But did he get the message?
In his first media interview in Australia, Ambassador Shingo Yamagama urged Australia to ‘push back on China’.
Did he decide to signal early in his posting that he would be joining the growing anti-China chorus in Australia? This anti-China chorus is led by some of our journalists and so called ‘think’ tanks that are partly funded by US defence interests.
Is the Ambassador choosing deliberately to publicly add his voice to this chorus? It seems so.
But apparently Frances Adamson, the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, was not impressed with his behaviour and told him so at their first meeting. But some wonder if the Ambassador got the message.
Ambassador Yamagama reportedly leads a Ministry of Foreign Affairs faction that is similar to the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s wolf warrior faction.
Was he posted to Australia to stiffen up Australia’s anti-China stance?
We should be very careful about where the Japanese Ambassador is trying to lead us against China.
China in the Second World War.
It is worth recording some very important history about the valuable role of China for Australia and others in the past. We should not forget it.
China suffered greatly at the hands of the Japanese military in the 1930s and the 1940s. Twenty million Chinese died and a large part of the country was plundered and extensively damaged. Fifty million Chinese were made homeless. A rural and undeveloped China was no match for a modernised industrial nation like Japan. China barely survived.
In that war China was on the Allies’ side and with its great land mass China absorbed, at heavy cost, a great deal of Japanese military energy. This tying down of the Japanese military was in some ways similar to the way the USSR absorbed a great deal of Germany’s military might. The Allies benefited but at the cost of great suffering by the people of China and the USSR.
But four years after the end of World War II the Communist Party of China took charge. China became the ‘enemy’ and the story of its suffering at the hands of Japan was lost for decades. Other issues, such as the Korean War, also pushed China’s World War II experience into the background. Now with China modernising and growing in confidence, it is not surprising that it expresses concern about what it endured from an invader who consistently seeks to avoid the truth about WWII. It is best expressed in Japan trying to make it’s school curriculum more “patriotic”.
If we are truly aware of China’s historic hurt and anger and our own self-interest we should at the least keep out of attempts by some Japanese to enrol us in their antipathy to China.
Footnote: In his speech at the NAB Australia-China Business Week on 5 September 2014, Malcolm Turnbull referred to the horrible histories of Japan and China.
He said:
“There is one chapter in those histories which is all too often unread even where it is written at all.
For China the war with Japan had begun in 1937 and for for four years she fought alone. Japan had 680,000 troops in China at the time it launched its offensive in the Pacific – four times the number it deployed to sweep through South East Asia until they were stopped at our doorstep in the jungles of New Guinea.
Had China been defeated and become a collaborating puppet state, like Vichy France, not only would Japan have been able to fling vastly greater resources into the war against Australia, but it would have been able to invade Siberia in 1942, as Hitler asked, when the Red Army was almost smashed by the Nazi offensive in the West.
We may not have succeeded in resisting Japanese aggression without the tenacious heroism of our Chinese ally.
The Soviet Union, reeling in the face of the blitzkrieg, may not have been able to survive a two-front war at its moment of greatest weakness.
The central role of China as our ally in the Second World War is barely remembered in Australia today. But it will never be forgotten in China.
We should never forget that China’s war against Japan was not just their war, but our war too – and without China we may not have won it at all.
John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.
Comments
34 responses to “Japanese Ambassador rapped over the knuckles by Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade”
I reiterate something no one has yet commented upon: Japan has tons of Plutonium, harvested from nuclear reactors and due to be sent to Europe, UK and France, but retained by Japan. Enough for 5,000 dirty warheads. Fukushima was probably an American prod to comply. Japan is going to war.
JAPAN IS GOING TO WAR.
Japan is not going to war, the only case for that would be if the Americans do as well through some reckless action in the region. Their trade with China is far too important.
