Australian Research on Asia by Region

JAPAN

The strength and richness of Japanese Studies is reflected in the fact that 34 of Australia’s 38 universities include Japanese Studies in their curricula and almost 12,000 undergraduate students are undertaking Japanese language or Japan-related courses. The major Australian institutions also have substantial research programs on many facets of Japan’s contemporary society, economy, politics, law, as well as history and culture.

Established strengths and characteristics

Last July, the professional body for Japan scholars across all fields, the Japanese Studies Association of Australia (JSAA), celebrated its 25th anniversary at its biennial conference at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). There were over 200 participants at this meeting, and around 180 presentations on subjects as diverse as ‘Reflections on Relations with Japan’, ‘The Body in Avant-Garde Theatre in Japan’, ‘Women and the Biwa Tradition’, ‘Comparing Japan’s Shifting Product Liability’, ‘The Japanese Sense of Architectural Space’, ‘The Origins of Japanese Deflation’, ‘Fear and Yearning of "Manga Japan" in Australia’, and ‘Coping with North Korea’s Nuclear Crisis’ (http://www.jsaa.info).

JSAA also publishes a major journal, Japanese Studies, three times a year internationally through Taylor and Francis.

Japanese Studies in Australia has a distinctly contemporary edge, having grown rapidly over the last 40 years to meet the demand for literacy in dealing with the postwar growth of the economic and political relationship between Australia and Japan. The interests in and perspectives on Japan reflected in Australian research are different from those in North America, Europe or East Asia. The growth of Japanese Studies is essentially driven by the universities that provide a home for it, and the community from which the students who fuel its expansion are drawn, importantly because of its high economic and professional value to contemporary Australian society. Governments and their agencies have also, in the past, encouraged the growth of Japanese and other areas of Asian Studies.

There is a great deal of complementarity, as well as competition, within the core areas of Japanese Studies among institutions in Australia. Queensland University has a strong language and contemporary society research base, including its highly respected school for simultaneous interpreters. Sydney University's program (headed by Professor Hugh Clarke) has been well known for its strengths in Japanese literature. The Australian National University hosts the Australia–Japan Research Centre (headed by Professor Gordon de Brouwer), among the world’s leading think-tanks on the Japanese economy and its role in the Asia Pacific (http://apseg.anu.edu.au). It also hosts a large research group within the Japan Centre of language teaching (headed by Professor Jenny Corbett), as well as specialisations in history, law and politics. The University of New South Wales (Associate Professor Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson), Monash University (Professor Ross Mouer), The University of Melbourne (Professor Bill Coaldrake), The University of Adelaide (Professor Purnendra Jain) and the University of Western Australia (Dr Tomoko Nakamatsu) also have large established programs of teaching and research in different areas. QUT (under the leadership of Dr Barbara Bourke) and Macquarie University (under Dr Susie Chow) are at the international forefront of research into the application of web-based technologies in the teaching of Japanese. There is a strong research presence hand-in-hand with different teaching strengths at the Universities of Western Sydney, New England (on Japanese music), Murdoch University and most institutions across the country.

Challenges and future directions

Japan’s position as the leading area of Asian Studies and language studies in the Australian universities and school systems now faces a number of challenges, and these will intensify over the next decade or two.

First, Japan’s position in the region and the world is changing significantly. China is on the rise and 'other East Asia' is growing in importance relative to Japan. Japan is developing new and complex relationships with its neighbours in Asia and a new role in world affairs. These developments inevitably affect the environment in which Japanese Studies programs in Australia will evolve over the coming years. The interaction between Japan and other East Asian societies is a more prominent focus of interest. Australia's position in Asia and the Pacific is also changing and under scrutiny.

After a big expansion of Japanese Studies in Australia in the 1980s, student numbers have plateaued and there are pressures on staffing leading to some attrition of the professoriate in both language and other fields of specialisation. Partly this is a product of perceptions of the diminishing relative importance of Japan. These trends are not yet deeply entrenched but they make predictions about the future of Japanese Studies in Australia problematic.

Second, there has been a huge restructuring within the universities more broadly, with increased emphasis on delivering teaching and research resources to where the growth in demand for courses is located. Increased demand for courses of international studies does not automatically translate into support for core specialisations such as Japanese Studies in the competition for resources within institutions.

These two developments have been accompanied by a big shift in the composition of the student body enrolled in Japanese Studies programs. Importantly, there has been a sharp rise in the intake of foreign students into Japanese Studies programs in Australian universities. A powerful trend is for foreign students, especially from Asia (but also from Europe and North America) to undertake professional and other studies in Australia's English-language study environment, but to combine that with Japanese language and Japan-related courses. This trend impacts back upon the nature of the Japanese Studies programs themselves, with a growing requirement for specialisations that situate Japan in its regional context.

