Organizer and Chair: Selcuk Esenbel, Bogazici University
Discussant: Harry D. Harootunian, New York University
The subject of Japan and the World of Islam is incongruous with the westernist orientation of postwar Japan. Islam hardly conveys a strong resonance as a political and cultural element in the mainstream identification of Japanese society which has turned its face to the American-Western European West. The collective amnesia in contemporary Japanese society about its flirtation with the cause of Muslims during the earlier prewar generations indicates not only the political but the psychological cleavage between the sensibilities of prewar and postwar Japan. However, in view of the breakdown of the Cold War boundaries concerning political and cultural identities, the revival of some of the prewar slogans and symbols of Japan’s bonding with the future of the World of Islam in new form has reappeared.
This panel on the subject of Japan and the World of Islam will introduce first-hand new research that is being done on various aspects of the prewar relationship between the two worlds. The panel participants constitute a creative combination of scholars from the United States, Japan, and Turkey who are also combining their expertise as specialists of Japanese Studies and Islamic Studies. The panel papers will discuss the historical relationship between Japan and the countries with Islamic populations, focusing on the late Meiji through the Second World War. The participants will present papers on the Japanese side of the issue as well as the Muslim side based upon the Ottoman Turkish and Egyptian encounters with the Japanese. An important focus of the panel will be the meaning of the World of Islam as a political and cultural identity for prewar ultra-nationalist intellectuals in Japan.
And for a while, Tokyo seemed to be a center for nationalist aspirations, anti-colonialist discourse, and its related strategies.
The narrative of the history of Japan and the World of Islam from the above vantage point argues in favor of the transnational character of nationalist history around the turn of the century. It is methodologically an argument in favor of historical research that requires the combination of sources, languages, and expertise from a multiple number of fields, breaking the rigid boundaries of the established forms of Area Studies. This panel topic is an excellent case for the argument in favor of a fresh look at the methodology of contemporary history that remains restricted to national boundaries in terms of training and frequently-held assumptions.
Masaru Tamamoto, Independent Researcher
The essay investigates Japan’s heightened interest in the world of Islam during the Great East Asian War, when Japan’s imagination of Asia expanded to include the Islamic world as far as West Asia (the Middle East), when Japan claimed to be the leader of Islamic peoples. The starting point of the essay is a cluster of Islamic research institutes and their publications which saw light during the war. It is about Japan’s Asianism, which is again a salient political and intellectual issue; about Japan’s modern predicament of defining its place in war. It is about Japan’s modern predicament of defining its place in (relation with) Asia; about the relationship between knowledge creation and international relations as power politics. To explicate these terms, the essay looks at an era when Japan imagined itself to be a multi-racial society (before the postwar retreat to the claim of cultural and racial uniqueness) to justify imperial expansion by a race of color.
Stefan Tanaka, University of California, San Diego
The achievement of Wilsonian liberal-internationalism was to establish the idea that law, not imperial and power politics dictate international relations. Yet it did not resolve a fundamental problem brought on by the integration of the globe into the liberal-capitalist world—the ideal of equality and equivalence on an ontological level that was implemented through a hierarchical epistemology that employed non-Western societies as incomplete variations of the modern West.
The orient is, of course, well-known as a central concept in this configuration. An early attempt among scholars in Japan to resolve this problematic was toyoshi which turned east Asia into a concept that paralleled the Orient. Yet, by the 1930s many, such as Okawa Shumei, recognized the bankruptcy of the idea of toyo and sought a different origin, one free from the abstract categories that were decreasingly apposite to conditions in Asia.
In Okawa’s writings, I will examine Japan as a center of the problematic of modernity—not a model of successful development. While heavily invested in the importance of positivistic knowledge, Okawa criticized Western imperialism and turned away from the origins established in toyo toward India, in particular, Gandhi’s spirituality (and later Islam). In short, he was seeking a humanity that he found absent in 1930s Japan and that was not simply the antithesis of modern Japan (thereby one that was coopted by the Japanese nation-state). Nevertheless, this brings out the difficulty of constructing an autonomous non-Western place within a liberal internationalist structure; his recognition of Anglo-American imperialism and the problems of modernity did not lead to criticism of, but support for, Japan’s exploitation of toyo.
