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Continued from Part 5...
Returning from China, I still had to keep on top of the Japan story.
THE TANAKA KAKUEI EXPERIENCE
1972 saw the drama of Tanaka Kakuei winning the LDP presidency away from Fukuda Takeo,
the conservative old guard candidate. Fukuda was supported by the devious Sato Eisaku
Tanaka’s main platform was building a network of new highways and bullet train lines
to formerly neglected regions in northeast Japan and facing the Japan Sea. Later
he would be accused of wasting public funds on extravagant projects. Yet no
one suggests Japan would have been better off without the projects — the highways
and bullet train lines to the north of Honshu especially.
At the time, Tanaka’s defeat of the LDP conservatives and his ideas for improving
transport links captured many Japanese imaginations. The progressive Asahi
Shimbun was so excited that it even ran an editorial saying ‘Ganbaru (go to it) Kaku-chan”
(Kaku-chan is the cute diminutive of Kakuei).
(Today Asahi would probably prefer not to be reminded of all this. Just two
years later the mood was to turn totally anti-Tanaka, thanks in part to an event
in which I had the dishonor to participate.)
(Soon after that the Lockheed affair guaranteed that Tanaka’s name would become
synonymous with political corruption in Japan. )
Tanaka moved quickly to recognise Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China.
Today that seems a very reasonable thing to have done. Even at the time, in
the wake of the pingpong diplomacy and Beijing’s accession to the UN, it was
hardly revolutionary.
Even so, it was opposed by many in the LDP, the LDP’s conservative and powerful Taiwan
lobby especially.
Western commentators then, and even now to some extent, have a romantic view that
sees Japan and China as East Asian cultural lookalikes, destined to come together
eventually, but kept apart only by US pressure.
The reality is very different., Wide cultural difference, the virulent anti-communism
of Japan’s conservatives and right-wingers, fear of China’s size and potential,
resentment at China’s refusal to forgive wartime atrocities, even a lingering belief
that those atrocities were forced on Japan by China’s unreasonable behavior (the
rightwing argument that Japan never intended to attack China proper, that it planned
to go into the Soviet Union from Manchuria but was sucked in by anti-Japanese Chinese
behavior during and immediately after the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937 deserves
more attention than it gets) ….. all combine to create a rigid anti-China dislike,
and even hatred, that will probably never be cured.
Right through to the very end, in 1971, the Sato administration was secretly
lobbying, mainly among the Latin Americans, in a vain effort to get the votes
to prevent Beijing from joining the UN.
Tanaka himself was no progressive. But on China he was a realist and was prepared
to follow the advice of his progressive and humanistic foreign minister, Ohira Masayoshi.
******************************
I was to get to know Ohira quite well. When he became prime minister in 1978
he appointed me to a committee to discuss his favorite project — the idea of creating
‘garden cities’ all over Japan.
Anyone familiar with the unkempt, higgledy-piggledy, unplanned nature of most Japanese
cities would welcome any idea for improvement.
I could not claim any expertise in ‘garden cities’ or any other form of town planning
(though years later I was to try to set up my own ‘garden village’ in the hills of
the Boso Peninsula). But on the principle that one never says no to any offer
to see Japan Inc. from the inside, I said yes.
And I did get one insight. Sitting next to me on the committee was someone
who knew even less about garden cities than I did. He was the Kyoto University
expert on monkey colonies.
Presumably someone in Ohira’s brain trust felt monkey colonies had something to tell
us about garden cities.
The Japanese seem to believe that they can learn a lot from monkey behavior. The
strict rules of gender and seniority are often noted. The lives and deaths of boss
monkeys in the larger zoos used to be regular news items.
But while I could do little to help Ohira and his ‘garden city’ idea, I can claim
some of the credit for Ohira’s agreement to introduce the very successful working
holiday scheme with Australia, allowing young Australians to come freely to Japan
to work - a scheme later extended to some other nations.
I had sold the idea to then Australian ambassador to Japan, John Menadue. He quickly
realised how much this could do for the relationship at the grassroots level. He
then sold it to Ohira.
Ohira’s untimely death due to the pressure of a meaningless election forced on him
by the unrepentant Fukuda and the LDP conservatives was a great loss for Japan.
TANAKA’S ASIAN TOUR
I was also to get to know and see something of Tanaka.
In January 1974 he set off on a brave five nation tour of South East Asia.
Four foreign correspondents were to be allowed to go with him on this voyage into
the unknown. I was one of them.
The tour was a bid to repair some of the damage caused by Japan’s former postwar
prime ministers who had refused to go into the area, fearing anti-Japan sentiments.
And resentments there were. Japanese visitors to the area were notorious for
their bad behavior. They still seemed to want to look down on their fellow Asians
as backward and primitive.
Japanese trade and investment in the area was seen as exploitative.
Worse, Japan had made little effort to apologise for its former aggressions
and atrocities. Indeed, it did not even seem to want to admit atrocities had occurred.
Among the materials handed out to us in advance of Tanaka’s tour was a Foreign Ministry
advisory for Japanese visitors to Singapore. It told them to avoid any discussion
with the natives about Japan’s wartime behavior.
Such discussion would simply cause trouble and misunderstanding, it was claimed.
One of those atrocities had been the deliberate selection of progressive, Chinese-origin
Singapore students and English-speakers for execution, on the grounds that such people
by definition would be anti-Japan.
According to some reports, several tens of thousands from the educated elite — the
best part of an entire generation— were shot and hacked to death at a secluded beach
on the north side of the island.
Another generation was needed before Singapore could recover.
(One rumor has it that Lee Kwan Yew, then also an obvious target for execution, was
only spared because he was willing to cooperate with the Japanese military in helping
to choose others for execution. Whatever.)
( But little wonder that even as late as 1974 there were still a lot of South East
Asians, those of Chinese origins especially, who did not like Japan. It also helps
explain Lee’s deep and generally correct suspicions of the Japanese psyche, through
to the present day. )
On the plane, travelling with us, was a very demure young lady who spoke
good English. We discovered later that she was Tanaka’s daughter, Makiko.
Makiko was to fill in for Tanaka’s wife, a very plain, elderly lady of rural origins
who would not have been very suitable as Tanaka’s opposite number at official banquets,
of which there promised to be many.
On the plane trip, Makiko declined most of our less than fully professional requests
for interviews. But many years later I was to be involved with her in a very
different capacity.
She had been made Foreign Affairs minister in the Koizumi cabinet. Fearing isolation
in her highly conservative ministry, she had formed a private advisory committee
on which I was asked to be a member, even though I had not seen her or talked to
her since that 1974 Asian tour.
As a result I had the rare privilege of being escorted monthly to the main conference
room in a building where previously I had been very much persona non grata, to discuss
the policies of a Ministry which saw me as enemy number one, mainly because
of the damage I had done to its efforts to propagate Japan’s bogus claims for the
so-called Northern Territories.
