to the few, rather than the many; the age of
mass recreational tourism to Asia was some years off. Armchair travellers
were catered to by best-sellers such as Colin Simpson’s The  Country
Upstairs (1956), which went through numerous reprintings and editions,
from the time of its original publication in 1956 right through the 1960s.
The Country Upstairs was prodigiously illustrated by photographs, mostly
stereotypical images of traditional Japan supplied by the Japan National
Tourist Organisation.
The domestic appetite for Japan was largely expressed through the
desirability of imported Japanese products, as a rapidly suburbanising
Australia enjoyed a period of sustained prosperity. Belying the imagery
of picturesque timelessness promoted by tourism, the ubiquitous ‘Made
in Japan’ label, applied to everything from cameras to cars, signified
modernity not tradition, the future not the past. A Japanese Trade Fair
held in Sydney in January 1959 was heralded by fireworks over Sydney
Harbour, reportedly attracting the biggest night-time crowd seen in the
city since the 1954 royal tour. Advertising for the event had spruiked the
‘industrial renaissance’ of a ‘time-locked feudal’ Japan, along with its new
status as ‘a dynamic democratic ally’, as being ‘a miracle of our time’.39
Not that the focus was entirely consumerist; along with the displays of
Japan’s technical acumen, the fair also featured film and fashion. The
new trade agreement was synonymous with ‘closer understanding and
goodwill between the two countries’, according to the representative of
the Japan Export Trade Promotion Agency at an International Trade
Fair held in Melbourne in 1959.40 Among the Japanese exhibitors was
the ‘Tokyo Toys and Wholesalers Association’. The prospect of mass
importation of toys from the Japanese ‘invaders’ had created controversy
in the early 1950s—a news item in the Sydney Sunday Herald stated
that it created ‘almost as big a stir in toyland as the Japanese submarines
caused in Sydney harbour’.41 However, by the end of the decade, the
transnational brand ‘Japan’ had become part of the Australian landscape.

39 Japan Trade Fair advertisement, Daily Telegraph, 23 January 1959, 17. See ‘Huge City Traffic
Tangle in Scramble to View Fireworks’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 January 1959, 1.
40 Japan Foreword by Michisuke Sugi, Melbourne 1959, International Trade Fair Catalogue
(Melbourne: Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, 1959), 5.
41 ‘There Is War in Toyland (But No Real Invasion Yet)’, Sunday Herald, 2 September 1951, 12.
See also ‘Japs “Ready to Dump”’, Argus, 31 August 1951, 5.
172

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

By 1961, Pix, once prone to highlighting the pitfalls of closer national ties
with the old enemy, had started producing positive photo essays about
Japan. A story on successful Australian–Japanese marriages included
glowing male tributes to ‘wonderful’ Japanese wives. A follow-up story
claimed that Japanese men in their turn make ‘wonderful husbands’, from
a Melbourne woman who met her spouse in Tokyo while working for
Radio Australia.42 This was a story unimaginable a few short years before.
The small but growing community of Australians living and working in
Japan also attracted attention. Published in Pix in 1960, ‘An Aussie Tot
in Tokyo’ described the challenges Australian business families faced in
raising children in Japan. The article concluded that, surprisingly, the
teeming metropolis is ‘a good place for rearing children’; a photograph
of an Australian three year old playing happily in a multiracial Tokyo
kindergarten illustrates the article.43
Nonetheless, while Japanese cultural phenomena such as its interior
design (though not yet its cuisine) were gaining greater cultural currency
in the Australia of the 1960s, the country itself remained terra incognita.
Most Australian artists and writers still headed straight for London and
the cultural capitals of Europe. Tourist photography taken during this
period by the small cadre of Australian travellers that ventured to Japan
reveals a nation on the move but perplexingly stuck in its ways. An album
of photographs taken by Ellen Brophy, the wife of a BCOF serviceman
who returned to Japan with him as a tourist in the late 1950s, contains
a portrait of a disparate group of women in an unnamed location. The
image, which reveals a tension between the tenaciously traditional and
the utterly modern, is as confounding as it is fascinating (see Figure 5.10).
The handwritten caption alongside the photograph reads: ‘Have you ever
seen anything like it?’ Presumably, the photographer is alluding to the
exposed breast of the older woman to the right of the picture. Equally,
the caption may refer to all three. Were Japanese females not supposed to
be decorous, passive and almost obsessive in their efforts to conform to
good taste? This collective of postwar Japanese women look defiant and
dismissive; certainly they do not feel the obligation to fake a compliant
smile for the foreigner’s camera.

42 ‘Japanese? They Make Wonderful Wives’, Pix, 19 August 1961, 242–48; ‘Australian Girl Tells:
“Why I Chose a Japanese Husband”’, Pix, 21 October 1961, 62–63.
43 ‘An Aussie Tot in Tokyo’, Pix, 2 April 1960, 18–21.
173

Pacific Exposures

Figure 5.10. Ellen Brophy, ‘Memories of Japan’ (Album), Kobe-Osaka, 1957–60.
Source: State Library of Victoria. Accession no. H2014.1002/125.

One trailblazing traveller photographer was the sculptor and printmaker
Bill Clements, who lived in Kyoto for nearly three years from 1964 at
around the same time as the noted Australian poet Harold Stewart.
Japan was changing, and so was the venerable city of Kyoto itself.
The  repository of many of the nation’s most prized structures and
precious gardens, Kyoto had narrowly been spared the ravages of the
wartime bombing, but it was ‘a city in transition’, Clements observed in
a photo essay published in the Kyoto Journal in 2011.44 Old Kyoto was
embracing the modern world. As elsewhere in urban Japan, there was
an explosion of interest in photography; camera stores, Clements noted,
seemed to be on almost every corner.45 Bill and his wife Barbara took
to the streets with a Minolta SR7, taking hundreds of photographs that
they hoped would one day become a book ‘that might help open eyes,
shape reconciliation’. The book, sadly, has not as yet materialised.46
The year of the Clements’ arrival in Kyoto—1964—was big one for
Japan. That October, the Tokyo Olympic Games demonstrated to the
world its evolution into a confident contemporary nation. The choice of

44 Bill Clements, ‘An Old Brown Overcoat: Kyoto in the Mid-Sixties’, Kyoto Journal 76 (Summer
2011): 11.
45 Ibid., 12; Bill Clements interview with Melissa Miles, San Isidore, NSW, 30 June 2016.
46 Clements, ‘An Old Brown Overcoat’, 16.
174

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

a student born in Hiroshima on the very day of its nuclear destruction
to light the Olympic flame highlighted Japan’s civic reconstruction from
the smouldering wreck of August 1945. The spectacle of the Olympics
illustrated not merely Japan’s ability to stage a huge international event
but also revealed its cutting-edge modernity.47 Tokyo was transformed
by new expressways, hotels and sports facilities built for the games. The
bullet train to Osaka was completed just days before the games opened.
The fastest train in the word, the shinkansen changed travel within Japan
and became a symbol of Japan’s breathtaking renovation. ‘A Pictorial
Introduction’ to the enlarged and revised edition of Simpson’s The Country
Upstairs, published in 1965, contains a two-page photograph of a bullet
train hurtling past Mt Fuji—in what has since become an instantly
recognisable image of Japan’s mesmerising blend of serene timelessness
and helter-skelter activity. In Australia, the Tokyo Olympics was marred
by the arrest of its star swimmer, Dawn Fraser, for attempting to purloin
an Olympic flag from the moated area outside the imperial palace.
The competition was over, it was 2.30 am and Fraser, along with other
Australians, had been partying at the Imperial Hotel across from the
palace. Yet, even in this awkward moment, magnanimous new Japan
was triumphantly revealed. When the Japanese police realised they had
taken an Olympic champion into custody, Fraser was promptly released,
and the next morning they made a presento to her of the flag along with
a box of flowers.48
Six years after the Olympics, another state-sponsored event, Expo ’70 in
Osaka, provided further compelling evidence that Japan had left militarism
behind for a more constructive future, while the mass nationalism it
produced offered a disquieting reminder of the war years.49 Sandra Wilson
described the exposition site as a ‘very effective advertising medium for
the achievements of Japanese industry’, a fantasia of pavilions containing
futuristic homes and robots, moving walkways, electric cars and a stateof-the-art computer system—and, troublingly, the enthusiastic embrace
of nuclearism.50 Up to half of the Japanese population saw the expo;
47 See Sandra Wilson, ‘Exhibiting a New Japan: The Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and Expo ’70 in
Osaka’, Historical Research 85, no. 227 (February 2012). See esp. 159–60, 163, 167, 173–74.
48 The Australian sporting authorities took a less charitable view of Fraser’s nocturnal escapade,
banning her from competition for 10 years.
49 See Wilson, ‘Exhibiting a New Japan’, 163.
50 In the context of a growing dependence on nuclear energy, the Japan Pavilion displayed two
‘Atomic Towers’, along with the legend, ‘Atomic power, if rightly used, will give us splendid power.
It can enrich our lives and give us high hopes’ (Wilson, ‘Exhibiting a New Japan’, 165).
175

Pacific Exposures

visitors totalled a staggering 64 million.51 A monorail was constructed
to transport thousands of people by the hour to the site. The Berlinborn, Melbourne-based modernist photographer Mark Strizic, known
for his pictures of architectural and industrial subjects, was in Osaka to
photograph the event. Strizic captured both Japanese technological elan
and the Australian attempt, in the dramatic design of its own pavilion, to
illustrate to the Japanese audience that it too was no industrial backwater.
He photographed the monorail from inside the pavilion as it snaked its
way around the vast exposition complex (see Figure 5.11). In another
photograph (see Figure 5.12), Strizic presents an exterior view of a tree
sculpture of skeletal ghost gums—archetypally outback Australia—
positioned in stark juxtaposition to a detail of the bold futuristic sweep
of the Australian pavilion, fashioned from Australian steel.

Figure 5.11. Mark Strizic, Monorail Viewed from Inside the Australian
Pavilion, Expo ’70, Osaka, 1970.
Source: Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria. Accession no. H2011.55/1342b.

51 Ibid., 174.
176

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

Figure 5.12. Mark Strizic, Exterior of the Australian Pavilion, Expo ’70,
Osaka, 1970.
Source: Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria. Accession no. H2011.55/1296c.

Pacific Exposures

Japan had already become Australia’s main trading partner well before
the end of the decade, and an important linchpin in its growing
national engagement with the Asian region more generally. Thus, as
Carolyn Barnes and Simon Jackson observed, Expo ’70 was seen by the
Australian Government as ‘an important exercise in cultural diplomacy’.
The ‘ambitious engineering’ of the pavilion itself and its exhibits (in spaces
curated by Robin Boyd) were calculated to impress.52 Designed by
James Maccormick, the pavilion featured a monstrous arched cantilever
holding in its jaws cables that supported a huge, lotus-like shallowdomed roof above the main exhibition hall. Maccormick claimed that
the cantilever was inspired by the Great Wave Off Kanagawa, the famous
print by the legendary nineteenth-century ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. More
sceptical observers might have opined that it resembled a mock dinosaur
in some suburban children’s theme park.
Despite the growing familiarity of Japan, the number of short-term
Australian travellers to Japan remained relatively low. The year after the
Osaka Expo, 1971, just under 10,000 made the journey. Through its
Community Relations Section, Qantas Airways did its best to inspire
interest in the country by producing a series of teaching kits for distribution
in both state and independent schools. Its Family Japan (1971) series of
publications focused on purportedly representative families in Tokyo and
the provinces, heavily illustrated by photographs mainly sourced from
Japanese agencies, including the Japan National Tourist Organisation.
The Two Families from Tokyo issue strongly emphasised the attractive
modernity of suburban life in the capital. Two Rural Families suggested
the passing of traditional ways of life, as land prices rise and urbanisation
continued its sweep across the landscape.53
Conversely, Japanese travel to Australia was on the rise, increasing
exponentially throughout the 1970s and 1980s. By 1988, Japanese tourism
to Australia outstripped Australian travel to Japan twelvefold.54 Japanese
52 Carolyn Barnes and Simon Jackson, ‘Creature of Circumstance: Australia’s Pavilion at Expo
’70 and Changing International Relations’, in Panorama to Paradise: Proceedings of the XXIVth
International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand,
Adelaide, 21–24 September 2007 (Adelaide: Society of Architectural Historians), 1–2.
53 Ted Myers, Qantas culture series no 5, Family Japan: Two Families from Tokyo (Sydney: Qantas
Airways and the Asian Studies Coordinating Committee, 1974); Family Japan: Two Rural Families
(Sydney: Qantas Airways and the Asian Studies Coordinating Committee, 1974).
54 See Ian Castles, Year Book Australia, no. 73 1990 (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics,
1990), 381. In 1988, the number of Australian tourists to Japan was 31,000; that same year,
Australia attracted 352,300 Japanese.
178

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

tourists came armed with their cameras, creating a national stereotype that
has continued to the present day. By 2015, Tourism Australia had come
upon the idea of creating a smartphone app, aimed specifically at young
Japanese, which allows tourists to take ‘selfie’ photographs with iconic
backdrops to inspire actual travel to the country.55
The camera was used more conventionally by some Japanese when they
started gravitating to Australia in the early 1960s. A singular moment in
the history of postwar Australia–Japan reconciliation—comprehensively
if prosaically covered by the camera—came with the arrival of the Fujita
Salvage Company in Darwin in 1959. This was to prove a story of
‘salvage’ in more ways than one. The city’s harbour was still choked by
the wrecks of ships destroyed by the Japanese aerial bombings in 1942
and needed to be cleared. After a worldwide search, the contract was
awarded to a Japanese company, an irony not lost on the local people.
Sensitive to a possible public backlash, the Australian Government
stipulated that no former Japanese soldiers could be involved in what
was a massive project. Yet, the company team of 120 Japanese workers,
brave men diving in deep and dangerous waters, earned the respect of
the Darwin community during their two-year stay. Housed aboard the
first of the salvaged ships, the British Motorist, they interacted with the
locals in various forms of social exchange, caught by the (anonymous)
company photographer. In one photograph (see Figure 5.13), taken in
1961, Australian visitors to the Japanese quarters (for what appears to
be a Japanese meal) make a toast for the camera in a convivial domestic
scene unimaginable a decade earlier.56
Further Japanese arrivals to Australian shores during the 1960s provided
more profound opportunities to produce definitive images of postwar
reconciliation, especially for the cluster of official photographers attached
to the ANIB. In 1964, the formal establishment of the Cowra War
Cemetery, containing the remains of Japanese prisoners of war killed
in the wartime ‘breakout’, occasioned the visit of still-grieving relatives,
whose arrival in Australia was photographed by Bill Brindle for the
55 Damien Larkins, ‘Selfies “on Steroids” Set to Lure Japanese Tourist to Australia’, ABC Gold
Coast News, 3 September 2015.
56 The spirit of amity was further fostered by the company owner, Ryogo Fujita, a pacifist, who
crafted 77 bronze crosses from the metal of one of the sunken vessels and donated them to Darwin’s
Uniting Church, destroyed during the air raids, now being rebuilt with the aid of its sister church in
Kyoto. The extensive photographic collection of the salvage operation went on public display as ‘Mr
Fujita’s Photo Album’ at Darwin’s Northern Territory Library from November 2016 to February 2017.
179

Pacific Exposures

Figure 5.13. Photographer unknown, Visitors and Crew Make a Toast,
Darwin Harbour 1961.
Source: Senichiro Fujita Collection, Northern Territory Library PH0874/0126.

