...This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Australian arrival in Japan to demilitarise and democratise the old antagonist - but the occasion has passed unnoticed. Overshadowed by the figure of the swaggering but magnanimous American GI, distributing chocolate and chewing gum to awestruck Japanese children, BCOF servicemen have always suffered an image problem...Vaulting rates of venereal disease in the Australian contingent fuelled early suspicions that they were debauched malingerers on a paid holiday. In the postwar atmosphere of vengeance towards the Japanese, as horrifying stories of their brutal mistreatment of POWs in the camps of South-East Asia continued to surface, public sentiment was affronted by the fact that Australians were playing a constructive part in the rebuilding of Japan. BCOF veterans returned home to find themselves ...socially ostracised...for having consorted with the despised Japanese...The poisonous Australian civilian attitude towards Japan lingered well into the 1950s. A journalist who visited the country in January 1952, just as the occupation was being wound up, wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald that people "must be prepared for some shocks" as the BCOF men return home. The journalist observed that one of the "cultural discoveries" he had made in Japan "was the degree of liking for the Japanese developed by Australians who have lived among them for any length of time". The very headline was intended to shock: "Our soldiers like the Japanese"...more...
Related FG Thread: 1946 - NZ Forces in Japan. There are some interesting photographs on the BCOF website.