Tanaka, the father, had a deserved reputation for intelligence, bluntness and
action — the computerised bulldozer, as he was called. (Makiko later in life came
to share some of that quality.)
His willingness to tread where others had feared to go in Southeast Asia was typical,
despite the anti-Japan demonstrations that had been promised.
At first, in Manila, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, the demonstrations were subdued.
But when we reached Thailand, the one nation that had not suffered Japanese aggression,
the students became violent.
They claimed they were against Japan’s alleged economic exploitation. And to some
extent they were right. In Thailand especially, Japanese heavy brand-name advertising
had made life almost impossible for local entrepreneurs trying to set up new businesses.
But the students were also looking for a stick to attack their own oppressive,
and later very brutal, regime.
Ignoring the panicky advice of his Foreign Ministry aides (those nice people responsible
for the cowardly Singapore advisory which had urged refusal to discuss war atrocities
in Singapore), Tanaka said he would meet and talk to the student leaders. This he
did, for over an hour, at our hotel.
Overnight the demonstrations were defused.
In Jakarta it was not so easy. The mobs were out for
blood, even though they too were protesting more against their own government than
against Japan.
All Japanese cars in sight that night, Toyotas especially, were torched. Why
Toyota? Because the company had put a large neon sign spelling out TOYOTA on
the top of Jakarta’s largest hotel, making it visible in the nearby slums.
Many of the slum dwellers may have been illiterate. But they did know how to spell
TOYOTA.
Soon after Toyota wisely removed the sign.
Throughout the chaos Tanaka refused to be panicked. He went ahead with his schedule.
He scored some achievements.
But when he got back to Japan he ran headfirst into the phenomenalist Japanese
logic that says that you judge things on the basis of the phenomenon you see before
you, without any consideration of causes or effects.
As far as the Japan’s excitable media were concerned, the riots, protests and demonstations
were all Tanaka’s fault. Why? Because he had gone to Southeast Asia and
the mobs had rioted. Therefore he had to be to blame. He had brought shame and disgrace
to the nation.
No one even thought of blaming the cowardly former Prime Ministers who had refused
to venture into the Southeast Asia which their soldiers had raped and pillaged only
a few years earlier.
The fact that the mobs had rioted for reasons that had little to do with Tanaka,
and that Tanaka had defused some of those reasons, was ignored.
The same shallow thinking cripples efforts in this otherwise intelligent nation to
tackle corruption. Few thank the whistle-blower or courageous reformer who exposes
the evil or wrong-doing in an organisation.
As far as Japan is concerned that organisation was operating quite peacefully until
the exposer or reformer came along. Like Tanaka in Southeast Asia,
that person is to blame — not the people who for years previously had done nothing
to prevent the growth of evil or corruption in the organisation.
Ironically, Tanaka’s daughter, Makiko, was to run into exactly the same phenomenon
almost 40 years later.
One of her first moves on being made Foreign Minister was to expose the long-standing
corruption in the Ministry’s administration. The ensuing uproar left her vulnerable
to every kind of media and political attack.
She was forced to resign, in semi-disgrace, little more than a year later.
Meanwhile the truly guilty men — the collection of bland, humdrum politicians who
had headed the Ministry in previous years and who had lacked the courage to do anything
about the corruption going on right under their noses — continued to be regarded
as people most worthy of representing Japan in foreign affairs.
THE ANTI-TANAKA MOOD EMERGES
True, in Makiko’s father’s case the media were also indulging in another of their
foibles — mood creation. By alleging failure of the South East Asia tour they could
add fuel to the already developing anti-Tanaka mood in Japan.
That mood had already got underway with the large oil shock price increases of late
1973. Even before that the economy was already somewhat over-extended, partly
because of Tanaka’s commitment to heavy spending on public works.
The oil price rises had triggered a vicious inflation.
Housewives panicked. Photos of them clamoring to buy toilet paper — a commodity rumored
to about to go out of stock — filled the media.
Tanaka was blamed, again, as if he could have done something to stop the oil sheiks
from raising prices, or as if Japan really need not need those new roads and railways.
As well, some in the public and the media were getting tired of his gruff, gravelly
voice and his sometimes unduly blunt approach to problems.
And the still-powerful LDP conservatives were still fuming over the way he had beaten
Fukuda for the leadership, and had been willing to sideline Taiwan to recognise Beijing.
In short, the tom-toms were beating. The mood for change was in the air. It
would not be long before someone, somewhere, would want to move against
him openly.
That someone was the maverick and highly disaffected LDP politician,
Ishihara Shintaro. The somewhere was a May 1974 article in the widely read,
conservative magazine, Bungei Shunju.
In it, he launched a vicious attack on Tanaka’s kinken seiji — money politics.
Vivid images of Tanaka henchmen scurrying around with shopping-bags full of money
to buy the votes needed to defeat Fukuda were drawn. Heavy corruption in public
works contracts were said to be the main source of that shopping-bag money.
Much of what Ishihara said was true. But the same was also true for a lot of
other conservative politicians.
The Kishi-Sato-Fukuda LDP old guard, for example, were worse. They got
much of their money from foreigners — the CIA, the banana trade with Taiwan, kickbacks
out of South Korea. Japan’s national interests could easily have been sacrificed
as a result.
Tanaka at least relied mainly on domestic sources for his funds. If any interests
were sacrificed they were domestic.
The Ishihara article was widely noted. The stock market fell heavily for a day or
so. Some of the national newspapers speculated over how Tanaka would react.
But there are natural limits to scandal damage in Japan, and not just because people
have become inured to political corruption.
Everyone knew that Bungei Shunju had its own conservative and rightwing agenda, especially
over China. It would have been very happy to print the Ishihara article.
And there was also the question of nawabari —territorial turf. If a particular newspaper
or TV station digs up a scandal, it remains their property, for them to follow up
and exploit.
The rest of the media are happy to ignore it. It is not within their ‘territory.’
Often, it is only when a foreign medium decides to pick the story up and run with
it that the Japanese media collectively decide to be involved. Overnight an
otherwise less than momentous scandal can become the center of national attention.
A good example of this strange phenomenon was provided by the unfortunate Uno Sosuke,
prime minister of Japan for only two months, from July 1989 to August 1989. Uno’s
scandal was minor — having as a girlfriend a rather pleasant lady in her early forties
who was running a small bar and eating place in Kagurazaka near central Tokyo.
(I happened to have visited the place a few times. And it is true that the
rather mature madam did have a kind of subdued sexiness.)
Uno’s crime was to treat her too casually, and to forget to pay her what she
thought was her worth.
