Actual warfare and the anticipation of conflict can alter the perspectives we form about other nations and their people. These tend to be lasting and can replace or bury previous perceptions. This is particularly so in the case of Australian perceptions of Japan in the wake of 1942 and subsequent wartime events.

Although Australian perceptions of Japanese people were not uniform prior to 1942, they were generally friendly. However, until at least 40 years after the war few would say: ‘My mother worked for a Japanese firm in Melbourne during the 1920s and 1930s and had wonderful friendships with Japanese neighbours’, especially when a family member, friend or close neighbour had died on the Thai–Burma railway. My own family’s stories of interaction with Japanese are reflective of these mixed experiences. My mother never had a good word for the Japanese in the decades after the war. In the 1950s, she scared children half to death with wartime stories that ended: ‘They nearly got us in the war – but for our boys in New Guinea’. Only in 2002 did we learn that her family’s very survival during the Great Depression was due to employment linked directly to Japanese–Australian trade and Japanese import houses. It was 60 years after her marriage in February 1942 before she felt free to speak of Japanese people in a positive way, without a sense that she might be downplaying the horrific suffering of those she had known in the war.