Japan, Turkey and the World of Islam: The Writings of Selcuk Esenbel 1906876126, 9781906876128

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Japan, Turkey and the World of Islam The Writings of Selçuk Esenbel Selçuk Esenbel completed her undergraduate degree in History at the International Christian University (Japan) and George Washington University (USA). She received her master’s degree from the Department of Japanese Language and Linguistics at Georgetown University (USA) in 1969 and a PhD in Japanese history from Columbia University (USA) in 1981. From 1982 to 1985, she was assistant professor at Bosphorus (Boğaziçi) University and became full professor in 1997, serving as Chair of the Department of History at Bosphorus University between 1994 and 2003. She helped establish Turkey’s Japanese Studies Association in 1993 and consolidated the organization as a Board Member. She became its third president in 2002 Her major publications in English include Even the Gods Rebel: The Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising in Japan and The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent (co-authored). Her articles in Japanese have appeared in Kindai Nihon to Toruko sekai and Ibunka rikai no shiza: Sekai kara mita Nihon, Nihon kara mita sekai. Her articles in English have been published in journals such as the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (UK), and The American Historical Review (USA).

a Widely known for her writings on Islam with a particular focus on the transnational history of nationalism in Turkey and Japan, as well as her work on the social history of Tokugawa Japan, this volume brings together seventeen of the author’s key essays written over a period of thirty years, a number of which have been edited to take account of more recent developments. The essays range from ‘Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Powers, 1900–1945’ to ‘The People of Tokugawa Japan: The State of the Field in Early Modern Social/Economic History’. Importantly, the first 30 pages of this volume also contain a personal memoir by the author exploring her early life and cross-cultural influences and their impact on the development her academic career.

Selçuk Esenbel

Japan, Turkey and the World of Islam THE WRITINGS OF SELÇUK ESENBEL

a

Series: THE WRITINGS OF

Volume 3 JAPAN, TURKEY AND THE WORLD OF ISLAM The Writings of Selçuk Esenbel First published 2011 by GLOBAL ORIENTAL PO Box 219 Folkestone Kent CT20 2WP UK www.brill.nl/globaloriental Global Oriental is an imprint of Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, and VSP. © Selçuk Esenbel 2011 ISBN 978-1-906876-12-8 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Set in Plantin 10 on 11pt by Dataworks, Chennai, India Printed and bound in England by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wilts

Contents a Plate section facing page 132 Introduction 1

vii

Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power, 1900–1945

1

2

Japan and Islam Policy During the 1930s

28

3

The Legacy of the War and the World of Islam in Japanese Pan-Asian Discourse: Wakabayashi Han’s Kaikyo¯ Sekai to Nihon

53

Maps in Our Mind: Chinese Coins, the Asian Muslim Network, the Japanese and the Transnational

73

A Transnational History of Revolution and Nationalism: Encounters between Japanese Asianists, the Turkish Revolution, and the World of Islam

87

4

5

6

Japanese Interest in the Ottoman Empire

108

7

A Fin de Siècle Japanese Romantic in Istanbul: The Life of Yamada Torajiro¯ and His Toruko Gakan

130

8

The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War on Ottoman Turkey

148

9

Meiji Élite and Western Culture

154

The Anguish of Civilized Behavior: The Use of Western Cultural Forms in the Everyday Lives of the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks During the Nineteenth Century

163

10

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CONTENTS

11

12

13

A Comparison of Turkish and Japanese Attitudes Toward Modern National Identity

201

Remarks on the Modernization of Japan and Turkey in the 18th and 19th Centuries

217

Commentary for the General Discussion on Japan in a Comparative Perspective

223

14 Reflections on Japanese and Turkish Modernization and Global History 15

16

17

234

The Study of Local Administration in Early Modern Japan: The Case of Nakano Tenryo¯ During the Tokugawa Period, 1637–1868

246

The Remembrance of the 1871 Nakano Uprising in Takayama as a Contemporary Trauma in Village Life Today

266

The People of Tokugawa Japan: The State of the Field in Early Modern Social / Economic History 285

Bibiliography (Writings of Selçuk Esenbel)

