13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

OLIVER, Pam

Who is 'one of us'?: (re) discovering the inside-out of Australia's Japanese immigrant communities, 1901-1957

This paper (re) discovers a lost chapter in Australian history, examining an unresearched community of Japanese merchants who largely immigrated after Federation and resided for decades. These merchants developed 54 trading companies that engaged with Asia before 1941. They often married Australians and maintained separate public and private identities within suburban communities particularly in Sydney and Melbourne. Some returned to Japan during 1940 but most experienced the dislocation and rejection of the internment experience. These family stories will be examined to determine (i) at what point of 'assimilation' within local communities a Japanese person was considered 'Australian' by other residents before 1941; (ii) what led residents to support as 'Australian', or refuse to support, particular Japanese in appeals against internment; and (iii) how far these principles relate to post-war myths about Asians in our midst.

This research relies on an extensive study of recently-opened National Archives of Australia records that were confiscated from Australian-Japanese in December 1941. It connects life stories of cultural and social difference with a (re) interpretation of Australians' assessments of Asians in their midst along a continuum from being judged as 'Australian' and an 'insider' to 'other' and an 'outsider’.