An Australian tale in a Japanese story: Reading the national ... - JPCS

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies 

ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic) 

An Australian tale in a Japanese story: 

Reading the national in Sue Brook’s Japanese story 

Chew Yi Wei 

Sue Brook’s film, Japanese Story (2003) lends itself to many peculiarities. Upon hearing its title 

and having some perfunctory knowledge of its association with Australia, one might - due to this 

overt incongruity - be tempted to assume the film to be either an exercise in the nation’s 

exoticisation of Japan, or even likening it to a Japanese production. Less impetuously and 

pejoratively, some would think it a film typically belonging to the pantheon of the transnational 

due to the presence of a Japanese actor in a supposedly all-Australian cast. Yet, should a deeper 

study be effected, we find Japanese Story to be substantially complex and more problematic than 

that, leaving the above suppositions surface and simplistic. In Japanese Story, polymorphous and 

fluid (conceptual) worlds imbricate and synthesise, forming a melange thick with complexity, 

movement and definitional subjectivity. Owing to the presence of Asian characters in the film 

and the external but consonant dialogue on Australia-Asia relations, the positions of Japanese 

Story in the film industry both nationally and transnationally are also inescapably implicated. My 

task however will be to argue for Japanese Story as being quintessentially national though it may 

not possess any ostensible nationalistic overtones. Before I proceed with an analysis of the film, 

contextualisation in terms of Australia-Asia relations and national cinema is a necessity: both 

these concepts are inextricably connected and therefore jointly scrutinised. 

Australia-Asia relations 

The relationship between Australia and Asia has been a contested and dialectical one, especially 

so since Prime Minister Keating ushered in the policy of multiculturalism in the early to mid- 

1990s, calling for Australia to be a “multicultural nation in Asia”. 1 That such a radical statement 

is proclaimed would indeed place Australia’s sense of self and identity in uncertainty and even 

defensiveness. With a pronounced and strong Anglo-Celtic core as its colonial-ethnic lineage, 

Australia has based her identity firmly on it as a form of social coherence that transcends 

transition and change. 2 As a complement to this assurance of selfhood, the White Australia 

Policy (1901 -1973) doubtless played a substantial role in accentuating the immovability and 

stability of Australian identity far removed from any locale beyond the borders of Australian 

territory; more significantly, it succeeded in distinguishing and separating Whites from Non- 

Whites, relegating the latter as the conspicuous Other. Since the 1970s however, the walls and 

spoils of colonialism in Australia have given way to the inexorable tide of globalisation, 

destabilising and shattering almost all previously held and grounded notions of Australian 

identity. Even more so today, Australia can no longer ignore the shifting sands of its modernity 

and sense of self. 

Asia has been by far one of the island continent’s most extensive but uneasy bedfellows 

and has invariably shaped the way Australia perceives itself, with politicians, artists and 

‘An Australian tale in a Japanese story: Reading the national in Sue Brook’s Japanese story,’ Chew Yi Wei 

JPCS Vol 1, No 1, 2010 

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intellectuals at the forefront of the debate: is Australia really a part of Asia? Echoing Prime 

Minister Keating’s call, one cannot say for sure if this question has really been answered at all – 

even till today. Australia is putatively seen to be part of Asia due to geographic inevitabilities. 

Anglican Bishop E.H Burgmann asserted once that “geographically, [Australians] are Oriental 

[and] not European. [Australia] is an island just off the south east coast of Asia and [is] part of 

the Oriental world. There [Australia’s] fate is set. [Australia] is there geographically and there 

[she] will stay”. 3 More pragmatically and remaining still in the vein of Burgmann, Jamie Mackie 

agrees that Australia is indisputably part of Asia but adds that her “economic prospects have 

become bound up inexorably with the great developments happening in the main Asian countries 

since the end of the colonial era”. 4 There are of course others who refute the claims of both 

Burgmann and Mackie and insist on Australia being essentially European with their shared and 

common cultural memory from the Greeks and Romans and the Enlightenment. 5 The absence of 

any conclusion or consensus in this variegated debate underscores the fact that constant 

negotiation is perhaps the on-going project of Australian identity. 

Increasingly, aversion to Asians is slowly but surely dissipating with Australians taking a 

less parochial and more progressive worldview. Today Australian understandings are generally 

more refined and the images of Asia are more positive”. 6 Still, most Australians remain wary of 

the notion that they are unadulterated Orientals; “[d]epending on their interests, Australians may 

now have to construct and negotiate multiple identities, new and old, and to learn to deploy them 

in different contexts. This means moving beyond notions of a single identity tied to a nationstate”. 

