Author’s Preface and Acknowledgments

Revisiting Unwanted Aliens to write a preface to the second printing, I realised that forty years have passed since I set out in the Spring of 1984 on my first field trip to the former site of the Loveday Internment camp in Barmera, South Australia.

My research had been triggered by a small encounter in 1980 soon after I migrated to Australia. I was in a small country town, Swan Hill, Victoria, and in the Folk Museum there I saw on display a small Japanese book with pencilled notes in Japanese in the margin. That notebook belonged to Ichiko Takasuka, the wife of Jo Takasuka, a rice grower who settled in the region in 1905. A few years later when I was working at Adelaide University as a Japanese language teacher, I began the process of upgrading to a higher degree, and I decided to focus on the history of the Japanese in Australia. I found that there were many publications about their presence from the nineteenth into the early twentieth century but I could find little about what had happened to the Japanese after the outbreak of World War II. Once I decided that this was the area I would like to research, Bill Gammage, Professor of Australian History at Adelaide University, was appointed as my Supervisor. Bill was a strict but enthusiastic supporter of my research, and I remain extremely grateful for his guidance.

I learned that just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor almost all of the Japanese residing in Australia were arrested and taken from their homes to internment camps. The majority were deported from Australia to Japan after the war. In that pre-internet era I started searching for former internees using all the available media such as archives, telephone directories, and newspapers.

The internment of civilians of Nikkei (Japanese descent) in Australia also included over 3,000 Japanese from neighbouring countries under Allied control. In 1985 the very first former internee I was able to reach was Tony Imaizumi. He was born in 1913 in Sumatra, which was then called the Netherlands East Indies (NEI). He was interned in Sumatra by the Dutch, one of the 1,949 internees brought to Australia from the NEI. After the war Tony was deported to Japan where he restarted his life. He had kept in touch with a former guard from the Loveday Internment Camp and that was how I obtained Tony’s address in Japan. After one year’s correspondence, we finally met in Japan in 1987. Tony was bilingual but preferred speaking English with me when we talked about the camp.

Also in 1986, the first person I was able to meet in Australia was Andrew Hasegawa, a Yonsei (fourth generation), who introduced me to Ida Hasegawa, the daughter-in-law of Setsutaro Hasegawa, who had been a laundryman in Geelong, Victoria. I gradually expanded my network of contacts of both Nisei (second generation) and Sansei (third generation) to approximately 100 people – 20 former officers and guards, and 80 former internees and their families. Where possible, I left it to the internees and their family members to tell their own stories with minimal editing, and I have received much positive feedback from readers about that.

I am pleased to know that the Australian War Memorial lists the book as a standard text on the subject of Japanese internment in Australia. The number of enquiries from researchers and family members of internees has been steadily increasing. This renewed attention has also been invigorated by other researchers who find new interpretations of the subject.

Unwanted Aliens has been generally well received, but there has been some criticism of what is seen as my uncritical reporting, as in:

“…the internment of Japanese in Australia was an insignificant part of the country’s involvement in World War II. It is simplistic to point out in hindsight that most internments were not justified. At the time there was probably little alternative.”¹

When I started researching my thesis, I had assumed that the internees must have experienced harsh treatment, but most of the internees spoke of the common decency with which they were treated. As I said earlier, I was only able to interview ex-internees who were young during their internment. If I had been able to interview older internees who had been dispossessed of their belongings and livelihood, and who were deported, in many cases to a country they had never seen, I might have been able to present a wider viewpoint. We also need to keep in mind that, unlike in some other countries, the internment of civilians of enemy origin in Australia was legal, as legislation had been passed during World War I to enable the internment of German civilians.

As a result of wholesale internment at the outbreak of the war and deportation of most former residents after the war, the vibrant Japanese communities around the northern coast of Australia were uprooted. However, a tenuous link does remain between the pre- and post-war presence.

This interrupted story of the Japanese in Australia needs to be retold and reconsidered because the Japanese communities in Australia today are overwhelmingly made up of post-war settlers who, through no fault of their own, know little about what happened before they arrived.