Thank you John and thank you Commentators for replenishing the void of Japan’s imperial atrocities in China and Western complicity in same. I love these history lessons in P & I that counter and challenge deliberate censorship i.e propaganda as history to dumb us down into unwitting cheerleaders of government war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Could it be that the Ambassador is merely relaying a message dictated by the (still) occupying U.S. forces? Those forces have been in Japan for 75 years now, they show no signs of leaving and Japan has yet to establish itself as an independent nation.
And what better place than supine Australia to deliver that message, another non-independent, U.S. occupied Pacific outpost?
The discussion so far is a salutary reminder for us all that we are walking on crushed eggs here and need to clearly distinguish Australia’s interests and responses from current US positions and responses in regard to both China and Japan.
John, your article touches my heart.
A screming headline “Envoy’s parting shot at China” appeared on the front page of the weekend Australian (2-3 January 2021). I don’t believe he was reprimanded by our government. Naturally the media here likes it because anyone bashing China is to be supported. Now the incoming Japanese embassodar is exhibiting the same anti-China aggressive behaviour. Sure, Frances Adamson told the ambassador she was not impressed with him, but that was not good enough. Is the Japanese envoy here responsible for relationship between Australia and Japan or responsible for relationship between Australia and China? One rarely mentioned offensive behaviour by Australia towards China happened back in 2011 and 2014. President Obama and former Japanese Prime Minister, respectively, attacked China from the floor of the Australian Federal Parliament. I remember the news left me totally flabbergasted. How this action could be considered anything but antagonistic is beyond me. Clearly, I was not alone in thinking this as the late Hon. Malcolm Fraser denounced Shinzo Abe’s speech in saying it “should only have been made on his own soil”. Referring to Obama’s 2011 pronouncement about a US “pivot” towards more vigilance in the Asia-Pacific region, Mr Fraser said it was “misguided and wrong……. because it was a major announcement of American policy from Australian soil as though Australian soil was American soil”. Australia should reflect on its many behaviour over the years and try to understand why China is upset with our country.
Australia’s lack of insensitivity towards China reminds me of an old colleague who could not understand why other drivers would hone frequently at him and give him a hard time while he drove on the road. That was until one day a mutual colleague took a lift in his car after which the passenger vowed that would be his last. Apparently, the car was driven in a erratic manner, often slowed down suddenly without good reason, and totally oblivious to what other drivers thought of his driving. Similarly, our government just cannot seem to understand why China is upset with Australia when many of us can see why.
The architect of the Obama “pivot” Kurt Campbell, a third rate Democratic Party hack has been put in charge of “containing” China by Biden. In 2013, Campbell was appointed an “honorary” Order of Australia by the boot licker Abbott. One of his inspired choices along with the racist Duke. Xi must hardly believe his luck. PRC is up against third raters.
There is or has been a well established protocol policy in Canberra that no embassy should criticise the government of a country also represented in Canberra. In 1975, I was head of the China and Korea section while we had both ROK and DPRK embassies in Canberra. When the DPRK embassy departed without notice, they had, the night before, left with the Chinese embassy a note to forward to us. This the Chinese embassy eventually did by slowest post. The note said that they were leaving because they had been prevented from carrying out their normal diplomatic duties.
Very senior people directed that i explain. I had fortunately kept full records and was more than pleased, counting up, that while I had had to speak to the North Koreans fifteen times I had spoken to the South Koreans seventeen times. It was all much harder for the North. They could only release the speeches of the Great Leader with his colourful descriptions of people in Seoul and Washington. The South Koreans often wily, once quoting the Great Leader but adding Rogue to his title. A sense of the absurd, but leave it to flame up and…
Before you ask, yes, that was a fascinating year. My account of it is among my (few) papers at the National library.
I think the aim now is to rupture protocol, see what you can get away with.
Surprisingly the Constitution and the law allow it to take place.