7 It is this very act of “moving beyond” that defines the Australian sense of nationhood as 

well. Theirs is an identity in crisis and an identity in motion. And the film industry, being 

watchers of culture must surely be privy to and proactive in tackling this enterprise. 

National Cinema 

The concept of “national cinema” has never been straightforward or unilateral. National cinemas 

have defined themselves according to the historical circumstances they found themselves in as 

well as against a variety of forces. Stephen Crofts attempts to deal with this loaded issue by 

separating the different types of national cinemas into categories: “[National cinemas] have 

performed quite distinct functions in relation to the state. They have had very different 

relationships to Hollywood. Divergent claims have been made for them. They adopt a range of 

formal and generic characteristics. They are ‘national cinemas’ in a variety of ways”. 8 Indeed, 

Crofts’ categories are not at all mutually exclusive. National cinema, being conceptually broad 

and fluid does not rest on independent, prescriptive definitions; the abovementioned categories 

will inevitably overlap when we deal with them in relation to globalisation, history, politics, film 

production and film distribution. One’s national cinema can necessarily be another’s 

transnational cinema. 

Benedict Anderson’s oft-asserted notion of the nation as an imagined community provides 

a very useful framework in this debate. Higson builds on Anderson by stating that “it is now 

conventional to define the nation as the mapping of an imagined community with a secure and 

shared identity and sense of belonging, on to a carefully demarcated geo-political space [...] 



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Those who inhabit nations with a strong sense of self-identity are encouraged to imagine 

themselves as members of a coherent, organic community, rooted in the geographical space, 

with well-established indigenous traditions”. 9 There is a problem that arises with his assertion: 

the conventional definitions of a nation having a secure identity within a particular geopolitical 

space notwithstanding, nations are in actuality made up of very divided communities who live 

with faultlines and fractures rather than coherence and unity. A nation is made up of city as well 

as non-city dwellers, immigrants, exiles and diasporic communities who contribute to the 

diversity of its being, thus to say that the makings of a nation are solely based on its indigenous 

traditions would be to negate the differences between these very dissimilar communities. 

Extending Anderson’s argument then, a nation is not only an imagined community but it is more 

significantly, made up of many imagined communities supposedly dwelling within a fixed geopolitical 

boundary. Should we explore this argument further, we would also realise that the 

business of how a certain community defines itself and their defining of the nation are in fact 

exercises in and of power. Those who demarcate and delineate boundaries – physical or not – 

presuppose a certain authority on their parts. Due to the existence of these diverse national 

stakeholders who possess a substantial role in the nation-building/defining project, it would be 

irresponsible and simplistic to state that a nation’s borders have eroded and dismiss the concepts 

of the Nation (and hence National Cinema) as being merely an excuse for maudlin nationalism. 

Nations want to exist and they will continue to do so – all the more in the face of globalisation. 

Tensions and ruptures will surely exist as the local tries to reconcile with the global; yet, it is this 

anxiety and search that make up dynamism and synthesis of what goes on within those carefully 

demarcated map lines. 

As my essay is on the subject of film discourses, I will concentrate on the film industry as 

one of the major stakeholders in detailing and defining a nation’s identity and experience, it 

having the power to create a certain image of a nation, package it and reproduce for its target 

audience. It is at this point that we must pause to consider who and what a national audience is. 

Like National Cinema, a national audience is a plural organism. While production can be tailored 

to an imagined profile of a national audience, reception can necessarily vary. How then can a 

film be considered ‘national’ should it be met with such a dynamic and complex interplay of 

factors? Is achieving a national cinema or indeed making a film “national” an exercise in 

parochialism and futility? 

Despite the problems that exist when it comes to understanding National Cinema, this 

essay will argue that Japanese Story is an essentially national film. In this vein then, the 

understanding of Australian (identity) can also run the risk of being pigeon -holed and fixed. 

