Assessing Australian Attitudes to Japan in the Early Twentieth Century — A New Approach

Ben McInnes

Published December, 2006
Pages 13-22
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21159/nv.01.02

New Voices
Volume 1
© The Japan Foundation, Sydney, 2006

Assessing Australian Attitudes to Japan in the Early Twentieth Century — A New Approach¹

After living in Japan for almost seventeen years, and being constantly intrigued by the attitudes of the Japanese to Australia, upon my return I was naturally interested to learn about Australian attitudes to Japan. The paucity of news concerning Japan in the press suggested that it was not of major interest to the Australian public, and one tends to pre- sume that, wartime apart, this had always been the case. An interest in Australian history fostered by prolonged absence was partly satisfied by undertaking volunteer work for the National Trust of Australia, at their property Saumarez Homestead’, located in the rural city of Armidale, New South Wales, where I had taken up residence. Saumarez’ is a large Victorian—Edwardian pastoral property, purchased by Francis John White in 1874. White and his wife Margaret raised their five daughters and two sons on the property, and became wealthy and socially important people in the township. While this may seem irrelevant to my experience in Japan, I was amazed to discover that Mary White, the eldest daughter of the Saumarez’ family, had indeed travelled to Japan in 1903, and I soon learned that quite a number of other local people had done the same in the period between Federation and World War I. That residents of what was a rather isolated community in country Australia had gone to the trouble and expense to travel such a long way, taking steamships up the Queensland coast, stopping over in Manila and Hong Kong, and taking over six weeks to reach the land of topsy-turvydom’, as Japan was referred to in the local press on one occasion, suggested that an investigation of attitudes to Japan in this part of Australia in the early years of the twentieth century might provide some significant data on the development of the Australia—Japan relationship.²

Several extraordinary events occurred in the Pacific Region in the first decade of the twentieth century — events which, while not directly involving Australia, are reputed to have had a profound impact on Australian attitudes towards Japan. Previous studies have concluded that the Russo-Japanese War of 1904—05 had an enormously positive effect on Australian perceptions of Japan. Australian public opinion was overwhelmingly in favour of the Japanese,³ who were seen as being engaged in a heroic resistance to Russian encroachment’.⁴ That the Japanese Consul in Sydney, as well as Burns, Philp, and Company — agents of the Japan Mail Steamship Company (Nippon Yusen Kaisha, or, more commonly, N.Y.K.) — found it necessary to discourage Australian would-be volunteers with the announcement that despite the large number of applications … being daily received … there is no possible chance of any officers or men being allowed to join the Japanese forces other than Japanese,’ illustrates the extent to which Australian sympathies lay with Japan.⁵ The warm welcome extended to the Training Japanese Naval Squadron upon its visit to Australian waters in 1906 bears ample witness to the nature of Australian sentiments immediately following the battle.⁶

From this point on, however, the literature has claimed unanimously that Australian attitudes towards Japan rapidly became negative. A number of explanations have been advanced for this shift. D.C.S. Sissons⁷ proposed the Russo-Japanese War as the source of both positive and negative sentiments towards Japan, with the negative feelings not assuming predominance until some time after the war, although he gave no convincing argument as to why this delayed reaction’ should have occurred. A.T. Yarwood⁸ suggested that the cause of the sudden escalation in anti-Japanese attitudes in Australia was a result of the fear aroused by the threat of war between Japan and the United States in 1906 and into 1907, over the so-called California School Board Crisis. Yarwood claimed that Australians felt that the racial tensions behind the conflict were ominous for an Australia that had only recently introduced an Alien Restriction Act, a view with which both Takeda⁹ and Walker¹⁰ concurred. While agreeing with Yarwood’s racial’ explanation of a reportedly Australia-wide anti-Japanese mood, Neville Meaney¹¹ added depth to the argument by including Britain’s withdrawal of naval forces from the Pacific, rumours of a collapse of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1910—11 as all contributing to increasingly negative attitudes towards Japan.

