by Geoff Dornan

This is the story of my grandfather Hirokichi Nakamura, who in 1897, boarded a ship in his home city Kagoshima bound for Sydney. He was just 18-years-old.

I’ve never known why he left Japan. Perhaps he was seeking fame and fortune in Australia, or maybe he was trying to avoid upcoming military service? Or did he feel he had no place in Japanese society as the son of an unwed mother? Perhaps it was a combination of all three.

Hiro initially worked as a houseboy for a Japanese family – the wealthy Yasuda family in Hunters Hill, a suburb of northern Sydney. Then he worked at Farmers department store in the city (Farmers eventually became Myer), while studying English at night. In 1907, he established his own import/export business, which was highly successful, importing objects such as vases, crockery, and fabrics, including exquisite silks. He also exported Australian wool to Japan. One estimate places his annual business turnover in the 1920s at $400,000 (from Pam Oliver, Raids on Australia).

Hiro met a young Australian girl, Bessie Gerard while on a fishing holiday at Woy Woy on the NSW Central Coast, where Bessie’s family had a holiday house. Their romance blossomed over several years and they married in 1917 at St Thomas’ Rozelle (then West Balmain). This was reported in the Sydney Sun on 23 September 1917.

The article expressed, ‘much interest and curiosity’ at this unusual union of a young Australian woman and a Japanese man, perhaps hinting at the underlying racial issues at the time.

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Affluent Family Life in Sydney’s north shore

Bessie and Hiro built a house in Countess Street, Mosman, which he named ‘Nippon’. His flourishing business had its offices in the famous Queen Victoria Building in the city. They had three daughters – Joan, Betty, and Naida – and lived an affluent life. Even during the depression years, they had a driver and house servants in their home in a delightful part of Sydney. The picturesque Balmoral Beach and Bantry Bay were within walking distance. The city was a ferry ride away.

The family were active members of the congregation at St Luke’s Anglican Church of Mosman, where the girls sang in the choir, and where eventually, they were all married. The Nakamura family mixed socially with other Japanese or mixed-race families, as Hiro extended his business networks and gravitated towards other expats living in Australia. The family enjoyed the many and varied social activities of the district, including  tennis and golf, church activities, dances, and house parties at the holiday home in Woy Woy.  There were also many visitors including businessmen from Japan, merchants and shipping company owners. I suspect Hiro was a good networker. He also took Japanese men to Woy Woy as they seemed to like fishing. There are many photos of them in happy times at the holiday house.

‘Enemy alien’ overnight

In December 1941, their world fell apart. Hiro was arrested at midnight immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The internment of people with German and Italian heritage also occurred but it was selective. The government policy regarding the Japanese was to ‘collar the lot’. Despite having lived in Australia for more than 40 years, having an Australian family, and extensive business interests, Hiro was interned as an ‘enemy alien’.

Hiro’s businesses were immediately closed, and he was incarcerated in a camp in Hay, in Central West NSW. Bessie took up a long but unsuccessful campaign to have him released with the support of many of the local Mosman community. Hiro’s health declined whilst in the camp and he was eventually released due to ill health in 1944. He died at their home in Mosman in early 1945. Bessie lived on until 1978, enjoying a motherly and grandmotherly role with her three daughters and her grandchildren.

Grandma Bessie

Bessie was a woman of strength and courage, as was demonstrated by her campaign to free her husband from the internment camp. Her enduring love for him was very obvious, with constant references to ‘Daddy’, as she liked to call him. They had a happy life together. She was 49-years-old when he died, but Bessie never remarried, declaring to her daughters that Hiro was the one and only love of her life.

Wartime years had a major impact on the three daughters. Their allegiances were with Australia, but they were surrounded by hostility towards the Japanese from families grieving for those missing or killed in action. At the wise advice of her boss, Joan (my mother) changed her name from Nakamura to Bessie’s maiden name Gerard. Such were the times.

After the war, nearly all Japanese were repatriated to Japan even though they may have lived in Australia for decades. This is the reason why I didn’t meet any Japanese people when I was young. There weren’t too many left in Australia.