Higson, in his earlier book The Concept of National Cinema defined national cinemas to be “the 

product of ‘home’ and ‘away’, between the identification of the homely and the assumption that 

it is quite distinct from what happens elsewhere. In this sense, there are two central conceptual 

means of identifying the imaginary coherence or specificity of a national cinema. On the other 

hand, a national cinema seems to look inward, reflecting on the nation itself, on its past, present 

and future, its cultural heritage, its indigenous traditions, its sense of common identity and 

continuity. On the other hand, a national cinema seems to look out across borders, asserting its 

difference from other national cinemas, proclaiming its sense of otherness”. 10 Later, Higson finds 

his earlier definition problematic as “it tends to assume that national identity and tradition are 



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already fully formed and fixed in place”. 11 While Higson’s later argument holds water in the 

light of what has been discussed, we cannot discount the significance of his earlier take on 

National Cinema. While it is tempting to lump Japanese Story as being part of the pantheon of 

transnational film due to its East-West/Japanese-Australian flavour, we must note that national 

identity in the modern nation state – and in this case Australian (and Japanese) identity in the 

face of each Other – can in fact solidify each distinct identity even more. Like Higson said 

earlier, national cinemas do proclaim the difference between the nation and the world, between 

the global and the local – and the film does just that. The need to give one’s identity shape, to 

darken the lines between the ambiguous interstices that globalisation has created seems to 

surface even more today. Truly, “[g]lobalisation, paradoxically, has led to a strengthening of 

local ties, allegiances, and identity politics within different nation-states formations, even though 

what may emerge is what Stuart Hall calls that more ‘tricky version ‘the local’ which operates 

within, and has been thoroughly reshaped by ‘the global’ and operates largely within its 

logic’”. 12 

A national cinema is constantly subject to change and discovery and filmmakers, being at 

once ambassadors and critics of their culture are appreciating the need to adopt a self-reflexive 

disposition and approach in the way they construct their films stylistically and thematically. O’ 

Regan therefore states emphatically and truthfully that “every film-making culture appropriates, 

raids and reconstructs cultural elements from outside itself thereby indigenizing the concept, the 

style[.]”. 13 Consequently, a hybrid is formed, opening the floodgates for syntheses and 

regeneration of what a national cinema can be. 

Japanese Story is a film that is both introspective and outward-looking. It understands that 

national identity though commonly situated in the local, also has a global proclivity. One has to 

be able to look out in order to look in and vice versa. Most importantly, it does not over-simplify 

Australian identity but performs and negotiates the nation’s local/global disruptions and 

complexities via its thematic concerns as well as filmic techniques and conventions. 

Where Landscape Cinema meets The Male Ensemble Film 

Conventionally, Australian Cinema has centred its themes, modes and styles on the “emblematic 

White Australian male stereotype”. 14 Being also genre specific, the cinema has had a reputation 

of privileging its male protagonists and in the process, adumbrating the roles of female ones. 

Japanese Story defies and resists these traditional mores and treads on new filmic terrains, 

thereby causing a shift and evolution in Australian Cinema. Not losing sight of its genre-based 

heritage, the film utilises but never internalises the distinct genres that pervade Australian 

Cinema by subverting and challenging the orthodoxies of its genre-scape. In the premise of Mary 

Louise Pratt, the film becomes then a “contact zone” 15 : contact zones are “social spaces where 

disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other”. 16 Extending Pratt’s argument, the 

contact zone is a space in the film where a range of genres meet and undermine each other on 

many levels both in the diegetic and non-diegetic worlds. 



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“The natural setting is ever present in location shooting across all the genres of current 

production within the Australian film industry”. 17 Shot mainly in the Pilbara Desert, Japanese 

Story then relies heavily on the oft-used and familiar genre of Landscape Cinema. In the opening 

sequence, we see the camera undertaking a long, tracking shot of the vast and intractable 

Australian desert. Also, the distant and unimposing camera work — the camera does not ever 

descend but remains firmly from a height above ground — allows the magnificence and presence 

of the Australian desert to dominate and form the prevailing backdrop of the film’s narrative. 

Here, we see no discernible subject but the monolithic and intimidating space of red, proffering 

at once the notion of the landscape as subject and text. While Sandy’s relationship with the land 

is met with more awareness due to her being local, as compared to Hiro’s fascination with its 

colossal immensity, she remains herself an alien and foreigner to the deep interior of Australia. 

That the land evokes in them such differing emotions flaunts clearly its status as Australia’s 

national and cultural edifice. Hiro, being from Japan and familiar only with his country’s 

claustrophobia views the land through romanticised and tourist lenses. In the initial stages, Hiro, 

like most unsuspecting tourists, lets his excitement and enthralment with the land to overcome 

him and insists with much chauvinism that Sandy drive further inland. His incipient impression 

of the land is later obfuscated and shattered when their vehicle gets bogged. Both characters are 

thus subjugated to the land, never having any form of dominion over it. Truly, the expression 

terra nullius exemplifies the Australian Outback. It is no respecter of masculinity or nationality. 

