Abstract
This symposium focused on the postwar historical evolution of Japan-Australia relations, with the special attention to the period between 1957 when the Commerce Agreement brought forward the 'economic rapprochement' between the former enemies and 1976 when the two countries concluded the Basic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, the so-called NARA Treaty. Teruhiko Fukushima looked into the negotiation process of the Commerce Agreement, where the Australians sought after the right to invoke selective import controls and Japanese assurance of purchases of their agricultural commodities and the Japanese side persisted in the anomalous surplus disposal agreement with US to the detriment of the sales of Australian wheat on a commercial basis. However, both parties eventually agreed to reject these bilateral deals and endorse the principle of nondiscriminatory trade on a multi-lateral basis under GATT. David Walton (University of Western Sydney) highlighted the Australia-Japan regional cooperation during the 1960s when Canberra came to regard Japanese relations as role models for Australia's approach to the Asia-Pacific region. He drew our attention to the fact that the Japanese diplomats provided the Australian counterpart with the useful information about South East Asia, especially about Indonesia during the fall of the President Sukarno in 1965, to promote a sense of mutual confidence between the two governments. Christopher Pocarier (Waseda University) dealt with the problem of the rise of Japanese investment in Australian mines and increasing concern about Japanese presence among the Australians during the 1970s. Although both the Whitlam Labor government and the Fraser Coalition government were quite enthusiastic about strengthening Japanese relations by bringing forth the Australia-Japan Foundation and the NARA Treaty, such national mood drove both governments into regulation of Japanese investments. By these days, however, the enormous benefits of economic relations with Japan were recognized by the Australian public so well that the short-term anxieties about being swallowed by Japanese money did not affect the overall bilateral relations. Minister Bruce Miller (Australian Embassy, Tokyo) emphasised the symbolic significance of the landmark events such as the Commerce Agreement in that they promoted national mood for mutual confidence, thus pumping 'ballast' in Australia-Japan relations so that they would restore quickly even when toppled. Professor Yoshihiro Toyama (Otemon Gakuin University) provided statistical figures to support his argument that the NARA Treaty was historically significant in that Japan and Australia made commitment to deepening mutual understandings by overcoming the so-called economic frictions of the early to mid 1970s.