Mainichi’s weekly magazine published the lady’s story at length, dwelling in particular
on Mr Uno’s alleged stinginess.
The story made little impact; it is taken for granted that most LDP politicians will
have girlfriends. But when the Washington Post correspondent in Tokyo picked up the
Mainichi story and ran with it, the unfortunate Uno came under the klieg lights.
Interviewers descended on the lady in question. Uno was forced to resign soon after.
Another victim of Japan’s sensitivity to the Western media had been Sato Eisaku.
In 1968 Bungei Shunju had run an in-depth article about him in which he had said
what many other conservative and chauvinistic Japanese males would say, namely that
occasionally he felt he had reason to slap his wife.
The statement was totally ignored in Japan. But a bright UPI reporter, Ted
Shimizu, picked it up. Overnight Sato became known around the world, and then
in Japan, as a wife-beater.
It took him years to live the reputation down.
Tanaka too was soon to become a victim of this strange sensitivity to what we foreigners
have to say about their leaders. But not because of the Ishihara article.
That article was in Japanese, and published in a magazine which few foreigners have
the time, inclination or ability to read. So its existence remained unknown in the
West.
(Actually it was not entirely unknown. I had run an article in my newspaper,
and the Far Eastern Economic Review, about it. I realised even then that this
could be the harbinger of something bigger. And I was soon to be proved right.)
TANAKA AND THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS
The waves caused by the Ishihara article in Japan quickly died. The stockmarket
soon recovered. Japan went about its business, unfazed.
But not Bungei Shunju. It was determined to see Tanaka unseated.
After a spell of several months it seems to have decided to make another anti-Tanaka
jab.
This time the blow was to be delivered by a rather obscure freelancer, Tachibana
Takashi. He wrote a long article outlining alleged wrongdoings by Tanaka in a public
works land deal in his (Tanaka’s) native Niigata prefecture.
Once again Japan took due note. Tanaka was hit with one or two questions about the
article at his regular press conference for that week. But he was able to deflect
them.
In short, the Tachibana story too seemed set to follow the path of the Ishihara story.
And would have, but for one very accidental event.
The Newsweek correspondent in Tokyo at the time was one Bernard Krisher (more about
him later). Krisher did not read Japanese, but he had an able assistant who
brought the Tachibana article to his notice.
The result was a small item in the Newsweek of early October 1974, noting that Tanaka
had been accused of land deal corruption.
Even that item would have done little to stir the Japanese media, but for another
accidental event — a scheduled luncheon for Tanaka at the Foreign Correspondents
Club of Japan (FCCJ) on October 22, 1974, just two weeks after the Newsweek article.
**************************
It had been a Club tradition to invite the current prime minister at least once during
his term for a luncheon, followed by a brief speech and some polite questioning.
It was done mainly as a mark of respect for the current Japanese leadership, and
not for newsgathering
But with Tanaka there was to be little respect.
An army of Japanese newspeople and cameras had been allowed to take their places
at the end of the dining room. Even the foreign newspeople were beginning to realise
that something was underway, that the mood in Japan was turning against Tanaka.
An Hungarian acting-chairman with a typically cynical European-communist view of
Japan did the rest.
In a biting introduction for Tanaka, he went out of his way to mention the Newsweek
article. That was all that was needed to unleash a wave of antagonistic questions
at what was supposed to have been a polite after-lunch discussion.
Tanaka behaved quite well under the strain. He said his private affairs, such as
the Niigata land deal, were separate from public affairs, and appealed for policy-related
questions, of which there were none.
In Japanese it is called the kikkake. It is the defining moment when a situation
can and is allowed to change.
Before that FCCJ lunch, the situation around Tanaka had not evolved to the stage
where there could be an open move against him. But thanks to that lunch,
the questions, the TV cameras whirring in the background, and most of all the fact
that gaijin were involved, the kikkake had been provided.
I knew already what the main TV news item would be that night, and the
main topic in the newspapers the next morning. I bet a colleague (Ted Shimizu
of UPI whose expose of Sato should have told him how easy it was for the foreign
media to create scandals) a case of wine that by the end of the year Tanaka would
not be prime minister.
I won that bet, with more than one month to spare.
But few of the foreign journalists present that day had any idea of the background
to what they were doing. Later I found that not one of them had read either of the
two Bungei Shunju articles.
Few of them could even read Japanese. All that they had to go on was the Newsweek
piece by Krisher.
Even fewer, it seemed, had any idea of how their behavior was crucial to creating
the kikkake for a mass media move against Tanaka.
(One of my memories of that fateful day is Sam Jamieson, then of the Los Angeles
Times and reasonably fluent in Japanese rushing from the room saying he had to get
hold of the Tachibana article and read it.)
Then when Tanaka resigned in November 1974, the Club hierarchy indulged in a welter
of self-congratulation. They told themselves, and the rest of the world, how
they, the foreign journalists, had done what the Japanese media were afraid
to do
They, and they alone, had had the courage to confront a corrupt prime minister
in his den, and force him to be replaced.
Needless to say, not one of them knew that Japanese journalists had in fact been
questioning Tanaka about the articles much earlier.
In the midst of this bragging, a small group of Club members (headed by a Frenchman
who also knew little about Japan but who was imbued with Gallic courtesy) got together
to apologise to Tanaka for the luncheon impoliteness. I was one of the group.
We were soon branded as traitors to our profession and the Club, unwilling to join
our elite colleagues in educating Japan about the splendid values independent enquiry
etc etc that the Western media were bringing to Japan.
At no stage was there any hint of self-reflection about the almost complete lack
of the language ability needed to monitor the publications of the nation these elite
journalists were supposed to be reporting. As for realising the cultural quirks that
would allow their crude behavior to have the effect that it had, forget it.
Today Tanaka has come to be seen as one of Japan’s better and more dynamic
prime ministers. Yet the ignorant correspondents responsible for his downfall still
boast about their role in having him deposed.
I have written about the Tanaka-FCCJ affair in some detail both in my Japanese Tribe
book and elsewhere. For me it was a defining moment in getting to know Western media
attitudes to Japan — a clear proof of the arrogance and ignorance which continues
to plague Western reporting on Japan.
Another proof was the refusal of subsequent Japanese prime ministers to go near the
Club that had behaved to crudely towards Tanaka.
Incidentally, a good indication of the continued foreign ignorance of Japan is the
number of Japan-watchers who write books and articles saying Tanaka lost his job
because of the Lockheed corruption affair. (That affair only broke several months
after Tanaka’s FCCJ-forced resignation.)
They include some who should know better, such as Don Oberdorfer formerly of the
Washington Post, writing in the house journal of the Kokusai Bunka Kaikan.
I once shared an NHK round-table discussion with Oberdorfer where he was saying
that the Japanese media would never have the courage to do what his own paper was
doing in exposing Watergate scandal.
