Regarding Roger Pulvers' Dec. 9 article, "A moment of opportunity for Australia's new PM": Pulvers should have sought information on the relative strengths of Japanese studies and Chinese studies at all levels of education in Australia (from the Japanese Studies Association of Australia or from professor Kent Anderson, current Head of Asian Studies at Australian National University, Canberra).
The hue and cry may be all about Chinese studies, but those numbers are paltry at all levels and pale in insignificance against the mature and persistent trend toward engagement with Japanese Studies -- again at all levels throughout the Australian education system.
In fact, what we now see emerging is first-year undergraduate students entering the study of Japanese at Australian universities who already have the competence and cross-cultural sophistication of first-year postgraduate language students in the United States or Britain. When they graduate, they become Japanese-capable professionals of an ilk that no other English-speaking country is producing.
Reports of the death of Japanese studies in Australia have been premature at best and pure sensationalistic nonsense at worst. The Howard policies may well have been as Pulvers says, but those policies did not have the effect widely surmised.
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