Amongst those titles that remained banned indefinitely were the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and J.P. Donleavy’s raunchy and rompish The Ginger Man.
The treatment as late as 1963 of Hal Porter’s brilliant autobiography of childhood and youth, The Watcher on the Cast Iron Balcony, demonstrates the degree to which the possibility of censorship inhibited writers. Before Porter’s book was published in London by Faber in 1963, the Sydney and Melbourne distributors thought it proper to refer its proofs to the Sydney Customs Office. The distributors sought a ruling on the book’s use of four-letter words before they felt safe in releasing it for sale. Porter said whimsically, ‘The public might need to be protected from monsters like me.’ Porter’s book was released, and that the possibility of banning lay over it would help its sales hugely.
OCCUPATION
In 1949, General MacArthur lifted the ban on the fraternisation of US troops with civilians in Japan and advocated a policy of friendly interest and guidance towards the Japanese people. The decision was a reaction to the advance of Communism in the world and not least in China. When asked if Australia would follow MacArthur, the Minister for Defence, Jack Dedman, replied that there would be no change in Australia’s policy.
‘Fraternisation’ of a most intimate form occurred nonetheless on the Australian base. Almost all the women whom Australian soldiers courted worked at the Australian base. Some were secretarial and accounting staff, others were employed as cleaners, one worked in the occupation forces dance hall, and another was a naval nurse. One Japanese woman who worked as a cleaner at the Australian base spoke bitterly of the demeaning nature of this employment and recalled how unwilling she had been to work for the enemy, but pride had to be put aside in the face of starvation. One thing was common—the disruption caused by the war to their schooling and home life. All the younger women had been attending high school in the 1941–44 period. But from late 1943, high-school students were directed into factory war work and lessons were suspended. Another direct educational result of the war was the cessation of English classes.
From February 1946, there were twelve thousand Australian troops stationed in Kure as members of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF), and their task was seen as that of demilitarising the Japanese. Indeed, the BCOF would be largely composed of Australian troops under an Australian commander throughout the occupation period, which ended in 1952. The military authorities issued instructions that ‘fraternisation’ with the Japanese should not occur. Military police supervised the women to prevent relationships being started. In the early years of occupation, suspicions of a relationship with a Japanese woman guaranteed trouble with one’s superior officers and, unless the soldier foreswore her, a shipment home. Some Japanese women would later speak of carefully managed relationships with their future husbands in the 1946–49 period, of secret meetings, arrests by military police and hours spent in police stations on charges of consorting and even of prostitution. One of the women felt she spent more time in the police station than with her husband. Later in the occupation period, after 1951, women were no longer hounded by the military police and courting could be done in public. Still, the families of the Japanese women were often opposed to a permanent relationship with a foreigner.
Since the Australians initially were not allowed to marry, at first these were ‘Japanese-style’ ceremonies. The wives and children were in a risky situation. If the husband were killed or injured there would be no widow’s pension nor any entitlement to the husband’s property. If their husbands were transferred back to Australia, neither they nor their children could accompany them. In 1948, in answer to a question about the problem of Japanese wives of occupation forces, Arthur Calwell said: ‘The decision that Australians serving in Japan were not to contract marriage with Japanese women was made by the Department of the Army. I think the rule a very salutary one. For forty-seven years our general Immigration Policy has prevented the entry into Australia of persons married to Australians if these persons are subject to certain restriction provisions of our immigration laws. There is particular objection to the presence of Japanese in this country. I believe I express the opinion of ninety per cent of Australians when I say that as long as there continues to live in this country any relative of any person who suffered at the hand of the Japanese, no Japanese, man or woman, will be welcome here.’
By 1952, with a peace treaty signed and Australia keen to develop a trade relationship with Japan, Harold Holt lifted the ban on marriage. Japanese wives were initially permitted to enter Australia under a Certificate of Exemption for a period of five years, provided certain conditions were met. One was that the Australian husband be of good character and maintain and accommodate his wife and children, and that the wife be a type who would readily be accepted by the Australian community. As the first significant group of non-Europeans permitted to settle in Australia, they represented a chip, even if a tiny one, in the enamel of the White Australia Policy.
These women were under more pressure than most immigrants to assimilate, and they witnessed their children losing their mother tongue and growing up with little knowledge of Japanese culture. The fact that their spouses had only a limited knowledge of their language and customs hastened the process. The women worried about how their children would be discriminated against in Japan and they feared there’d be different kinds of discrimination in Australia. When asked if their children had experienced prejudice in Australia, most answered that there had been very little. In spite of all the women’s efforts to assimilate, though, they were not admitted as settlers like European immigrants.