At the time Ishihara’s Bungei Shunbun article had just appeared. Needless to say
he had no idea of its existence. And Oberdorfer was seen as one of the better
reporters on Japan.
Incidentally, there are suspicions that the US-sourced information that triggered
the Lockheed affair came to the surface well after Tanaka had resigned owed something
to CIA hawks cooperating with LDP hawks.
TROUBLE IN THE ECONOMY, AND THE POLITICS
Meanwhile my daily grind of political and economic reporting continued. Japan was
starting to be a big story in the West, and not just because of Tanaka. Every
foible and failing of this exotic society was news.
And in addition to The Australian, I was also filing for The Far East Economic Review,
mainly as a result of my earlier dealings with the editor, Derek Davies.
The ‘Nixon shock’ forcing the Japanese yen to go from 360 to the US dollar up to
240 yen sent Japan Inc into a predictable panic. I recall doing an interview
for the London Financial Times in which I said Japan would survive the upvaluation,
that the yen had long been chronically under-valued, and it would still be competitive
even if the yen went to 200.
Some years later it was to go to 80 to the US dollar.
Then as Japan’s trade surpluses with the US continued to mount, we moved to almost
daily reporting of trade disputes, first textiles and then more important things
like cars and TVs.
Meanwhile the political scene in Japan began to shift violently, with the clean
and somewhat progressive Miki Takeo being chosen to replace Tanaka, and then being
overthrown in an LDP palace coup by the waiting and vengeful Fukuda Takeo.
As a background to all this we had the Red Army scares — guerrilla camps in the hills
outside Tokyo, plane hijackings, occasional bombings. Japan’s horrified reaction
to each event — the Yodo-go JAL plane hijacking to North Korea especially —
gave me my first understanding of Japan’s collective psyche.
The entire nation would remain glued to the TV screens for days on end, following
every detail as if it was happening to each and everyone of them personally.
Needless to say, there was never any hint of wanting to know why these young people
were prepared to endure such hardships in their battle against what they saw as the
evil in the society around them.
That would be carrying the burden of trying to link cause and effect much too far
for the minds of our phenomenalistic Japanese friends to grasp
True, today most Western minds today seem unable to grasp the link between Islamic
militancy today and Western behavior in the Middle East over the past century or
so. But there the cause and effect link is not quite as obvious.
*************************************
Personal highlights of those four and a half years as a correspondent in Japan were
many. But among them two major scoops loom large — the Francis James story,
and the pingpong trip to China.
The full and accurate James story I was only able finally to recount in detail
after his death (see website, The Real Francis James Story). He had warned me, in
writing, how litigious he could be if I ever came out with the story while
he was alive.
Even so, it was as great scoop for me in the professional sense. Not one of
the many journalists waiting in Hongkong to get the story realised that all they
had to do to get the story was go to the large hospital on The Peak tpo which he
had been transported by the British authorities, and ask at the front desk
for the number of the room holding Francis James.
Meanwhile the unfortunate correspondent for The Age, Michael Richardson, thinking
his paper had already sewn up exclusive rights to the story, was waiting in his hotel
room confident the UK authorities would prevent anyone else from getting the story.
(Richardson had a career as a Singapore-based journalist where he would pepper his
usually hawkish articles with constant references to insider information said to
have been gained from the local ‘authorities.’ )
The Australian was, naturally enough, very pleased with the scoop. They
ran it over much of the front page and on to the second page.
But as I relate in the Real Story, they then stupidly fouled everything up by telling
the world I would, in effect, produce out of thin air the full story that James was
selling exclusively to The Age.
They then compounded that damage by their refusal to fight the injunction imposed
by Perkin of The Age.
The decision not to fight was made by then manager John Menadue, It was typical
of his readiness to turn and run when lawyers were involved.
As a result many believed (including Whitlam too I later discovered) that I had indeed
planned to do a rude deed by retailing the entire Francis James story and so depriving
Francis of his hard earned royalties.
The true story, if published at the time, would have been a lot more interesting
that anything James could produce. It would have been have taken the wind out
of the sails of the constant rightwing efforts over more than three years to use
the James incarceration as yet another stick to beat Beijing.
But thanks to Perkin, and his thick chequebook, it was not to see the light of day
till many years later.
*******************************
As for the pingpong China story, in many ways that was an even better scoop than
the James story — intrigue, high politics, some sex, and, of course, my first chance
to get to the country I had long studied and been close to.
I recount the main details in part five of this series.
RESOURCES DIPLOMACY
Scoops aside, my main interest while in Tokyo had to be the Australian resources
story , coal and iron ore exports especially. Major new contracts being announced
almost weekly, with both sides prone to get into disputes over those contracts.
The 1973 oil shock had sent not just oil but almost all raw materials and even
food prices through the roof. Prime Minister Tanaka had not helped with his
proudly announced policy of shigen gaiko, or resources diplomacy, which said that
since the world was running out of food and raw materials, Japan had to embark on
an active diplomacy to secure longterm stable sources of raw materials and food supplies.
For the narrow minds in Canberra shigen gaiko could only mean that Australia would
be the target of various and devious Japanese schemes to grab hold of its resources.
Australia had to move quickly to guard its resources.
Even better, it had to try to exploit its resources advantage against Japan to the
maximum.
Whitlam had already tapped into a large vein of Australian nationalism with promises
that the foreigners would be kept in their cages. His minerals and energy
minister, the notorious Rex Connor, set out to mine the vein to the hilt.
Gruff warnings to the effect that the Japanese would have to get down on their hands
and knees if they wanted to buy our precious raw materials became standard fare.
If possible he would also force them to process those materials before they left
Australian shores.
No one seemed to realise that Tanaka with his shigen gaiko was engaging in typical
Japanese alarmist exaggeration, or that Canberra’s tough talk would do more harm
than good. Japan did not have to rely entirely on Australia for its resources.
It had many other and much more compliant sources of possible supply.
It was also very much in Japan’s interests to exaggerate future demand, and so encourage
over-production by suppliers. In any case, Japan was entering a period of much
slower growth. Demand for resources would not continue to rise at past rates.
I tried to make a few of these points in my reports. As far as I know, they made
no impression back in Canberra, other than to have myself listed as a pro-Japan sycophant.
(At the time Canberra’s officials in Tokyo were busy making confident predictions
that Japan’s future demand for raw materials was unlimited. Steel production would
soon reach 200 million tons annually, they said, doubling the level of coal and iron
ore imports. In fact it has stayed at around 100 million tons ever since, ie
for the next 30 years.)
**********************
Officials sent by Canberra to preach the Rex Connor-Whitlam doctrine on resources
did little better.
None of these people spoke any Japanese. None had any idea how to negotiate
with the Japanese. For most, a trip to Japan was an excuse to carouse nightly
in Tokyo’s girly bars.