It is no coincidence too that the Landscape Genre exists as a subset of the Male Ensemble 

Film. Rayner suggests that: 

“[t]he unique Australian environment is foregrounded in numerous productions 

as the landscape shaping the Australian (masculine) national type, as the primary 

influence upon the development of national character, and as a distinctive 

resource or selling point to be used to an aesthetic and commercial advantage 

[…] However, the celebration of a distinctive landscape, as an integral part of 

filmic and cultural identity, is undertaken primarily in male-centred dramas […] 

because of the definition of nationality and masculinity through a respectful 

and/or competitive relationship with the land”. 18 

Not only is there an overt process of nationalising evinced, here we see also a gendering of the 

land and a subversion of the traditional filmic topos. Sandy and Hiro, boldly traversing the 

territory belonging to the hegemonic figure of the Australian While Male are accordingly placed 

as the Other(s) against him. This internal negotiation lends itself suitably to the matrix of the 

national and its boundaries: while the action is located within the borders of Australia, a 

concurrent dialectic is taking place as well. By replacing the dominant Australian White Male 

subject with two othered subjects, the film queries and re-negotiates the parameters of Australian 

National Cinema, introducing a new definitive dimension. Historically, the land has had a deeprooted 

and tight relationship with exploration. Exploration as a historical event was dominated 

by the typical White Male Explorer who sought power, prestige and discovery in the hideous 

void that was the Australian desert. Australia’s history as it were, was indispensably malecentered, 

starting and establishing a pronounced European patriarchal lineage. With Japanese 



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Story, this supposed lineage gets modified. Instead of the White Male Explorer making his 

willing foray into the land, position and power are now attributed to the reluctant (white female) 

heroine, Sandy. As the mistaken and misunderstood driver, Sandy assumes the role of stranger 

cum explorer cum tour guide, subverting at once the power attributed to the White Male Explorer 

and history-as-male. The genres of Landscape Cinema and the (gender -discriminating) Male 

Ensemble Film get embellished with an additional texture with the female figure now being at 

the forefront of the ensemble. As a corollary, the land, once so closely associated with male 

activity and subjectivity is now furnished with the overt presence of female competition. Hiro 

steps in to further accentuate and perhaps enrich this dynamic. Should the texts of Hiro and 

Sandy be given a gendered reading, we can tell at once that their sexualities are rendered as 

binary opposites with each of them embodying non-archetypal qualities of masculinity and 

feminity: while the former is presented as being rather effeminate with his fair skin, red lips and 

slight frame, Sandy is androgynous, strong, burly and masculine. In the contact zone of the 

desert, subjectivities and objectivities get tossed around and re-shuffled, engineering an 

ambiguity of dominance and subservience. 

In the manner of the body politic, Sandy gazing at Hiro as he dries himself after a swim is 

an act that questions conventionally held notions of the male gaze. “Even these days, men in 

movies are still doing the looking, and women are still being looked at. We women filmmakers 

are beginning to change things. In Japanese Story, when Sandy sees Hiromitsu at the beach, 

she's conscious of his thighs. He's a small man but strong. I'm fascinated by that. I'm fascinated 

by his precision, how carefully he folds his towel. A lot of the communication is through the 

body, not intellectual communication". 19 The camera maintains, at this juncture a quiet distance 

that is not so much detached as involved from the point of view of Sandy while she stares at him. 

Hiro’s drying of himself with the towel is met with much detail and slowness as the camera 

closes in and descends from his torso to his thighs, revealing an uncertain exoticisation on the 

part of Sandy. By looking intently at his body, Sandy intimates an alienation and surreptitious 

fascination of Hiro and his culture. Once again, this diegetic instance serves as an example of the 

mutability of cinema and in particular, Australian cinema. While privileging the business of 

gazing to Sandy and taking into consideration her entire presentation as gender type and national 

type, the shifts and adjustments to Australian National Cinema are then coterminous with Sue 

Brook’s direction. There is no need for Australian cinema to pander to and perpetuate prevailing 

filmic norms. Switching and re-appropriating the positions of the gazer and the gazed duly 

proves Brooks involvement in wrestling with and revising the limits of Australian National 

Cinema. 