ANIB.57 However, by far the most moving Japanese familial pilgrimage,
widely covered by the press and television as well as the ANIB, was
that, in 1968, of Matsue Matsuo, the aged mother of the submariner
Lieutenant Keiu Matsuo, who was killed in the midget submarine raid
in Sydney Harbour in 1942. In Canberra, Mrs Matsuo met with the
Australian Prime Minister John Gorton and made an emotional visit to
the Australian War Memorial to formally receive her son’s bloodstained
body belt, until then kept on public display.58 Paid for by funds raised by
public subscription in Japan, Mrs Matsuo’s sentimental journey created
immense public interest in Australia and in her home country.
The most affecting moment of the trip came when, accompanied by her
daughter, Mrs Matsuo was taken by launch to Taylor’s Bay in Sydney
Harbour, where her son’s vessel had been destroyed. Supported by two
Australian sailors, the frail, traditionally attired mother stood shakily on
the launch’s rear deck and read a poem expressing her yearning for her
dead son, before casting flowers and pouring sake from his home town
57 See NAA A1501 A5755/1; A5755/2.
58 See photograph, AWM 135591.
180

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

Figure 5.14. George Lipman, Matsue Matsuo Pays
Her Respects to Her Son Lieutenant Keiu Matsuo,
Sydney Harbour, 29 April 1968.
Source: Courtesy of Fairfax Syndication.

into the sea. The Sydney Morning Herald’s George Lipman was there to
capture an extraordinary moment in modern Australian and Japanese
history, one that illustrates the camera’s ability to distil the abstract forces
of history into snapshots of shared human emotion (see Figure 5.14). The
visit and the emotive visual imagery with which it was rendered made
undeniably good public relations material at the time, and has continued
to provide a useful historical touchtone for political rhetoric celebrating
bilateralism—in a speech to the Australian parliament in July 2014
celebrating the two countries’ ‘special relationship’, the Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe confessed that the episode ‘pulls at my heartstrings
even now’.59 For her part, the frail 83 year old was put to work on her visit,
59 Abe speech, 8 July 2014, japan.kantei.go.jp/96_abe/statement/201407/0708article1.html.
181

Pacific Exposures

laying a wreath for the Australian war dead at the cenotaph in Sydney’s
Martin Place and calling on Healesville Sanctuary outside Melbourne for
the obligatory close encounter with Australian fauna.60
Staged encounters of visiting Japanese with iconic Australiana were the
stock-in-trade for the ANIB photographic cohort. An incarnation of
the wartime Department of Information, the ANIB was set up in 1947
to promote Australia abroad, with one eye on encouraging migration.61
Stimulating Japanese investment (and not migration) was the name of
the game in the 1960s. Nevertheless, photographers working for the
ANIB doggedly documented the developing cultural links between
the two nations, usually by placing the Japanese in ‘typical’ Australian
environments. In 1965, the onetime Sydney Daily Telegraph photographer
Keith Byron—fresh from a stint in the US photographing presidents and
Hollywood celebrities for United Press International and other agencies—
captured members of a Japanese Youth Goodwill Mission observing a
sheep-shearing demonstration at Werribee near Melbourne.62 Visits by
Japanese business delegations, local government figures forging ‘sister
city’ links and members of the royal family were also comprehensively
photographed by the ANIB. Some of its images reveal the tourists
themselves photographing fellow Japanese, often in the act of tentatively
attempting to cuddle a koala or a kangaroo.63
Photographing the mundane niceties of cultural exchange between
Australia and Japan evidently presented a representational challenge to
the ANIB cohort, some of whom, such as the noted war photographer
Cliff Bottomley, had experienced rather more bracing professional
conditions. Badly wounded in New Guinea in 1942–43, Bottomley
took some dramatic pictures of the Papuan campaign after having been
present at Singapore in the lead-up to its fall in February 1942; his
photograph of local women wailing beside the corpse of a child killed
in a Japanese air raid is one of the most upsetting images of the Pacific
60 Mrs Matsuo seems to have enjoyed the visit to Healesville. See ‘It Is Paradise, Says Mother’,
Canberra Times, 6 May 1968, 14.
61 In 1973, the bureau was renamed the Australian Information Service. One of its later titles
(from 1986) was Promotion Australia.
62 Byron image, NAA A1501 A5553/2. For a resume of Byron’s career, see ‘Press Photography in
Australia: Keith Byron 1930–2002’, accessed 5 January 2018, ppia.esrc.info/website/kbyron.html.
63 See, for example, the image of members of a 1963 Goodwill mission with kangaroo, NAA
A1501 A4719/1; 1963 image of the mayor of Takada, in Australia to sign a ‘sister city’ agreement
with Lismore NSW, NAA A1501 A4568/1; members of Japan’s ‘Floating University’ taking
photographs of a woman holding a koala (1965), NAA A1510 A5894/8; the 1965 visit to Canberra
of Princess Misako, NAA A1501 A6063/8.
182

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

Figure 5.15. Cliff Bottomley, Visiting Japanese Schoolchildren
at an Australian Family Barbecue, near Melbourne, 1963.
Source: NAA A1501 A4288/5.

War. Later, in 1944, he captured General MacArthur triumphantly
returning to the Philippines, striding ashore what had been Japaneseheld territory, like some latter-day Poseidon.64 Back home in Australia,
Bottomley did occasional work for the ANIB. In 1963, he went to
the outer suburbs of Melbourne to picture a party of Japanese school
children attending a barbecue hosted by a local family. The students had
won a trip to Australia in a competition co-sponsored by the Mainichi
Broadcasting Company, the Australian Broadcasting Commission and
Qantas Airways. Their task had been to either paint or write an essay on
what they thought Australia was like. The competition was reciprocal;
Australian students were asked to do the same of Japan, with a visit also
the prize for them. Bottomley’s image of the barbecue conveys the stilted
nature of these official or quasi-official gestures and merely serves to
accentuate the essential differences in the two cultures (see Figure 5.15).
The two Australian children are dressed disarmingly casually, compared
with the more formal and conventional attire of the Japanese. Even the
family dog seems constrained by the formality of the occasion, though
perhaps it was transfixed by the sight and smell of the meat on the grill.
64 See Shaune Lakin, Contact: Photographs from the Australian War Memorial Collection (Canberra:
Australian War Memorial, 2006), 133, 141, 163.
183

Pacific Exposures

The Whitlams Go to Tokyo
Like the humble domestic encounters dutifully photographed by the
ANIB, the imagery of Australia–Japan political diplomacy during this
period inadvertently captured a continuing unease in the bilateral
relationship, one which perhaps went beyond the intrinsically artificial
nature of such high-end tête-à-têtes. In October 1973, two years after
his historic trip to Peking as opposition leader to meet with Chinese
Premier Chou En-lai, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam visited
Japan. He was en route to China to confer again with Chou en-lai, call
on Chairman Mao and give (as he put it) further expression to Australia’s
‘new international outlook’.65 Post-Vietnam, Australia was re-engaging
with Asia. The Japan visit was no mere sideshow to China. Accompanied
by the largest ministerial delegation ever to leave Australian shores, and
his wife Margaret, Whitlam had important business to conduct. It was,
observed the commentator Max Suich at the time, the ‘most crucial
encounter between Japanese and Australians in the last 20 years’.66
Australian and Japanese officials had long been negotiating to diversify
and extend the trade and economic partnership formalised by the 1957
Commerce Agreement. On the Japanese side, there was the desire for
a broader, deeper relationship. Australia, for its part, had traditionally
resisted treaties with other nations.67 Upon the successful conclusion of
the discussions in Tokyo, Whitlam and the Japanese Foreign Minister
Ohira appeared together at a press conference at which the former talked
of the ‘reluctance’ and the ‘negative attitude’ of Australian administrations
towards the longstanding Japanese proposal for a broad-ranging treaty
between the two countries. His government was determined to redress
this negativity with what was to be known as the Nippon–Australian
Relations Agreement (NARA). At the press conference, Whitlam
casually mentioned that Japan’s Prime Minister Tanaka had suggested
the treaty might be named the Treaty of Nara, after the ancient capital
and cultural centre, which Whitlam had toured a couple of days earlier.
In fact, the suggestion had come from Whitlam himself, possibly via his
65 Whitlam quoted in Fred Brenchley, ‘Whitlam in Tokyo and Peking Mixes Business with
Symbolism’, National Times, 5–10 November 1973, 7.
66 Max Suich, ‘PM Woos Japan in Crucial Tokyo Encounter’, National Times, 29 October –
3 November 1973, 31.
67 See Moreen Dee, Friendship and Co-operation: The 1976 Basic Treaty Between Australia and
Japan (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2006), 2.
184

5. Through Non-Military Eyes

press secretary Graham Freudenberg. No doubt Whitlam was attracted
to the historical resonance of the nomenclature, but the suggestion
was greeted coolly by the Japanese, in part because the title contained
what was diplomatically called ‘an unfortunate pun’—for ‘onara’ is the
Japanese word for ‘fart’.68
In Tokyo, Whitlam had hoped that the NARA treaty might be signed in
Australia the following year, on the occasion of Prime Minister Tanaka’s
reciprocal visit. However, the negotiations became protracted and
Whitlam, dismissed from office on 11 November 1975, never saw the
process through to fruition. Renamed as the less offensive ‘Basic Treaty of
Friendship and Cooperation’—the first (and still the only) official treaty
of friendship and amity between Australia and any other country—it
was signed by Whitlam’s successor, Malcolm Fraser, in Tokyo in June
1976. It was an occasion, Fraser noted, ‘born of goodwill and mutual
interests’.69
As is de rigeuer with state visits, the Whitlams’ trip to Japan was
assiduously captured by a bevy of official and press photographers, from
the welcoming handshake from Prime Minister Tanaka at the airport to
scenes of both Whitlam and his wife interacting with the local people.
At Nara, the immensely tall Australian was pictured standing like
a skyscraper over a cluster of Japanese children.70 The formal portrait of
the Whitlams’ audience with Empress Hirohito and Empress Nagako at
the Imperial Palace, broadly circulated in the Australian press, suggests
the inevitable awkwardness of such formal occasions (see Figure 5.16).
Gloved and frocked to the hilt, Margaret Whitlam looks glumly away
from the camera while the emperor looks in the opposite direction.
Meanwhile, the tiny empress appears to be faintly amused, and Whitlam,
fists clenched, looks tense and uncharacteristically uncertain. Seemingly
without irony, the picture was captioned in the Melbourne Sun as
a ‘Happy Visit to Japan’.71

68 Ibid., 12, 52 (fn 66). See also Deborah Cameron, ‘Ill Wind Blows around Nara Treaty’,
Sydney Morning Herald, 15 June 2006, www.smh.com.au/news/world/ill-wind-blows-around-naratreaty/2006/06/14/1149964584749.html.
69 Malcolm Fraser quoted in Dee, Friendship and Co-operation, 40.
70 ‘PM Takes a Hand in Old Japan’, Sun, 29 October 1973, 1. Handshake photograph in National
Times, 29 October – 3 November 1973, 31.
71 ‘A Formal Portrait on a Happy Visit to Japan’, Sun, 27 October 1973, 2.
185

Pacific Exposures

Figure 5.16. Photographer unknown, Gough and Margaret Whitlam with the
Emperor and Empress of Japan, Tokyo, 26 October 1963.
Source: NAA A6180 15/11/73/39.