The mama-san of one of these establishments once showed me the list of name-cards
given her by satisfied Australian clients. It included many of Canberra’s top
bureaucrats, and not a few politicians!
Australian resource firms represented in Tokyo were not much better. Then, as now
to some extent, they were staffed with non-Japanese speakers who had to rely on their
Japanese staff for everything from advice on billion dollar contracts to organising
the wall-paper for their luxury apartments .
CRA-Comalco once sent a team to look into a proposed takeover of the struggling aluminium
maker, Showa Denko. One of the team was my brother Antony, a numbers-cruncher
and later in life, a computer expert.
He shared the Clark dislike for waste and conspicuous entertainment
So while the rest of the team were touring the Ginza hostess bars, courtesy of Showa
Denko and its backers in the Japanese-staff of the CRA Tokyo office, he stayed in
his hotel room working on the figures.
It did not take him long to realise the figures did not make sense. But he was over-ridden
by the rest of the happy team from Melbourne and accused of lacking team compatability.
The takeover turned out to be a flop, and not just because of the collapse of the
Japanese aluminium industry. The company was in trouble from the start, and knew
it. That’s why it wanted a takeover.
The only ones who did not know it were the carousing team from Melbourne.
(Ironically, another one of my brothers, Christopher, trained in Japanese and
the Chinese classics, and who had served in the Tokyo Embassy back in the early sixties,
had had a similar experience. In his case the run-in was with other Embassy
officials over the way they inflated cost of living expenses in order to get higher
allowances. As a result he moved from the then External Affairs to Treasury).
TONGUELESS IN TOKYO
The lack of Japanese expertise and language ability among the Australians in Tokyo
was bad enough in itself. Even worse was the way it inevitably led them to depend
on people of dubious reputation to help them bridge the linguistic and understanding
gap.
A constant visitor to the Australian Embassy at the time was a strange Korean-Japanese
we knew as Hiroshi. He had spent time in Australia, and he could speak English
with an Australian accent.
This had made him very persona-grata in the Embassy — a constant invitee to Embassy
receptions and middle man in some Embassy negotiations.
His role as Embassy fixer did not impress Japanese Foreign Ministry officials involved
with Australia. In addition to any anti-Korean prejudices they might have had, they
were only too aware of the way naïve foreign embassies in Tokyo could easily
be manipulated by fixers with a foothold in embassy doors.
Hiroshi was involved in a range of strange real estate deals with Australia, many
of them to the disadvantage of Australians. But none of that seemed to worry the
Embassy.
Many years later, when I had a chance to make a few complaints about Hiroshi’s
baleful presence to people in charge, I was told confidentially that he was tolerated
because he had a direct pipeline to the rightwing ex-Kishi faction in the LDP. Charming.
*********************************
In the 30 or more years I have been involved with Japan, I have tried often to make
an issue of the Embassy’s scandalous lack of Japanese expertise.
It was bad enough back in the seventies. But recently, with the creation of a go-go,
McKinsey style public service where time spent learning languages or gaining cultural
background is a kiss of promotion depth, the situation has become far worse.
In 2002 not a single senior official in the Embassy, from the ambassador down, could
speak Japanese. The contrast with the British Embassy where almost all the top posts
are filled by language speakers, and where a non-Japanese speaking ambassador is
almost unthinkable, was painful.
But whenever one points these things out in published articles there is never any
sign of hansei, or self-reflection on the Australian side. All one gets is pained
attempts at denial. One can almost hear the sobs of wounded pride.
True, a year or so earlier Canberra finally had sent an ambassador with the language.
But his accent was so atrocious that he would have been better off relying on an
interpreter.
A favorite Canberra rebuttal device is to list as language speakers everyone who
can claim even a smattering of the language. A recent Embassy gambit is to list the
junior staff with the language.
And it is true that in recent years, thanks to a range of exchange and other schemes
(the Working Holiday scheme is one of them), a generation of young Australians with
good Japanese is finally emerging.
But with language ability still seen as some kind of quirk rather than proof of superior
ability, few are able to break through to senior levels in the bureaucracy or
the Embassy.
TRIBAL SENSITIVITIES
The inability of the Australian psyche to handle criticisms over this lack of Japanese
expertise is curious.
In 1973 I had to cover a particularly boastful Whitlamesque speech in Tokyo warning
Japan Inc that henceforth Australia would control its own minerals resources and
decide its own minerals policy. It would not be kowtowing to Japan as
it had done in the past.
The only problem with the speech was that the Embassy official translating the speech
did not know the world for ‘minerals.’ He kept on saying ‘metals.’
Since Australia was not producing very much in the way of ‘metals’ the audience was
left rather bemused.
I wrote the story, and The Australian, which always enjoyed making Whitlam look foolish,
gave it a good run. All I got were complaints about how cruel I had been to
the poor translator. The fact that an Australian Prime Minister was made to look
stupid before an audience of senior Japanese was secondary.
It was a peculiarly Japanese-style reaction. The feelings of the individual being
criticised for mistakes are far more important than the harm caused by those mistakes.
Then there is a Japanese ‘we versus they’ response. For an Australian
to be criticising a fellow Australian in front of foreigners is just not on. You
cease to be one of the mates.
As for trying to understand how educated Japanese might feel being forced to listen
to an incompetent interpreter who did not know the difference between metals and
minerals, forget it. Much too distant and abstract.
RESOURCES AGAIN
I was talking about Rex Connor, and the damage caused by Australia’s efforts to run
a reverse resources diplomacy against Japan.
In particular great harm was being done at the time by Connor’s permanent head, the
abrasive and highly ambitious Lennox Hewitt.
He had been demoted from a powerful public service position under the previous regime.
In effect, he would now try to use his new department to set up his own independent
public service empire. Connor would be his tool for that ambition.
But while Connor generally got good reviews for his tub-thumping nationalism (after
an article criticizing Connor’s resources nationalism, I once got an angry
rebuttal from a young and still obscure politician called Paul Keating), the arrogant
and reclusive Hewitt was a favorite target for media attack.
Hewitt was no fool. He was a lot smarter than his boss. His only problem
is that he was working for himself rather than for Australia.
Some years later I had occasion to ring Hewitt in Canberra about some aspect
of coal policy. To my surprise, he treated me to a lengthy and quite sensible outline
of government moves at the time.
At the end of it all, I felt moved to semi-apologise for past criticisms, saying
that it must have been hard for him over the years to endure the ‘occasional snipe’
from journalists. To which his memorable reply was: ”Mr Clark, it is not the
occasional snipe. It is whole buckets of shit.”
LOOKING BACK
Despite the problems, those four and a half years in Tokyo were good years. I often
say they were the best years.
