This is the sub-title to a fascinating recent book by University of Wollongong CAPSTRAN Research Fellow, Dr Christine de Matos, Imposing Peace and Prosperity (Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2008, ISBN 1740971612 ix + 427 pp). This eminently readable work is based on her PhD dissertation submitted to the University of Western Sydney in 2003. But those readers (like myself) who do not specialise in history per se may like to fast-forward first to her “Concluding Thoughts” in Chapter 8, “The Context of Australian Policy Towards the Japanese Labour Movement” (pp 328-9):
The United States came to promote a capital-led economic recovery in postwar Japan, while the Chifley government [in Australia, 1945-9] favoured a labour-led one. These essential differences could never be reconciled in terms of Allied labour policy in Japan. A labour-led recovery was essential to the pragmatic Australian aims of security, trade and maintenance of ‘White Australia’. A labour-led recovery would negate the traditional fear held towards a ‘yellow’ nation, once economically and militarily powerful, yet a nation with low living standards and an exploited workforce deemed inimical to living standards and jobs in Australia and Australian regional trade ambitions. For the United States, the Japanese labour movement was too radical, too militant and too political – thus the free rein given to labour was, after 1947, tightly drawn back. For Australia, the Japanese labour movement was not radical enough, or sincere enough, or had developed roots deep enough to play its integral role in Australian policy – a role for which permission and approval was never sought. Japanese workers were, in the end, not trusted by a nation steeped in suspicion, fear and insecurity. The United States enacted a controlled and superficial revolution from above; Australia envisaged the conditions and structures from outside that would, over time, nurture a controlled but penetrating revolution from below. Time was what Australian policy demanded; time was what US policy was not willing to concede.
Continue reading “Australia, Social Justice and Labour Reform in Occupation Japan”