The Nakamura family in the postwar years

Hiro and Bessie’s three daughters had four children between them. I am the son of the eldest Joan (Isako), and I have an older sister Liz, who now lives in Melbourne. Betty and Naida had one child each, and my two cousins and I currently live in Sydney. We are all baby boomers, born after World War II and raised in the 1950s and 60s. I was born in 1949, so I never met my grandfather.

But Hiro’s presence was infused into our childhood through Bessie’s lovely stories. We were regular visitors to the Mosman house that Bessie retained into the 1960s, with all the photographs and artefacts, almost like a shrine to her happy life with Hiro and their daughters. Within the family and the home, our heritage was palpable.

When I was growing up, wartime memories were very much alive and still raw. ANZAC Day marches were huge, as returned soldiers relived their glory, and perhaps gory days of military campaigns against the Axis powers. The later part of the war was concentrated in the Pacific, hence a majority of Australian servicemen fought in the Pacific theatre of war. Stories of the battlefield were powerfully enhanced by the harsh tropical conditions and of the Japanese treatment of their prisoners of war. It was the exception to find a younger Australian man who had not served during the war among the friends of my parents, my uncles and other relatives. They all had stories to tell.

Anti-Japanese sentiments

Probably around 1960, I recall Japanese cars beginning to appear on Australian roads. Around this time, the head of the Returned Services League (RSL) made the comment that he ‘never wanted to see a Japanese car in an RSL carpark’. Nice one!

As soldiers returned home, there was a huge rise in activities of the RSL. Surf Life Saving clubs had militaristic marching carnivals and Freemasonry thrived as men sought the camaraderie, structure, and purpose they had as soldiers. All this contributed to residual nationalism left over from wartime, and perhaps contributed to anti-Japanese sentiment.

So how were we, the children of the Japanese diaspora impacted during our formative years?

Despite the negative societal attitudes towards things Japanese, and despite having a mother with a more Asian appearance, none of us can point to any particular incidences of racism that impacted detrimentally on our childhood or teenage years. Nor did it impact us as young adults, or when we were seeking employment.

I have recently discussed our childhoods with my sister and my cousins. The general consensus is that outside the home, our heritage had little impact on our lives. It was as if our heritage lay dormant, and we never actively promoted it. Perhaps it was subsumed by many other challenges of growing up, or perhaps we recognised that it was not something to boast about in postwar Australia.

We all had dark or black hair, but were certainly less ‘Asian-looking’ than our mothers. Our fathers were all Caucasian. I had jet black hair, but living in Wollongong, where many postwar European migrants lived, I just did not stand out among similarly hued children from Italy, Greece, and other Mediterranean countries.

My cousin however was raised in the surfing and beach culture of Cronulla (the Puberty Blues era!!!) in southern Sydney, and recalls that there were only two girls in her high school with black hair, the rest were blonde. Yet she does not recall being targeted for looking different.

My sister Liz, my cousins, and I are now in our seventies and it is eighty years since Hirokichi Nakamura died. We have our own families, and our adult children are Hiro’s great grandchildren. For me, my Japanese heritage is of increasing relevance and perhaps part of my personae. But for my children and their cousins, being a mixture of so many heritages, the Japanese part is a mere curiosity on the family tree. However, this new generation do recognise their Japanese heritage and undertake some activities related to it such as learning Japanese at school, visiting Japan, working and studying there. They are fortunate as they are free to do so without the prejudices of pre and post WWII Australia. 

Postscript

Liz worked at Monash University in the 1990s, where she was a colleague of Dr Pam Oliver. Dr Oliver contributed valuable research and scholarship pertaining to the Japan-Australia bilateral relationship. In the preface to her book Raids on Australia, Pam says:

 ‘but for a request in 1996 at Monash University to undertake a biography of a Japanese man who had emigrated in 1897 and become a successful merchant in Sydney, I would not have encountered the material needed to write this book’.

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All photos courtesy of Dornan family archives, unless otherwise stated.