Being a journalist forces one to go out to find out what is actually happening in
the world, something that rarely happens to diplomats, and certainly does not
happen to university people.
I got to meet a lot of people, many of whom were to help me later. And as should
be obvious, I got to like Japan and its people.
I was also forced to try to learn how to write. Years spent as a bureaucrat or academic
do not help much in that direction.
At the time I used to sum up my career like this:
First I learned Chinese. This made me feel fairly pleased with myself since
it gave me an asset and some insights that few other people had.
Then I learned Russian and felt even more confident of my ability to go out and face
the world. Not too many people can handle both Chinese and Russian.
Finally I learned Japanese. This time I knew I really did have something
very few others could hope to have - three of the world’s most difficult languages
under my belt, and the understandings that go with them.
But then I became a correspondent. I soon discovered that all the insights,
understandings and information one has from knowing these languages is useless
unless one can write English.
So I had to start out all over again and learn another language — my own.
The ability to express oneself clearly and convincingly in English is crucial for
anyone who wants to move in the world of ideas. My father had that skill, naturally,
and it served him well.
I have had to work a lot harder, and there is still some doubt whether I have
made it.
DISCOVER JAPAN
The years as Tokyo correspondent also saw me get my private life into some sort of
shape.
I began to see a lot of Yasuko. She still had her job with the Ajiken. We spent
many good weekends exploring the very beautiful countryside around Tokyo.
For someone brought up in the monotony, solitude and harshness of the Australian
countryside, the lushness, variety, seasonal changes and the wealth of human interaction
in Japanese nature was something wondrous.
We began with the mountain country to the west of Tokyo - first the 1500-2000
meter ranges of Oku-Tama, Oku-Chichbu, Tanzawa, and then gradually further away,
mainly into the deep and largely unknown 3,000 meter ranges of the Southern Alps.
The Japanese are strange people. They happily spend six-eight hours travelling
to the well-known but distant and often over-crowded Northern Alps, mainly because
they are well-known, distant and over-crowded.
But they ignore the equally challenging, deserted, and very attractive Southern Alps
just the other side of Mt Fuji and almost within viewing distance from Tokyo.
Thursday afternoons would see me poring over hiking maps, planning the route for
that weekend. Friday evenings we would set off on the overnight trains to the
starting point for our climb.
Sunday afternoons would be descending many miles away, tired and happy, hopefully
to a hot spring hideaway before taking the train back to Tokyo.
One hangover from those years at Oxford studying geography was learning something
about maps and geology. Studying the rocks, and seeing how the trails and the
contours on the maps matched the reality were added pleasures.
One of my ‘Discover Japan’ techniques was to take a map, look for an area with
few villages or roads, and the head off to find out what was there.
Inevitably one would find a Shangri-la hidden away in the hills and forgotten by
history.
One of our best finds was the island of Kakeroma down near Okinawa.
I had been invited by the elderly Iwasaki, who was being bitterly criticised
by our greenies for trying to build a honeymoon hotel in Queensland’s Yeppoon area,
to visit the island of Amami Oshima where he had made his fortune prewar exporting
hardwood sleepers for the Manchurian railways.
While there I saw on the map a large island just to the south with almost no roads
or large settlements. No one seemed able to tell me what went on there.
So we decided to go and find out. We discovered a paradise of unspoiled semi-tropical
hills and beaches surrounded by coral reefs, inhabited by dear hearts and gentle
people clinging to the customs and crafts of another era.
The place was so untouched that hotels, taxis and even vending machines did not exist.
Yet it was only 30 minutes by boat from Oshima.
Even now only a few diving fanatics know about Kakeroma, though it has over 200 kilometers
of coastline and a population of around 4,000 (7.000 then).
The world has this image of Japan as a grossly over-crowded nation. But there are
also large areas of countryside where people rarely venture.
Even ardent hikers rarely want to stray from the beaten track.
In the Tanzawa hills just outside Tokyo it was thirty years before someone came across
the remains of downed wartime plane. Yet the trails nearby are often crammed with
weekend hikers.
I never found any airplane wrecks. But in the remote headwaters of the Mibu
river on the western and rarely visited side of the Southern Alps I once came across
what I am sure was a small Red Army camp.
About half a dozen of tough, good-looking youth were camped out there.
If they really were Red Army fugitives, it was sad that their talents, energy and
youth were being wasted in an fruitless confrontation with a society that had no
idea of, or sympathy for, their idealistic goals.
THE FEMALE FACTOR
At first Yasuko only tolerated my expeditions into deserted hills. Japanese women
usually do not like to be made to fight through scrub for hours looking for non-existent
trails.
But she never complained. Gradually she even seemed to begin to enjoy it.
Some of those trips were wild.
Our first trip to the Southern Alps saw us setting off to climb Kai Komagadake in
the light gear and sandshoes we used for strolls in the hills around Tokyo.
Only after hours toiling up steep, never-ending ridges with thousand meter cliffs
on either side, and snow at the top even though it was still early September,
did we begin to realise that we were into some serious climbing.
But the exhilaration stayed with us, and dragged us back again and again.
It is said that men reach a physical stamina peak in their early forties. That seemed
fairly true for me, particularly since I had never been keen on physical fitness
before coming to Japan.
In Moscow my main sports had been swimming the Bassein near the Embassy and ski touring
in the winter. In Canberra it had been mainly squash.
But in Tokyo it became a hunger for vigorous mountain climbing . The fitness that
came as a result has stayed with me through to today and kept me healthy. That,
together with the genes inherited from my parents, both of whom lived through to
very reasonable old age.
What impressed me about Yasuko was her mental stamina.
On one trip to the Southern Alps we had been caught in heavy rain at the top of a
3000 meter ridge, just to the south of Akaiishi-dake. We had to overnight in
an abandoned hut, wet and shivering,.
The prospect of even heavier rain the next day meant we had to get off the
ridge quickly, that morning, or else. But the only way off was down a little-used
trail that traversed a 40-50 degree slope down to the 1500 meter level.
En route we had often to balance on slippery logs to cross rushing side streams with
sheer hundred meter rock slides below us.
Yasuko hung on bravely. Late that evening when we finally made it to safety and a
hot bath, I knew I had found a woman I wanted to be with.
Our son Dan was born in 1974. We celebrated with a delightful Japanese custom — a
‘first eating’ ceremony one hundred days after birth to which we invited all our
friends and in effect also celebrated our coming together.
Young Dan performed well, going through the motions of sipping champagne and eating
a slice of fish in his cot. Soon after we moved to Australia, and Canberra.
GOODBYE TO TOKYO?
Working for The Australian out of Tokyo had never been greatly satisfying, despite
the occasional scoop.
I enjoyed the challenge of having to go out and get stories. But things like
the Tanaka Kakuei FCCJ affair made me realise that journalism was as fairly low level,
even if important, profession.
