When the factory ship of a Japanese whaling fleet collided with and sank anti-whaling speedboat Ady Gil early in January 2010, radical conservationists cried not only ‘foul’ but ‘attempted murder’. The Japanese countered with claims of harassment on the high seas, including attempts to foul propellers, and alleged that the activists were armed and dangerous. Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s call for mutual restraint drew from Tokyo ‘the toughest public stance a Japanese government has taken towards Australia on…[any]issue—in recent times’, and was ‘highly unusual in singling out for criticism a senior member of a friendly government’. Shortly after this the seas yielded up grizzly evidence of earlier Japanese naval action, with the discovery of the torpedoed hull of AHS Centaur, an Australian hospital ship whose wartime sinking in May 1943 claimed 268 lives. A week later it was reported that major US marine detachments might be redeployed from Okinawa, where they were no longer welcome, to tropical north Queensland. By mid January normally placid relations with Australia’s most important trading partner were suddenly tense. Were these incidents minor, and of little consequence to the overall relationship, as Canberra claimed? Or were there indications here of more fundamental changes, which the new governing coalition in Tokyo has promised to usher in, that might have a direct bearing on Australia’s future?

For decades Japan has offered abundant evidence of being a stable, prosperous, well-organised nation state, committed to peaceful international action and disinclined to countenance radical political departures at home. Yet despite gleaming, futuristic structures and a technologically savvy workforce, all was not well. Since the bursting of its bubble economy in the late 1980s, the country has seemed to many observers directionless. Reforms faltered, and society at large appeared content to drift until the 2008–09 worldwide recession brought home the precariousness of its export-dominated economy. Japan’s GDP suffered an annualised contraction of 11.7 per cent, the highest among industrialised nations, and this shock was accompanied by record levels of unemployment. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party asked for more time to allow its emergency measures to take effect. The verdict of voters was a resounding ‘no’ to the LDP, which, after more than five decades in power, was widely viewed as corrupt, moribund and intellectually bankrupt. In a vote for change in late August 2009 the Japanese elected a largely unknown government. They and the world awaited the outcome with trepidation.