Views on Australia

Many Japanese books published in the years leading up to 1942 provide a glimpse of how Japan viewed Australia in the critical period leading up to the opening of war in the Pacific. Several from the pre-war period provide an overview of Australian society: its industry, economy, agriculture and the like, with the aim of developing and strengthening Australia as a trading partner. After 1936, when Australia instituted a trade diversion policy, which favoured British over Japanese markets for Australian wool, several works began to be more critical of what they perceived to be a growing anti-Japanese sentiment in Australia. Central to this was criticism of the so-called White Australia Policy. For example, a work published in 1939 entitled Present Day Australia (Saikin no Gōshū), portrayed Australia as maintaining childish ideas concerning Japan, desperate to keep out the ‘coloured man’, and locked into believing the ‘crazy idea’ that Japan was bent on a southward advance.

After the start of war in the Pacific, there was an increase in the number of books published in Japan related to Australia, with a peak during 1942. Some were free of wartime ideology, such as an anthropological account of Australian Indigenous peoples or an economic study of the sugar industry. Others were published with the aim to support Japan’s war effort, and included studies of Australian transport and communications infrastructure, agriculture, mineral wealth, harbours and so on. Some of these books argued for the inclusion of Australia in the Greater East-Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, a proposed pan-Asian economic bloc led by Japan, even though the literature of other Japanese nationalists generally did not include Australia in the scope of regional Asian cooperation.