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Literature of Australia in Japan and Singapore

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Literature of Australia in Japan and Singapore University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive) Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 2011 Contesting civilizations: Literature of Australia in Japan and Singapore Alison E. Broinowski University of Wollongong, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Broinowski, Alison E., Contesting civilizations: Literature of Australia in Japan and Singapore 2011. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/1869 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Contesting Civilizations: Literature of Australia in Japan and Singapore ALISON BROINOWSKI University of Wollongong USTRALIA AND JapaN EMERGED SIMULTANEOUSLY AS most recent group of narratives, from the late 1960s to the modernizing states in a shared region, and Singapore present, contestation over civilization persists, and is much Ajoined them in the 1960s. Interaction between more evident in writing by men than by women.4 Australia and Japan is more than 150 years old, while its Australia/Singapore counterpart is much more recent. But NARRATIVES OF WOMEN IN JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA mutual perceptions appear in both cases to be characterized by concerns about cultural superiority or inferiority, and by A pamphlet issued to the British Commonwealth Occupation complex contests over the deference due to civilizations. Forces (BCOF) in Japan asserted, “It has been said that Here, I will trace the workings of civilizational contestation Japan is inhabited by two races, the men and the women”.5 in Australian, Japanese and Singaporean fiction.1 Certainly responses in fiction to war, occupation, and their consequences were markedly different between genders. In FICTION OF AUSTRALIA AND JAPAN her novels about Japanese and Americans in the occupation period (Someone will conquer them, 1962, With kisses on both An indication of the asymmetry—or of the hierarchical cheeks, 1981) Elizabeth Kata, an Australian married to a distance—between these two cultures can be found in the Japanese pianist, used her virtual house arrest in Karuizawa to quantity of narratives Japanese and Australians have produced create a varied cast of characters. Feeling more Japanese than about each other. I calculate that there are about 120 works Australian, she showed in her fiction none of the civilizational of fiction from Australia and some 30 from Japan that involve contestation common among male writers of the period in the other: a rather small output over 150 years.2 The common Australia and Japan. Kata then turned to history and the themes taken up in Australia/Japan narratives amount to a impact of Westernization with Kagami (Mirror 1992), a saga dozen or less, among which racial difference, or civilizational of her distinguished Japanese family, which may be the first contestation, is a constant presence. 3 The themes are few, novel by an Australian in which the characters are exclusively and surprisingly similar in both societies. Arranged in a rough Japanese.6 Another historical novel, Nancy Corbett’s Floating chronology, they include: (1986), moves between the eighteenth century Yoshiwara district and the pleasure quarters of twentieth century Kings • early travelers’ tales and invasion fiction, characterized Cross. Corbett, a Canadian who wrote in Australia, merges by ignorance and exoticism, Hanatsuma the geisha and Hannah the dancer into one • encounters between men and women in novels and Janus-faced woman. Since 1993, British-born Australian short fiction, that most often end unhappily, author Lian Hearn has immersed herself in Japanese language • war, captivity, internment, and occupation, in novels and history and, with nine novels whose characters are all and memoirs, that evolve over time from reflecting Japanese, has established herself as Kata’s successor. enmity to expressing fellow-feeling, and In the 1980s, British-born Ann Nakano was briefly • the postwar and contemporary experience of Japanese married in Japan and worked there as a journalist before and Australians in each other’s cultures. moving to Australia. Her novel (Bit Parts 1985) has none of the historical awareness of Kata and Corbett. Instead, The third theme, the Pacific war and its consequences, her troubled protagonist inhabits the gaijin enclaves of attracted far more writers than all the others, mainly male. inner Tokyo, devoid of values or constraints. In this “social It continued to do so into the 1980s in fiction by Japanese vacuum” 7 another woman, the Australian protagonist of men (with prisoner of war novels by Asada 1967, Inoue Geraldine Halls’ Talking to