Aussies abroad raising the flag
A report by Justin Norrie in the Sydney Morning Herald says that in the run up to Australia Day this year, organisers of the Big Day Out music festival triggered a nationwide round of chest-beating by declaring the national flag unwelcome at the Sydney event.
Their aim, they said, was to prevent aggressive displays of nationalism and ethnic violence.
While the festival passed peacefully, the anticipated outbursts of drunken thuggery and cultural friction were unravelling 8500 kilometres away, on the freezing streets of Hokkaido, in northern Japan.
At Niseko, a small ski resort town dubbed “Little Australia” in honour of the Antipodean property developers and skiers who have driven its revival, the Japanese owners of Cafe Pow Pow had thoughtfully thrown a barbecue to mark the special day for their patrons.
They had supplied Australian wine, beer, meat pies and fish and chips – even fireworks. Before long their guests quaffed the lot and – amid the occasional refrain of “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!” – began throwing punches and glasses around the bar, then out in the street, in one of at least three brawls across the town that night, witnesses recalled.
“This fighting is common for Australians,” a female bar worker at Pow Pow told the Herald. “They get drunk, take off their clothes, sometimes smash glasses and have fights – like it’s fun.”
The Australia Day skirmishes received no media attention. Three weeks later, however, Australian media were understandably quick to celebrate the bravery of the Thredbo Ski Patrol members and their friends who rescued 22 Japanese from an avalanche in Hakkoda.
Ten months have passed, and some staff at Japan’s ski resorts are almost certainly bracing for another Australian onslaught.
In the northern hemisphere winter of 1997-98, there were 4001 Australian holidaymakers to Japan. By last winter the number had increased more than fivefold to 21,814. Most of those visitors arrived on cheap flights headed straight for the ski fields of Hokkaido and Honshu, Japan’s main island.
At this rate, Australians may one day be rushing to Japan’s slopes faster than the Japanese descended on the Gold Coast in the late 1980s. Whereas that earlier invasion prompted a racist backlash from some locals, the Japanese have shown gratitude for the boon we’ve delivered to their rural economy, and tolerance for the boorishness besides.
As the number of Australian skiers in Japan continues to rise, so too does anecdotal evidence of bad behaviour. “I was embarrassed to overhear some older Australians berating the poor Japanese staff at my Nagano guest house for not serving Vegemite,” says Andrew Gray, a 38-year-old Sydney lawyer who visited Japan in January and is now based in Europe.
A Report by The Mole from The Sydney Morning Herald
John Alwyn-Jones
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