George, the diplomatic corps is a curious thing. It’s a term often misused but correctly refers to the corps of ambassadors accredited, in the order of presentation of credentials, and no one else. The corps would all know the rules. It’s nothing to do with the constitution, it’s about manners among people who notionally share the objective of advancing their country’s relations with the receiving country. The ambassadorial business is ancient: you ask the foreign ministry, if say Roberta Teo is ok, and normally the receiving country says yes thus granting agrément if my French is sound. No doing this stuff in English. Roberta can then travel to the receiving country with two copies of his letters of credence, in the case of the Japanese ambassador a formal letter from the emperor of Japan to the queen of Australia. On arrival the ambassador-designate calls on the foreign ministry and hands over the copy “d’usage”. If that’s ok, if there’s no insult of manner of address or geographical or political, or misspelling, on an appointed day the chief of protocol takes you to the head of state to hand over the formal letter of credence, i.e. your credentials, with ceremony. There is a tendency of members of the corps to take their ruffle-able feathers and status seriously. But these are not national constitutional or legal things, accredited diplomats are outside national law, as provided these days by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Australian ambassadors must take leave from the public service and take up an executive council appointment as head of state representative “I send unto my trusty and well beloved friend (or such)” to head of state. But all this stuff is of much longer standing than Australia. Some hiccups here and there. In 1288 when a Chinese delegation came to the Majapahit court in West Java (again) to ask for tribute, as if Java were a tribute state, the delegation according to written record went home with their noses cut off. That had consequences, the Chinese then sent a fleet, which was actually defeated giving rise to the Srivijaya empire over essentially what is now Indonesia.
Back to my point: an ambassador newly arrived may be in for a rough time if he ignores practice and standing requests from the protocol office. And as the discussion here suggests other Asian countries may be antagonised. Moreover, in formal term a Japanese ambassador represents the Emperor. He’s not himself, he’s not just his foreign ministry.
Thanks Dennis for an in depth almost textbook explanation of the process, and it is an interesting process. I respect your understanding of such matters.
My flippant remark was more about the general tendency in politics to test the limits and see what you can get away with as we see today happening in many countries. And that often lays beyond the diplomatic corps itself.
I guess the best example is how Trump turned presidential diplomacy into a abuse and racism via Twitter messages well beyond the usual language or channels, sidestepping the unspoken intercountry behaviour of a president. Many other governments around the world were shocked by this too. What we found out from him is that the American constitution actually allowed him to do it and far more. We didn’t know that before.
Similarly in Australia we a have a government, and very supportive media that shows signs that it does not want to respect the normal methods when it has been so accusatory of China yet not telling us about their own actions against China. The entire relationship has broken down, no one is picking up the phone in Beijing, even to our trade minister.
In a general way in politics, seeing what you can get away with has become more prevalent, so has biased finger pointing and hypocrisy. There are so many transgressions of what we might expect in terms of sacking ministers according to codes of conduct, yet nothing ever happens to these people. And there is little in our constitution to stop it either. So seeing what you can get away by testing the limits is now widespread behaviour.
There was even once a tacit but commonly accepted protocol to give important OS postings out in a bipartisan way, but now we only see Liberals getting most of the highest positions particularly with the US and UK. No one is saying a word.
In essence I think there is more tendency to try to break the rules to see if you can get away with it, and general diplomacy has become far more aggressive. This is what made me think the young Japanese diplomat might be trying such a tactic.
John you quote Malcolm Turnbull. I heard him make those remarks in 2014. But what sort of a man is he when he so quickly forgot this episode in history when it suited his political compass.
Australia in aligning itself with China’s historical enemies. So what conclusion can China draw from that?
And also the enemies of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. The brilliant Morrison strategy to isolate Australia from ASEAN is now complete. The mugs of Asia.
Thank you John for setting the record straight again. May I add a little more to the history.
We should also to remind ourselves that Theodore Roosevelt was right behind Japan after the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).
Quotes from Roosevelt:
“No human beings, black, yellow or white, could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant in short, as untrustworthy in every way as the Russians…”
He called the Japanese in comparison:
“a wonderful and civilized people,” and “entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world.”
