THE only Japanese force to land in Australia during WWII was a small reconnaissance party that arrived in northern WA’s Kimberley region on 19 January 1944, to investigate reports of the Allies building large bases there. The party consisted of four officers on a fishing boat. They investigated the York Sound region for a day and a night before returning to their base on Timor.
Upon returning to Japan in February, the junior officer who commanded the party suggested using 200 Japanese prison inmates to launch a guerrilla campaign in Australia. Nothing came of this as it’s likely the officer’s seniors looked at a map of the Kimberley and after realising it was three times the size of England, filled with deep gorges, miles of desert plains and rocky wilderness, decided this was no jumping off point for the invasion of Australia.
Nowadays Japanese soldiers have been replaced by Japanese tourists – and tourists from all over Australia and the world – who’ve come to the country’s last great wilderness area to experience this ancient landscape. Most of them see
