Cainsites who were around then prefer to forget the Daikyo days. That mongrel company bought the lease (or whatever) to Green Island and proceeded to change the currency of the island from coin/dollars of the realm to Daikyodollars. Very few locals went there. One of the other Jap plans was to overload the area with Jap owned tour businesses and only lead their tourists to Jap owned shops/cafe's and restaurants. Talk about 'don't mention the war',huge amount of divisiveness at the time.
Trust me, there was NO division in the ranks of hoteliers, golf course owners, restauranteurs in TOWN in those days... everyone was on the gravy train.
Yeah well if we keep handing them our ports, realestate, cattle stations, food producers etc etcetc they’re probably right. You could link this with the Cairns comments in another thread - have we learned anything from the past or just keep chasing the ‘get rich quick’ chimera?
Not quite Karen. Many,many bizz's were owned or operated by Daikyo and subsidiaries including all those you mention,you walk down any of the streets in Cairns and from the awnings outside dozens of shops was Jap signage. The Jap tourists were 'guided' into those bizz's and if anyone wanted to go off on their own they were hastily headed up and pretty much shackled to the tour operator and told the error of their ways. Yes there were some Aussie owned bizz's that benefited but not on the whole.
Same BS here on the Coast !! The Chinese get off the plane into Chinese buses, go to Chinese owned shops and tours .... not all of them but a significant amount