Intercultural Affiliations 

Because of Hiro’s overt Japanese identity, the trope of Australia-Asia relations is tremendously 

hard to ignore. Hiro’s Asian presence not only disrupts the homogeneity of the Australian 

landscape, he reshapes too the genre-scape of Australian National Cinema. During the film’s 

inception, a lone vehicle with a Japanese man is seen driving along the insurmountably long road 

of the Australian Outback. A cultural fusion is demonstrated vis-à-vis the film’s mise-en-scene: 

when Hiro decides to take a picture of himself against the great expanse of the Australian 

landscape, he comically stands right in the centre of the frame with hands by his side. Such 



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symmetry and orderliness reminiscent of Japan juxtaposed with the wilderness and 

unpredictability of the Australian Outback propagates a fusion both in the diegetic and nondiegetic 

worlds injecting an intercultural domain into the film. Later, having gotten back into the 

car, Hiro deliberately chooses a change of tune, that of an English one to a Japanese one, 

presumably finding familiarity and comfort from the Japanese language in a place so remote and 

far from home. Another classic example is of course Sandy’s and Hiro’s conversation at their 

first meal after freeing themselves from the bog. Over their meal, a linguistic exchange is 

demonstrated and it is in the course of this that Sandy’s fences are demolished as she begins to 

be more accepting and open towards Hiro with their relationship culminating in sex. 

Within the intercultural framework, sex becomes the contact zone where ethnic and sexual 

lines are disintegrated. At the outset, Sandy purportedly takes charge of the sexual encounter 

with her accorded the role of the White dominatrix and Hiro, the subdued Asian. Nevertheless, 

this dynamic does not sustain itself for long when it is initiated into the world of the intercultural. 

The inter- is a site of mutual negotiation and engagement. Following this, privileging one gender 

or ethnicity above the other would then be a presumptuous and reductive endeavour. Does 

Sandy’s whiteness or Hiro’s masculinity, characterized by his chauvinism render each of them 

the more domineering one? Considering too their marginalized positions as female and Asian, 

who then holds the place of privilege? At this point, their sexualities and ethnicities converge 

conceiving a space that is both uncomfortable and liberating with sexuality and ethnicity 

perennially undermining each other. Sandy getting into Hiro’s pants as a prelude to sex is, as 

Director Sue Brooks says, an act of suturing and concentrated understanding between two very 

different people: "Step by step, [Sandy and Hiro are] into a strange world that defies language. 

She's stepping into his skin in order to understand him". 20 Alluding to Pratt, geographic and 

cultural disparities collude in the zone, arresting their uneasy dalliance with each other. Positions 

of privilege are diluted in sex when the intercultural becomes itself a contact zone forming a 

conglomeration of new meanings where power structures suffer a meltdown. Both Sandy and 

Hiro reach new heights of understanding each other through sex. Macrocosmically, the 

intercultural encounter between the White female text of Sandy and the Asian male text of Hiro 

intersect with the boundaries of the national, stretching it once again and contributing to the 

Australian film industry’s relationship with Asia and itself. With the genres constantly engaging 

in a self-conscious interaction with themselves and each other, the ontology of national cinema 

in Australia and its conventions are continually re-assessed and reframed. 

A passing reference to Australia’s history with the Japanese is articulated in the form of the 

old man who rows the boat together with Sandy and Hiro. Coupled with a glaringly bright miseen-scene, 

the dialogue between the three reflects a long-standing tension between World War 

Two veterans and a destructive and traumatic history that they cannot get over. Sandy and Hiro 

being both unable to relate to his sentiments do not share a similar cultural memory and reply 

only with silence and stillness. Adjacent to this is an accurate reflection – in like manner of the 

film’s over-exposed lighting – of the gulf between pre- and post war Australians and Japanese, 

their far-reaching and tumultuous history notwithstanding. One questions nonetheless the 

validity of such stereotypes when it is so elusively and loosely dealt with. Could it be that Brooks 

is obligated to insert such an abrupt and incomplete scene be due to the fact that the film is after 

all government-funded? Is Brooks doing this out of national-duty or out of a sense of political 



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obligation towards history that she must mention the past, albeit so briefly? Surely this scene, if 

interpolated deliberately, proves the film’s negotiation with the more sensitive and taboo sides of 

Australia’s history and how the war, despite the putative embracing and celebratory nature of 

globalization, remains still a searing memory in the hearts and minds of older Australians. 

