Living Histories Interview Series 2011: Stories of Australians and Japanese who have made history or have seen history in the making

Sayuki in Asakusa
photo: Ben Robins

The Japan Foundation, Sydney’s ‘Living Histories’ series returns in 2011 with a new format - live interviews with Japanese and Australians who are shaping the relationship between our two countries. Join us as we explore the worlds of art, food, history and current affairs with interviewees including Sayuki, the Australian-born geisha, and Kariya Tetsu, Sydney-based author of the bestselling Oishinbo manga series.

Participants in the series will be interviewed by Ian McArthur, a former Tokyo correspondent for the Herald and Weekly Times and a former writer and translator for the International Department of Kyodo News in Tokyo. Ian is a subeditor at the Sydney office of News Corporation. He is also an honorary associate of the Department of Japanese Studies at Sydney University. Ian will chat with participants about their lives, experiences and thoughts on Japan. Using photographs and film, these intimate talks with people who bridge cultures and hemispheres bring to life the history of the Japan-Australia relationship.

Film & Discussion Series

Dates:               Wednesday 3, 17, 31 August and 7, 14, 28 September 2011
Time:                6.30pm (Doors open 6.00pm) – 8pm
Venue:              The Japan Foundation, Sydney – Multipurpose Room L1 Chifley Plaza, 2 Chifley Square, Sydney
Admission:         Free. Bookings Essential.
RSVP & Enquiry: reception@jpf.org.au or phone 02 8239 0055

Interviews

Series Coordinator & Interviewer: Dr Ian McArthur

Dr Ian McArthur is a writer and academic. He has worked as a journalist in Japan and Australia, including at The Courier-Mail in Brisbane, as Tokyo correspondent for the Melbourne-based Herald and Weekly Times, and a reporter at the International Department of Kyodo News in Tokyo. He is an Honorary Associate of the Department of Japanese Studies at The University of Sydney where his research interest is cross-cultural communication. In 1992, Ian authored a Japanese-language book about Henry Black, an Australian storyteller who was active in Japan in the 1890s. In 2002, he completed a doctoral thesis about Black's contribution to the Meiji-era reform debate in Japan. He is now writing a biography of Black in English.

28 September
Father Paul Glynn

This Marist Catholic priest and author has devoted a lifetime to reconciliation and friendship between two former wartime foes. Inspired by his brother Tony Glynn, Paul Glynn spent many years in Nara where he made a point of studying the Japanese language and culture via complex Buddhist texts. What do Buddhism and Christianity have in common? And what does Father Paul Glynn see in the Japanese kanji for “mu” (nothingness)?

Father Paul Glynn has been a Catholic priest since 1953. He was inspired to follow Padre Lionel Marsden, a former prisoner-of-war of the Japanese on the Burma Thailand Railroad, to work for reconciliation with the people of Japan. He subsequently helped his brother Tony, who was a trail-blazer in reconciliation with Japan, and has spent 20 years in Japan. He is a recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun from the Japanese government and a medal of the Order of Australia from the Australian government for reconciliation work between Japan and Australia. He initiated Australia's first Sister City relationship with a Japanese city – between Yamato Takada in Nara Prefecture and Lismore in northern New South Wales – 48 years ago. Father Paul Glynn is author of a number of books, including A Song for Nagasaki, The Smile of the Ragpicker and Like a Samurai – the Tony Glynn Story (all pub. by Marist Fathers Books, Australia.)

ARCHIVE

14 September
Walter Hamilton & Alan Stokes

Walter Hamilton worked for ABC radio and television in Tokyo between 1979 and 1996. Alan Stokes was Tokyo correspondent for The Australian in 1998 and 1999. The work of foreign correspondents shapes and informs people in their home countries. Both covered major events. For Walter Hamilton, these included the second "oil shock", the Kobe Earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack. For Alan Stokes, they included the long economic slump, the premiership of Keizo Obuchi and the growing threat from North Korea. Find out how they reported on these and other events and people during their time in Japan. How do they see the future of the Australia-Japan relationship as portrayed through the media?

Walter Hamilton worked as a journalist for 37 years, with Australian Associated Press and the ABC in Sydney, Canberra, London, Singapore and Tokyo. He was North-East Asia Correspondent for the ABC for a total of eleven years between 1979 and 1996. He covered civil strife and democratic change in South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines; economic boom and bust in Japan; natural disasters, such as the Kobe Earthquake; and man-made ones, including the Aum Shinrikyo sarin nerve gas attacks. He has published two books, Serendipity City: Australia, Japan and the Multifunctionpolis and Koala No Hon, and has recently completed a third on the mixed-race children of the Occupation, under the working title of Lest We Beget: The Mixed-Race Legacy of Occupied Japan. (www.lestwebeget.com)

Alan Stokes is a journalist, author and small businessman. He has worked in senior editing and writing positions here and overseas at newspapers such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Times and the Courier-Mail. Alan is the author of The Australian on Australia (2003, John Wiley), established his own biography writing business in 2006 and now writes two op-ed columns a week on a range of topics for The Australian Financial Review. He was Tokyo and North-East Asia Correspondent for The Australian in 1998-99. Two of his four young children at the time attended the local Japanese public school. One of them is now majoring in Japanese and Advanced Mathematics at the University of Sydney.