319

Index

323

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Introduction a

BETWEEN THREE WORLDS

I

suppose I have always felt that my life has been made up of a series of border-crossing experiences based on my exposure to a life lived in the United States, Japan, and Turkey which has inevitably resulted in a certain ambivalence regarding all the claims of any particular culture about itself. Moving between different societies, cultures, and political discourses has allowed me to see and hear what frequently remains hidden in bilateral comparisons and relations between countries – juggling as I have had to do between three different worlds which I had to simultaneously understand and navigate. This rich and varied experience, which is the sum of my life, has been meaningful and exciting but at times presented me with great difficulties. I was born in Washington D.C. right after World War II as the child of a young diplomatic couple of the Embassy of the Republic of Turkey. My father is said to have congratulated my mother on the fact that I was a “peace” baby. As diplomats, my parents Melih and Emine Esenbel knew the horrors of World War II first hand even though Turkey had remained neutral during that worldwide conflict. My father’s first appointment was to Paris where they saw first hand the outbreak of the war and the German occupation. To my father, who was the product of his French education in Turkey, the defeat of France was as unbearable as it would have been to a French citizen. After a difficult journey, the Turkish Embassy staff joined the thousands of French men, women, and children escaping from Paris and finally settled in the embassy quarters in a hotel under occupied Vichy France. My mother published a memoir about their experiences in the oppressed atmosphere of Vichy France revealing what really went on beneath the seemingly congenial everyday life of the city during these little known years.1 After this first appointment, my parents had moved on to the United States where my father was appointed first secretary to the Turkish Embassy in Washington. As a young diplomat he directly participated in the first important steps to bring Turkey into the Western Alliance, namely NATO, and the shift in the foreign policy of the United States toward incorporating Turkey into the Southern flank of the Truman Doctrine. The genesis, at least in part, of this historic turning point began as intensive conversations between Turkish diplomats and Americans in our modest middle class home on 41st and Fessenden street North West which still stands in that quiet and pleasant

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neighborhood to this day, the only home of my childhood which remains intact – the others in Turkey have been demolished as a result of so-called “development” projects. Before he died, my father wrote briefly about this important transition to the Western Alliance. 2 As a kindergarten student who spent a happy childhood among the residential family homes of Wisconsin Avenue and Fessenden, lined on both sides with shady trees and the small back yards of wooden homes, I have fond memories of my childhood in the United States enjoying a happy carefree life with friends from the block with whom I played every day. But although “diplomatic immunity” protected us from the harsh reality of racism, I still remember American society with the unwritten rules of racial segregation in the nation’s capital where Afro-American men and women had to sit in the back of the bus. Later, when I studied at Holton Arms Junior High School in 1959–60 and as an undergraduate in History at George Washington University in 1967–69 and subsequently in 1969–71 as a graduate student of Japanese language in Georgetown, and again in Washington in the heady anti-Vietnam War movement era, I also witnessed the race tensions and violence in the streets, the Civil Rights movement, and the radical shift after the Kennedy administration toward breaking down the walls of race in American society. The experience gave me the enduring sense of how the American people were able to grapple with the inner problems of their own society regarding racism and other issues of inequality. The outcomes may not have been perfect, not least concerning the problem of poverty that was the backbone of the racial divide. But Civil Rights had opened channels of integration that were significant in demolishing racism from the public culture of the nation as we witness today the courageous political act of electing President Obama. Such courage is not often encountered in other societies. During these years my father’s career took us back and forth between Turkey, Japan, and the United States. After arriving in Turkey for the first time at the young and impressionable age of six, I grew up in Ankara of the fifties with summer holidays on the outskirts of Istanbul near the Marmara coast where travel was still mostly with horses, donkeys, and horse-drawn carriages, with the rare appearance of a car or truck that passed by on the local unpaved streets. There was no television and most homes, including ours, did not have a phone. I had left TV in Washington. It took my mother and I half a day to make it to the European side of downtown Istanbul to visit family and friends where we had to stay overnight and return home the next day. While I transferred through numerous elementary and junior high schools (I dread the day any one will ask me for my transcripts) between Ankara and Washington when my father became the Ambassador at the Washington embassy, we were probably the last generation to travel on passenger boats crossing the Atlantic three times in my own lifetime on the Independence and the Constitution. In Turkey, these years also witnessed tumultuous political upheaval transitions between military coups and returns to parliamentary governments that took its toll in our personal lives. In 1961, at the age of fifteen, I was initiated into adulthood – jolted at the news of the political hangings of the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and the Minister of Finance after seeing the photograph of the hangings on the front page of the newspaper. I knew the Foreign Minister, a friend of my parents, as a cheerful “uncle” who visited us frequently. These years led to my growing awareness of the incompatibility between the political views of the Turkish