It is significant, however, that while all of these sources used data from the contemporary press extensively, it was drawn almost without exception from the press of the capital cities. Thus, although studies of the attitudes of Australians towards Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have implicitly accepted the premise that items appearing in the press form a useful tool for determining contemporary Australian attitudes, researchers have then also made the presumption that attitudes throughout Australia were essentially homogeneous. The unacknowledged premise has been that the results of investigations into the attitudes of city-dwelling Australians, as determined from the metropolitan press, could be extrapolated across the entire population to arrive at an Australian attitude towards Japan.

One aim of the study presented in summary here was to test the validity of this presumption that the press of the capital cities provides an accurate indication of attitudes towards Japan in all sectors of the population, including rural-dwellers, in the period 1906 to 1914. Such a test’ was considered important because the population group across which the extrapolation has been made — the rural population — constituted a far greater portion of the total population of Australia in the period under investigation than it does today. For example, in 1906, 48.5 per cent of the total population lived on rural properties or in towns of less than three thousand people, while only 34 per cent lived in the four cities of over 100,000 people. In contrast, by 1996 only 18 per cent lived in rural areas and almost 63 per cent lived in cities of over 100,000. Similarly, although over one-third of Australians were directly engaged in primary production in 1906, only approximately five per cent were engaged in this industry in 1996.¹² A division in country—city attitudes over a number of issues, including the administration of the legal system, transport, labour distribution, and government spending, was more than evident in the heated debate surrounding the decentralisation issue, in which the rural electorates struggled to retain political power against the growing might of Sydney. Whether this division was paralleled in other spheres, such as the stance taken on international matters, remains unaddressed.¹³ It is clear, however, that due consideration of rural attitudes is vital to the accuracy and validity of any statement of Australian attitudes in the early years of the twentieth century.

It must be emphasised that previous research in general has used not only press data, but also that to be found in a number of other sources, such as the Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, the writings and correspondence of politicians and other prominent persons, and defence force documents. It is not the intention of this paper to suggest that these sources are not an invaluable resource for investigations into Australian attitudes towards Japan. However, as the city press has been used consistently as one of the more important tools in such investigations, it is undeniably important that the validity of this tool as an indicator of Australia-wide attitudes be tested.

As in previous research, it was an acknowledged assumption of this study that a survey of press articles dealing with Japan during the era between the Russo-Japanese and Great wars would provide evidence of the attitudes of Australians at that time. While it could be argued that editorials might be attempting to inculcate certain attitudes in the readership, rather than reflecting already-held viewpoints, this was not felt to be an obstacle to the research. Although an individual editor might promote a point of view opposed to the generally held opinions of that newspaper’s readership, the tendency of data collected from that newspaper to prejudice outcomes would be largely counteracted by the use of data from several newspapers and journals, and from not only editorials, but also the range of other items appearing in the press (including news reports, readers’ letters, trade and business reports, educational columns, and entertainment items).

It could be argued that the statements of politicians, for example, are a more accurate indicator of public opinion than the press, in that they would be unlikely to depart dramatically from what they understood to be mainstream public opinion. However, although political leaders are likely to trim their sails’ to suit the mood of the voters at election times, it is clear that at other times this is not necessarily the case. In any event, by the early years of the twentieth century, Australian federal politicians often voiced extremely diverse opinions on a number of issues. Thus, basing an assessment of the attitudes of the public on the statements of any one politician alone, or even on the opinions expressed by a small group of politicians, would be fraught with dangers equally as severe as relying solely on the press.

In any case, although it is recognised that a more extensive study of the question of attitudes towards Japan would need to incorporate data from a variety of sources, the purpose of this study was not to arrive at a definitive assessment of Australian attitudes, but rather to test the validity of the presumption made in previous research that the rural press would simply echo the opinions of the capital city press, and could therefore justifiably be ignored.

