Originally Posted by
Orophin
It's all about how the route is calculated from you to the game servers. For some odd reason Australia could take some weird out of the way route to get to Japan. (like AU > Los Angeles > Tokyo)
Best thing you can do is do a netstat while connected to each server, log the IP and do a traceroute to each. The more hops you have to travel to get to the destination, usually the more latency you'll have.
Geographically speaking though, yeah it's weird AU doesn't have a direct link to Japan.