As cultural production is central to the discussion of the national, we must now interrogate 

the relation between the government funding of the film to the wider discussion of the film 

medium as well as national cinema. When a film is nationally funded, there indubitably lies an 

unspoken obligation of the filmmaker towards the state. While it is also true that national films 

can be transnationally funded, there lies a larger and stronger affiliation for nationally funded 

films to involve overt negotiations and engagements with specifically national peculiarities, or at 

the very least, create a national cinema that interrogates and inquires deeply about the issues of 

national identity. “In a transnational world typified by the global circulation of images and 

sounds, goods and populations, media spectatorship impacts complexly on national identity, 

political affiliation, and communal belonging”. 21 In order to tackle the inevitability of 

transnational reception, the filmmaker must then create and (re-)package a certain version of the 

nation. In the case of Japanese Story, the mediated but overt allusion to that silent and taboo part 

of Australian history becomes a political necessity. “By facilitating a mediated engagement with 

‘distant’ peoples [and pasts involving these very distant peoples], the media ‘deterritorialise’ the 

process of imagining communities. And while the media can destroy community and fashion 

solitude by turning spectators into atomised consumers of self-entertaining monads, they can also 

fashion community and alternative affiliations”. 22 This of course sounds distinctly transnational; 

however, it must be noted that Brooks, in acknowledging the silence of that side of Australian 

history and recognising the nation’s shared history with Japan, has articulated the countervailing 

forces that make up Australian identity. By moving centrifugally, she has also moved 

centripetally: this dual or inter- movement brings to light the inexorable tide of global flows, the 

persistence in wanting to establish a certain core to one’s national and local identity. Most 

importantly, it successfully communicates the negotiation between these two. The globalising 

process has not limited nor stumped the development of national cinema because capital can and 

still does flow within a nation’s borders, and in the process underscores the existence as well as 

the continuity of a nation’s film industry without the interruption of transnational capital flows. 

National capital flows, though not ensuring the burgeoning and flourishing of the local film 

industry nor guaranteeing a film to be nationally-distinct, is at best a joint effort between the 

local government and the local film industry to promote an awareness of a country’s national 

character and the support it has for its creative industries. 

The Rites of the Road 

Intercultural elements and the mere presence of Japanese actors do not necessarily delineate a 

film as transnational or Asian. Undeniable though it is that Japanese actor Gotaro Tsunashima 

plays a part in contributing to the film having an Asian/transnational 23 element in terms of its 

production, conveniently agreeing that the film is then a transnational one would be too 

superficial a stance to take. 



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Moving to the ‘Rite of Passage’ and ‘Australian road movie’ genres, we will then see the 

veracity of the above point and that Japanese Story, despite its multifarious intercultural 

elements, remains well and truly national. That these two genres coincide and meld comes as no 

surprise as it is the journey that characterises one’s self-realisation. Japanese Story is 

indisputably an Australian road movie with its characters constantly on the move. Their 

itinerancy notwithstanding, these characters are not without a centre. Hiro for example carries a 

picture of his family, a source of consistency and rootedness in a strange land. Sandy’s centre 

though less overt, is still revealed at the end of the film as hers is doubtless largely determined by 

her rite of passage through her travels on the road. Typically, “characters are repeatedly alienated 

and driven apart, condemned to loneliness, or at the very least to being alone. In this context, the 

dearth of happily resolved love stories is entirely appropriate […] Australia’s film-makers have 

concentrated more on the spaces that separate people, on communities that stifle the spirit and 

circumstances that drive lovers apart”. 24 Japanese Story fits nicely into the mould of Enker’s 

explication of Australian cinema. Through the death of Hiro, the divisive and inimical nature of 

the land is reiterated. His death albeit catastrophic, functions in actuality for Sandy’s rite of 

passage. “The protagonist undergoing fundamental, formative and traumatic experience, 

travelling and questing within a country supposedly his own but over which he can exert little 

control, emerges as a key characteristic of Australian film narratives”. 25 Together with the 

Australian Road Movie which represents “the travel undertaken by the protagonist […] as a 

metaphor for life itself”, 26 integral to this genre is also the employing of the symbolic car which 

provides one with social, physical and personal mobility. 27 As regards Japanese Story, the car 

serves as a space of transformation from which Sandy is the driver. She starts off by driving the 

living Hiro around and later, the dead Hiro. Their relationship develops and blossoms in the car 

the moment they leave the bog with them predictably singing Willie Nelson’s On The Road 