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left and the right, the unending conflict between political parties, and the dark valley of intermediate military regimes as a result of the coups d’état of 1961, 1971, and finally 1980 – the three major events that formed the political environment for all. The rights of, and respect for, the individual were always lost in the wake of the militant atmosphere. On the other hand, there was a positive side to growing up in this complex environment. I remember being placed in the first grade at a public elementary school in Ankara with other children without any of the cultural orientation support programs sensitized to the so-called “multi-culturalism” that is so fashionable these days. My parents, who simply did not find the radical change from Washington to Ankara that important, expected me to make all necessary adjustments on the first day of school and just get on with my life. During these early years, I developed the self-inflicted peculiar habit of repeating to myself in English and Turkish every single word or sentence, like what is your name, adin ne, dog, kopek, house, ev, Mr, Bay, etc. I must have appeared a very strange child to those who met me speaking to herself and others in “double talk” all the time. Like many of my generation, I remember those years as a time of idyllic family life in Istanbul and Ankara surrounded by a dominantly agrarian society with a strong peasant presence from that great hinterland of Anatolia that went hand in hand with the slow pace of urban life in Istanbul which had lost its lustre and pride following the loss of Empire. All that remained were faded glimmers of the city’s former glory when it was once the imperial capital of the East Mediterranean and the Balkans. But it was also full of new energy. To my eyes, the suburbs of Istanbul then being settled by migrants from the villages and countryside were very poor, accustomed as I was to the middle-class life of Wisconsin Avenue and the amenities of the childoriented culture of America; it was the latter that I missed most. We were living in a city that was located amidst a hinterland of vivid peasant culture whose men and women were being forced into disbanding their traditional lives to become city workers as a result of urbanization and the grueling pace of industrialization. Their arrival had a profound impression on me. Strangely enough, the result was my Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University during the seventies on Japanese peasant uprisings; in those days it was not a popular topic in the American academy of Japanese studies. Many years later, that doctoral dissertation became my first publication entitled Even the Gods Rebel: Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising (1998, AAS monographs). In 1977, after I became a young graduate student of Japanese history at Columbia University, I went to Japan for research where I met Aoki Keiichiro¯, the doyen scholar of the history of Japanese peasant uprisings who had also earned his credentials as an activist leftist member of the pre-war tenant movement during the thirties. I clearly remember his first question to me was why I, as self-evidently somebody who came from an urban family in Turkey, bothered with writing the history of Japanese peasants. He said he had guessed my social status from the way I sat. It was a very reasonable question. Taken aback by his directness, my heartfelt response was that I had witnessed the pathos in the gradual erosion of an ancient life-style in my childhood, where peasants always lost out in the process of modernization, which in turn made me feel a special affinity to the same pathos in the making of modern Japan. ◘

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Never one to be nostalgic about the past, however, my memory of the social transitions of Turkey during the fifties and the sixties is how the Turkish country people were poor but resourceful, their men dour-faced, but dignified in a rough sort of way, their women outwardly complacent but courageous in demeanor. They were all trying to survive under difficult circumstances. For some reason, I saw the same people in the determined but desperate struggle of the Takaino farmers against what they thought was the harsh and unjust attitude of the newly established Meiji authorities in Tokyo who demanded high taxes. More important, the arrogant officials of the new regime disregarded the tradition of negotiation and compromise of the late Tokugawa Tenryo¯ , the Celestial Domains, of the Bakufu, the national government in Central Japan Shinano province, today’s Nagano prefecture, which exhibited a kind of de-centralized way of managing feudal power. The history of the Takaino villagers showed that in time, by the early 1800s, they had through negotiation and resistance tactics, “whittled away” at the expropriation of the government by lowering the proportionate level of taxation to rises in total production. In the official tax-rice growing fields the real value of taxes was down to 15% of production from the official 40% as recorded by the ancient seventeenth-century registers that could never be reappraised due to local resistance despite the occasional attempt of the Tokugawa authorities to do so. This fact nicely confirmed T. C. Smith’s general thesis for rural capital formation. But for me, it also proved that the peasant uprising of 1871 was not the result of increasing poverty, but rather the increasing wealth and its accumulation in the hands of a resourceful rural landed peasantry, the torishimari, and that the crisis over the Meiji government’s tax hike after 1868 was the response of the “rational” peasant who used what seemed outwardly to be old-fashioned communal solidarity networks as the vehicle for their protest movements. To my mind, this condition was at the heart of the financial crisis of the Tokugawa Bakufu which in due course brought about its decline. That my analogy, Turkish peasants of my childhood, and the subjects of my dissertation, Japanese peasants of a by-gone era a century ago were from different “cultures,” “religions,” and temporal-geographic sites, to this day does not seem that important for me. This is despite today’s reification of culture as a differential in human behavior that has arisen as the critic of reading too much of the Enlightenment into the world historical processes of Non-European peoples. But, I find the way “cultural turn” is practiced today has in fact blinded us to the shared human condition of the plight of our life-styles determined by class, education, and profession: in this case, as far as I am concerned, peasants giving way to totalizing modern states for the sake of economic and social engineering toward modernity are the same whether they are Anatolian or Japanese. To me culture, unfortunately, has become a catch-all word: even terrorists sometimes justify their violence on the basis of “culture.” The distortion has led to the neglect of the need to be aware of the actual social, material, and political exigencies of human behavior. Today, were I to add anything in terms of culture to this formative research on Takaino and the Nakano uprising, I would add a chapter (maybe I will write a paper on this in the future) on the connections between the local village matsuri and the worship of Takamori, the deity of the mountain, to the uprising because I have come to the view that the Japanese matsuri festival and ikki are different faces of the same communal tradition of