The retelling of the history of the Nikkei community in Australia up to the end of World War II is now being driven by new generations of researchers, creative writers and artists, many of whom are members of Nikkei Australia, a group which was founded in 2014. “Nikkei” originally meant “of Japanese origin”, but it has now become an umbrella term for activist groups working to renew understanding of the Japanese diaspora. Nikkei Australia has been invited into a new wider coalition of Nikkei organisations in South America, Canada and the United States, and these groups have together committed to making this history better known and understood. Without the combined resources and energy that these groups provide, the stories of the wartime experiences of Nikkei communities would be more easily forgotten.

In Australia there has been some governmental acknowledgement of the suffering of Italian and German internees during World War II, but there has not been any government statement about what happened to Japanese internees. The only time any statement has been made was at the site of the Cowra Japanese War Cemetery where many Japanese prisoners of war are buried. It is the same place where all of the civilian Japanese internees who died during internment in Australia are also buried. One of the first acts of Nikkei Australia was to create an interpretive board to explain the background of the civilian internees buried there. The board was unveiled in 2014 by the Mayor of Cowra, Bill West, and the late Evelyn Suzuki, who represented the surviving former internees. To my knowledge, the speech given by the Mayor on that occasion remains the only official acknowledgement of Japanese internment in Australia.

There have been many new research programs related to the Nikkei experience, and among these is the PWFC (Past Wrongs Future Choices) program, which is funded by the Canadian government. I became aware of the PWFC when it contacted Nikkei Australia and I soon realised that my work needs to be seen in a new wider context.

Almost all of the internees have now passed away, so on their behalf I hope this book continues to provide stories about internment of Japanese in Australia during World War II.

Thirty years have passed since this thesis was published as a book. The title “Unwanted Aliens” was rather provocative, but I think it highlighted the experiences of the people who lived the events described in the book. I ended the first edition of Unwanted Aliens by expressing my hope that we might at least learn from the experience and not allow such things to happen again. World events since then have proven it was a forlorn hope, but I believe projects such as the PWFC can illuminate the present by shining a light on the past. We must remind people that these broader historical events are, at their heart, the stories of individuals whose lives were crushed. One of these was Mary Nakashiba, who I did not meet until 2010. Mary was a teenager while she was interned at Tatura Camp and she published a book Beyond Borders: A Memoir. She wrote about her father:

“All his life he had been a businessman who had provided well for his family… He was reduced to dependence on the charity of church organisations. He had no people and no real place in the community, nor in a country that hated the Japanese. Another factor, which I understand totally, was more than likely the feeling of collective racial responsibility for the war, and worse, the atrocities committed by his people… It was a great burden to carry.”

The Nakashiba family was one of many Nikkei families who not only lost everything they had before the war but also lost the social and economic infrastructure on which their lives depended.

Under the then National Security (Enemy Property) Regulations and the Peace Treaty signed in 1951, the Australian government was empowered to seize and liquidate “enemy property”, and to distribute Japanese moneys retained under the Treaty to Australian Prisoners of War and civilian internees who had been held by the Japanese.² The Issei were not only dispossessed of what they had built before the war, but they also lost the social and economic infrastructure on which their lives depended. The financial loss was great for some families, but they were not compensated.

Further to the list of names I already included in my original acknowledgement, I would like to thank the following individuals and organisations for this digital publication. This digital reprint would not have been possible if Nikkei Australia had not been approached by Professor Jordan Stanger-Ross of Victoria University Vancouver and Director of the Past Wrongs Future Choices (PWFC) project and Co-Director Professor Emerita Audrey Kobayashi of Queen’s University. PWFC is funded by the Canadian Government as a collaborative project between Nikkei Canada and groups of researchers in other countries. The global reach of this project is enormous and includes dozens of Nikkei organisations.

I also acknowledge continuing support from colleagues of Nikkei Australia: especially, Elysha Rei who coordinated with the leadership of this PWFC project, and Masako Fukui, Mari Suzuki and Chie Muraoka who gave technical support and advice. I also want to acknowledge the continuing moral support from my research associates, Keiko Tamura, Mayu Kanamori, Peter Monteath, Anna Shnukal and others.

Finally, this research would never have begun without the encouragement and advice of Bill Gammage, Aiko Utsumi, David Holman, and it would never have reached this stage without the patience of my family, Terry and Yumi.

Yuriko Nagata
Brisbane Queensland, 19 February 2026

Notes

Roulston, K., Social Alternatives Vol.16, No.3, July 1997. ↩
Twomey, Christina, Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War Two, Cambridge University Press, footnote 31. ↩