Again. Both car and desert are liminal spaces in which transformations happen. Firstly and 

superficially, the death of the foreigner demarcates and reinforces Sandy’s subject position of 

female white settler, having her identity solidified with her as the lone survivor from the 

competition she has with the land, just like her male counterparts down the annals of Australian 

film history. The land’s metaphorical swallowing of Hiro buttresses its hostility to the tourist 

who oversteps his boundaries, being perhaps a little more merciful to the local. Secondly, and 

more profoundly, his death marks the key contributory factor of Sandy becoming less removed 

and disconnected from life. Towards the end of the film, we see her clamouring to be involved in 

Hiro’s funeral arrangements, her anguish being most poignant in this endeavour; a far cry from 

the person she was before the whole ordeal began. 

Mirrors serve as a device for thorough reflection and contemplation; the camera’s lingering 

on at Sandy’s gazing at herself then underscores a change and transition in a very personal 

capacity. She gets also a better sense of her national character by asserting that Tokyo is different 

from Kyoto. Barring the dry humour, this proclamation affirms a renewed Sandy who has been 

forced from her insularity and self-absorption to be aware not only of her own failings as an 

individual; but on a greater scale, she and Hiro transmute into what Rayner terms “continuities in 

communication (emphasis mine) between the subject(s) and object(s) of cultural 

representation”. 28 Both the texts of Hiro and Sandy perform the function of cultural interaction. 



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The local needs the outsider to realise his/her sense of self; this sense of self is determined and 

defined by the local’s alliance with the outsider, subsequently negating and eliminating any hint 

of a static and immovable white subject position and simultaneously, fulfilling the topos of 

looking-out-to-look-in. Mrs Hiromitsu’s stoicism in front of Sandy and the rest of the Australians 

mitigates a complete cultural transaction. Sandy, albeit a little more acquainted with the Japanese 

after her passionate but brief relationship with Hiro still stands outside of his culture. The camera 

frames her to be in a respectful distance from the bereaved Mrs Hiromitsu accompanied by a 

sorrowful and cathartic-sounding Japanese tune gives the scene a melodramatic edge. As it coopts 

the viewer into a space of empathy, the melodrama concomitantly constructs a diegetic 

space that reflects the realities that Australian National Cinema tries to deal with: Sandy’s 

participation in this melodrama does not make her a part of Japanese culture. Likewise, being 

“cultural continuities” does not ensure and grant one unbridled access to another’s culture. The 

winds of globalisation cannot and will never tear away fully the barriers between two disparate 

cultures although one must and should acknowledge and embrace differences and diversity. 

Sandy’s looking out at the viewing gallery reiterates Australian Cinema’s adopting of a selfreflexive 

angle in order to move forward. This has a deep bearing on Australian identity as 

Sandy’s awakening and coming-to-terms resonantly parallels the coming-to-terms and 

integration of Australian identity with other cultures as well. Filmic styles and genres conflate 

and interconnect in the contact zone where dichotomies are razed. By the same token, the film 

uses the land, reverently, as creator, conduit and destroyer of Sandy’s and Hiro’s inter and 

intrapersonal relationships. Over and above their cultural disparity, a mutual agoraphobic fear of 

the land binds both Sandy and Hiro. 

National Cinema is committed to engage in the arena of diversity and this on-going 

enterprise has come to perculiarise Australia’s film industry and Australian identity. Australia 

and its film industry, while toeing the line of globalisation does not relegate its identity to 

ambiguity, but sets out to preserve it while entering into a world beyond dichotomies. “To be 

Australian now is to be much more like other people, anywhere, than we may have admitted in 

the past”. 29 Japanese Story is not Asian, nor is it transnational, neither does it reaffirm or obviate 

Australia’s identity relations with Asia. It does nevertheless borrow a slice of the prevailing 

Australia-Asia narrative for a national augmentation and negotiates reflexively with this current 

and relevant state of affairs. Not being satirical or antagonistic towards previously held 

orthodoxies, the film seeks to transform and celebrate an evolving diversity that Australian 

cinema has the proclivity to have - co-opting its diversity into the domain of the national and via 

the act of searching, it reveals as a result, this unmistakable and remarkable trait of Australian 

identity. 