The Whitlams must have understood that physical stature did not equate
with strength, and that the Japanese remained masters of their own
territory. One cannot help comparing the scene with the photograph
of MacArthur towering above Hirohito at the American Embassy
in 1945, in which there is no doubt about who is most at home and
self-confidently in charge. Of course, the contexts are starkly different;
MacArthur was the triumphant conqueror and Gough Whitlam merely
a slightly awestruck visitor. Yet this awkwardly staged display of bilateral
camaraderie with the once-despised emperor illustrates the sensitivities
still surrounding the Australia–Japan relationship in the early 1970s.72
Certainly, as the Melbourne Herald editorialised, the Tokyo agreement
of October 1973 clinched ‘a welcome Pacific partnership’ that had
opened ‘an historic new chapter’ in bilateral relations.73 Nonetheless,
some Australians still harboured conflicted feelings about the Japanese,
and perhaps a niggling sense of inferiority.
72 First performed at Melbourne’s Pram Factory theatre a few months after Whitlam’s visit, in
early 1974, John Romeril’s The Floating World placed these sensitivities on full dramatic display.
The play enacted the crack-up of an Australian war veteran on a Women’s Weekly ‘Cherry Blossom’
cruise to Japan, tapping into contemporary disquiet about Japan’s new economic dominance while
satirising the war-derived hatred that lingered in sections of Australian society.
73 ‘A Welcome Pacific Partnership’, Herald, 31 October 1973, 4.
186

6
CROSS-CULTURAL
(MIS)UNDERSTANDINGS:
INDEPENDENT PHOTOGRAPHY
SINCE THE 1980s
It may seem paradoxical that, as the bilateral relationship has continued to
mature since the 1970s, several contemporary Australian photographers
have sought to focus on ambiguity and hidden tensions when picturing
Japan. The deepening of relations—formalised in a series of new
agreements on investment, industry, trade and defence1—has coincided
with growing official interest in the value of cultural diplomacy and
recognition of the role of culture in promoting mutual understanding.
The staged pictures of cultural exchange produced by the Australian
News and Information Bureau in the 1960s revealed that interest-driven
governmental photographic practices regularly trade in national clichés.
Such a trade continues in the present, recycling the very outmoded
stereotypes that governments seek to modernise. The independent
photographers who are the focus of this chapter, by contrast, reject such
representational complacencies to pursue more adventurous modes of
image-making.
Unafraid to address complex and often challenging issues, their practices
may nonetheless be seen as the product of an increasingly relaxed
relationship between the two nations. The diversity of this work also

1 These include a Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation (2007), an Information Security
Agreement (2013) on the sharing of classified information, the Japan Australia Economic
Partnership Agreement (2015) and an Acquisition and Cross Servicing Agreement (2017) on
defence logistics cooperation.
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Pacific Exposures

speaks to the many channels through which today’s photographers can
engage with Japan, including cheap and frequent travel; opportunities
to live and work in Japan for extended periods; ever-widening access to
Japanese literature, art, popular culture, news, photobooks and fashion;
and online media and social networking that provide the means to
build and maintain friendships and professional connections from afar.
These contemporary travelling photographers use their cameras not so
much to ‘explain’ Japan or make the strange familiar as they do to raise
questions and challenge assumptions. By seeking out the unsettling and
the uncertain, interrogating them and making them sites for creativity,
they highlight how moments of confusion and misunderstanding can be
fertile ground in the photography of cross-cultural encounter.

The Art of Cultural Diplomacy
It was not until the 1970s that cultural diplomacy was formalised as
a key component of Australian–Japanese relations. Cultural diplomacy is
typically understood as a form of ‘soft power’ that helps to further national
interests by encouraging other states to be receptive to one’s own national
values.2 Prime ministers Kishi and Menzies discussed the expansion of
cultural connections in the form of travelling art exhibitions and the
exchange of students and scholars during the Australian leader’s visit to
Japan in April 1957.3 Japan’s desire to gain acceptance internationally
in the postwar order—beyond being a diplomatic or trading partner—
meant that cultural diplomacy was to play an increasingly important
role in its foreign policy in the following decades. Created with a five
billion yen endowment (later increased to 50 billion), the Japan
Foundation was established in 1972 as an international cultural agency
that complemented Foreign Minister Takeo Fukuda’s policy focus on
fostering ‘mutual understanding’.4 One of the main aims for the Japan
2 Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, ‘What Are We Searching For? Culture, Diplomacy, Agents and
the State’, in Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, ed. Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht and Mark C.
Donfried (New York: Berghann, 2010); J.M. Mitchell, International Cultural Relations (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1986), 5–6; Joseph Nye, ‘Soft Power and American Foreign Policy’, Political
Science Quarterly 119, no. 2 (June 2004).
3 Alan Rix, The Australia-Japan Political Alignment 1952 to the Present (London: Routledge,
1999), 31, 104.
4 Maki Aoki-Okabe, Yoko Kawamura and Toichi Makita, ‘Germany in Europe, Japan and
Asia: National Commitments to Cultural Relations within Regional Frameworks’, in Searching for
a Cultural Diplomacy, ed. Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht and Mark C. Donfried (New York: Berghann,
2010), 222–23.
188

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Foundation was to promote Japan as a peaceful and economically
advanced nation in other countries.5 Rising anxiety in the Asia-Pacific
over Japan’s perceived economic strength and local dependence on
Japanese trade,6 investment and development assistance was countered
with the opening of Japan Foundation offices in most South-East Asian
countries during the 1970s and 1980s. Its Australian office was opened
in Sydney in 1978.
Australia likewise sought to ensure a healthy bilateral relationship
through cultural diplomacy initiatives in the 1970s. An Act of parliament
established the bilateral body the Australia-Japan Foundation in 1976.
One of its main functions was to ‘encourage a closer relationship between
the peoples of Australia and Japan, and to further the knowledge and
understanding of each other’.7 It was hoped that, by fostering peopleto-people relations at the non-government level, the foundation would
help to maintain friendly relations and confront negative, limiting or
deep-seated stereotypes that could undermine successful diplomatic
relations.8 In place of lingering perceptions of Australia as a large country
with a small population, blessed by natural resources and populated
by picturesque flora and fauna, the Australian Government actively
promoted the image of a stable, multicultural and technologically
advanced society distinguished by its artistic and intellectual excellence.
Cultural diplomacy initiatives are traditionally distinguished from
cultural  relations, which tend to be driven by non-state actors whose
international activities are the result of trade, travel, personal relationships,
migration, entertainment, communication and cultural exchanges.9
However, this distinction is not always clear cut. Governments often
pursue their aims by sponsoring or exhibiting the work of independent
practitioners, provided that the initiatives reflect the state’s agenda.
One example of this crossover is the exhibition Continuum ’83, the
first major exhibition of Australian contemporary art in Japan held in
1983. Continuum ’83 was initiated by a group of Australian artists who
5 Kazuo Ogoura, ‘From Ikebana to Manga and Beyond’, Global Asia 7, no. 3 (2012): 25.
6 David Goldsworthy and Peter Edwards, Facing North Volume 2: 1970s to 2000 (Carlton:
Melbourne University Press, 2001), 133.
7 Australia Japan Foundation, Annual Report 2002–03, Canberra: Australian Government, 3, dfat.
gov.au/people-to-people/foundations-councils-institutes/australia-japan-foundation/Documents/​ajfannual-report-2002-03.pdf.
8 Mitchell, International Cultural Relations, 17–18.
9 Ibid., 5; Richard Arndt, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth
Century (Washington: Potomac, 2005), xviii.
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Pacific Exposures

lived and worked in Japan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including
performance artist Stelarc, the sculptor John Davis, the sculptor and video
artist Peter Callas and jeweller and sculptor Maryrose Sinn. Produced
with the help of Emiko Namikawa, director of the Lunami Gallery in
Tokyo, and several gallerists and curators in Melbourne, Continuum
’83 involved 15 rental galleries in Ginza and 18 major artists including
installation artists, performance artists, sculptors and photographers.
These exhibitions were supplemented by programs of video art, film,
sound, posters, artists’ books and performance art, bringing the total
number of artist participants to over 70.
Rather than producing new work in direct response to Japan or
Australian–Japanese relations, organisers selected existing artworks
that complemented the central curatorial theme of ‘Land, Earth,
Environment and Australia’s Polycultural Society’. This theme tapped
into long-held Japanese impressions of Australia as a vast, underpopulated
outback, while the emphasis on sculpture, installation, performance
and photography reflected Japanese interests in contemporary art.
The photography component included Sue Ford’s portraits Time Series,
Virginia Coventry’s conceptual landscape work Whyalla-Not a Document,
John Williams’ Living Room Portraits and Douglas Holleley’s A Portfolio
of Colour Photographs Made on the Last Day of Luna Park. It was hoped
that, by focusing on common creative ground and building on existing
impressions of Australia, the event would provide a means of pursing
the larger aim of encouraging dialogue between Australian and Japanese
artists and galleries based on ‘mutual interests’.10
Although Continuum ’83 was an initiative of independent artists rather
than governments, its discourse of mutual understanding and interest
lent  itself well to the concerns of cultural diplomacy. Continuum
’83 received funding from the Japan Foundation, Australia-Japan
Foundation, Australian Embassy in Tokyo and Australia Council Visual
Arts Board, in addition to support from many corporate sponsors from
both countries. Ken Scarlett, the director of Gryphon Gallery who was
instrumental in organising Continuum ’83, adopted the official discourse
of ‘friendship’ and ‘mutual understanding’ in the bilingual catalogue:

10 Peter Callas, ‘Editorial’, Special issue on contemporary Japanese art, Art Network, Spring
1984, 23.
190

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Forty years ago we were enemies at war—but no nation suffered more
than Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now trade and tourism are
helping to destroy the memories of those tragic years. But  friendship
based on trade may last only as long as the trade is profitable.

Continuum ’83, Scarlett proclaimed, is:
‘A further step, a significant advance in understanding. Japanese and
Australian artists and gallery directors are working together to make
their respective cultures known outside their own countries … Not just
Australian coal to Japan and Japanese cars to Australia but a two-way
trade in people and ideas!11

This two-way trade was pursued further two years later with Continuum
’85, which presented Japanese contemporary art to Australians.
The ideal of mutual understanding recurs in discourses surrounding
more recent touring exhibitions, including Sun Gazing: The AustraliaJapan Art Exhibition Touring Program, 2002–04 supported by Asialink
and the Australia-Japan Foundation; Rapt!: 20 Contemporary Artists
from Japan (2006) held in the Australia–Japan Year of Exchange; and
Imminent Landscape (2012) exhibited at the Japan Foundation Gallery
in Sydney.12 The artistic director and exhibitor in Imminent Landscape,
Utako Shindo, commented in the bilingual catalogue that the aim of the
initiative was ‘to create active dialogues for not just the artists but also
the broader art communities in both Japan and Australia’.13
However, in selecting cultural forms for export that are expected to be
meaningful to a foreign audience, there is often a temptation to draw
on imagery that already has currency and neglect the more complex
relationships that nations share. Continuum ’83 highlights how, in aiming
to foster mutual understanding, initiatives may end up exporting imagery
that reinforces, rather than challenges, stereotyped impressions. In her
critique of this event for Art Network, Lyndal Jones noted: ‘It is apparent
that there was an attempt at providing a bridge of understanding; the ease

11 Ken Scarlett, ‘Australia, Japan and “Continuum ’83”’, in Continuum ’83: The 1st Exhibition of
Australian Contemporary Art in Japan (Tokyo: Japan-Australia Cultural & Art Exchange Committee,
1983), unpaginated.
12 Alison Carroll, Sun Gazing: The Australia-Japan Art Exhibitions Touring Program, 2002–04
(Carlton: Asialink, 2004); Reuben Keehan, ‘Hello Tokyo! Good to See You Again’, Artlink 28, no.
4 (2008): 55–56.
13 Utako Shindo, Imminent Landscape (Sydney: Japan Foundation, 2010), unpaginated.
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Pacific Exposures

of familiarity rather than the shock of foreignness’.14 This emphasis on the
‘ease of familiarity’ meant that, at least to some Japanese critics, Continuum
’83 confirmed long-held conceptions of Australia as a ‘fenceless zoo’ set apart
from heavily urbanised, densely populated Japan.15 Writing in response
to Continuum ’83, Toshio Matsuura argued that Australian and Japanese
artists were concerned with fundamentally different approaches to nature,
underpinned by Australia’s youth—and implicit lack of development—in
comparison to Japan’s ancient cultural traditions. Australian art has not
yet come to terms with its environment, argued Matsuura, as evinced in
artworks that provide ‘literal translations of nature’. The critic contrasted
this lack of maturity with the deeper engagement with nature developed
over centuries of Japanese fine art practice.16
The hugely popular feature film Crocodile Dundee (1986)—widely
screened in Japan—nourished such impressions, as did Australian
tourism promotion in the 1980s, whose reductive emphasis on wildlife
and outback imagery simplified and commodified Australia. In a speech
about public diplomacy to the Australia-Asia Association in Melbourne
in 1990, then–Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Gareth Evans
stressed the importance of challenging such narrow views of Australia as
‘a land of open spaces, exotic flora and fauna, an exporter of commodities
– and a good place to relax’. ‘At a time of great change in the structure
of international relations’, he argued ‘it is more important than ever that
relations among nations be based on an accurate understanding of each
other’s society and culture’.17 Yet, the image of the unpeopled outback
continues to be invoked in cultural diplomacy initiatives as a dominant
signifier of Australia. The Culture Centre of the Australian Embassy in
Tokyo, for example, has promoted the work of Japanese photographer
Aihara Masaaki, who has been photographing the Australian landscape for
over 20 years. Aihara’s colour photographs typically present a landscape
that is undeveloped and devoid of signs of human inhabitation. Emphasis
is on the rich colours of the earth, the enormous skies and apparently
boundless expanses of land. As well as featuring this work on its website,
14 Lyndal Jones, ‘The Continuum Symposium on Australian Art’, special issue on contemporary
Japanese art, Art Network, Spring 1984, 49.
15 These ideas can be tracked to the Meiji period. See Alison Broinowski, ‘About Face: Asian
Representation of Australia’ (PhD diss., The Australian National University, Canberra, 2001), 8.
16 Toshio Matsurra, ‘Notes of a Traveller: Continuum ’83 Reviewed’, Bijutsu Techo 35, no. 517
(1983): 174–79.
17 Gareth Evans, ‘Australia and Asia: The Role of Public Diplomacy’, Address by the Minister
for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Senator Gareth Evans, to the Australia-Asia Association, Melbourne,
15 March 1990, www.gevans.org/speeches/old/1990/150390_fm_australiaandasia.pdf.
192