Taruko Morimoto, a Hiroshima survivor, met her husband-to-be, Warrant Officer Bill Blair, while working as a waitress in the officers’ mess at Kure in 1949. She had not liked Blair at first, when she saw him striding around the base, baton in hand, but a friend invited her to a dance with him and she accepted. The ultimate Japanese war bride, Taruko Blair saw herself as a potential Madame Butterfly, afraid that her husband would be sent back to Australia and she would be denied permission to join him. She later said, ‘I could not go on living without him. But what I was doing brought disgrace on my parents and my sisters. I got some poison and hid it in a drawer with a suicide letter addressed to Bill and my parents.’ Taruko said that Japanese people disapproved of girls who went out with the ex-enemy. When she and Blair walked down the street they looked at her as if she were a prostitute. But Taruko was lucky with her own family. Intermarriage was still forbidden, but Taruko and Blair visited a church and then underwent marriage in a Shinto shrine in June 1950. Other Japanese girls in relationships with foreign soldiers had to conduct their affairs in complete secrecy, and many were ostracised by their families.
Gordon Parker was the first soldier to be officially permitted to marry and bring his wife Cherry and their children to Australia. It was a difficult bureaucratic process. All the war brides were to go through three marriage ceremonies—a Japanese ceremony, a service in a Christian church and a marriage ceremony in the British Consulate. Before that the girl would be interviewed by the commanding officer in Kure and a Notification of Intention to Marry had to be posted for six months.
Taruko and Bill Blair, already man and wife in Japanese terms, were ‘officially’ married by the British consul-general in February 1953. Until then she considered she had been ‘living in sin’. Their son was born seven months later, and in November 1953 Taruko and her baby joined over twenty-five other Japanese brides travelling to Australia on the Taiping. The parting from family—at least for those women whose families were still speaking to them, was painful and the ship journey was uncomfortable. When Taruko sailed into Sydney, however, in Australia she was charmed by the foreshores and believed she could be happy. And when she finally arrived in Melbourne, Bill’s family gave her a generous reception. Nonetheless, as Bill was moved around Australia with his job, Taruko felt homesick and missed Japanese food. She hated
the way the Blair family cooked rice but was too polite to say so, and when the family left for a weekend outing she began preparing Japanese rice balls, hoping to have a picnic with her baby in the backyard. However, the family surprised her with an early return and she hid the plate of rice balls under the bed.
To make sure her children had a smooth time at school she did not teach them to speak Japanese, though she taught them Japanese songs. It was fifteen years before she could visit her family back in Japan. In the meantime, letters from her younger sister Junko relieved her homesickness.
Sadako Morris (née Kikuchi) was another Japanese war bride who made the leap of faith and came to Australia with her husband, John Morris, an army signaller. During the occupation she worked as a seamstress in a department store, where she met Morris, but immediately after the war she had survived by scavenging for scrap metal to sell and scraping old cement off bricks for recycling. Sadako had four brothers, the oldest of whom wanted nothing to do with the former enemy, as distinct from the youngest who got to know Australian soldiers, in part through black-market deals.
When Sadako’s family discovered that she and Morris were seriously involved, they forbade her to meet him again under pain of their disowning her. The courtship continued secretly, but ultimately Sadako took the extraordinary step of leaving home. Morris found an apartment for her in Kure so he could visit whenever he was free, and though officially her family condemned her, most members of the family visited Sadako—even her father would secretly deliver fish he had caught for her in the Inland Sea. They went to the Izumo Taisha Shrine to pray for a long relationship.
Sadako became pregnant in 1952, and inspired by Gordon Parker’s case, she and Morris applied for marriage and were permitted to wed on 16 August 1952 at St Peter’s Garrison church in Kure. Most of Sadako’s family attended the ceremony. A second daughter was born to them in October 1953. Morris was shipped home and Sadako boarded the Changte with her two baby girls in December 1953. When she and her husband went to live in Adelaide, their arrival was noted by the Adelaide News, the tone of whose article was welcoming. Sadako was also given a warm welcome by Morris’s family. She was surprised at a lower living standard than she had expected, but she was a survivor and took on learning the language. Her children suffered an occasional schoolyard taunt. Gradually she and Morris established a home and garden and Sadako hosted parties with other Japanese wives while their husbands stood in the yard clustered around a keg of beer. After ten years she revisited Japan but realised that her life was in Australia.
Not all pregnancies ended in marriage. After the occupation of Japan by Australian servicemen in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a small group of Japanese–Australian children living in the Kure district where the troops had been stationed. In the late 1950s, there were calls from some members of the public for the children to be brought to Australia. But they were never to be admitted. Moves made in Australia in 1962 to have the government acknowledge the plight of children of Australian servicemen and to allow their migration to Australia met with little official response. B.A. Santamaria wrote in outrage in 1962 that to maintain the sacred cow of the White Australia Policy, ‘we as a nation refuse to recognise our responsibility to children of our nationals’. Government discussions about providing help to these Japanese–Australian children took place at a time when immigration was slowly opening up to non-British people. Over the next two decades after the war, activist groups would start to challenge the restrictive immigration policies of the White Australia Policy.