Conclusion: An Arborescent National 

Tom O’ Regan asserts that “A culture cannot turn itself into a sending culture without being at 

some point a receiving culture”. 30 As Australian Cinema plays the role of Australian identity’s 

sentinel, it cannot help but keep a watch beyond the Island Continent’s borders. Festivals are 

economic and interactive spaces of a sending out of one’s culture. Via festivals, Japanese Story 

performs a level of cultural and pecuniary reciprocity by allowing a cautious and calculated 



55



overlap of Australian and Japanese cultures so as not to run the risk of being nationalistic and 

inauthentic to both. Perhaps it can be posited that identity in the wilderness of globalisation is 

analogous to the rhizome. Like the rhizome, identity establishes its centre by finding other 

roots. 31 The national then seeks itself by searching for but not binding itself strictly to any 

particular root. Japanese Story neither tags itself to Japanese culture - though it explores facets 

of it - nor does it depart from keeping to its key endeavour of engaging respectfully and 

critically with Australia, preserving its core ultimately to be exclusively national. 

Biography 

Chew Yi Wei has just completed her Masters in Literary Studies at the National University of 

Singapore. 

Notes 

1 Dever, Maryanne, Australia and Asia: Cultural transactions, Ed. Maryanne Dever, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon 

Press, 1997, 2. 

2 Dixson, Miriam, “The Imaginary and the Self”, The Imaginary Australian: Anglo-Celts And Identity 1788 To The 

Present, Sydney, Australia: University of New South Wales Press Ltd, 2000, 3. 

3 Hudson, Wayne and Geoffrey Stokes, “Australia and Asia: Place, Determinism and National Identities”, The 

Politics of Identity in Australia, Ed. Geoffrey Stokes, Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University 

Press, 1997, 146. 

4 Ibid., 147. 

5 Ibid., 148. 

6 Ibid., 145. 

7 Ibid., 155. 

8 Higson, Andrew, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema”, Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, 

London; New York, Routledge, 2006, 15. 

9 Ibid., 16. 

10 Ibid., 18. 

11 Ibid. 

12 Wilson, Rob and Dissanayake, Wimal, “Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local”, GlobalLocal: Cultural 

Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, Durham: Duke University 

Press, 1996, 5. 

13 O’Regan, Tom, “Making a distinct cinema: Negotiating cultural transfers”, Australian National Cinema, London, 

New York: Routledge, 1996, 230. 

14 Rayner, Jonathan, “Introduction: Reading the National Cinema”, Australian Cinema: An Introduction, 

Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000, 21. 

15 Pratt, Mary Louise, “Science and Sentiment: 1750-1800: Science, planetary consciousness, interiors”, Imperial 

Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London; New York: Routledge, 1992, 20. 

16 Pratt, Mary Louise, “Introduction: Criticism in the contact zone”, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and 

Transculturation, London; New York: Routledge, 1992, 4. 

17 Rayner, Jonathan, “The Male Ensemble Film: Landscape Cinema”, Australian Cinema: An Introduction, 

Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000, 117. 

18 Ibid 

19 Peary, Gerald, “Sue Brooks”, Film reviews, interviews, essays & sundry miscellany, February 2004, 20 March 

2008, 

. 

20 Ibid. 



56



21 Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert, “From the Imperial Family to the Transnational Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in 

the Age of Globalisation”, GlobalLocal: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and 

Wimal Dissanayake, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, 145. 

22 Ibid. 

23 Here, I use specifically a slash between the terms Asian and transnational because, at its most apparent, both terms 

are interchangeable as their elements exist outside the borders of Australia. However, I must add that what is Asian 

need not necessarily be transnational should we analyse other films that may depict otherwise. 

24 O’Regan, Tom, “Making a national cinema: A national cinema”, Australian National Cinema, London, New 

York: Routledge, 1996, 63. 

25 Rayner, Jonathan, “New Glamour, New Gothic: Australian Films in the 1990s: The Rite of Passage Film”, 

Australian Cinema: An Introduction, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000, 142. 

26 Ibid., 149. 

27 Ibid. 

28 Ibid., 21. 

29 O’Regan, Tom, “Making a National Cinema: A National Cinema”, Australian National Cinema, London, New 

York: Routledge, 1996, 69. 

30 _________, “Making a Distinct Cinema: Negotiating Cultural Transfers”, Australian National Cinema, London, 

New York: Routledge, 1996, 214. 

31 Glissant, Edouard, “The Unforseeable Diversity of the World”, Trans. Haun Saussy, Beyond Dichotomies: 

Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalisation, Ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi. New York: State 

University of New York Press, Albany, 2002, 291. 



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An Australian tale in a Japanese story: Reading the national ... - JPCS

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