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activating the forces of the divine, whether in joy or in anger in an exceptional liminal moment. ◘ On another note, some of my Japanese colleagues have in jest commented on why, after the violent topic of peasant uprisings, I am now focused on the study of the Japanese Pan-Asianist right-wing, the militarist era of the thirties, which is another violent topic. I think that one’s geographic location has much to do with the choice of research interest that explains why I moved on to the study of Japanese Pan-Asianist nationalism and its relations with Muslim politics during the 1990s after the Takaino uprising. Perhaps the simplest explanation would be the fact that I know at first hand, having lived under these conditions in my own life, political violence in the streets between social and political activists of the left and right, and the militarist politics of coups d’état. The dynamism of the sixties in Turkey as a young industrializing and urbanizing society, the troubling seventies with the hopes of social democracy dashed in the cauldron of street fighting and economic hardships of the black market have made their mark on my generation, the ‘68ers’ of Turkey. I always feel we have gone through the thirties in Japan, but in seventies Turkey. Put bluntly, my collective memory constitutes the transition from the horse-drawn carriage to the automotive revolution, the radical politics of the left and the right to military coups and the final transition back to parliamentary politics after 1985 up to the present day. The construction of democracy which I still believe is the best system all around is a long and difficult process. It was so in Japan and it still is in Turkey. But this is a personal view. ◘ Between 1963 and 1967, and later at regular intervals since 1977, Japan has become my third home and most important, as implied in the above account, the source of my intellectual bonds. To paraphrase, I have an intellectual goen with Japanese history and the Japanese people. Part of it is growing up as a high school student in ASIJ, The American School in Japan, but particularly as a young undergraduate at ICU, International Christian University, where I learned Japanese. My father’s diplomatic career, again as Ambassador, had taken me to Japan after the United States for the first part of my exposure to Japan. The second part, which will last for the rest of my life, is entirely my personal choice. I learned Japanese rather quickly and it was at this time I came to the conclusion that the so-called Altaic language affinity of Japanese to Turkish, if cleansed of its pre-war nationalist Asianist elements, was probably true. As the only Turkish-speaking student of ICU’s Japanese language program under Professor Ishida, my teachers noted how quickly I grasped the grammar of the language. It made a world of a difference. After being able to speak Japanese, I made deep friendships that continue to this day. The road led me to Columbia University between 1972 and 1981 when I became a student in the East Asian Studies program studying under Donald Keene, Herschel Webb, Hans Bielenstein, Paul Varley, Ivan Morris, Herbert Passin, and Martin Wilbur. I benefited tremendously from their lectures and remember them to this day. What I did not understand then, but am deeply aware of today, is that all

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were part of the war-generation who had fought in the Far East during World War II and in many ways their extraordinary experience in world history had become part of their pursuit of Japanese and Chinese studies that was of an exceptional quality. The academy tends to isolate itself from the real life of political reality outside of its gilded cage. My Columbia and New York experience also diverged from that of my contemporary classmates because I was probably the first and only non-American in the program in a long time, and to make it worse a foreign student on a diplomatic visa, that made it simply impossible for me to qualify for any of the funding available to graduate students of East Asian studies. ◘ During my years in New York, my life-saver in the first couple of years was working in the Japan Trade Center on Fifth Avenue, a small office compared to the impressive location that they moved to later on the Avenue of the Americas. At the Center, I worked as a student interpreter and office worker, making use of my Japanese language skills which back then were still relatively rare. State Department regulations that normally restrict work for diplomat families gave me permission to work in the Japan Trade Center, which had a semi-diplomatic status, and the fact that I was required to speak Japanese could be counted as educational training. I remember how depressed Professor Hans Bielenstein was after diligently going through the hefty scholarship program booklet in the Chair’s office when he discovered I qualified for none. The only option was to wait for an opening as a research assistant in the East Asian Institute, which subsequently opened up, making it possible for me to complete the program through the qualifying exams. I became the assistant to Professor Ikei Masaru of Keio University who was a visiting professor at the Institute and to whom I owe a deep gratitude for having always been supportive in my career. Many years later, when the Turkish government was desperate about finding a suitable venue for the display of an exhibition on the history of Japanese-Turkish Friendship that took place during the year of ‘Turkey in Japan’ in 2003, I called Professor Ikei with a plea for help. He saved the day and secured for us the beautiful top floor Exhibition Salon of the Waco Department Store in Ginza – the best location for such an event, through his kind intercession with the owner of the store Mr. Hattori. During the 1990s, Professor Ikei Masaru and Sakamoto Tsutomu of Keio University and I organized a project of studying Japanese-Turkish relations, probably the first comprehensive team project on the topic which came out as a publication first in Japanese Kindai Nihon to Toruko no sekai (Tokyo: Keioshobo¯, 1999), edited by Ikei and Sakamoto, and later in English edited by myself and our new member Inaba Chiharu as The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on Japanese-Turkish Relations, (Bogazici University Press, 2003). ◘ Looking at my personal and professional life after all these years, I have to admit that there are a number of serious difficulties which a scholar who is not from any of the principal centers of academic and financial resources encounters if one desires

