August 5, 2006
Hiroshima is closer than you think. There's a tragic, yet in some ways hopeful Australian connection.
After the atomic bomb, the city suffered the horrors of foreign occupation. The Americans were bad, but worse was to follow — the Australians were coming.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the ‘advance guards of the Australian occupation force seem to the Japanese to be frigid and unfriendly in comparison with the withdrawing Americans’. Aussie censors reported the locals found Americans ‘more kind and attractive’.
But then Australia wasn't there to be kind. Canberra demanded a role in the occupation to stake its claim on a share of the Pacific, and to crush an imperialist rival.
So the diggers came to bombed-out Hiroshima, cheered on by military journos with the tasteful headline, ‘Australia Takes the Ashes’. Eyewitness Alan Clifton described how the Aussies traded on black markets to ‘drag the last possible yen from these bomb-stricken people, some of them mothers with pale weakly children’.
Canberra set out to teach the Japanese a ‘democratic way of life’ through a kind of apartheid. All over Japan stores, hotels, trains, and buildings were off limits to Japanese, while officials of the occupying forces requisitioned their houses. The Australian authorities were more rigid about this than the Americans.
When misery bred unrest, occupation forces crushed it, for example at Ube where Australian troops fixed bayonets and marched around the town in a display of force for two days.
Of course women weren't spared. Returned Services League (RSL) blowhard Bruce Ruxton was telling the truth for once when he said that in the eyes of occupation troops, Japan was ‘one big brothel’.
Worse than brothels, there was rape, and not just the odd case. Alan Clifton endured the looks of hospital staff treating rape victims. Their eyes said, ‘So, we are barbarians, and you are civilized … How is it then that all through the Far East your tribunals are now trying Japanese soldiers for these very crimes?’ He wrote:
It was easy to answer them at first: ‘This is not the act of a typical Australian. Such brutes as these are found among all peoples, in all armies. It is a question of proportions. There were so many more of them in your army.’ That was the first time it happened. But since then I had become a monotonously regular visitor to the hospital, always bringing with me a victim of the Yabanjin — the barbarians — as they had begun to call the Australians.
There was a wider pattern of violence. Peter Bates tells us the Australians committed
a steady stream of robberies, sometimes with violence, committed against the civilian population … Naval ratings ashore at Kure were particularly prone to committing thefts from Japanese shops and other acts of a more or less violent nature, and struck fear into the hearts of Japanese of both sexes as they roamed the streets in their rowdy gangs.
This isn't to say the rank and file soldiers were all thugs, or that any of them were inherently bad. On the contrary, the vile logic came from above. Alan Clifton recalled:
On Morotai we were issued with instructions as to the method of returning a Japanese prisoner's salute. We were to ‘stare him fiercely and fixedly in the eye’, and walk past. In Japan, we were told, they were unhygienic and disease-ridden and unfit to associate with, and we were constantly reminded of their war-time villainies. This indoctrination was without doubt the major cause of the delinquency of a large body of Australian soldiers. The polices of the different Occupying Governments were reflected faithfully in the behaviour of their troops. British soldiers held themselves aloof; the Americans indulged themselves to the hilt; the Australians acted as if they were still at war.
Rank and file Australian soldiers often resisted the reactionary orders of their commanders. They found ways around the racial exclusion policy, with tactics ranging from sexual liaisons to invitations to church. Some married Japanese, then waged a long battle to get visas for their spouses to enter White Australia. As the soldiers got to know ordinary Japanese people, wartime hatreds declined — despite the best efforts of their officers, their government and the media. Robin Gerster remarks:
A journalist who visited the country in January 1952, just as the occupation was being wound up, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that people ‘must be prepared for some shocks’ as the men returned home [owing to] ‘the degree of liking for the Japanese developed by Australians who have lived among them for any length of time’. The very headline was intended to shock: ‘Our Soldiers Like the Japanese’.
The RSL shunned the returning troops, because they hadn't seen battle but also because they'd consorted with the despised Japanese. Later they began to show an abnormal incidence of cancer, from living in Hiroshima. Here you have the Australian victims of the A-bomb. A 2003 report recommended that they get a service pension and gold health card, but the Howard Government didn't want to know.
The government, one old digger told Gerster, was just ‘waiting for us all to die’.
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