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

the Australian Embassy in Tokyo hosted exhibitions of Aihara’s work
in 1998 and 2000 and has acquired some of his photographs for its
official collection. While the embassy’s support of a local photographer
is laudable, its choice of this particular work does little to challenge the
impression that the Australian Government has long sought to change.
Landscape was again featured prominently in the Australian Government’s
publicity for the ‘Australia Now’ initiative, delivered in Japan in 2018
as part of its public diplomacy ‘Focus Country Program’. The website
of the Australian Embassy in Tokyo described the aims of the program
in terms of overcoming stereotypes: ‘strengthening and deepening
bilateral ties and building understanding beyond our landscape and
lifestyle. Most of all Australia Now is about building relationships for
the future’. The  diverse program involved performances, cultural and
sporting events, and offered opportunities for partnership building in
business. However, despite the goal of building understanding ‘beyond
our landscape and lifestyle’, the online event promotion was illustrated,
predictably, with photographs of the unpopulated outback.18

The Shock of Foreignness
Unmotivated by the economic and political benefits of soft power, the
contemporary photographers discussed in the remainder of this chapter
relish the creative potential of more complex histories and experiences
when forging alternative, informal cross-cultural photographic relations.
While Continuum ’83 aimed to eschew ‘the shock of foreignness’ to
promote mutual understanding, Melbourne photographer Christopher
Köller embraced it. Fulfilling a long-held ambition to spend time in
Japan, Köller lived in Kyoto for 19 months between August 1982 and
January 1984, supporting himself by teaching English. Japan’s economic
growth in the 1970s meant that more Japanese citizens had the means
and opportunity to travel overseas, and more came into contact with
foreigners as part of their business activities. As interest in learning
English increased, so did opportunities for Australians to teach in
Japan. Teaching provided a certain amount of flexibility for Köller,
allowing him to spend his free days studying bonsai and photographing.
His experience at the bonsai nursery was a reminder of the limits of
intercultural connection and understanding: ‘They never called me by
18 ‘Australia Now’, accessed 3 January 2018, japan.embassy.gov.au/tkyo/australianow2018.html.
193

Pacific Exposures

my real name the entire time. They just banged on the table with a
big stick and pointed at me to do things. It was hysterical’.19 However,
Köller’s work is also the product of many happy, productive and enduring
relationships with new friends.
Köller began working on his series Zen Zen Chigau (1984) four
months into his stay. The title translates roughly as ‘something out of
the ordinary’ and is indicative of Köller’s choice of subjects. Rejecting
a photojournalistic approach and a reliance on the visual clichés of
temples and geisha, Köller’s 23 black and white photographs are staged
to reflect his own responses as an outsider to strange occurrences and
stories encountered in Japan.20 ‘These photographs are about my Western
preoccupation with and attempts to understand an alien culture and
thinking’, said Köller. ‘Their purpose in my mind is not to document
“objective” thinking’.21 The photographs also reflect the ever-diversifying
ways that contemporary Australians could access and consume Japanese
culture in the 1980s. The images are variously inspired by newspaper
articles, Japanese literature, Zen Buddhist philosophy, television
programs, film, traditional theatre, popular music and Köller’s own
observations as a traveller and temporary resident in Japan. He recalled:
‘I read a lot of Japanese novels by Kōbō Abe and by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
and also by Yukio Mishima and I would get ideas from there’.22 Being
without a studio pushed Köller to be creative in his staging of these
ideas. The cast was selected from his circle of friends and students, and
sets were improvised in spaces that he could find. Köller’s sketchbooks
and notes reveal how carefully he considered his tableaux, noting details
like the expression on the models’ faces and the direction of their gazes,
as well as composition, costume and lighting.
There is an evocative tension in the finished photographs, in which stories
are implied but never fully explained. Inspired by the words of English
painter Francis Bacon—who aimed to ‘give the sensation [of  a  story]
without the boredom of its conveyance’23—Köller carefully stripped back
elements of the story to leave something for the viewer to invest in the
work. This process is evident in his photograph inspired by the horrific
19 ‘Interview with Christopher Koller, A Dialogue’, Fierce Latitudes, accessed 20 January 2018,
www.fiercelatitudes.com/new-page/.
20 Christopher Köller, interview with Melissa Miles, 6 February 2018.
21 Christopher Köller, ‘Statement’ on Zen Zen Chigau (1984) from the artist’s personal archives.
22 ‘Interview with Christopher Koller, A Dialogue’, Fierce Latitudes, accessed 20 January 2018,
www.fiercelatitudes.com/new-page/.
23 David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 65.
194

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Figure 6.1. Christopher Köller, Untitled from the series Zen Zen Chigau, 1984.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

crimes of Issei Sagawa, sensationalised in press coverage while Köller was
in Japan (see Figure 6.1). Sagawa was living in Paris studying literature at
the Sorbonne in 1981 when he murdered his classmate, a Dutchwoman
called Renée Hartevlt, raped her corpse and, over two days, cannibalised
her. When Sagawa was arrested he was carrying a suitcase containing her
body parts; he had been attempting to dispose of them in a public park.
The police discovered other body parts in Sagawa’s refrigerator at home.
After reading about this case of cannibalism, Köller became conscious of
the recurrence of this sexual fetish in Japanese literature. A passage from
Kōbō Abe’s Box Man: A Novel was copied into Köller’s notebook:
First I shall woo the girl boldly, and if I am refused (and refused I shall
be), I shall kill her over a period of days. I shall enjoy eating her corpse.
This is not a figure of speech; I shall literally put her in my mouth, chew

195

Pacific Exposures

on her, relish her on my tongue … She is submissive, and even when she
turns into meat, her smile will be unquenchable and she will have a taste
somewhere between veal and wild fowl and will be utterly delectable.24

Recreated with the help of one of Köller’s students and a friend who
worked as a nude model, his photograph does not sensationalise
Sagawa’s crime. There is no blood or gore; the violence is implied by the
nude woman seen only from the waist down lying on a table covered
in newspapers, the open fridge door and the dishevelled male figure
positioned to the side of the foreground to create compositional tension.
Sagawa’s story grew stranger after Köller made this work. After his return
to Japan and subsequent release from a psychiatric hospital in 1986,
Sagawa made a living writing restaurant reviews and books, appearing in
an exploitation film and public speaking, and was the focus of the 2007
documentary The Cannibal that Walked Free.
Another of Köller’s photographs refers to a news article, this time about
a  suicide pact between three junior high schoolgirls who jumped off
the roof of a high-rise building in Yokohama (see Figure 6.2). The girls
reportedly appeared cheerful to their families, who could not fathom
what led them to take their own lives. Japan’s seeming obsession with selfdestruction—from the ceremonial disembowelling known as harakiri or
seppuku to the kamikaze ‘suicide gods’ that terrorised Allied navies in
WWII—has long fascinated Western observers.25 Attitudes to Japanese
schoolgirls are another source of fascination. Thanks to manga, Japanese
porn and the Western media’s reports on joshi-kosei cafes—where adult
men pay a premium to share the company of schoolgirls—demure,
innocent schoolgirls have become key symbols of fetishised Japanese
femininity. Pointedly, however, Köller does not sexualise his schoolgirl
models. Their dowdy uniforms suggest they are utterly respectable
and the brown paper he put down so that their uniforms would not
be dirtied by lying on the concrete roof suggests his concern for his
models. The girls’ staged yet subtle expressions convey a range of possible
emotions—the central figure’s eyes are closed in introspection and she is
without her shoes, one friend looks to her for guidance, while the other

24 Excerpt from Kōbō Abe, Box Man: A Novel, trans. E. Dale Saunders (New York: Knopf, 1974)
in Christopher Köller’s unpublished notebooks.
25 Albert Axell and Hideaki Kase, Kamikaze: Japan’s Suicide Gods (Harlow: Longman, 2002);
Ian Littlewood, The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 36.
196

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Figure 6.2. Christopher Köller, Untitled from the series Zen Zen Chigau, 1984.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

appears anxious as she stares straight ahead. The vertiginous tilt of the
composition creates the impression that the girls are about to fall, their
hands linked to signify their pact.
Other photographs in Köller’s series are much less confronting; they
include portraits of his friends, his bonsai teacher and uniformed
workers, as well as references to Japanese literature and theatre. Together,
the photographs appealed greatly to contemporary Australian audiences.
Köller recalled:
My Japanese show was very successful. I made enough money to go back
overseas and I just couldn’t print them fast enough. Everybody loved the
show, I got great reviews and it seemed like everybody wanted another
Japanese show.26
26 ‘Interview with Christopher Koller, A Dialogue’, Fierce Latitudes, accessed 20 January 2018,
www.fiercelatitudes.com/new-page/.
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Pacific Exposures

Between 1984 and 1988, Zen Zen Chigau was exhibited in Melbourne,
Adelaide, Sydney and London, and a selection was later exhibited in
a group show in 2005.27 Beatrice Faust’s review of Zen Zen Chigau
at Melbourne’s Photographer’s Gallery in 1984 suggests that the
photographs tapped into popular impressions of enigmatic Japan:
Owing little to current Japanese photography, they are still peculiarly
Japanese, at once familiar and bizarre, open and shuttered, humanly
emotional and dispassionately controlled, whimsical and earnest, trivial
and important, elaborate and simple.28

Robert Rooney similarly spoke of the contradictions that characterise
‘outsiders’ views of this ‘land of contrasts’, its refined taste and its
perceived capacity for extreme cruelty.29
The exhibition of Köller’s work coincided with rising public anxieties
about the threat posed by Japanese business and export activities to local
interests. In this context, his photograph of a young, suited Japanese
man who had killed and was about to devour a European woman
perhaps resonated in ways that Köller did not intend. As the Japanese
economy matured in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was rising
concern in the Asia-Pacific about Japan’s rapidly growing power. Japan’s
share of total investment in Australia increased from 8.7 per cent in
1981 to 17.9 per cent in 1991, making it the second largest source of
investment after the US. The rise in Japanese investment in Australian
real estate skyrocketed from zero in 1980–81 to 49.2  per  cent, or
US$1,255 million, in 1991–92. The public perception of this investment
was bound up with the increased visibility of Japanese visitors, including
businessmen and ever-growing numbers of tourists. The total number
of visitors from Japan increased nearly fourfold from 1984 to 1988, and
tourist visitors increased fivefold (to 294,000) in 1988. Japanese visitor
arrivals continued to increase substantially in the early 1990s, reaching
813,100 in 1996.30

27 For example in the group exhibition Loaded at Gallery 101 in 2005.
28 Beatrice Faust, ‘From Japan, an Exhibition of Images to Haunt the Memory’, Age, 10 December
1984, 14.
29 Robert Rooney, ‘Powerful Images in a Land of Contrasts’, Australian, 15–16 December 1984,
Arts 12.
30 Rix, The Australia-Japan Political Alignment 1952 to the Present, 107.
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6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Political leaders naturally embraced the palpable Japanese interest in
Australia. Then-Treasurer Paul Keating declared during the visit of Prime
Minister Takeshita in 1988 that:
Our friendship is reflected in the very large numbers of Japanese families
who are visiting our country as tourists, and enjoying our hospitality and
the grandeur of our landscape. Let me say, Mr Prime Minister, that your
fellow countrymen and women are very welcome guests to Australia.31

However, the mass media and general public were not always as supportive
of the growing Japanese presence. Two particular Japanese investment
initiatives were met with heated public debate—a plan to establish
Japanese retirement settlements in Australia (the ‘Silver Columbia’
project) and the Japanese Government’s proposal for a Multi-Function
Polis. References in the press to the ‘Japanese takeover’, ‘Japanvader’ and
‘the polite invasion’, along with the catchcries ‘Australia for Australians’
and ‘Wake up Australia’, recurred in the late 1980s. ‘Lest we forget’ was
a particularly pointed rebuke of excessive Australian enthusiasm for
Japanese investment.32 In the press, photographs helped to establish the
link between the growing presence of Japanese tourists and Australia’s
historical fear of Asian invasion, which had seemed likely to be realised
in 1942. In a special supplement to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of
the end of WWII in 1995, the Sydney Morning Herald included a large
photograph of four smiling young Japanese tourists posing in front of
the Sydney Harbour Bridge under the headline ‘Engaging the Enemy’.
While the article itself told the story of a positive relationship built after
the war, the combination of photograph and headline linked the mass
arrival of Japanese tourists to this wartime history.33
As Japan experienced a comparable backlash in other parts of Asia,
Japanese cultural diplomacy became one of the ‘three pillars’ of its foreign
policy, alongside official aid policies and contributions to international
peacekeeping operations. Politically, Japan and Australia became strong
regional allies during this period. Australia acted as kind of a mediator or
‘cushion’ when much of Asia remembered all too clearly Japan’s wartime
history of aggression and brutality. Prime Minister Hawke supported
Japan’s permanent membership on the United Nations Security Council
and the participation of the Japanese defence force in United Nations
31 Quoted in ibid., 109.
32 Ibid., 108.
33 David Jenkins, ‘Engaging the Enemy’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 August 1995, 10V.
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Pacific Exposures

