ABSTRACT
Cooperation between Australia and Japan with respect to ‘hard’ security matters began, in secret, in the mid-1970s, at the instigation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), and was essentially limited to secret intelligence exchanges for more than a decade. However, its purview began to be substantially expanded at the beginning of the 1990s, albeit with very tentative initial steps, to include reciprocal visits by senior defence officials, official dialogues on security matters of mutual concern, and modest cooperation in some maritime fields (including joint exercises between elements of the respective Australian and Japanese navies). It was given a critically important public dimension when, in May 1990, Yoso Ishikawa became the first Japanese defence minister to visit Australia, and Senator Robert Ray, the Australian minister for defence, visited Tokyo in September 1992. Minister Ishikawa’s visit ‘had little policy content’, but that it ‘took place without incident or any negative publicity in Australia . . . was extremely reassuring to those who wanted a strategic dialogue and the opening of defence contacts between the two countries’.1 The close cooperation between the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and the Japan Self Defense Force (JSDF) in the peacekeeping operation in Cambodia in 1992-3 added a further dimension to the security relationship.