Strangers (1982), finds Tokyo 1977, Nagase 1990, and Nakano 1984) and for even longer a site of liberation when a few weeks without her husband in Australian war fiction (for example Keneally 1980, 2007; offer novel experiences and opportunities for affairs (all with Malouf 1990). Since then, although the volume of Australia/ gaijin). Her search for personal meaning is more important Japan fiction has declined somewhat in both countries, in the ANTIPODES v in the story than the society in which she seeks it: Japan felt lonely.” (122) She and her husband go there for a second itself is mere wallpaper. Not so for Australian-born Dianne honeymoon, but eventually return to their superior culture in Highbridge (her nom de plume is a translation of her husband’s Japan. Encountering Australia in real life was more climactic name, Takahashi), for whom Japan has been home since the for Honda Chika, a Tokyo barmaid who stoically served a ten- 1980s. Her second novel, In the Empire of Dreams (1999), year jail term in Melbourne for drug importation. In Japan, draws together some of her observations of Japanese society three television documentaries about these events alleged her from her articles and short fiction. Through a group of foreign human rights had been violated in Melbourne. In 2004–2005 women friends, she observes the foreigners’ restricted circle an ABC radio feature, and a documentary performance, and the one-dimensional view of Japan later exemplified on Chika, by Western Australian resident Kanemori Mayu, were film inLost in Translation (Sofia Coppola 2003). based on her experience. In four later novels, Australian women all accept older Japanese men as their cultural mentors. In Caroline Shaw’s NARRATIVES OF MEN IN JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA Cat Catcher (1999) and Eye to Eye (2000), the implied civilizational hierarchy, with Japan on top, inculcated by If one Australian author exemplifies civilizational contestation a psychiatrist/Zen instructor, Dr. Sakuno, is unquestioned it is Hal Porter. His early fiction of Japan under occupation, by her investigator Lenny. Another authority figure, Mr. which precedes the period of this survey, reflects his nostalgic Sakamoto, a researcher of early telephony, is similarly fascination with traditional Japan and his partiality to young accepted in Gail Jones’ Dreams of Speaking (2006) by Alice, Japanese men. As soldiers in the BCOF or teachers, as Porter who is in Paris investigating communications technology. was, many of his Australian males are authority figures. But Hilda, the protagonist in Paddy O’Reilly’s The Factory (2005), in his later narratives of Japan (The Professor 1965, Mr. is respectful towards and somewhat afraid of the director of a Butterfry 1970) gullible Australians are all on the losing Japanese arts commune she is researching. She ends up losing side in marriage, business, and academia in the face of the their contest, disappointed in love with a commune member, newly confident Japanese. In The Actors (1968) he deplored and in effect a captive of the system. their betrayal of their culture, but castigated them too for Japanese women’s fiction of Australia falls into a comparable challenging his notion of Western civilizational superiority.9 pattern—history, family, and being a foreign visitor—but the A decade later, Brian Castro skillfully evoked the exploits civilizational hierarchy it implies is different. The historical in wartime Tokyo and Shanghai of the famous German spy interface between Japanese and Australians has occupied and Soviet double agent, Richard Sorge, in Stepper (1997), Yokohama-based Endō Masako, who wrote several accounts a novel in which no Australian appears. The Australians of the early interchange with Australia. In fiction, she was in Roger Pulvers’ fiction The( Death of Urashima Taro 1981, preceded by Yamamoto Michiko, who had lived in Darwin and General Yamashita’s Treasure in Japanese 1986, in English from 1969 to 1972. Her four stories of lonely Japanese wives 1994) are distinguished by their gaucheness in dealing with in northern Australia were published in Japanese in 1972 as Japanese. In the latter novel, his Japanese protagonist exacts Betei san no niwa (Betty’s Garden 1983). In the title story, which double revenge from two former military men, a Japanese won the Akitagawa prize, the protagonist “Betty” is isolated war-profiteer and an Australian “expert” on Japanese culture. for twenty years among red-faced, casual, simple Australians, Queensland academic David Myers visited Japan several and Aborigines whom she sees as feckless. In contrast to Kata times in the 1990s, and produced tales of his experiences that and Highbridge, “Betty” feels she is her husband’s captive in
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