BRIDGING AUSTRALIA AND JAPAN VOLUME 1 THE WRITINGS OF DAVID SISSONS, HISTORIAN AND POLITICAL SCIENTIST BRIDGING AUSTRALIA AND JAPAN VOLUME 1 THE WRITINGS OF DAVID SISSONS, HISTORIAN AND POLITICAL SCIENTIST EDITED BY ARTHUR STOCKWIN AND KEIKO TAMURA ASIAN STUDIES SERIES MONOGRAPH 8 Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at press.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Creator: Sissons, D. C. S. (David Carlisle Stanley), 1925-2006, author. Title: Bridging Australia and Japan : the writings of David Sissons, historian and political scientist Volume 1 / J. A. A. Stockwin, Keiko Tamura, editors. ISBN: 9781760460860 (paperback) 9781760460877 (ebook) Series: Asian studies series; 8. Subjects: Sissons, D. C. S. (David Carlisle Stanley), 1925-2006. Emigration and immigration. International trade. Australia--Relations--Japan--History. Japan--Relations--Australia--History. Other Creators/Contributors: Stockwin, J. A. A. (James Arthur Ainscow), 1935- editor. Tamura, Keiko, 1955- editor. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Cover design and layout by ANU Press This edition © 2016 ANU Press Contents Acknowledgements . vii Introduction . 1 Arthur Stockwin 1 . Reflections and engagements . 5 David Sissons and I . 5 Fukui Haruhiro My reminiscences of David Sissons . 9 Okudaira Yasuhiro David Sissons, my doctoral supervisor and mentor . 16 Arthur Stockwin David Sissons and Shiba Ryōtarō . 25 Watanabe Akio David Sissons, his methods of supervision and the adventures of one of his students: A memoir of the days when the world was wide . 28 John Welfield 2 . Australian–Japanese relations: The first phase 1859–1891 . 41 3 . The Lady Rowena and the Eamont: The 19th century . 87 4 . The Japanese in the Australian pearling industry . 97 5 . Japanese in the Northern Territory, 1884–1902 . 119 6 . Karayuki-san: Japanese prostitutes in Australia, 1887–1916 (I & II) . 171 7 . Immigration in Australian–Japanese relations, 1871–1971 . 209 8 . An immigrant family . 231 9 . Private diplomacy in the 1936 trade dispute with Japan . 247 10. Manchester v. Japan: The imperial background of the Australian trade diversion dispute with Japan, 1936 . 267 11 . Correspondence on the trade diversion episode . 293 12 . Japan and the Australian wool industry, 1868–1936 . 311 13 . James Murdoch (1856–1921): Historian, teacher and much else besides . 319 Acknowledgements This is the first of two volumes of the work of David Sissons, historian of relations between Australia and Japan. The second volume is in preparation and will cover his writings on the War in the Pacific and Australian war crimes trials on south Pacific islands, for some of which he interpreted. In preparing these two volumes devoted to the work of David Sissons, we are above all indebted to David’s widow Bronwen, who has supported this project from the outset and has been an invaluable source of information about David, and insights into his career, his passions and concerns, as well as his personality and temperament. We are also grateful to their son, Hilary, who helped with access to relevant computer files; and their daughters, Meredith and Miranda, for their understanding and support for this project. We thank Dr Pam Oliver, who gave us valuable advice at an early stage of this project and Drs Yuriko Nagata and Lorna Kaino for their comments and encouragement. We are grateful to Dr Craig Reynolds for his enthusiasm about making David’s work on Australia–Japan relations more widely known, and to the staff at ANU Press for their hard work in the production process. David’s important work on cryptography was published by ANU Press in 2013 as Breaking Japanese Diplomatic Codes: David Sissons and D Special Section during the Second World War (Desmond Ball and Keiko Tamura, eds). That volume may be considered in a sense an integral part of our attempt to make David’s historical and political research more generally available. We have profited from the insights given in conversations with Professor Desmond Ball concerning the broader aspects of David’s concern with relations between Japan and Australia, especially relating to the tragic period of the relationship that ended in 1945. Sadly Professor Ball died after a long illness on 12 October 2016 at the age of 69. We also wish to acknowledge the kindness of David’s former doctoral students, Professors Haruhiko Fukui, Akio Watanabe and John Welfield, and his great friend the late Professor Yasuhiro Okudaira, in writing of their memories of him. We are grateful to Dr Miyume Tanji for providing research assistance in the shape of photographing a portion of the documents in the 60 boxes of materials that David placed in the National Library of Australia. These are items that we selected for inclusion in this book. Support and help provided by the National Library staff vii BRIDgINg AuSTRAlIA AND Japan who knew David, including