Earlier, while working in government and diplomacy I had been on the inside and surrounded
by people I could respect to some extent. Journalism does not attract the same quality
of people.
True, I knew from experience that there is very little that goes on in the inside
that does not find its way into print outside soon, and somewhere. But even
so..
Then there was the constant problem of having to second-guess second-rate editors.
What seemed to me to be an important or interesting story would leave them cold.
, and vice versa. As well, quite serious stories would often be rewritten or
beaten up.
The Australian was still fighting for circulation numbers, and relying on old
journalistic tricks to do so.
And by 1974 Rupert Murdoch was discovering the profitability of popular, and gutter,
journalism in London. That inevitably had its backflow influence on The Australian,
even though the paper was supposed to be Murdoch’s flagship of journalistic respectability.
Deamer had long ago been ousted for his determined and liberal views. One of Murdoch’s
hatchet editors from London, Bruce Rothwell, had been put in charge.
The paper’s attractively progressive stance was being watered down, despite the obvious
failure of US policies in Indochina. Trivia and rightwing rants had become standard
fare.
I was keen to find myself another profession.
Meanwhile the Whitlam government was getting itself installed in Canberra.
Many of the ALP people I had known during the anti-Vietnam War days were getting
good slots in the new administration.
I could only watch on, in envy, from a very long distance.
THE WHITLAM CONNECTION
I had never been close to Whitlam. I only got to know him, and even then only superficially,
on his trips to Japan and China. He probably saw me as firmly in the rival Cairns
camp
But Whitlam seemed very aware of my existence. I too did not escape the encyclopedic
memory and fascination with personalities that led him to try to categorise most
people he knew.
He was curious, I have been told, about how the son of well-known conservative
and DLP supporter, Colin Clark, could have ended up as a Foreign Affairs rebel
.
He thought I had a father complex. I suppose that means I was supposed to have had
an urge to try and match my father’s fame, and to rebel against his Catholic conservatism.
I may have a few complexes, but I doubt if they have much to do with my father.
I had left home at age 20. I saw very little of him after that.
His conservative views had influenced me when I was young. But I was hardly aware
of them in the years when I was working out my own ideological position.
The one thing that did upset me was his seeming lack of interest in my ‘Fear of China’
book. He was entitled to disagree with my politics (he shared the DLP alarmist view
of China and at one stage had even gone along with the idea that it should be pre-emptively
bombed to halt its nuclear development).
But I felt it very wrong that a man whose own career depended so much
on writing books and getting them published, should not want to encourage similar
effort by his son, whether he agreed with the contents or not.
But I will always be grateful for the depth of his intellectualism, and the influence
it had on me.
His mistake was one I often see with conservative intellectuals, namely the attempt
to apply abstract reasoning to social questions that can only be understood on the
basis of the direct practical experience. They find it hard to see the other
side of problems.
This is especially true in foreign affairs, where gaining practical experience often
involves having to learn foreign languages and live among foreign peoples — something
that most intellectuals, conservatives and rightwingers especially, are usually
very reluctant to do.
They prefer to remain in the world of their own ideas, theories, prejudices and intellectualism.
That can do a lot of damage, in foreign affairs especially.
Today, only a madman can believe that the world would have been a better place if
China had been pre-emptively bombed back in the early sixties. Yet that is
what a lot of people, and not just my father, wanted to see then.
EMBASSY ADVISER?
But to come back to Whitlam. Either he or someone around him, Peter Wilenski
perhaps, seems to have felt that something should be done to ease my exile in Tokyo.
After all, I had done much to help the ALP over Vietnam. And my junior, Fitzgerald,
had been given a good job in Beijing.
During one of his trips to Tokyo he seems to have told the ambassador in Tokyo, K.C.O.
(Mick) Shann, to use me as a kind of Embassy adviser.
I had always liked Shann for his sensitivity, intelligence and activism, even
if at times he could show certain feline bitchiness.
But politically we were far apart. And he was very jealous of his prerogatives.
He was hardly likely to want to go overboard to have someone like me wandering around
his Embassy.
We went through the motions of agreeing how the adviser thing would be implemented.
But both of us knew from the start that little would come of it.
If I was to be effective I would have to be shown the confidential cable traffic
between Canberra and Tokyo, and no one had bothered to arrange clearance for that.
In any case, Shann would hardly have wanted to accept advice from someone he regarded
both as his junior and inferior.
AMBASSADOR TO JAPAN?
Many years later my brother Nicholas was to tell me something I still find
hard to believe. But he is adamant it occurred.
He says he was standing near Whitlam at the Sydney airport baggage collection, when
Whitlam approached him and said cryptically “We wanted to appoint your brother, Gregory,
as an ambassador but we could not get agrement.” (‘Agrement,’ is the French word
for formal agreement by the recipient government to accept an ambassadorial appointment.)
Brother Nicholas says that Whitlam did not say to which country I was to be sent.
But if the story is true, I would have to assume it was Japan.
Normally a government would not seek formal agrement without first informing the
person concerned. I knew nothing about any appointment. It is also rare for
agrements to be refused.
If there is anything in the story, it could have been Whitlam asking Foreign Affairs
to make very informal approach to Tokyo, probably via Shann . At that level,
neither Tokyo, or Shann, would have found it very hard to manufacture a negative
response.
Even so, my brother’s story does help to explain the many hints I have had over the
years about how I was supposed to feel resentful about not being made ambassador,
particularly after Fitzgerald was made ambassador to China.
All I can say is that I would hardly have felt resentful, even if I had known
what was going on at the time. An ambassador’s life is fairly miserable — endless
receptions and dinner parties, almost no private life, administering rebellious embassies,
looking after visiting notables, taking orders from home base etc.
In the case of Japan, there would have been the problem of representing a government
that basically was ignorant of the country, and ready to believe any hint of anti-Australian
conspiracies.
If anything, a journalist abroad can do more than an ambassador to change mistaken
attitudes and policies.
One example was the way I was able to team up with Max Suich of Fairfax in
a newspaper campaign to overcome some of Canberra’s resistance to Tokyo’s long-standing
desire for the same routine treaty of friendship, trade and commerce it had with
many other nations.
Canberra’s policies towards Japan then, and even today to some extent, seem constantly
to vacillate between deep suspicions of Tokyo’s alleged cunning, and covert
missions by sly spies and bone-headed military types trying to link up with
Japan in yet another fat-headed plan to try to project military and diplomatic clout
into the rest of Asia.
If I wanted to be really effective, I had to try to get back to home
base, to a position in Canberra so I could try to change attitudes there. But
in 1973 the chances of my being able to do that seemed remote.
Even the lowly position of honorary Embassy adviser seemed beyond my grasp.