In 1900 he wrote: “I should like to see Japan have Korea.”
And later, “The sympathies of the United States are entirely on Japan’s side.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06bradley.html
Since Commodore Perry’s gunship diplomacy in the early 1850s to open up Japan, the US did everything to turn the country into a replica of the US society. Those back home in America were told the Japanese were all turning into Christians and wearing Western clothing. Their industries were learning new technologies and much of it directed eventually at war technology.
Both the US and Britain saw Japan as the country in the region that was following the Imperialist example they had set, and they had a common foe in the Russians. But between Japan the US and Britain, various duplicitous actions were being carried out on all sides. Japanese animosity over Perry’s humiliation played a part in Japanese feeling and thinking (as it still does today), because they were also cleverly planning to rid themselves of the US oppressor while playing the Western game.
In August 5th 1907, the Japanese navy had already completed drawing up plans to attack and destroy the American fleet in the Pacific. It was like the US’s fledgling example of Eastern minds being converted to Western value systems was also waking up Japanese nationalism. Japan was turning into a Frankenstein ready to cast off its parents. Just for the record, 1907 was 34 years before the WWII attack on Pearl Harbor.
Despite Japan being the shining example of an Eastern country accepting to be Westernised, Britain and the US never showed the Japanese any level of equality in relations behind the scenes. For example, the Washington Naval Treaty, established in 1922 after WWI, left Britain and the US in a position of having far more fire power in that the ratio of 5:5:3 (US, Britain, Japan, respectively) and the Japanese immediately saw it as a snub – they were not being treated equally to Westerners despite their willingness to follow their ways, and a combined force of US and Britain meant Japan was outnumbered in ships by 10 to 3.
When Roosevelt said “I should like to see Japan have Korea,” it actually led to the invasion of the Korean Peninsular and formal takeover in 1910, and then eventually the invasion of Manzhou (满洲) or Manchuria. The motivation for this was that Japan needed land for its increasing population -real estate. Films about offers to Japanese families and individuals to move to Manzhou were made as advertisements during the 1930s.
On a final note I suggest to anyone to read into the Rape of Nanjing which was one of the most appalling invasions of a city in history, only comparable to the Rape of Magdeburg in Germany in the 17th Century.
The attack on Nanjing (especially for women) was so bad that John Rabe, a German businessman in Nanjing who was also a member of the German Nazi Party at the time, took compassion on the people in the city and managed to create a Nanjing safety zone providing Chinese refugees with food and shelter. He is quoted as saying:
“…there is a question of morality here… I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me, and it is touching to see how they believe in me.”
It is said Rabe rescued between 200,000 and 250,000 Chinese people. Rabe said around 60,000 died, but modern estimates say the number of murdered civilians was as high as 300,000 given that so many bodies were burned and not accounted for. As many as 60,000 women and girls were sexually assaulted, and great deal of those were killed, abused or tortured in atrocious ways as well.
Thank you John. I’ve sent on to friends and colleagues who might be as ill-informed as me.
Thank you again JM. We certainly seem to forget the role that China played in the Pacific War. Japanese conduct in China 1931-1945 was certainly disgusting but seems to be conveniently forgotten.
Japan continues to run its own agenda re China and Australia should be extremely careful.
The Imperial Japanese Navy was deliberately created on the British model in the late 19th Century, with immense technical aid from Britain. It paid off with the smashing of the Czar’s fleet at Tsushima: Japan was used as Britain’s tool against Russia, the old rival in the “Great Game”. The imperialist, Anglophile element in the US was right in there with them, hence Roosevelt’s remarks. The alliance between the two continued through the Great War (Japanese destroyers escorted Australian troopships bound for Europe) and as a reward Japan got Germany’s colonial outposts in China after the latter’s defeat. One can imagine how the Chinese felt about that little act of imperial bastardry.