Ms Mary Gosling, Ms Amelia McKenzie, Ms Karen Johnson and Ms Mayumi Shinozaki, are greatly appreciated. We should like also to thank Peter and Margaret Janssens for their friendship and hospitality to Arthur Stockwin during his several stays in Canberra working on this project. We are grateful for reprint permissions that were generously granted to us, and we thank the State Library of Queensland, the State Library of South Australia, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan editorial board, and the publishers Taylor & Francis and Wiley. We also acknowledge the work of digitising the mostly pre-digital (and, in some cases, hard to read) typescripts provided by Sanarosu and high-quality scanning work of the National Library’s Copy Direct section and the ANU University Printing Service. We would like to acknowledge and thank the ANU Publication Subsidy Committee for a grant to assist towards the copyediting, so ably done by Ms Justine Molony. Above all, we give our profound thanks to our sadly departed friend and mentor, David Sissons, for the monumental work of meticulous scholarship that he accomplished in the course of his career, which brings us close to a definitive understanding of the structures, personalities and sometimes conflicted trajectories of the relationship between two peoples that share that part of the globe bounded by the western Pacific. Arthur Stockwin and Keiko Tamura viii Introduction Arthur Stockwin David Sissons was born on 21 December 1925 and attended Scotch College in Melbourne, from which he matriculated in 1942. He spent one year at University of Melbourne, reading classics, before being called up for active service on 27 June 1944, aged 18. He was at a training camp at Cowra, New South Wales, at the time of the mass breakout of Japanese prisoners from the nearby prisoner-of-war camp on 5 August, and was involved in rounding up those who had escaped. After eight weeks at the training camp, he was sent for seven months of Japanese-language training and, between April and September 1945, he worked as a linguist/ translator in the D Special (Diplomatic Special) Section, a highly secret unit of the Australian Military Force HQ in Melbourne, involved in cryptographic decoding. Little or nothing was known about the D Special Section until, in the 1980s, David and Professor Desmond Ball, with others, began to unearth and publish information relating to it.1 In November 1945 David was posted to Morotai, on which was located the headquarters of the Australian element of the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section. Morotai and neighbouring islands were the scene of Australian field trials of Japanese officers and men accused of war crimes and, in February 1946, David served as a defence interpreter for three trials.2 In Morotai, he also had opportunities to mix with surrendered Japanese troops and to improve his proficiency in their language and culture. A trial in which he was involved resulted in a Japanese officer, Captain Kato, being found guilty of the murder of an Australian prisoner of war and executed. David believed the trial process to have been fair, however, he judged 1 For a comprehensive account of their findings, see Desmond Ball & Keiko Tamura (eds), Breaking Japanese Diplomati Codes: David Sissons and D Special Section during the Second World War (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013). 2 Georgina Fitzpatrick, ‘War crimes trials: “Victor’s Justice” and Australian military justice in the aftermath of the Second World War’, in Kevin Jon Heller & Gerry Simpson (eds), Histories of War Crimes Trials (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 329. 1 BRIDgINg AuSTRAlIA AND Japan the death penalty as excessive in light of subsequent judgements in later trials.3 No doubt it was this experience that stimulated his later determination to research issues of atrocities and war crimes trials, and he regarded his work in this area as being among the most important of his research career. The extent of his concern with issues of justice in these trials is shown by his anguish at the condemnation of an officer (Katayama) who had, under orders, executed a Canadian officer but who was, in David’s opinion, essentially a man of moral rectitude. David did not confine his investigations to atrocities that were allegedly committed by Japanese military personnel, but also applied his sharp analytical approach to possible ill-treatment by Australian armed forces of Japanese prisoners in the islands. The depth of David’s commitment to understanding such situations is graphically indicated by a long letter (see volume 2, in preparation) to his brother, Hubert, a distinguished physician, concerning the effects on prisoners of heat stroke and related illnesses. Hubert wrote back telling David, in effect, that David now understood more about the subject than he did.