peacekeeping missions in Cambodia and the Persian Gulf. Although
Japanese troops in Cambodia were admitted on the condition that they
remain unarmed, the nation’s eagerness to send its troops to a foreign
country on policing operations opened old wounds. Coupled with
renewed disputes with China and South Korea over ownership of what
Japan calls Takeshima and the Senkaku Islands, activists and government
officials in both countries repeatedly criticised Japan for its perceived
‘lack of contrition’ for the brutalities committed during their periods of
annexation and occupation earlier in the twentieth century.34 Speaking
to the New Sunday Times, Singapore’s Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew
claimed in 1991: ‘Allowing Japan to once again send its forces abroad is
like giving a chocolate liqueur to an alcoholic. Once the Japanese get off
the wagon, it will be hard to stop them’.35
Cooperation between Australia and Japan was critical in this regional
context and central to the creation of the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) in 1989 and the development of APEC leaders
meetings in 1993–95. It was hoped that, by coming together, Australia
and Japan could build regional cooperation.36 This diplomatic
relationship was not without its tensions. Japanese concern over
Australia’s protection of its manufacturing industry and Australia’s
grievances about Japan’s agricultural protectionism were among the
issues. There were also ongoing disagreements over Japanese whaling
and Japan’s refusal to acknowledge its abuse of comfort women during
WWII. The Japanese Government’s unwillingness to apologise for its
wartime brutality, particularly regarding its mistreatment of prisoners of
war, added another point of tension.
Given the importance of this bilateral relationship, Australia’s dwindling
investment in cultural diplomacy during the 1990s is surprising.
Asialink was established in 1990 amid an apparent upward turn
as a body dedicated to delivering high-level forums, international
collaborations, leadership training, education, community health and
cultural programs in Australia and Asia. Its art program helped Australian
34 Steven H. Green, ‘The Soft Power of Cool: Economy, Culture and Foreign Policy in Japan’,
Toyo Hogaku 58, no. 3 (2015): 56.
35 Quoted in Lindsay Murdoch, ‘Push for Power in Asia’, Age, 30 December 1991, 7.
36 Rikki Kersten, ‘Japan and Australia’, in Japanese Foreign Policy Today, ed. Inoguchi Takashi and
Purnendra Jain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 292; Takashi Terada, ‘The Australia-Japan Partnership
in the Asia-Pacific: From Economic Diplomacy to Security Co-Operation?’, Contemporary Southeast
Asia 22, no. 1 (April 2000): 177, 186.
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6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

artists to work more effectively and easily in the Asian region.37 In 1991,
a  new international arts policy was introduced with a commitment
that, by 1992–93, 50 per cent of the international budget would be
spent on Asian or Pacific-oriented projects under the title ‘Asia-Pacific
Connections’. However, this new policy impacted on a small percentage
of the overall Australia Council budget and was criticised as a symbolic
stunt for ‘political self-protection’.38 Several commentators have noted
the subsequent, ever-dwindling governmental support for Asialink and
Australian cultural programs in Asia.39 Ien Ang, Yudhishthir Raj Isar
and Phillip Mar argued that despite government attempts to develop
a more integrated approach, cultural diplomacy activities tend to be
modest, dispersed and have been subject to ‘almost continual budget
erosion over the past fifteen years, leading some commentators to speak
about Australia’s diplomatic deficit’.40 In this climate, non-state cultural
organisations and actors have become increasingly more important
in filling the void. While there is a chance that photography projects
that explore cross-cultural tensions—like Köller’s—may be received
in a manner that reinforces attitudes that run counter to the interests
of governments, such projects are valuable because they acknowledge
important issues of interpretation and dynamism in bilateral relations.

Photographic Connections and the
Limits of Understanding
For Australian photographer Kristian Häggblom, photography offers
a means of immersing himself in Japan and thinking deeply about
its culture, spaces and people. Häggblom first travelled to Japan in
1999 after graduating from his photography studies in Melbourne. In
contrast to Köller, Häggblom was not pursuing a long-term ambition
to visit Japan and did not have many expectations about what he might
find there. His reasons for choosing Japan were more pragmatic—
employment opportunities and favourable visa requirements meant
that it was a place where he could feasibly spend an extended period of
37 Alison Carroll, ‘Art to Life: 20 Years in the Australia-Asian Arts Atmosphere’, Art Monthly
Australia, no. 235 (November 2010).
38 Robert J. Williams, ‘Australia’s International Cultural Relations: Some Domestic Dimensions’,
Australian Journal of Political Science 30, no. 1 (1995): 65–67.
39 Evans, ‘Australia and Asia’; Carroll, ‘Art to Life’.
40 Ien Ang, Yudhishthir Raj Isar and Phillip Mar, ‘Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National
Interest?’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 21, no. 4 (2015): 376.
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time.41 Häggblom ended up living in Japan for eight years, mainly in
Tokyo, and married a Japanese woman. The income Häggblom earned
working as an English teacher and his flexible working hours freed him
to spend time walking through Tokyo, photographing as he went, in
particular, exploring the photography galleries and second-hand camera
stores in hyper-urban Shinjuku. During his walks, Hägbblom was also
mindful of his own family history. His uncle Michael (Mick) Kelly’s ship
was sunk by the Japanese in WWII. During the subsequent Occupation,
Kelly managed a port in Kobe and developed a great fondness for Japan.
He  returned regularly, including while Häggblom was living there.
Although Kelly rarely spoke about his war experiences, his time in Japan
was in Häggblom’s mind as he walked the Tokyo streets and throughout
the country.42
In 2001, with fellow Australian Warren Fithie, Häggblom opened
a gallery called Roomspace above one of the many bars in Shinjuku’s
famous Omoide Yokochō, known colloquially as ‘Piss Alley’. Roomspace
was a modest gallery, as its name suggests, that exhibited photographs,
paintings and other experimental works for over a year. After returning
to Australia, Häggblom also worked to introduce Australian audiences to
less well-known Japanese photographers at his Wallflower Photomedia
Gallery in regional Victoria, established in 2012 with Ross Lake through
Arts Mildura.43 Häggblom continues to return to Japan regularly to
develop new bodies of photographic work and heighten the profile of
Japanese photographers in Australia.
Häggblom’s own photographs reflect his cerebral approach to photography
in which ideas are explored over time through large interconnected
bodies of work. Drawn to open areas where urban landscapes and
nature meet, such as riverways and parks, he is interested in ‘vernacular
spaces’ and how these are used in diverse, very personal or ritualised
ways. Häggblom’s series O’Hanami centres on the parks occupied en
masse during the annual cherry blossom festival. He steadfastly avoids
fetishising the delicate blossoms as symbols of the cycles of life and death
or an essentially feminine Japan. Rather, he turns his camera towards the
41 Kristian Häggblom, interview with Melissa Miles, 17 January 2018.
42 Häggblom plans to investigate Kelly’s wartime history further in the future.
43 Wallflower Gallery closed at the end of 2015. Häggblom still works under this title as a not-forprofit organisation to facilitate activities that include an exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary
Photography, Melbourne, of contemporary Japanese photography. See www.tsukaproject.com/
(accessed 12 March 2018).
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6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

sometimes drunken hanami, or cherry blossom viewing parties, that take
place in public parks across Tokyo. Shooting in large format, Häggblom’s
photographs are exceptionally detailed. One photograph (see Figure 6.3)
focuses on young men dressed in eggplant and daikon costumes, relaxing
on the outstretched blankets that mark out their much sought after
place beneath the trees. A pair of legs and torso belonging to a man
partially out of shot, and seemingly passed out, can be seen next to two
young women slouched at a picnic table, looking right at Häggblom’s
camera, bleary-eyed from the day’s celebration. Another photograph
(see Figure 6.4) shows older men sitting on unfeasibly small picnic chairs
around an equally tiny table on which food and drink has been served.
Younger women sit by the river, with their pile of plastic bags gathered
behind them. The hole in Häggblom’s camera bellows creates light leaks
in several photographs that pit the slightly awkward and messy reality of
the festival against a romanticised ideal.
The product of countless hours spent walking off the track beaten
by tourists in the areas between metropolitan train lines, Häggblom’s
substantial body of work Nihon (1999–ongoing) brings together large
format photographs of open urban spaces and anonymous-looking
buildings. The scenes are sometimes taken from slightly different angles
or moments apart to afford subtle changes in light and texture. These
large photographs act as structuring elements that map the terrain of
Tokyo for the project, while other images explore more poignant uses
of space, including those in rural areas. Some photographs in Nihon are
carefully staged with the help of Japanese friends and students to recreate
odd moments that Häggblom witnessed, such as a man chopping a whole
watermelon by a river, or another young man posing nude by a waterway
in front of his camera phone mounted on a tiny tripod. These images
are punctuated with studies of small details observed in the streets from
Häggblom’s Dossier #1 (2015–ongoing). Including strange photographs
of a doorknob encased in paint, an abandoned suitcase and folding table
stacked neatly by a footpath, and a second-storey doorway leading to
a sudden, deadly drop into an alley, this large body of photographs can
be edited and arranged to allude to different open-ended narratives.

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Figure 6.3. Kristian Häggblom, Yoyogi #11, 2006.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 6.4. Kristian Häggblom, Kichijoji #6, 2006.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Figure 6.5. Kristian Häggblom, Aokigahara Jukai, Bible Translations, 2000.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Aokigahara Jukai (The Blue Sea of Foliage) is Häggblom’s best known
and most personal series. It is concerned with a stretch of forest situated
at the base of Mt Fuji. Häggblom returned to this forest several times
between 2000 and 2018. These photographs reflect his larger interest
in the ritualised uses of open outdoor spaces and how the landscape
has been shaped by those uses. Noted in tourist guides for its views of
Mt Fuji and its lakes, the area is a popular hiking spot. In Häggblom’s
photographs, the forest is largely devoid of people but is littered with
remnants of their visits. Whether due to the disorienting, undulating
landscape or stories about the magnetic properties of iron deposits in
the soil that purportedly confound compass readings, this area has a
reputation as a site where people get lost. A confusing tangle of strings
is visible in some of Häggblom’s photographs (see Figure 6.5), left by
visitors who trail the long lengths behind them as they enter the forest so
they may follow the string to navigate their way out again.
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Figure 6.6. Kristian Häggblom, Aokigahara Jukai, Donald Duck Badge, 2000.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

This is also a site where people willingly submit to the enveloping
forest.44 Signs pleading visitors not to end their lives and religious texts
nailed to trees reveal the forest as an infamous suicide spot; indeed, it is
described in Wataru Tsurumi’s best-selling book, The Complete Manual
of Suicide, as the perfect place to die.45 Occasionally seen among the
dead leaves on the forest floor are personal objects that people have left
behind. A backpack, a Donald Duck badge and a plastic bag can be seen
in one of Häggblom’s photographs (see Figure 6.6), while others show
a membership card, a shoe and the remains of a meal. There is a sense
of intimacy in these objects, as we wonder why they were taken into the
forest and by whom.

44 Kyla McFarlane, ‘Kristian Häggblom’, Un Magazine 7, 2006, 6.
45 Wataru Tsurumi, Kanzen jisatsu manyuaru (The Complete Manual of Suicide) (Tōkyō : Ōta
Shuppan, 1993).
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6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

One photograph includes decomposing human remains, thus drawing
attention to some challenging ethical questions. There is ongoing debate
in Japan about whether it is the responsibility of the local council to
recover and attempt to identify human remains that lie in the forest.
The ‘suicide forest’ has also become a site for dark tourism. There
have been no less than seven films made about the ‘haunted forest’,
including independent films like Shan Serafin’s Forest of the Living Dead
(2010) and Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees (2015) starring Matthew
McConaughey, Ken Watanabe and the Australian actress Naomi Watts.
Sensationalised responses to Aokigahara Jukai reached a new low in 2017
when 22-year-old American YouTube star Logan Paul used one man’s
suicide as clickbait for his 15 million plus subscribers. In Paul’s video, he
and his friends laugh and joke near the body of a young man who hangs
limp from a tree. The camera scans up and down his body, lingering on
his blue hands and the wallet that still sits in his back pocket. ‘This is the
craziest moment in my life’, proclaims Paul in an extraordinary moment
of narcissism, before the video continues with a scene of him greeting
fans in the carpark. The international outrage at Paul’s post led him to
apologise for his thoughtlessness. Yet, this and so many other references
to the forest in popular culture underscores the way that suicide persists
as a marker of the ‘otherness’ of Japan in contemporary Western cultures.
Debt suicides supposedly speak to the Japanese sense of duty, while the
suicides of depressed teenagers who had withdrawn from life are seen as
signs of the pressures of conformity and family obligation.
Rather than subscribe to these clichés of quintessential ‘Japaneseness’,
Häggblom’s photographs quietly underscore the humanity of those
affected by suicide. The photographer comments on the importance
of addressing the enormity of suicide in Japan, where help lines are
overstretched, investment in prevention programs is lacking, mental
health care for those at risk is inadequate and some 25,000–30,000
Japanese succeed in taking their own lives each year. Häggblom stresses
the need to talk about suicide in Japan and understand its causes and
profound impacts. However, this is a fine balancing act in photography.
In the critical reception of these photographs in Melbourne when they
were exhibited in 2005, it was suggested that the photographs act as
‘evidence’ of something fundamentally Japanese:

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Figure 6.7. Matthew Sleeth, 12 Views of Mt Fuji #4 [Fujikyu Highland Park], 2004.
Source: Courtesy of Matthew Sleeth/Claire Oliver Gallery (New York).

In depicting evidence of these contradictory, yet co-existing engagements
with Aokigahara Jukai, Häggblom alludes to the tangle of cultural, social
and psychological forces that shape Japanese society beyond the forest
but which are thrown into sharp relief in this small stretch of land.46

Other responses to this work have been far less sensitive. Häggblom made
the decision to remove one of his photographs from his website because
it had been taken without permission and used in an offensive online
video. A risk is that the fetishisation of Japanese suicide by Western
audiences will see this critical issue pushed off the international agenda
altogether. Häggblom ultimately highlights the importance of being
mindful of this Orientalist tendency and maintaining empathy and
respectful conversation. Although it is highly unlikely that photographs
about suicide will be embraced officially in aid of bilateral relations,
Häggblom’s work opens up a space for another, extremely important
type of dialogue.

46 McFarlane, ‘Kristian Häggblom’, 6.
208

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Figure 6.8. Matthew Sleeth, 12 Views of Mt Fuji #43
[Shinjuku Southern Tower Hotel], 2005.

Source: Courtesy of Matthew Sleeth/Claire Oliver Gallery (New York).

