JAPAN AND NEW ZEALAND: 150 Years.

• Author: RABEL, ROBERTO
• Position: Review

JAPAN AND NEW ZEALAND: 150 Years Edited by: Roger Peren Published by: New Zealand Centre for Japanese Studies, Massey University, on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tokyo, and the Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1999, 255pp.

This book of essays examines various aspects of New Zealand-Japanese relations over the past 150 years. In his excellent introduction, Malcolm McKinnon notes that any study of the relationship between two nations risks being either too narrow by focusing only on government-to-government interaction or too broad by seeking to encompass everything which shaped relations between those countries. An added complication in the case of the New Zealand-Japanese relationship is its essentially asymmetrical nature, as stressed by McKinnon and subsequently elaborated by the other authors.

The strategy adopted in this book to meet those challenges is to use linking themes across relevant chapters, which highlight both historical continuities and noteworthy shifts in New Zealand-Japanese relations. This strategy is more effective for the period up to the early 1960s when direct contacts between the two societies were distinctly limited. Relations in this period were shaped by the larger contexts of enduring East-West cultural stereotyping, of shifting power politics in the Pacific region and of few sustained people-to-people contacts. These themes (and some `secondary' ones such as immigration restrictions) provide a discernible coherence to the first four chapters of the book.

That thematic coherence is less evident in the three chapters covering the subsequent years, when a dense network of diverse, overlapping associations have come to link New Zealand and Japan, especially since the 1980s. McKinnon acknowledges that the explanatory frameworks which dominate the first two-thirds of the book become progressively less salient in these final chapters. Offering the more diffuse rubric of `Normalisation?' as an overarching theme for the post-1960 years, he speculates that `the parallelism of state-to-state, business-to-business and people-to-people relations' now exemplified in the New Zealand-Japanese relationship may become `the model of relations throughout the world in the twenty-first century, as "globalisation" takes hold'.

This provocative observation points to the wider significance of the long-term transformation in New Zealand-Japanese relations traced in this book. In broad summary...