A second and no less important goal of this research was to trial’ a new methodological approach in this field, namely, the incorporation of quantitative analysis into what has been traditionally an area subject to purely qualitative methods. It should be noted here that this form of empirical research has not to this writer’s knowledge been undertaken previously in a study of Australian attitudes towards Japan in the pre—World War I era. Although earlier research has discussed the general tone’ of reports in, for example, the Sydney Morning Herald of a certain year as being positive or negative towards Japan, no actual records of the frequency with which items about Japan appeared, nor of the relative proportions of different types of items appearing in that year, have been presented. Clearly, arguments could be advanced as to the advantages or disadvantages of qualitative over quantitative methods in historical research,  although a discussion of this topic is beyond the range of this paper. However, it would seem that a purely qualitative approach to this research area, where enormous amounts of data are available, serves only to expose the researcher to claims of bias; the plenitude of data means that numerous examples can be found to support nearly any argument put forward. On the other hand, a purely quantitative methodology, merely tabulating frequencies of publication of the various types of item, fails to take into account the relative weight being placed on items of any one kind by the press of the day; a passing reference to the trade relationship, for example, would be granted the same importance as a full-page article reporting the imminent threat of Japanese invasion. Although the dangers involved in combining qualitative and quantitative research were fully appreciated, it was considered that just such a combination of methods would shed new light on the questions addressed in this study, and might foster a deeper understanding of the issues involved. Hence, although a quantitative analysis of the data was undertaken, the output of that process was then examined qualitatively, in an attempt to avoid the weaknesses and exploit the advantages of both methodologies.

Three periods were selected as covering critical points in the interval between the Russo-Japanese War and the upheavals of the Great War. In particular, the reportedly anti-Japanese years in Australia of the California Schools Board Crisis, the intervening period of what has been labelled the era of Australian Crisis Fever’, and the months immediately prior to Japan’s entering into the conflicts of World War I, were chosen as representing periods when, according to the literature, negative attitudes towards Japan in Australia were rampant.

The New England Region of northern New South Wales was chosen as the subject of an in-depth case study. This region was selected not only because of evidence of considerable numbers of individuals from this region having travelled to Japan and of their having personal interest in that country, but also for the fact that New England had a flourishing press at the time, making it a fertile source of data. The availability of contemporary local newspapers, for example, in the Dixson Library of the University of New England, was, of course, an important consideration in the undertaking of this study.

Nine New England newspapers were surveyed, as well as two major journals.¹⁴ Although published in Sydney, the journals were included not only because of their clearly intended rural readership, but also because evidence exists that they were widely read in the New England region during the period covered by this study. All editions of the source materials were scanned for all references to Japan and the Japanese people. These items were briefly summarised and recorded by date and source.

Data items were assigned to one of four groups: those items portraying, or tending to create, a positive attitude towards Japan; those portraying a negative view; those which were neutral; and those which tended to exoticise Japan, rather than reporting events or facts.

The second phase of analysis involved the counting of occurrences of items in each group, and tabulation of results. It was recognised early in the study that the assignment of data to one of the four categories did not always present the researcher with obvious, objective choices. In the interests of reducing researcher bias to a minimum, a number of procedures were established in advance to assist in the allocation of items to one of the four categories on the basis of other features of the item itself, rather than leaving the decision to the researcher in each case.

Following quantitative analysis, a detailed qualitative investigation of items categorised into the four groups was undertaken, to determine the topics or news events around which the items in each category tended to cluster. By then combining these two sets of data, it was possible to discover whether the rural press was portraying an attitude towards Japan similar to that reported in the literature for the capital cities, or whether a different view was evident.

A summary of the results of the quantitative analysis is presented in Tables 1 and 2, below:

Table 1: Totals of item types for all press surveyed by year groupings

Table 2: Totals of item types for entire survey

Ben McInnes

The University of New England

Ben McInnes was a resident of Tokyo from 1983 to 2000. Since returning to Australia, he has been a student of Japanese at the University of New England, Armidale, where he is currently engaged in doctoral research into the first Japanese Antarctic expedition of 1910—12.