Like Häggblom, Matthew Sleeth returns to the same subjects to form
large bodies of photographs that address a central idea. Whereas
Häggblom’s work is the product of many years living and working in
Japan, Sleeth’s photographs reflect the preoccupations and experiences
of a repeat, short-term visitor. His more recent practice is concerned
with sculpture, installation, performance and film, but photography
was a major focus during Sleeth’s early trips to Japan. Sleeth first visited
Japan in 2002 while accompanying his partner, furniture designer Sally
Thomas, who was participating in a group exhibition at the Australian
Embassy in Tokyo. The city’s glary neon, consumer culture and dense
urban environment lent itself well to Sleeth’s photography practice at
that time. His approach built on the somewhat ‘joyless’ deadpan 1960s
conceptual art photography—in which photographs were produced to
convey a central idea—and infused it with the ‘seductive visual language’
of popular culture, fashion and cinema.47 On that first brief visit in
2002, Sleeth produced Feet (2002), a series of colour photographs
framed tightly on the feet and legs of train commuters. Together, the
47 Matthew Sleeth, interview with Melissa Miles, 18 January 2018.
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Pacific Exposures

Figure 6.9. Matthew Sleeth, 12 Views of Mt Fuji #24 [Kawaguchiko], 2004.
Source: Courtesy of Matthew Sleeth/Claire Oliver Gallery (New York).

photographs of differently clad feet variously dangling, sitting neatly,
‘manspreading’ or pointing towards the train door in anticipation
of a quick exit, draw attention to the subtle social habits that occupy
our attention amid the confinement and boredom of an urban train
trip. Sleeth returned to Tokyo several times following this initial visit.
Abandoned Umbrellas (2004) responds to Japanese umbrella culture.
It centres particularly (but not exclusively) on the cheap clear plastic
umbrellas sold in convenience stores when rain unexpectedly pours
down on the city and are discarded when the weather clears up. When
gathered together, Sleeth’s photographs of twisted, bent and broken
umbrellas jutting out of overfull rubbish bins or lying in the rain-soaked
gutter allude to the failure of mass-produced consumer goods and the
excessive waste of consumer culture.
Sleeth returned yet again for an Australia Council residency over the
Japanese winter of 2005–06. Among the several series he completed
during this Tokyo residency was Twelve Views of Mount Fuji (2004–06)
(see Figures 6.7–6.9). This series began during a trip in Spring 2004 and
reflects Sleeth’s desire to respond to Japan’s art history and contemporary
context, while carefully avoiding the tendency towards Orientalist
210

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Figure 6.10. Matthew Sleeth, Kawaii Baby #15 [Tokyo], 2006.
Source: Courtesy of Matthew Sleeth/Claire Oliver Gallery (New York).

travelogue that often looms large in Australian representations of Japan.
This series is a homage to Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock prints Thirtysix Views of Mount Fuji (1830–34), which informed a popular tradition
of visualising Japan. Hokusai’s prints pictured the iconic volcanic
mountain from different perspectives and in different landscapes and
seasons, framing it with clouds and foreground elements like arched
bridges, snowy fields and cranes. Rather than recreating Hokusai’s
images, Sleeth pictured the distant Fuji against foregrounds that could
not have been envisaged by Hokusai, including a used car yard, a tangle
of power lines, contemporary housing, a roller coaster and Tokyo’s
extraordinary contemporary illuminated skyline.
Kawaii Baby (2005–06) (see Figures 6.10 and 6.11) operates at
a  more personal level, while maintaining Sleeth’s conceptual interest
in documentary photography, seriality and consumer culture. These
photographs capture the surprising encounters between Sleeth’s baby
daughter and members of the public in busy Tokyo. Sleeth and his
wife were initially taken aback by the way that strangers would so
readily approach the little blonde-haired blue-eyed girl exclaiming
‘kawaii’ (cute), playing with her, adjusting her clothes and even feeding
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Figure 6.11. Matthew Sleeth, Kawaii Baby #16 [Tokyo], 2006.
Source: Courtesy of Matthew Sleeth/Claire Oliver Gallery (New York).

her, sometimes without acknowledging her parents. While knowing that
they meant well, Sleeth was confronted by the treatment of the infant as
public property:
Japan is a very child-friendly place, which is one of the reasons we
moved there, but it was quite weird, and one of the reasons I started
taking these photographs was to help me deal with it.48

Taken from above and behind the little girl’s head—so her wispy blonde
hair is just visible in the bottom of the shot—the photographs focus on
the warm, joyous smiles and playful expressions on the faces of fellow
train passengers, teenagers and office workers as they entertain the baby.
Central to the appeal of these photographs is the warmth and sincerity of
this interaction. In sharp contrast to the commercial use of photographs
of children to transmit adult values and world views, of which Sleeth
remains conscious, these people seem to utterly forget the adult world as
they coo and giggle at the baby girl.49
48 Diana Smyth, ‘Baby Face’, British Journal of Photography, 19 December 2007, 17.
49 Matthew Sleeth, interview with Melissa Miles, 18 January 2018.
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6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Sleeth brought together Feet, Abandoned Umbrellas, 12 Views of Mt Fuji
and Kawaii Baby, along with other photographs made in Japan and
elsewhere in the world, in his book Ten Series/106 Photographs (2007).
This book is the first by an Australian photographer to be produced by
the renowned American publisher Aperture in its 55-year history. In the
critical response to Sleeth’s book, much of the focus is on his process of
creating visual typologies and the photographer himself—his ‘obsessions’
and travels—rather than what the photographs may say about Australian
engagement with Japan.50 However, when 12 Views of Mt Fuji was
included in the Queensland University of Technology Art Museum
group exhibition Zen to Kawaii: The Japanese Affect, the reception was
reframed. The Japanese art expert Gary Hickey was highly critical of
how the exhibition represented impressions of Japan by Australians but
failed to offer meaningful insight into Japanese culture:
What is also apparent from the works in the Zen to Kawaii exhibition
is that there has been little historical development in Australian
understanding of Japanese culture since Japanese art travelled to the
West in the late 19th century. This neglect has much to do with the
dearth of any in-depth engagement with Japanese art by our educational
and cultural institutions.51

This critical objection tends to reinforce the long tradition of presenting
Japan as an enigma waiting to be unravelled by the expert. The value of
Australian photographic engagements with Japan must not be limited
to the expectation that they will ‘explain’ Japan to a foreign audience.
Rather, these photographers’ interest in confusion, misunderstanding
and their place as outsiders may offer other valuable insights and
perspectives.
To Sleeth, the pervasive sense of being at odds with Tokyo, of being
unable to speak the language, read its street signs or understand the
conversations of passers-by, allows him to gain a productive sense of
presence in the moment.52 This impression of contemplation amid the

50 Jo Roberts, ‘Australian Photographer Captures Focus of Esteemed Arbiter’, Age, 4 October
2007; Michael David Murphy, ‘Ten Series/106 Photographs’, Foto8, 14 November 2008, www.foto8.
com/​live/ten-series106-photographs/; Robert McFarlane, ‘Images of Life’s Ups and Downs’, Sydney
Morning Herald, 23 October 2007; Paddy Johnson, ‘Matthew Sleeth’, Art and Australia 45, no. 4
(2008): 646–47; Edward Colless, ‘World Vision’, Australian Art Collector, July–September 2007,
109–17.
51 Gary Hickey, ‘Impressions of Japan’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 236 (December 2010): 20.
52 Matthew Sleeth, interview with Melissa Miles, 18 January 2018.
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Pacific Exposures

Figure 6.12. Matthew Sleeth, Millenario Lights, Marunouchi [Tokyo], 2006.
Source: Courtesy of Matthew Sleeth/Claire Oliver Gallery (New York).

bright lights and white noise of the city is particularly evident in Sleeth’s
large-scale photographs in which he layers and heavily works over the
images. Printed at 127 x 153 cm or 182 x 228 cm, the photographs are
large, immersive and cinematic, and create a sense of artificiality that
heightens the seductive appeal of Tokyo’s bright lights. These works
build on Sleeth’s previous work with film and video and look forward
to the more experimental video work to come. ‘I’m interested in found
narrative’, says Sleeth, ‘but photographed in a way where everything is
so controlled that it looks staged’.53 The spectacular winter light displays
in a busy Tokyo square accentuates that sense of a staged backdrop in
Millenario Lights, Marunouchi (2006) (see Figure 6.12). Turning away
from the illuminated decorative arches and towards the lights and images
reflected in the glass of nearby buildings, Sleeth creates the impression
of a confusing, disorienting space that is nonetheless kept at a distance,
as though being viewed on an enormous screen.

53 Colless, ‘World Vision’, 116.
214

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

The Western sense of Tokyo as a disorienting city goes back at least
as far as  Roland Barthes in Empire of Signs (1970), with his famous
characterisation of a ‘city with an empty centre’. The city is ‘routinely
described as chaotic’, observed the architectural critic Peter Popham
in 1985.54 The idea of Tokyo as both anarchic and labyrinthine has
gained traction over the decades. Significant was Toyo Ito’s multimedia
installation in the Visions of Japan exhibition at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in 1991, which represented this ‘simulated city’ using a jarring
mass of screens, sounds and images. Australian-based architecture
historian Ari Seligmann argued that the ‘chaos trope’ has long positioned
Tokyo as a territory for creative intervention, with varying implications.
Chaos may be understood in light of Tokyo’s uncoordinated
conglomeration of architectural styles and developments; the saturation
of images, signs, billboards and neon in urban space; and the sheer
enormity of the city set against thoughtful details at street level, such
as neatly clipped street trees. The structure-defying layout of the city,
in which nameless streets meander in all directions and are interwoven
with snaking overpasses and rail lines, adds to the confusion.55 In Sleeth’s
views of illuminated Tokyo from a Shinjuku high-rise (see Figure 6.13),

Figure 6.13. Matthew Sleeth, North West from Shinjuku [Tokyo], 2005.
Source: Courtesy of Matthew Sleeth/Claire Oliver Gallery (New York).

54 Barthes and Popham quoted in Paul Waley, ‘Re-Scripting the City: Tokyo from Ugly Duckling
to Cool Cat’, Japan Forum 18, no. 3, (November 2006): 368, 369.
55 Ari Seligmann, ‘Tokyo Tropes, the Poetics of Chaos’, in Fabulation: Myth, Nature, Heritage:
The Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia &
New Zealand, ed. Stuart King, Anuradha Chatterjee and Stephen Loo (Launceston, Tas.: Society of
Architectural Historians of Australia & New Zealand, 2012).
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structures seemingly jut up against one another without any organising
principle. A comparable perspective was used in Sofia Coppola’s film Lost
in Translation (2003) to reflect the sense of alienation of the American
protagonists. Some Japanese and foreign architects have sought to reveal
the hidden logic that sits beneath this alienating disorder—a strategy that
is part of the wider tradition of shedding light on ‘inscrutable Tokyo’.56
However, that hidden logic is not apparent in Sleeth’s Millenario Lights,
Marunouchi or North West from Shinjuku [Tokyo]. Nor was it sought.
Glimpses of distinct spaces seem to collapse into one another, allowing
the city to become a stimulating space for creativity.

‘Cool Japan’ in an Anxious Age
Although Sleeth was not motivated by the interests of Japanese cultural
diplomacy, his work picks up on the concurrent interest in bright lights
and pop culture as part of a distinctly Japanese brand of cultural ‘cool’.
The American journalist Douglas McGray famously observed in 2002
how a ‘whiff of Japanese cool’ had become a selling point around the
world and proposed that cool had great potential as a form of soft power:
There is an element of triviality and fad in popular behaviour, but it
is also true that a country that stands astride popular channels of
communication has more opportunities to get its messages across and to
affect the preferences of others.57

Inspired by the success of the United Kingdom’s ‘Cool Britannia’
campaign in the 1990s and the international explosion of South Korean
K-pop music and communications technologies, Japan’s Ministry of
Foreign Affairs officially launched its ‘pop-culture diplomacy’ strategy
in 2006. Two Cool Japan books were also published locally that year.58
It was hoped that Cool Japan would provide a means of countering
negative regional perceptions of Japan’s international interventions,
develop a new driving force for cultural exports and stimulate the local
economy, which had been struggling since the rupture of the bubble
56 Ibid., 986. Peter Popham has alluded to the city’s ‘hidden sense of order’. Rather than chaotic,
it is marked by ‘a remarkably strong and simple structure’, he argued. See Peter Popham, Tokyo:
The City at the End of the World (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985), 93.
57 Douglas McGray, ‘Japan’s Gross National Cool’, Foreign Policy 130 (May–June 2002): 583–84.
58 I. Nakamura and M. Onouchi, Nippon No Poppupawaa (Japanese Popular Power) (Tokyo:
Nihon Keizai Shimbunsha, 2006); T. Sugiyama, Kūru Japan. Sekai Ga Kaitagaru Nippon (Cool
Japan. The Japan the World Wants to Buy) (Tokyo: Shoutensha, 2006).
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6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

economy in the early 1990s. Everything from manga and anime to
J-pop, games, cosplay and food were heralded as icons of Japanese cool.
Among the government’s many ‘cool’ initiatives was the appointment
of three young female fashion leaders as ‘Kawaii Ambassadors’ to travel
the world promoting contemporary Japanese culture. The Ministry of
Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) was reorganised with a view to
supporting creative industries and the rebranding of Japan. The Creative
Industries Promotion Office was established in June 2010 and the Cool
Japan Advisory Council began work in November that year.
In the wake of the natural and technological calamity that befell northern
Honshu on 11 March 2011, Cool Japan increasingly became ‘both
a  defensive response against and an adaptation to globalization’.59 Just
two months after the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear
meltdown, the Cool Japan Advisory Council issued recommendations
for the advancement of national branding and creative industries in the
‘Creating a New Japan’ proposal.60 The illustrated bilingual booklet Roots of
Japan, produced as part of METI’s November 2011 initiative, ‘The Japan
Mother Program’, is indicative of the way that Cool Japan was refigured.
The publication explains that ‘Our “mother country” is in great need of
protection, of recovery, and of nurturing the strength required to make
a bold leap into the future’.61 The disaster was a shocking reminder that:
We Japanese seem to have forgotten some of the critical codes that made
up our mother country, Japan. In the heat of pursuing success, wealth,
and industrial development, we never paused to inquire into the fact
that Japan was, at once, both singular ‘Japan’ and plural ‘Japans’.62