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to pursue one’s interests intellectually as an international scholar: I hope I will not bore the reader with a brief discussion of such difficulties which might help those who are living in far-away corners of the world in order to give them hope that they might actually be sitting at the forefront of knowledge if only they could find the means of communicating with the outside world, as it were. An historian among all social scientists has the ability to do this for we work with the “tracks” of history, as Marc Bloch said about the traces of past evidence, that are everywhere among us. I greet the incoming freshmen students in Bogazici University where I have been working since 1982 as a member of the Department of History with the following speech that is more of a dire warning than a pep-talk. The gist of it is that even in combining all the library resources in Turkey it will never match a Harvard, Yale, or Columbia. So, one should be very realistic about one’s expectations. My advice and educational strategy is we can never have the library resources, but we can educate the minds who can discuss issues with colleagues and use the resources if and when they have access to the centers of the academy outside of Turkey. But this message does not deny the fact that unless one’s choice is that of becoming the émigré scholar in Western Europe or the United States, one’s scholarship has to develop in proportion to the state of one’s country in the global arena. If one chooses to stay at home as a “nation-builder” in the old-fashioned sense, then one has to bear the cost as well. Real politic dictates that Turkey, like many other countries which have shown remarkable economic, social, and educational progress in the last half century that I have witnessed (according to the benchmarks of “development”) will never have the accumulation of resources available in the “developed” West because of what I called in the Even the Gods Rebel volume’s preface, “remote country conditions.” 3 There is no library to check the names or facts of Japanese studies in Turkey other than the one that I worked hard to set up for the last twenty years through Japan Foundation donations in Bogazici University which is good for the general public, but it does not serve one’s specialized needs. Lacking the scholarly resources and the finances of being a historian of Modern Japan in Turkey, my scholarly work that you see in this volume is the result of a rather entrepreneurial approach that I developed on my own over many years, by bringing back sources, checking on notes etc., consulting with Japanese colleagues only during brief Conference visits or the much appreciated sabbatical leaves to Japan in 1993, the United States in 2000, and Canada in 2008. On the other hand, the early 1980s in Turkey was a country without the fax, in many cases working phones, or the ample finances to buy books or travel. Things are slightly better now with the internet revolution and Turkey is also more “developed” compared to the past which has helped scholars like myself tremendously who depend so much on the outside world, especially one like myself who is actually studying the outside world – in this case Japan. A young scholar embarking on a topic such as Japanese history from Turkey or a country with similar conditions has to take this reality into account and develop special solutions to discover the “frontier” knowledge in his or her environment. The challenges were greatest when I was working on the history of Takaino Village and the Nakano uprising. Having returned to Turkey during the seventies for personal reasons of marriage and to give birth to my precious daughter, Ceylan, in Ankara, I spent the rest of the seventies under the strain of moving between my three worlds in order to finish my dissertation. Today, all is well. After many years, I am happy to note that Ceylan has also graduated from Columbia University (2008)