KOREA

Korean Studies

One of the most important elements in the Australia-Korea relationship is the academics who study and teach about Korea. But resources for the serious study of Korea, especially in the Humanities and some Social Science disciplines, are spread very thin across the six universities that have Korean Studies programs. The best way to meet this challenge is not so much by duplicating programs and spreading scant resources even more thinly, as by formulating long-term collaborative research projects for which major grants may be obtained.

In Australia, the first scholar to take up Korean Studies is Dr Kenneth Gardiner, recently retired from the ANU, who taught and carried out research on early Korea from the 1960s, and whose 1969 book, The Early History of Korea, became a classic and was re-issued some years later. Korean Studies as a field in Australia appeared on the international scene with the January 1982 edition of the Korea Journal, a special issue called "Korean Studies in Australia," which contained a number of articles mainly on linguistics/language and history/politics. From this point there was a reasonably strong development in Linguistics and Economics but little in the Humanities, which suffered from a serious lack of financial and institutional support. The rising importance of Korea as a trading partner of Australia since the late 1980s encouraged the governments and some universities to fund research into Korean Economics and into business and trade. The Monash Asia Institute, Griffith University, and the ANU Australia-Japan Research Centre all devoted funding, personnel and research to Korean economics and the Australia-Korea business and trade relationship.

Developments in the 1990s

It was necessary to lay a solid foundation of Korean language proficiency before one could expect any take-off in the Humanities, since it is in the Humanities in particular - history, literature, religion and so on - that Korean language proficiency is indispensable, an essential prerequisite for scholarship. This required considerable time and expense, and the challenge was not really taken up until the early 1990s. The ANU Korean language program commenced in 1980 but for some years could offer only 2 levels each year. The Key Centre for Language at Griffith University made a good, energetic start in Korean language teaching in the later 1980s, and this impelled other universities to take a more active position regarding Korean studies. In Melbourne, a consortium was established that became centred on the National Centre for Korean Studies in Swinburne in 1990, and this prompted the ANU to reinforce its own language program in 1992, with the appointment of Shin Gi-Hyun. Sydney University and UNSW joined in, and have grown under the direction of Park Duk-Soo and Shin Song-Ch'ul. Curtin University in WA has also offered Korean language courses since the early 1990s.

But the energy and funding required to institute good language programs have meant only minimal attention was afforded the humanities, a condition reflected in the fact that even 10 years after the publication of the 1982 Korea Journal, hardly a single new name could be added to the list of Korean Humanities scholars in Australia, and of those contributing to the 1982 issue, almost all had disappeared from the field or had gone out of Australia.

From the mid-1990s, more favourable winds began to blow. Funding agencies such as the Korea Foundation realized that in addition to language studies, it was important to ensure that knowledge of Korean history, culture and society was provided to students in a systematic way. But the most important factor within Australia was the stimulus provided by the increased Korean language training. The government decision in 1994 to designate Korean as one of the four Asian languages to be taught at schools added its own momentum. This has led to the realisation in some universities that students need to learn about the history and culture of the nation whose language they have studied, which has resulted in the appointment of several humanities scholars in universities over the past decade.

These appointments include John Jorgensen at Griffith (Korean religion), Ken Wells (history and religion) and Andrei Lankov (North Korean history and politics) at the ANU, Gregory Evon (literature, religion and history) at UNSW, Pankaj Mohan (religion and history) and Kwak Taesong (journalism) at Sydney University, Kirsten Bell (anthropology) at Macquarie, and Sally Yea (geography) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. The ANU is now in the process of hiring two further specialists on Korea, and UNSW is hiring another specialist for 2005.

At another level, a number of students who have graduated from Korean programs in Australian universities have begun or continued graduate studies in very good institutions, such as Seoul National University, Oxford University, SOAS (London University) and Harvard University. By the same token, Australia has attracted students into its Korean Humanities graduate programs from abroad, from Korea, Canada, the USA, New Zealand and Russia, among other places. The ANU has by far the largest Korean graduate program at present, and is responsible for the bulk of the publications in several fields including history, politics, gender studies and economics.

An important fruit of the expansion of Korean programs throughout Australian and New Zealand universities and schools was the founding of the Korean Studies Association of Australasia in 1994, with a membership by 1995 of over seventy people. This has provided not only exchange of information about the various programs in the region, but a vital sense of identity and common interest among the relatively small community of Koreanists. It has created a structure that is of considerable moral importance to those in the Humanities.

International recognition of the recent growth in Australia of Korean Studies as a broad field is reflected in the hosting of the PACKS (Pacific and Asian Conference on Korean Studies) Conference at Sydney University in 1996, with an organizing committee composed of Korean academics from around the nation. Further, the Korea Foundation decided to provide capital for the foundation of an Endowed Chair of Korean Studies at the ANU, to which Ken Wells was appointed in February 2003.