The Japan Mother Program aimed to collect, record and distribute
stories about the revival of the Japanese ‘mother country’ nationally
and internationally in an effort to reinvent Japan’s industry, culture
and economy. Roots of Japan marked the start of this process by laying

59 Yoshitaka Mōri, ‘The Pitfall Facing the Cool Japan Project: The Transnational Development
of the Anime Industry under the Condition of Post-Fordism’, International Journal of Japanese
Sociology, no. 20 (2011): 40.
60 Katja Valaskivi, Cool Nations: Media and the Social Imaginary of the Branded Country (London
and New York: Routledge, 2016), 17.
61 Seigow Matsuoka, Roots of Japan(s): Unearthing the Cultural Matrix of Japan (Tokyo: Ministry
of Economy, Trade and Industry, 2011), 62.
62 Ibid., 62.
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‘a foundation for the re-creation of Japan’s industries and cultures—
through which we will attempt to create a connection between the
country’s origins and future’.63
The result was a paradox. Post-disaster, Cool Japan was an attempt
to embrace globalisation and a desire to rebrand Japanese values as
universal. However, it also constituted an inwardly focused ‘Japanese
only’ nationalism—reiterating the ‘closed’ and supposedly unique
qualities of Japanese national identity and seeking to export them as
a form of global engagement.64 This embrace of internationalisation by
shoring up national identity finds visual form in the 2013 photography
exhibition, Cool Japan! Through Diplomats’ Eyes. Launched in 1998,
the Through Diplomats Eyes’ series of annual exhibitions presents
photographs of Japan taken by international diplomats and their
families. The exhibitions are promoted as a means of fostering ‘cultural
exchange’.65 Each year, a different theme is selected that complements the
Japanese Government’s approach to cultural diplomacy. The 2013 theme
‘Cool Japan!’ was addressed by representatives of Albania, Australia,
Egypt, France, Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Zimbabwe and
the European Union, among others. Selected for the cover of the
catalogue was the contribution by the Australian Embassy in Tokyo’s
first secretary, Ciaran Chestnutt, which was also judged the winner of
the Prince Takamado Memorial Prize. The photograph (see Figure 6.14)
features Chestnutt’s young niece ‘enthralled by a geisha’ while walking
back from Sensō-ji—Tokyo’s oldest and most popular Buddhist temple,
first built in the seventh century. The temple is located in Asakusa, a
principal entertainment district in the Edo era that was badly damaged
by the American firebombing of March 1945, but which has regained
its status as an attraction for both foreigners and Japanese alike, as much
for its modernity as its tradition. Looming over the area is the world’s
tallest tower, the Tokyo Skytree, which opened in 2012, standing well
over 600  m tall on the city’s earthquake-prone ground. Chestnutt’s
photograph captures this meeting of tradition and modernity. Shot from
behind, the photograph focuses on the geisha’s elaborate silk dress and
63 Ibid., 2.
64 Chris Burgess, ‘National Identity and the Transition from Internationalization to
Globalization: “Cool Japan” or “Closed Japan”’, in Languages and Identities in a Transitional Japan:
From Internationalization to Globalization, ed. Ikuko Nakane, Emi Otsuji and William S. Armour
(London: Routledge, 2016), 25.
65 ‘Through Diplomats Eyes’ website, accessed 7 February 2018, www.diplomatseyes.com/
contents.html.
218

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Figure 6.14. Ciaran Chestnutt, My Niece, Enthralled by a Geisha,
Strolling Back from Senso-ji, 2013.
Source: Courtesy of Ciaran Chestnutt.

Pacific Exposures

her decorated upswept hair, which contrast with the little girl’s simple
dress and free-flowing blonde locks. The pair seem to be in conversation,
while the slight blur of their dresses create a sense of movement. The
closed shutters of the souvenir shops on the empty, neon-lit Nakamise
shopping street provide a dramatic stage for this encounter between
ancient Japan, cool, contemporary Japan and the young international
guest who soaks it all up. Thus, Chestnutt’s photograph provides an
evocative mirror in which Japan can enjoy a distilled version of its selfimage reflected back onto itself.
Criticism of Cool Japan has been widespread. The Australian-based
Japanese media and cultural studies scholar Koichi Iwabuchi is
concerned that ‘pop-culture diplomacy goes no further than a one-way
projection and does not seriously engage with cross-border dialogue. The
Japanese case also shows that pop-culture diplomacy hinders meaningful
engagement with internal cultural diversity’.66 Moreover, as a form of
soft power, Cool Japan has had questionable success. Cool Japan may
promote tourism and the consumption of Japanese media cultures, but
there is no evidence that this translates into foreign policy benefits.67
Steven Green looks at a BBC World Service Poll that measures global
attitudes towards other nations. He points to China, where 31 per cent
of people view Japan in mainly negative terms and only 58 per cent
view it in mainly positive terms. A Pew Research Centre survey in
2013 produced even more stark results, with 90 per cent of Chinese
having ‘unfavourable’ feelings towards Japan and just 4 per cent feeling
‘favourable’.68 These results suggest that it is relatively easy for people to
separate their consumption of Japanese pop culture from perceptions
of the country’s historical military misdemeanours, and that Japanese
popular culture does not necessarily make foreigners more amenable to
Japan itself.

66 Koichi Iwabuchi, ‘Pop-Culture Diplomacy in Japan: Soft Power, Nation Branding and the
Question of “International Cultural Exchange”’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 21, no. 4
(2015): 419.
67 Burgess, ‘National Identity and the Transition from Internationalization to Globalization’,
26; Yasushi Watanabe, Bunka to Gaikō: Paburikku Dipuromashii No Jidai (Culture and Diplomacy:
The Age of Public Diplomacy) (Tokyo: Chukōshinso, 2011), 89; Christopher Graves, ‘Cool Is Not
Enough’, in Reimagining Japan: The Quest for a Future That Works, ed. Clay Chandler, Heang Chhor
and Brian Salsberg (San Francisco: VIZ Media, 2011), 413.
68 Green, ‘The Soft Power of Cool’, 64–65.
220

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

The neglect of the more challenging aspects of Japan’s international
history is a recurring theme in the critical commentary. Commenting
on the use of the Sanrio character Hello Kitty as Japan’s Ambassador of
Tourism to Taiwan, China and Korea in 2008, Christine Yano argued
that the export of kawaii and cool helped to paper over international
disputes about territory and history:
The positioning of Hello Kitty as one face of Japan represents the power
of the would-be child, at once appealing, seemingly benign, and ever in
need of care and nurturance. Kawaii diplomacy builds upon affect and
nostalgia, rather than on critical thinking. And in doing so throws a soft
pink blanket upon the razor-sharp edges of history.69

Australian journalist and Kwansei Gakuin University media studies
teacher Sally McLaren expressed deep concern about the post-disaster
manifestation of Cool Japan, noting that Japan is simultaneously ‘sliding
backwards into a nationalistic cocoon and preparing to switch the
nuclear power stations back on. It’s irradiated to an unknown degree,
increasingly chauvinistic and, slowly but surely, re-militarising’.70
To Burgess, Japan’s reluctance to embrace globalisation and its inward
focus risks ultimately limiting the influence it hopes to achieve through
soft power diplomacy.71
Despite these concerns, the Australia–Japan bilateral relationship
remains strong and Australians generally have favourable attitudes to
Japan. A 2017 Lowy Institute Poll found that 86 per cent of Australians
trust Japan ‘to act responsibly in the world’. This result is second only
to trust held in the United Kingdom (90 per cent) and was equal to
Australians’ trust in Germany.72 Japan remains Australia’s second
largest foreign investor, and the trade and investment partnership has
been further reinforced by the Japan–Australia Economic Partnership
Agreement, which began operating in 2015. Yet, questions over the
potential cultural impact of Japan’s approach to cultural diplomacy
remain. Iwabuchi argued that Cool Japan’s homogenisation of culture
and movement away from recognising true cultural diversity brings
69 Christine Yano, ‘Hello Kitty and Japan’s Kawaii Diplomacy’, East Asia Forum, 10 October
2015, www.eastasiaforum.org/2015/10/10/hello-kitty-and-japans-kawaii-diplomacy/.
70 Sally McLaren, ‘Made in Cool Japan: Delights and Disasters’, Griffith Review, no. 49 (2015):
165.
71 Burgess, ‘National Identity and the Transition from Internationalization to Globalization’,
17–18.
72 ‘2017 Lowy Institute Poll’, 21 June 2017, accessed 7 March 2018, www.lowyinstitute.org/
publications/2017-lowy-institute-poll.
221

Pacific Exposures

to mind Edward Said’s observation that the constructions of cultures
in dualistic, overly simplistic terms amounts to a form of symbolic
violence.73 If pop cultural diplomacy is to work, insisted Iwabuchi, it
should advance transnational connections in a manner that promotes
‘self-reflexive international conversation’ around challenging historical
issues and enhances ‘intercultural understanding of cultural diversity’.74
Working beyond the remit of official Cool Japan programs, the work
of independent Australian photographers in Japan indirectly helps
to  further these goals. Meg Hewitt’s body of work Tokyo is Yours
(2015–17) marks her response to a prevailing sense of disquiet in postdisaster Japan. The title comes from a graffiti tag that has appeared
throughout Tokyo in recent years declaring in English ‘Tokyo is Yours’.
Reflecting the openness of Hewitt’s work, this phrase has at least two
possible interpretations—part gift to Tokyo’s inhabitants, part confidant
reclamation of the city after the disaster. Tokyo is Yours is the product of
eight short-term trips to Japan between 2015 and 2017. Spending up to
12 hours a day walking through Tokyo, this Sydney-based photographer
pictured small details that captured her attention and the people that she
met. Like Sleeth and Häggblom, Hewitt speaks of the sense of freedom
and creativity that can come from language barriers:
I suppose being in a country like Japan—where I don’t understand most
of the language—leads me to question things on a more basic level.
Humanity plays out in front of me, and I seek meaning separate from
words. I like to pick up the manga at the corner store and flick through,
interpreting the story from the pictures alone.75

Ironically, Hewitt’s language limitations help her to explore the city
freely, to take it in without distraction and to interpret what she sees as
symbols, archetypes, metaphors and potential stories.76 ‘When making
the work, I looked for fantasy, the absurd and metaphor in reality.
Through the photographs, I explore the layers between things, as well as
memories, human connection, fear and escapism.’77

73 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; repr., New York: Vintage, 1994), 204.
74 Iwabuchi, ‘Pop-Culture Diplomacy in Japan’, 429–30.
75 Meg Hewitt, ‘Tokyo Is Yours: Seeking Sense through Street Photography’, Lens Culture, 2017,
accessed 25 January 2018, www.lensculture.com/articles/meg-hewitt-tokyo-is-yours-seeking-sensethrough-street-photography.
76 Meg Hewitt, interview with Melissa Miles, 24 January 2018; Meg Hewitt, ‘Tokyo Is Yours’.
77 Meg Hewitt, ‘Tokyo is Yours’, Lens Culture, 2016, accessed 25 January 2018, www.lensculture.
com/articles/meg-hewitt-tokyo-is-yours.
222

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Figure 6.15. Meg Hewitt, Underwater Observatory, Katsuura,
from Tokyo is Yours, 2016.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 6.16. Meg Hewitt, Tokyo is Yours, 2015–17.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

223

Pacific Exposures

From the thousands of black and white photographs that Hewitt took,
she selected 86 for publication in her photobook Tokyo is Yours (2017).
One photograph focuses on a little girl looking up towards a scuba
diver who cleans a window at the aging Katsuura Undersea Observatory
(see Figure 6.15), while another shows a collection of worn concrete
cranes found at the end of a street near an abandoned house. Many
of the photographs are tightly framed so their original context is not
apparent, allowing them to generate new meaning in relation to the
other images. By often taking photographs at night with a flash, Hewitt
uses light to isolate her subjects and absorb extraneous details into the
black background. The resultant contrast creates a gritty, noir effect far
removed from the highly polished and finished appearance of Sleeth’s
Marunouchi photograph. Paths, ladders, stairs and walkways leading
to destinations unknown, animals caged in a zoo, a mass of electricity
pylons and eerie suburban streets at night are interspersed with tranquil
landscapes and images of young love (see Figure 6.16). Sequenced and
layered in the pages of the book—to be read with the spine on the left by
English-speaking audiences or from the opposite direction by Japanese
audiences—these photographs cumulatively create a sense of spatial and
psychological compression and an underlying desire for escape.
The meltdown at the deceptively distant Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
power plant made Tokyo’s vulnerability starkly apparent. Reflecting
that Japan had come within a ‘paper-thin margin’ of a nuclear disaster,
the former Prime Minister Naoto Kan remarked: ‘From a very early
stage I had a very high concern for Tokyo. I was forming ideas for a
Tokyo evacuation plan in my head’.78 Hewitt’s book alludes to this
narrowly averted catastrophe and the impossibility of escape. A
photograph of a building in which a maze of cracks has been crudely
patched acknowledges this sense of danger quite directly. By pairing this
photograph with one of a bar owner squeezing through the impossibly
small doorway of her establishment, Hewitt emphasises the psychological
dimension of the desire for escape. Shot from behind, only the woman’s
back, shoulder and half of one leg and arm are visible, as though she
is disappearing into another world. As well as heightening narrative
intensity, the close physical proximity between Hewitt’s lens and her
subjects creates a sense of intimacy. At times, her connection with her

78 Andrew Gilligan, ‘Fukushima: Tokyo Was on the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Admits
Former Prime Minister’, Telegraph, 4 March 2016.
224

6. Cross-Cultural (Mis)understandings

Figure 6.17. Meg Hewitt, Tokyo is Yours, installation view, Flinders Street Gallery,
Surry Hills 2017.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

subjects is clearly evident, as in the man who held up each of his eight
cats to her camera, one after the other. It is also apparent in the care that
she takes when shooting. This emphasis upon personal connection may
be informed by Hewitt’s admiration for the work of Masahisa Fukase,
known for his deeply personal photographs of love and loss.79 Whereas
this Japanese photographer’s focus was on his wife and family, Hewitt’s
abiding relationship is with Tokyo, its inhabitants and its post-2011
tensions.
When exhibiting these photographs, Hewitt prints them at different scales
and installs them in a way that hints at other open-ended narratives—
grouping, overlaying or displacing photographs to imply the interaction
of different characters, objects, scenarios and places, and to suggest
different atmospheres or feelings (see Figure 6.17).80 These strategies
have resonated with international audiences and in Australia. Hewitt
exhibited these photographs as part of the fringe Voies Off program run
in parallel to Les Rencontres d’Arles in France (2017), Sydney (2017),
Canberra (2016) and regional Victoria at the Ballarat International Foto
Biennale Fringe (2017), and her work has been covered in the British
79 Meg Hewitt, interview with Melissa Miles, 24 January 2018.
80 Ibid.
225

Pacific Exposures

Journal of Photography.81 Significantly, it has also generated interest
in Japan. As well as being exhibited at Place M photography gallery
in Tokyo, in 2018 it was shown in the Kodoji Photographer’s Bar in
the legendary Shinjuku precinct the Golden Gai, a hub for Japanese
photographers like Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki since the
1960s, and a site that rarely shows the work of non-Japanese. That
Hewitt has attracted interest in Japan and at home is not coincidental.
To be meaningful cross-culturally, photographs need to transcend the
reductive binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Hewitt’s work is open, allusive and
complex; she examines the emotions and desires that connect human
beings and keenly observes the people and places in front of her.
Hewitt and the other independent photographers discussed here reject
an export model of cultural relations; they do not attempt to project
carefully crafted images of their own culture to foreigners in an effort to
engender sympathy or favour. Nor do they aspire to enlighten audiences
back home by presenting a supposedly ‘accurate’ view of the ever-elusive
‘other’. These contemporary interpretations of one culture by another
are compelling because they create a new representational language
that draws attention to diverse perspectives and to new possibilities for
forging cross-cultural connections.