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with a Ph.D. in Classics. Back then, I went to Japan as a graduate student with a Japan Foundation scholarship which gave me the opportunity to live in Nagano city and Takaino village in the highlands of central Japan, “sweating” over village rural archival documents regarding the peasant uprising of 1871. The experience of living in the Japanese countryside, and becoming friends with historians of local history at the Nakano Prefecture Historical Institute (Nagano kenshikanko¯kai) such as Furukawa Sadao, Yanagisawa Satoshi, whose friendships I continue to cherish to this day, has been an enormous advantage. I was also able to meet the elderly Japanese members of the community in whose village archives, basically a Japanese cypress chest full of documents, I worked in snowy winter days; these are precious memories. My approach as an American-trained historian of Japanese history during the seventies, makes me part of the critical revisionism which my generation in the United States represents in the discussion of the late Tokugawa to the Meiji Restoration. But I had to return home to Ankara six months before the end of my stay, which meant I had give up the rest of the Japan Foundation scholarship, because my family could not come with me and I could not bear being away for so long from my daughter. Finally, in 1981, I returned to the United States in a final stretch to complete the Ph.D. in Columbia. The experience made me who I am today, perhaps a little crusty on the edges compared to the idyllic memories of my childhood on Fessenden Street, but then on a positive note perhaps all of this fertilized my vision of Japanese history between three worlds rather than a bilateral one of the “East” and the “West” that I never found to be a convincing argument. My years as a member of Bogazici University also gave me an invaluable precious opportunity to be the pioneer of Japanese and Asian Studies in Turkey – making use of Bogazici University, a premier academic institution in the country, as a venue to start up a Japanese language program with Japanese history, now complemented with Chinese language and Chinese history as well. Though our conditions are very modest by international standards, it is a beginning. Together with my colleague Mariko Erdogan, we developed a strong Japanese language program, which I think is essential for any pioneering attempt to start Japanese or any other Asian studies, and we also set up exchange programs with eight Japanese universities which have become the crucial vehicle for our students, including many from Central Asia, to develop a significant knowledge of Japan in a relatively short period of time. The Bogazici collection on Japanese Studies is the best in Turkey and probably in the region, except for Israel which has a collection recognized by international standards. As a young academic, I have been fortunate to have served as the Chair of the Department of History for nine years between 1994 and 2003 that gave me the blessed opportunity to develop a history program with a strong world-history approach while enlarging the department from eight to twenty members whose talents range from Ottoman, Byzantine, and European history to the history of art and architecture and Ancient history and archeology. My brief sojourn at Ankara University in 1985 when I was appointed by the government to head start the Japanese Language and Literature program with my colleague Pulat Otkan has made me feel that the young faculty of the oldest degree program in the country very much part of my own. The outcome is the joy of seeing a new generation in Turkey now pursuing the topic of Japanese history and language or using their expertise in Japan-related business. In 2009, while in Canada, I was informed that our application for an

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Asian Studies Center, the first one in Istanbul, had been approved by the Ankara authorities. I also owe many thanks to the Good Family Fellowship of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, which has made it possible for me to prepare this volume and pursue writing the subsequent one that I am preparing on the comprehensive history of Japan and the World of Islam. During 2008, I was asked to join President Abdullah Gül’s visit to Japan with more than 200 Turkish businessmen and diplomats, representing the Turkish academy on Japan. One of the most memorable occasions was when during President Gül’s meeting with Japanese parliamentarians, the young professional translator interpreters on the Turkish side, many of whom were graduate students, were from Bogazici, Ankara, Middle Eastern Technical University, some of these being my former students, accomplished their task with extraordinary professionalism. This was the first time that the Turkish side could use its own language experts in Japanese-Turkish relations. During 2007, I was awarded the Minister of Foreign Affairs Special Award, the Japan Foundation Special Prize for Japanese Studies, and the Order of the Rising Sun that I gratefully accept as an honor for myself, family, and country. Most important, my colleagues in Bogazici would be seen as a remarkable group of creative and interesting individuals on any world campus, namely Zafer and Binnaz Toprak, Faruk Birtek, Selim Deringil, Edhem Eldem, Nevra Necibogˆ lu, Gülen Aktas¸, together with the new generation of colleagues such as Asli Özyar, Dario Mizrahi, Huri Cihan Islamogˆ lu, Arzu Öztürkmen, Çigdem Kafesc˛igˆ lu, Ahmet Ersoy, Yavuz Selim Karakis¸la, Lale Babaogˆ lu, Paolo and Miyuki Girardelli, and many others to whom I am indebted for being the mirror of my ideas on Japanese history even though none majored in the subject. I would also like to acknowledge the importance of the famous social scientist of Turkey Serif Mardin, in my opinion the most thoughtful observer of social phenomena in Turkey to date. Many of my articles that were published later internationally such as “The Anguish of Civilized Behavior,” 1994, and “Japan’s Global Claim,” 2004, began in the informal forum of the Bogazici community looking over the shores of the Bosphorus. I am also especially grateful to my colleagues in the United States, the late Marius Jansen who literally helped bring the Nakano Uprising book out of the dissertation box, Harry Harotuunian, Ariel Salzmann, Thomas Bender, Rebecca Karl, Madeleine Zelin, Carol Gluck, Jim Bartholomew, Philip Brown, and Donald Quartet among others for giving their support and engaging in discussions. I would also like to express my heartfelt thanks particularly to Ariel Salzmann who is presently developing Middle Eastern studies in Queen’s University, Canada. Our joint collaborative research projects that have been especially significant in helping me gain a comparative perspective between the historical processes in the Middle East and East Asia. Suraiya Faroqui, the eminent Ottoman social historian in the field, has also been a partner in exchanging ideas across fields throughout my career. In Europe above all else, the academy surrounding the European Association for Japanese Studies, Ian Nish, Ian Leary, Sven Saaler, the late Jan Van Bremen – a kind and wonderful friend who together with Joseph Kreiner brought me into the Association – have proven to be a very fertile environment for developing my research into publications. The role of Paul Norbury of the Japan Library then and Global Oriental now has been particularly helpful in making it possible. In addition to the Japan Foundation, the support of Nichibunken, the International Center of

