A STRANGE ASPECT aspect of life back in Canberra was that for a while at least, we found ourselves looking at Australia almost through Japanese eyes. It seems that his is not an isolated phenomenon. A journalist (later Japanese university president) Gregory Clark, who had spent several years reporting from Tokyo, returned to Australia and wrote a piece in The Australian describing entering a bank in Sydney on his return. There he witnessed a customer who was carrying a cat chatting about the cat with the bank clerk who was cashing her cheque for him. He reacted to this with astonishment, realising that such a scene could never take place in Japan, where formality in a client-customer relationship would almost always prevail.

Curiously, I had a not dissimilar experience many years later, after flying from Japan to the UK. I had been in Japan for several months, and this was a two-day visit to Oxford, then quickly back to Tokyo. I had written several letters, and had them in Japanese envelopes, which in those days lacked the means to close them securely. I went to the main Oxford Post Office, and asked whether they had any gum with which to secure the envelopes. The clerk behind the counter replied in a plummy but deadpan voice, ‘Unfortunately not.’ It may seem strange to a British reader, but that reply seemed to me extraordinarily rude, and was unimaginable to me in a Japanese context.

Our reactions on returning to Canberra after fifteen months in Japan probably involved several components: we were going from late spring straight into late autumn. We were moving from a teeming, exciting Japanese city into Australia's ‘bush capital’. We were exchanging a traditional Japanese house in a back street for an unattractive university flat facing onto a main road. But over the period we had stayed in Japan, and being young and adventurous perhaps, something of the ethos of Japan had seeped into us, and we missed it.

But the phase passed fairly quickly, as we both had a great deal to do right from the start of our return. In my case, I was indebted to my supervisor for coercing me into drafting a substantial monthly paper or (in later months) a draft chapter.