81 Susanna D’Aliesio, ‘Arles 2017: Tokyo Is Yours by Meg Hewitt’, British Journal of Photography,
6 July 2017, www.bjp-online.com/2017/07/photobook-tokyo-is-yours-by-meg-hewitt/​#close​Contact​
FormCust00.n%20.
226

7
CONCLUSION:
REVISING ‘US AND THEM’
‘Life does not mean that same thing to them and us … What we feel
is the difference, the gulf, the distance between us and them.’1 This
response to Japan’s periodic but insistent criticism of the Immigration
Restriction Act was printed in 1919 in Brisbane’s evening newspaper
the Telegraph. Some habits of mind die hard. Over the decades of
Australia’s evolving relationship with Japan since the Meiji period, it
seems that photographers have often been intent on inscribing—and
reinscribing—this entrenched sense of difference and distance. Yet, as
this work has sought to reveal, the vast body of snapshots, lanternslides,
art, news, military and governmental photographs through which
Australian impressions of Japan have been imaged, conveys a diversity of
perspectives, as well as conflicting and sometimes transgressive desires,
anxieties and ambitions.
Now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the old simplistic
dichotomy of ‘us and them’—and the ideology that supports and
perpetuates it—is both unproductive and redundant. Contemporary
currents of the trans-Pacific photographic encounter lead to more
fluid and sceptical modes of representation. In this context, it is worth
noting the work of Mayu Kanamori, a Japanese photographer, poet
and playwright long resident in Australia. Tokyo-born and Sydneybased, Kanamori’s transnational photographic dialogue involves
interrogating her own place in histories of the Japanese people in
Australia and questioning persistent clichés. Kanamori has completed
several projects on these subjects since she emigrated in 1981, including
1

‘Japan’s Protest against Race Prejudice’, Telegraph, 24 March 1919, 6.
227

Figure 7.1. Mayu Kanamori, Untitled from You’ve Mistaken Me for a Butterfly,
2017–18. © Mayu Kanamori 2017.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 7.2. Mayu Kanamori, Untitled from You’ve Mistaken Me for a Butterfly,
2017–18. © Mayu Kanamori 2017.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

7. Conclusion

her photojournalism in the mid‑1990s and her play about a Broome
photographer Yasukichi Murakami—Through a Distant Lens (2014).
Photographs feature prominently in Kanamori’s performance work
You’ve Mistaken Me for a Butterfly (2017) (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2).
As its title suggests, You’ve Mistaken Me for a Butterfly examines Western
clichés of Japanese femininity, perhaps the most predominant of all the
delimiting stereotypes that have saddled the country over the years.
Taken in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia,
Kanamori’s photographs are a long way from the images of eye-catching,
butterfly-like geisha that have long captivated Anglo-Australians. There is
a sense of melancholy in the dilapidated interiors, their browned peeling
wallpaper and the red dirt paths marked with footprints of someone no
longer present. A small brown moth flutters in one interior window—
where it is likely to be mistaken by many viewers for a butterfly—while
rusted industrial equipment stands idle outside. These photographs are
fragments of a narrative that cannot quite be grasped. Kanamori places
herself within this narrative as both its subject and author, photographing
her reflection in a mirror in the old building with her camera held firmly
in her hands.
The spoken word component of Kanamori’s performance describes how
she was led to the Western Australia goldfields by the story of a young
woman named Okin.2 In the 1890s, Okin lived in the town of Malcolm,
30 km north of a gold mine named Butterfly. There are no buildings left
in Malcolm today, so Kanamori visualises her response to Okin’s story
elsewhere in the area. These goldfields became home to many Japanese
in this period. Where camps and towns were established, prostitutes
soon followed, working in brothels that frequently operated under the
guise of laundries or boarding houses.3 Frequently known as karayukisan (literally ‘those who go to China’), these travelling women were often
poor and illiterate daughters of farmers and rural labourers. Many were
tricked or kidnapped into prostitution and forced to work for extended
periods to pay off the ‘debts’ incurred from their journey and board.
Some karayuki-san saved their earnings, later using the funds to launch
their own businesses, and several established lasting relationships with
2 Mayu Kanamori and Vera Mackie, ‘You’ve Mistaken Me for a Butterfly’, Japanese Studies 37,
no. 3 (2017): 387–94.
3 It has been argued that most of the Japanese women counted in the 1901 Australian census
worked as prostitutes. See Yuriko Nagata, ‘Gendering Australia-Japan Relations: Prostitutes and the
Japanese Diaspora in Australia’, Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 11 (March 2003).
229

Pacific Exposures

local businessmen. While the presence of these Japanese women in
Australia has attracted the attention of several historians, very little is
known about them as individuals with their own experiences, thoughts
and perceptions.4
Kanamori first came across Okin in the archive of the eminent historian
of Australian–Japanese relations, D.C.S. Sissons. Handwritten notes
described Okin as the victim of a violent crime.5 In July 1898, three
men forced themselves into a house where Okin was staying. Two of
them raped her while the third stood guard. A Japanese man named
Enaba who lived with Okin tried unsuccessfully to help her, so he ran
to fetch the local police constable who was able to apprehend, arrest and
charge the men. At the subsequent trial, Okin’s testimony that she was
a laundress was challenged by the defence, who sought to establish that
she was a prostitute and her home was a brothel. The accused asserted
that they were paying customers of the brothel and that a dispute erupted
about money. It was her word against theirs. Kanamori’s performance
quotes the crown solicitor’s request to the jury in which he argued for
Okin’s right to justice:
It is of great importance in all countries, especially in a country like this,
where women were practically alone in outlying, far away parts, that the
chastity of women be cherished and protected in the highest degree. No
matter what their colour, race, creed or reputation.6

The jury could not agree initially, but the men were ultimately
acquitted. Yet, Kanamori reminds us that fundamental questions remain
unanswered about Okin. Was she a laundress or was she lying? Was
Enaba her pimp or saviour?
These mysteries are amplified by the persistence of stereotypes
surrounding Japanese women in foreign countries. Alison Broinowski
has used the term the ‘butterfly phenomenon’ to describe the Orientalist
rendering of Japanese women (and by extension Japan itself ) as seductive

4 May Albertus Bain, Full Fathom Five (Perth: Artlook Books, 1982), 91; D.C.S. Sissons,
‘Karayuki-San: Japanese Prostitutes in Australia, 1887–1916—II’, Historical Studies 17, no. 69
(1977): 474–88; Nagata, ‘Gendering Australia-Japan Relations’. For an early Japanese account
of karayuki-san see Morisaki Kazue, Karayuki-San (Tōkyō: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1976).
5 Papers of D.C.S. Sissons, 1950–2006, National Library of Australia, MS 3092.
6 Performance—Post Memory: You’ve Mistaken Me for a Butterfly (the Second Instalment) (Crawley,
Western Australia: Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Western Australia, 25 September
2017).
230

7. Conclusion

but fragile and subject to the demands of the West.7 The term, of course,
is derived from Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly (1904), which is about
an impoverished 15-year-old Japanese girl who marries an American
naval officer and eventually commits suicide after being abandoned by
him and being forced to give up her child. The gender politics of Madame
Butterfly and its geo-cultural overtones have been heavily critiqued in
recent years. ‘In Western eyes’, Dorinne Kondo argued:
Japanese women are meant to sacrifice, and Butterfly sacrifices her
‘husband’, her religion, her people, her son, and ultimately her very life
… the predictable happens: West wins over East, Man over Woman,
White over Asian.8

Kanamori is aware that this dualistic mode of critique is problematic
because it reinforces the position of Japanese women as victims—‘they’
remain passive and silent while ‘we’ assert scholarly authority. The ways
that such stereotypes affected the experiences of actual Japanese women
remain obscured, as do the nuances and variability of representations of
Japanese women over time. This history and its critique left Kanamori
in a bind—how could she escape the enduring logic of ‘us’ and ‘them’?
In the end, Kanamori resisted narrating yet another story about the rescue
of a vulnerable, victimised butterfly by the Australian policeman or,
indeed, enacting a subsequent rescue of Okin from historical obscurity.
Her open-ended narratives and photographs of empty buildings reflect
her resistance to easy answers, while her use of the first person in the
title You’ve Mistaken Me for a Butterfly implies the lingering legacy of
the hegemony of foreign representations of the Japanese on her own
experience and identity.
Central to Kanamori’s work, and to this book more broadly, is the
question, ‘what do photographs do?’ Photographs are understood not
simply as representations of things that exist independently in the
‘real’ world. They are also material objects, a means of communication,
a  way of constructing meaning and disseminating ideas both locally
and internationally. The photographs discussed in these pages highlight
that, while much of the way that nations relate to one another happens
at a distance among strangers, these international relationships also
7 Alison Broinowski, ‘The Butterfly Phenomenon’, The Journal of the Asian Arts Society of Australia
1, no. 3 (1992): 10.
8 Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theatre (New York and London:
Routledge, 1997), 34–35.
231

Pacific Exposures

affect familial and personal connections closer to home. Whether in
government documents, commercial environments, family albums, or
newspapers and galleries, photographs have been used to both boost
official international relations and cement interpersonal bonds.
Moreover, these public and private photographic relationships often sit in
conflict. In Australia, Japan has been variously positioned as an innocent
child, potential invader, refined artist, despised enemy, beneficial trading
partner and, finally (and albeit ambivalently), good friend and partner.
Friendships and productive working relationships can flourish during
periods of diplomatic dispute and political suspicion, just as clichés
about racial difference may be used to express professional or personal
admiration. As Kanamori suggests in her work, limiting critical analysis
to cultural stereotypes risks reinforcing the racism that they articulate
and perpetuate. This is especially important in today’s Australia, where
some are lamenting the impending loss of a national homogeneity that
was always illusory. Australian–Japanese photographic relations highlight
how national identities and histories are the products of encounters with
foreign nations, individuals and cultures, rather than simply inwardly
focused myths of imagined isolation and particularity. Understanding
the significance of those encounters demands sensitivity to patterns
of change and continuity in intercultural relations; it involves looking
at and around the apparent similarities in images and their subjects—
beyond that which can be read at a glance—to consider the changing
role that photographs and photographic practices play in political,
cultural and social life.
This interpretive task also recognises how the history of the Australia–
Japan relationship, including but not limited to its visual traditions,
continues to affect how intercultural relations are negotiated, formed and
understood today. Although several contemporary artists who respond
to this history are not interested in the popular clichés of picturesque
Japan that have long pervaded photographic representations of the
country, they do acknowledge how this history of representation shapes
perception. Kanamori’s self-reflexive approach considers the impact
of this history on her own practice and sense of place in Australia,
while Häggblom, Köller, Sleeth and Hewitt examine how stereotypes
of Japanese difference have an impact on some very challenging issues
such as suicide, natural disaster and globalising economies. These crosscultural projects are driven by tension and complexity—by the desire
to ask questions of the past and present rather than to propose neat
232

7. Conclusion

resolutions. ‘Us’ and ‘them’ ultimately become impossible categories in
this work, which also problematises the camera’s power to seemingly
separate the past from the present.
As the Australia–Japan relationship continues to evolve in both AsiaPacific and global contexts, photographs and photographic practices
will keep playing a significant role in the ‘complex cultural flows and
connections’ that bind the two nations.9 Maintaining a respectful,
inclusive partnership involves balancing a range of perspectives and
interests, and photography will remain a potent, if problematic, register
of those interests. ‘Picturing’ Japan was always a selective and contingent
endeavour; Japan itself has always in a sense remained out of view, close
by but somewhere else. That Australians seem increasingly relaxed in
this knowledge suggests a kind of ironic representational breakthrough.
It reflects, further, a more assured view of the way they see the world
itself and their own place in it.

9 Koichi Iwabuchi, ‘Pop-Culture Diplomacy in Japan: Soft Power, Nation Branding and the
Question of “International Cultural Exchange”’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 21, no. 4
(2015): 430.
233

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