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Japanese Studies in Kyoto, and the colleagues that I met there including Kashioka Tomi, Brij Tankha, and Kasaya Kazuhiko have been very precious assets as friends and research partners. My colleagues in Japan such as Tadashi Suzuki, Nakayama Noriko, Sakamoto Tsutomu, Ohta Hiroshi and Mitani Hiroshi have all played a part in the outcome of my publications. Throughout my life, I have also owed special thanks to Fujimoto Katsuji of Osaka Kansai University, doyen of Islamic studies, who has been a rare source of knowledge about prewar Japan, Mori Masao of Tokyo University, the expert on Turkic and Turkish studies, who encouraged me to start up Japanese studies, and Okamura Tatsuo my good friend and colleague from Osaka Kandai with whom I have foraged for prewar publications throughout the Kansai area in the midst of engaging discussions about world politics. They are no longer with us today, but their friendship and intellectual breath has been invaluable in my understanding of prewar and postwar Japan. ◘ The essays in this volume are a product of those years that look at modern Japan from multiple lenses of Japanese peasant uprisings and village history, JapaneseMuslim relations, Pan-Asianism and Islam, Japanese encounters with Turks, comparative modern experiences that constitute the main subject matters of my intellectual interests that I would like to treat in a topical order rather than in the chronological order of publication with some explanation about the circumstances of their development. The first set of articles on Japan and the World of Islam which were published between 1998 and 2009 grew out of a series of Turkish articles that I initially published in Istanbul in 1995 on discovering the links of Abdürreşid ibrahim, the interlocutor of prewar Japan’s relations with the Muslim world with the Kokuryu¯kai, the prewar nationalist organization known as the Black Dragons. The study opened into a wide world of Japanese-Muslim relations that I am continuing to write on today. I find the topic important in the context of imperial Japan’s relations with Muslim nationalists and Pan-Islamist actors from Russia, Turkey, India, Egypt, and the Malay world which constitutes a transnational history of nationalism in Japan and abroad that was intellectually and politically significant during the thirties when Japan was asserting its right to be the leader of Asia. More important, I find that the topic points to the connection of world-power engagement at the political / intelligence level with political currents among Muslims of different regions and nationalities that is a harbinger to the post-war practice of Islam as an anti-Communist Green Belt by the United States in the Cold War. It is a story that is a mixture of sincere partnership, shared idealism, ideological propaganda, subversive activity, and collaboration that is not a history that can be simply defined in “positive or negative” terms, but can only be explained as an enigmatic combination of all these different aspects. But above all the topic teaches one about the international history behind our “national” history in the twentieth century. The topic of Japanese military use of Islam in the outlying frontier regions of China during the thirties, Japanese-Muslim relations as a patriotic “propaganda,” the Japanese Muslim pilgrimage as international relations with Arabia, the Japanese Asianist collaboration with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist elements among Muslim nationalists and particularly Pan-Islamist actors are part of a global history.

