Book Review Comment

Abstract

In the May 2010 issue, Andrew McKay reviews Basil Archer’s Interpreting Occupied Japan: The Diary of an Australian Soldier, 1945-1946. I am the editor of the book, which comprises an original diary, with notes, my Introduction, and a 2009 Foreword by Archer, who in 1945-46 was an intelligence offi cer in the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan. McKay dismisses the book, but on very peculiar grounds. He does not engage with what Archer says, except to belittle it as inappropriate and by implication morally unworthy. His chief complaint is about what Archer does not say, and he seems to blame the Archer of 1945-46 for not possessing the hindsight or sense of political correctness now available to us, 65 years later. Thus he objects to Archer’s description of a trip to Hiroshima, because the young soldier does not discuss the impact of the atomic bombing on the Japanese people, though he does record the ‘terrible’ bomb damage. Here, there is no recognition that the reaction to Hiroshima with which we are familiar today was not the fi rst response of Australian soldiers, but took some time to emerge; nor is there a capacity to perceive the diarist’s defensiveness and perhaps feelings of guilt. McKay seems to criticise Archer’s description of the famous shrine island of Miyajima because the account does not resemble a travelogue, but instead focuses on the alienness of the Shinto ritual. Here, McKay makes an unfavourable comparison with Allan Clifton’s Time of Fallen Blossoms, a work written after the author’s return to Australia, for the purposes of commercial publication and sale, and therefore designed to appeal to readers in a way that Archer’s private diary was not. McKay castigates Archer for recording indirect allusions to sexual misdeeds by Australian soldiers; Archer does not confront the issue of rape, referring instead to ‘crook’ and ‘disgusting’ behaviour (by which he meant, in fact, not rape, but legal behaviour in which Australian soldiers took advantage of the easy availability of women at a time of poverty and hunger). Here there is no appreciation of a reserved personality, or of the constraints of writing a daily diary during a busy working life, with the reduced capacity for refl ection that that implies. McKay also appears unable to accept that Archer volunteered for language training not because of ‘nascent enthusiasm for the culture or country itself’ (how many ordinary Australian soldiers in 1945 could have felt such enthusiasm?) but through general intellectual curiosity and a desire to serve his country. This is no way to deal with a primary source. Not only is it unfair, it is ahistorical and misses the opportunity – very rare, in the case of Australian soldiers in occupied Japan – to learn from a participant’s fi rst-hand observation. McKay’s review implies that a text is only illuminating if it confi rms what we already ‘know’. It is because Archer writes so carefully about daily life and work, with its mundane as well as exotic aspects, and because his diary illustrates the attitudes and prejudices of the mid-twentieth century rather than the early twenty-fi rst, that this is such a valuable historical source.