This paper makes an historical comparison between the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Labour Party of New Zealand since their foundations. The ALP not only has a longer history than its New Zealand counterpart, but prominent Australian settlers in New Zealand contributed to the establishment of the Labour Party in New Zealand. The ALP had two golden eras from 1941 to 1949 under John Curtin and Ben Chifley and from 1983 to 1996 under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. The New Zealand Labour Party had three golden eras from 1935 to 1949 under Michael Savage and Peter Fraser, from 1983 to 1990 under David Lange, Geoffrey Palmer, and Mike Moore, and from 1999 to 2008 under Helen Clark. The New Zealand Labour Party has fared better electorally than the ALP, because of less intraparty frictions, the favourable electoral systems, and the absence of the intractable upper chamber.

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While I was writing a biography of James Munro Bertram (1910-1993), who had the New Zealand nationality and had a checkered career before and during the Pacific War, I wrote the seven related essays on this topic. Six of thLe seven essays were written during my sabbatical leaves in the University of Auckland in New Zealand (April 2013-March 2014), though I have not yet completed Bertram's biography as of June 2016. His life divided into two phases with the outbreak of the Pacific War; the first phase was stormy and the second phase was tranquil as an academic in university. The first phase subdivided into two periods; one was the period of his studying abroad in China and his participation in the anti-Japanese war in China and Indochina, the other was the period of his imprisonment as a prisoner of war in Hong Kong and Tokyo by the Japanese forces. In contrast with his stormy days before and during the war, he got a position as one of teaching staff of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand after the war and then married. He led a tranquil life as a literary man during his tenure in university and as an editor after retirement from the university. It is his activities in the prewar period that I have an interest in about Bertram. Especially, he went into the city of Xi'an as the first foreigner just after the Xi'an Incident (December 12, 1936), kept a record of the incident, and then published it as a book (Crisis in China: The Story of the Sian Mutiny, 1937). In Xi'an he met Agnes Smedley (1892- 1950), who had the connection with the Richard Serge Affairs and was known to Americans as a victim of the McCarthyism, and he traveled to Yan'an, the headquarters for the Chinese Communist Party at that time, and had an　interview (October 25, 1937) with Mao Zedong (1893-1976). As is mentioned above, Bertram himself is related with my research topic, but any study on him has never been made in Japan. Therefore I found out some materials on his biography during my last stay in New Zealand. The essays collected here were written as by-products from my research interest and study abroad.

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