Then suddenly, towards the end of 1974, all this was to change, thanks almost
entirely to an accidental relationship with a very accidental person — one John Menadue,
then largely in charge of Murdoch’s Sydney empire.
THE MENADUE CONNECTION
John Menadue AO today is a man with what many would see as a very distinguished career.
After rising to head the Murdoch operation Sydney, in 1974 he went on to head the
Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) through the Whitlam years. After
that he became ambassador to Japan in the Malcolm Fraser years, then head of the
Department of Immigration and Customs followed by a turbulent spell as Qantas chief
executive.
He has also been prominent in a number of advisory, charitable and voluntary organisations.
But few know that this rise to fame was largely due to a very unusual Japanese happening.
In the sixties he had left Whitlam’s office to contest the Hume electorate for Labour.
He had failed badly. As he himself admits, he lacked political talent and charisma.
And lacking also any remarkable academic or workplace qualifications,
he was threatened with serious unemployment. Certainly neither Whiltam or the ALP
were rushing to give him another job.
However, on the basis of his former Whitlam connection he had just managed to persuade
Murdoch to give him a job as manager for The Australian, then small and struggling.
In those days, a major income source for Australian newspapers were the annual supplements
on Japan, then a rising power and of some interest to Australian readers. Japanese
companies keen to get Australian footholds would spend good money buying advertisements
in the 40-50 pages devoted to these supplements.
(As correspondent in Tokyo I would later have to provide much of the copy to go on
the back of the ads, an annual and somewhat degrading chore took up far more time
than I liked. )
Lacking any advertising foothold in Japan, The Australian had entrusted ad sales
to a dubious American there. Said American had absconded with the sales revenue
of 90,000 dollars. Murdoch had then sent Menadue to Tokyo on a do or die mission
to collect the missing funds.
According to what Menadue later told me (in his memoirs “Things You Learn along the
Way” he gives a rather different version) he arrived in Tokyo with few contacts
to help him and was getting nowhere very fast.
One night at a foreigners bar he began to pour out his sorrows to someone sitting
next to him. He said how Murdoch planned legal action against the offender.
By chance, the offending American was sitting next to him on the other side of the
conversation. The American had some visa and business problems of his own.
The last thing he needed was legal action against him. He introduced himself, together
with a promise of early payment provided the lawyers were kept away .
Murdoch was so impressed with this unlikely victory that he soon began to promote
Menadue to high posts in his Sydney empire.
That at least is Menadue’s story to me, and I have little reason to disbelieve him.
************************
I first began to know Menadue personally while doing my journalist ‘apprenticeship’
in Sydney in mid-1969. He was interested in Japan for some reason, and often
invited me to his house to meet his then very young family.
While I was working in Tokyo he visited several times, twice with his family. We
would all set off, with Yasuko, to discover the Japanese countryside, travelling
once as far as Hokkaido.
He and his wife, Cynthia, quickly developed a genuine liking for Japan, in
part through the stays we had small local minshuku — household-inns. Later she was
to write a book on the subject and to organise minshuku tours for interested Australians.
In the book I get a small mention, with my name spelt incorrectly.
I think I also introduced John to the joys of middle-aged physical fitness through
mountain hiking. He kept me briefed on the political situation in Australia.
I think I also taught him a few things about world affairs.
***************************************
In October 1974 I had to go to Canberra to cover a visit by Tanaka.
It was the usual hectic run-around, trying to chase up contacts and to cover press
briefings from both sides.
(I had long ago discovered that the briefings for the Japanese press, to which I
was allowed entry, were often much franker and more honest that the Australian briefings.)
(Once in 1973 I had used this technique to get a neat scoop about how Tokyo had rejected
Rex Connor’s request for Japanese money to fund his grand plans for uranium enrichment
in Australia.)
( The large contingent of top Australian journalists covering the Whitlam/Connor
visit had meekly gone along with a briefing by Foreign Affairs’ ‘tricky’ Dick Woolcott
who, on Cornnor’s instructions, had claimed the Japanese were seriously considering
the plan.)
(All I had to do to get the true story was simply to walk into the Japanese briefing
in the adjacent room and discover the exact opposite. Even Woolcott’s subsequent
fast talking did little to recover the situation.)
During the Tanaka visit, where the Japanese leader had shown once again that he knew
more about Australian minerals development than Whitlam and his aides, I got to see
Menadue.
Whitlam had made him head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, previously
headed by Sir John Bunting.
Many in the Labour government believed that the Canberra bureaucrats, Bunting especially,
had been working against them. Eric Walsh, then Whitlam’s press secretary, had persuaded
Whitlam to replace Bunting with Menadue.
Menadue accepted the job, but feared confrontations and sabotage from the conservative
bureaucrats under him. He wanted to bring in a few of his mates, me included,
to form a kind of secretariat in PMC — a Policy Coordination Unit — which would back
him up.
We would help both in policy formation and in making sure that the government’s
policies were being implemented. We would ride herd on the bureaucracy generally.
I was not averse to the proposal, though I had little idea to what it would mean
in practice. I had been out of the Canberra loop for too long. And I would be working
in domestic policy areas where, apart from minerals, I had little experience.
But I was keen to get back to Canberra to see how policy was being handled by the
Whitlam administration. I said I was interested.
THE PRODIGAL RETURNS
Back in Tokyo after the Tanaka visit, and hit with another trivia request from Rothwell,
I was also not averse to the idea of ceasing to work for The Australian. This
time it was a Rothwell request to confirm stories about Australian racehorses
being mistreated in Japan.
There were also suggestions that I should begin filing for the London Sun. I
countered with a suggestion that they should find a replacement for me in Tokyo.
And so, with little regret and much anticipation I closed The Australian office in
Tokyo (my bosses were on yet another money-saving campaign and did not plan to send
a replacement for me), packed my bags, departed the cold and gathering darkness of
a Tokyo winter and arrived less than 24 hours later into the hot, dry sunshine
of a Canberra summer.
It was quite a contrast. But it was not the only one I would face.
*******************************
I had been invited to go straight from the airport to Menadue’s office for Friday
afternoon drinks.
Gathered there were Brian Johns, Eric Walsh and a few of the other Menadue mates
. Overnight I had been thrown not just into a Canberra summer, but also into the
center of Canberra power and patronage.
A few moments later Menadue arrived.
He had just been to a meeting with Connor and the Prime Minister. Conner had
unveiled a plan for Canberra to borrow billions from an unknown Pakistani broker
called Khemlani.
The scandal that was to undermine the Whitlam government had already started….. and
I still had not unpacked my bags.
(end of part six)
PS, From here on, please allow me to use derogatives like ‘rightwing ratbags.’
The right takes it for granted they can talk of leftwing loonies. It is time
they got some of their own medicine back.)
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