(Left: Walter Hamilton, Right: Alan Stokes)

7 September
Dr Christine de Matos & Kathy Wray

In this interview, Dr Christine de Matos, co-author of Love Under Occupation, the inspiring story of former Australian soldier Noel Huggett and his Japanese war-bride Reiko (Ruth) Yamamoto, will be joined by their daughter Kathy Wray, who was born stateless in Japan in 1951. How did Christine approach the writing of their story? How have Noel, Ruth and Kathy fought Japanese and Australian bureaucracy to achieve legal status for Ruth and Kathy in Australia?

Christine de Matos is an historian based at the University of Wollongong, University of Western Sydney and University of Notre Dame. She has been researching the Australian role, both diplomatically and militarily, in the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) over the last 18 years. Her main publications include: Imposing Peace and Prosperity: Australia, social justice and labour reform in occupied Japan (ASP 2008); and Occupying the 'Other': Australia and military occupations from Japan to Iraq (co-edited with Robin Gerster, CSP 2009). She is completing another edited collection (with Rowena Ward), Gender, Power, and Military Occupation: Asia Pacific and the Middle East since 1945, to be published by Routledge in 2011.

Kathy Wray’s father, Noel Huggett, went to Japan in 1946 with the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces, after the defeat of Japan. There, he met and fell in love with her mother, Reiko (Ruth) Yamamoto. Kathy’s father wrote a book called Love Under Occupation, with the help of Christine de Matos, from the University of Wollongong. The book was launched at the family’s home town, Goulburn, in March this year, 10 days after Noel passed away at the age of 89. The story tells of what Noel and Reiko went through to be able to marry, and after Kathy was born in Tokyo on December 3, 1951, the continual denial of her Australian citizenship from birth.

(Left: Christine de Matos, Right: Kathy Wray)

31 August
Kariya Tetsu

The worlds of food and manga meet in the work of writer and essayist Tetsu Kariya. What motivated this creator of the popular Oishinbo series to live in Australia? How does he define the Japanese influence on Australian culinary culture? And is there an Australian influence on Japanese cuisine?

Manga writer and essayist Tetsu Kariya graduated from Tokyo University. Kariya made his debut as a manga writer in 1974 when he teamed up with legendary manga artist Ryoichi Ikegami to create Otoko Gumi (Male Gang). The worlds of food and manga were forever changed in 1983 when Kariya, together with artist Akira Hanasaki, created the immensely popular and critically acclaimed Oishinbo. Focusing on Japanese food, Oishinbo (the title combines the Japanese word for delicious, oishii, and the word for someone who loves to eat, kuishinbo) has been published since 1983 in Japanese and since 2009 in English translation. It was also made into a TV series. Tetsu Kariya has lived in Sydney since 1988.

17 August
Sayuki

Melbourne-born Fiona Graham became Sayuki, the first foreign-born geisha in Japanese history, when she debuted in Asakusa in 2007. Sayuki is an anthropologist who gained a PhD in social anthropology at Oxford University. What prompted Sayuki to embark on a career as a geisha? What insights does she have into the world of the geisha?

Sayuki is Australian, and an Oxford-trained anthropologist and documentary filmmaker specialising in intensive anthropological documentaries. She has spent half of her life in Japan, went through Japanese schools, and graduated from Japan’s oldest university, Keio. Sayuki has lectured at a number of universities around the world, has published extensively on Japanese culture, and is also an anthropological film director with production credits on a wide range of international broadcasters.
(www.sayuki.net)

3 August
Christina Wilcox & Peter Rushforth

Peter Rushforth is one of Australia’s most distinguished potters, who applies Japanese techniques to his work. Christina Wilcox is a producer and director of the documentary Playing with Clay – the Life and Art of Peter Rushforth, a 50 minute film which will be screened during this interview. Find out why a potter and a documentary maker have the Pacific War, reconciliation and the love of a Japanese aesthetic in common.

Christina Wilcox graduated from Sydney University in Pharmacy in 1959. She worked as a pharmacist in the multicultural frontier town of Cooma North in the pioneering days of the Snowy Mountains scheme in the early 1960s. Christina returned to study at Macquarie University, Sydney and graduated in 1980 with majors in Literature and Media studies. She then embarked on a career in film, focusing on environmental and biographical documentaries, mainly of Australian artists (such as actor Ruth Cracknell and artist Fred Williams) for which she has won many awards. Her film on the distinguished Australian potter Peter Rushforth has introduced her to many aspects of the culture of Japan and Japanese people.

Peter Rushforth was born in Sydney in 1920 and enlisted in the army in 1941, serving in Singapore. After the fall of Singapore in 1942 he spent three and a half years as a prisoner-of-war including a year on the notorious Thai/Burma railway. On returning to Australia, Peter studied ceramics at RMIT College in Melbourne as well as sculpture and drawing. In 1952 he joined the staff of The National Art School Sydney, later becoming head teacher of ceramics and working with Japanese potter Shiga Shigeo. Peter has held more than 30 solo exhibitions in Australia and overseas, including many in Japan, and in 1985 he was presented with the Order of Australia for his work as a teacher and ceramic artist. At almost 90 years of age, Peter is still working on a daily basis and his property in the Blue Mountains is a Mecca for potters from all over the world.