Selim Deringil, Bogazici University
The study of the foreign policy of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century usually focuses on the Western powers. There is next to nothing in the literature on the relations of the Ottoman state with the emerging power in the east: Japan.
However, from the early 1890s onwards, the Ottoman statesmen had a good idea of what was going on in the Far East. Just as they paid close attention to the "rape of China," they were also aware that a new power was emerging in the region. What little research there is on Ottoman-Japanese relations at this time in Turkish tends to focus either on the failed efforts to convert Japan to Islam, or the exaggerated admiration for the Japanese after their victory in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.
However, the Ottoman archival materials show us that the Ottoman view of Japan was much more nuanced and much more complicated. First, despite popular admiration for Japanese success in the press etc. the actual power elite was very wary of the emergence of Japan as yet another source of trouble. Particularly the Japanese demand for a trade treaty with the Ottoman state, resembling the unequal treaties that Japan was so keen to shake off, and the demand to establish consulates in the Ottoman Empire was met with great suspicion. Japanese "private travellers" in Iraq were followed and constantly monitored. During the Russo-Japanese war, the Ottomans made every effort to maintain balanced relations with both sides, to the extent of sending a field hospital unit to both belligerents. This paper will focus on this hitherto unexplored facet of Ottoman/Japanese history, on the basis of primary source material, with a view to establishing the groundwork for future avenues of research in the comparative histories of the two countries.
Renee Worringer, University of Chicago
As part of a larger dissertation project comparing discursive images of Japan in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish press, literature, and archival documents (1876–1920) as they were used to legitimate certain notions of social reform, technical modernization, and the development of a national consciousness in the Ottoman Empire, this paper will argue that a changing world-view was developing among its citizens at this time that focused on Pan-Asian solidarities. However the social and political circumstances surrounding Cairo and Istanbul influenced these expressions of solidarity as well as the perceptions themselves. The lack of real political power among Egyptian nationalists is reflected in their exaggerated use of Japanese imagery in periodical literature, perhaps the single most powerful means for these activists and intellectuals to express their dissatisfaction with British occupation and their aspirations for ultimate Egyptian independence. In the Ottoman political capital, other factors proved more significant. The Ottoman State’s skepticism about Japan’s political motives concerning the signing of an official treaty (and Japan’s insistence on being granted Capitulatory privileges) differs greatly from the State’s public demonstrations of affinity toward Japan, its "hero of the East," and the Ottoman press’ tendency to promote the idea of an alliance or the pursuit of specific reform and modernization initiatives within a "Japanese paradigm." These tensions appeared clearly when the Ottoman government sought to use the force of Japan’s image to achieve concrete reforms, to legitimate itself and its policy choices in the eyes of public opinion, and to keep itself in power when an opposition was also using Japanese images to critique it.
Selcuk Esenbel, Bogazici University
The subject of Japan and the World of Islam has not been treated extensively by historians. This paper discusses the historic relationship between Japan and the world of Islam for the politics of empire-building between the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and the end of the Second World War. Just like any strategy, Japan’s policy among Muslims came to life through personal contacts between Muslims of various ethnic and national origins and their Japanese contacts, sometimes friends for many years. It reveals a window into the transnational milieu that provided the flesh and blood for the formation of an imperialist policy.
This paper deals with three aspects of this historical development that have much to say about the Japanese self image about its relations to the West as well as the East in modern history; the strategic aims of the Japanese authorities; the activities of the Japanese authorities in diplomacy, intelligence, in the countries that had Muslim populations; the network of Japanese and the pro-Japanese figures from Muslim societies which constituted a pro-Islam policy intermediary and lobby.
The paper will present a brief outline of the following topics based upon ongoing research in Japanese, Turkish, and English sources in preparation of a book on the subject.