The 1952 formal Peace Treaty with Japan (as distinct from the 1945 surrender) and the politics of the Cold War meant that Japan was positioned on the globe and diplomatically as a potential friend. The idea of ‘ministerial discretion’ began to take hold in the early 1960s as a way of dealing with the more unjust and damaging cases of exclusion. But the traditional immigration policy was maintained. A.B. McFarlane, Secretary of the Department of Air, in 1959 suggested that it might suit Australia’s interests to improve the condition of these children’s lives. But he was worried that ‘such a gift could be taken as an admission of collective Australian guilt for this particular problem’.
At a Cabinet meeting in 1962, the idea of providing financial assistance to the children was rejected and it was noted that any assistance given by any Australian body such as a charity should be undertaken on the understanding that the Australian government took no assumption of liability in the matter. Later in the same year, however, the Federal government agreed to allocate £10,000 for the support of orphans in Japan. It was stipulated that the money was not specifically for children with Australian fathers.
Gwen Meredith, writer of the beloved ABC radio serial Blue Hills, wrote to the secretary of the Immigration Department, Tasman Heyes, to check with him on a particular storyline she wanted to pursue. Peter Macarthur, one of her characters, who has since married an Australian and has a small son, discovers that he is beyond any doubt the father of one of these Australo–Japanese children. Macarthur becomes increasingly obsessed with his obligations towards the child and asks his wife if she would consider having the child as a member of their family in Australia.
Would there be a realistic chance such a child could be brought to Australia? Heyes replied, ‘Your letter . . . poses a very difficult question indeed—so difficult that I do not think I could venture to say what the answer would be if the situation arose in real life.’ When the storyline aired, a Blue Hills listener wrote to Meredith to tell her that anti-Japan sentiments remained: ‘Two families who live in our town have children who are going to find the going very hard among the Australian children and are in appearance, absolutely Jap without any trace of European in their makeup.’ No doubt she was right in her prediction of their coming struggle. Another writer told Meredith, ‘If a move were made to bring the children here en masse, I think it would involve altering our immigration laws, and that is just what the communists are working for at the moment. If they could have these laws relaxed, selected Chinese Reds could be brought into this country and used to pave the way for future aggression . . . this would in time mean the end of the Christian way of life . . . this is just a note of warning. We still enjoy listening to your serial.’
One article in the Australian magazine Pix in 1957 described the children in Japan as ‘typically Australian in appearance and mannerism, despite their Japanese upbringing’. Pix mentioned the child of one Corporal George Budworth who did begin proceedings to adopt the child and save it from a life of ‘near slavery as the lowest type of manual labourer’. This story included an extensive photo shoot of the child in Australia with his adoptive father, wearing an Akubra hat. George Budworth himself was not in a favourable economic situation. The father and son tramped around New South Wales looking for work and a place to settle. Budworth lived in hope, himself having to make his bows towards White Australia. ‘Although the Australian might not have much love for a Nip,’ he acknowledged, ‘everyone loves a Nipper.’
On Saturday 11 April 1953, Western Australia’s first Japanese war bride, Noriko Copeland, flew into Perth from Sydney. She had first travelled from Japan to the east coast of Australia on a ship named New Australia with thirty-nine other war brides and twelve of their children, together with 750 Australian troops from Korea and one Korean war bride. The first landfall had been Brisbane. In Sydney Noriko had been rushed from the dock with a threatened miscarriage. Her husband, Hugh Copeland, had been a prisoner of war in Japanese camps for over three years, spending twelve months in work camps in Singapore and southern Malaya before being sent to work on the Burma Railway as an engineer. After the completion of the railway, he was sent back to Changi until his liberation in August 1945, when he returned to Australia. Like many returned soldiers, however, Copeland found it difficult to settle down. When volunteers were called to join the British occupation forces in Japan, he re-enlisted and was sent to Hiroshima as part of a military police detachment. There he worked with his future wi
fe’s cousin, a Japanese-born American interpreter. Through him he met Noriko, then still a schoolgirl. He married her in 1952. Noriko’s father had been in the Japanese merchant navy and was well travelled, and sceptical of his own government’s prejudice against intermarriage. Copeland remarked later that he had ‘copped more flak from other POWs’ than he had from either his own or his wife’s family.
There was flak for the wives as well. One woman in dry Western Australia had a small quarrel with her father-in-law when she washed the napkins the Japanese way, using several rinses of water, before hanging them out. The father-in-law was a veteran of life on the goldfields where water was scarce, and she came to understand his feelings. Fridays became bath night Japanese-style, for every Friday her parents-in-law left for a meal and a beer in town. She, her husband and son could then indulge in deep baths and she could wash her hair using as much water as she liked without causing any trouble.
Parker, the first Australian serviceman to openly marry a Japanese woman, later commented that few Australians understood the opprobrium and prejudice that Japanese families extended towards the daughters for forming an association with an alien. Occupation soldiers were seen as at most temporary providers of extra food and little luxuries. One woman who married an Australian and became a citizen ultimately fled from physical abuse inflicted by her alcoholic husband, but believed she could not ask her family in Japan for any help. That would have been to admit that their opposition to the marriage had been well founded.
Australians: Flappers to Vietnam Page 61