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INTRODUCTION

The protagonists at the local level involved a partnership between Japanese Muslim agents and Muslims against Russia or Britain, or Holland. The relationship also transformed from a clear-cut anti-colonial partnership against the Western Asian colonial empires, that was part of the worldwide liberal nationalist anti-imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century, to the right-wing anti-Communist collaboration in North Asia against Soviet power. The crucial divide was the Bolshevik Revolution. Some of the Muslim actors were political and intellectual members of a diaspora from Russia who took asylum in the Japanese-controlled territories following the Bolshevik Revolution that shook the world. Others were nationalists from Egypt, India, and the Malay world. Above all else, by studying Japan and the World of Islam I am interested in the investigation of the routes of transnational linkages in the history of nationalism in Japan and in Asia as a phenomenon of borders crossing transnational history. Lately, I have been intrigued with the historical process of how events on the transnational level along traditional pilgrimage, commercial, and trade routes between the tri-continental space of Euro / Asia / Africa have also come to interplay with the political reality of national and imperial power in the late twentieth century that we do not see within the contained environment of “national” histories, even if they are critical of the official historiography of the nation. I first came upon this engaging historical fact of prewar Japanese history of Pan-Asianism and Islam Policy, kaikyo¯ seisaku, actually from the residual hints of this relationship in the early 1980s in Istanbul. A friend, Ekmelleddin Ihsanogˆ lu, the Director of the Islamic Research, and Culture Research Center in Istanbul, IRCICA (now the secretary general of the Islamic Conference) pointed out the memoirs of Ibrahim (1853–1944), the Tatar religious scholar, journalist, and activist who was instrumental in the development of Islam Policy for the Japanese military circles during his visit to Japan in 1908 under the auspices of his hosts the Kokuryu¯kai. After reading the memoir with Japanese colleagues Komatsu Hisao and Komatsu Kaoru who later published the Japanese translation of the section on Japan, and Selim Deringil my colleague in Bogazici (it took us a whole year), I was able to decipher the political connections of Ibrahim in the text that are not readily acknowledged which in turn prompted me to search for further material in Japan and Turkey whenever I had the opportunity. It led me to the rich cache of archival sources to be found in the Boei Tosho – the Military History Archives of the National Defense Agency – and the Gaikoshiryo¯kan – the Diplomatic Record Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – as well as the discovery of the Dai Nippon Kaikyo¯ Kyo¯kai – the Greater Japan Islamic League – the arm of the government in Islamic Affairs materials at Waseda University which are re-catalogued today for the general public. The Ottoman Turkish publications of the 1900s were full of articles on Japan when the public became totally mesmerized with all things Japanese after their victory in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War. The product of this initial activity, centered on Ibrahim, was the 1995 special issues that came out in the premier social history journal of Turkey, Toplumsal Tarih, that introduced the topic of Japan and Islam and Ibrahim for the first time in such detail in the academy in Turkey and abroad. My articles in the first section of this volume treat different aspects of the topic concerning Japan and Islam based on investigations that I have been pursuing ever since that first publication. Interest in this subject soon spread internationally as well. Renee Worrringer has to date written the most exhaustive study of Ottoman

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Turkish and Arab discussions of Japan based on first-hand research in Cairo and Istanbul. Sakamoto Tsutomu and others have pursued in some detail the role of Islam in Japan during the thirties. Recently, Merthan Dündar in Ankara, and Cemil Aydin in the United States have also written on the Pan-Asianism and Pan-Islam covenant. My latest article in AHR 2004 is a result of this series of discoveries providing an opportunity for a deeper appraisal of the topic. As I write in the long preface of the article, the 9/ll attack on the twin towers in New York and the events that followed made me suddenly drop the book project and write the article first, which I thought could throw some light on what is going on today with the hope that it will benefit those who are seeking a solution to the global quagmire we all face. In the meantime the “hints” in Istanbul continued. A coincidental encounter just before 1993 in Rejans, the historic Russian restaurant founded by White Russian émigrés, with one of the present owners a wonderful lady, Zinnur Taygan, who knew Ibrahim through her husband, one of the Tatar Turkish émigrés, introduced me to the family descendants in Izmir. Ibrahim who was born of Bukharan parents in the borderlands of Siberia in the town of Tara, had lived the life of intellectual and political engagement within the revolutionary environment during the last years of the Romanovs and the Ottoman world. He had participated in the Great War campaigns purporting to be a member of the Turkish Secret Service, according to the Kokuryu¯kai records. After the war he had returned to Turkey, but his vision of Pan-Islam as a modern path was no longer valid in the Westernist atmosphere of the Turkish revolution following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. She also knew Fevziye hanim (hanim honorific for lady in Turkish) who was married to a Turkish Egyptian and living in Cairo, and had visited Ibrahim in Tokyo just before the outbreak of the war (plate 1). Zinnur hanim also remembered him from their engagement ceremony which had to take place in Konya where he was under a congenial form of house arrest in central Anatolia during the period of the staunchly secular policy of the Turkish Republic, whereupon in 1933, Ibrahim, an elderly man by now, quickly departed for Japan and in due course became the imam of the Tokyo Mosque. Following Zinnur hanim’s phone-call, Ibrahim’s great granddaughter Müge Isker, immediately set off by bus for Istanbul carrying a single suitcase full of Ibrahim’s papers and photographs which his second daughter, Kadriye hanim, had managed to retrieve during her visit to occupied Japan when she was able to arrange a series of inquiries, including former military personalities who were now living a discreet life away from the public gaze. The suitcase contained fascinating photos of Ibrahim featuring To¯yama Mitsuru and other members of the Kokuryu¯kai and the Army establishment, a signed copy of a Chinese edition of the Koran, a few propaganda essays in Japanese on Islam, and Hatiratiye, a propagandist Journal in Arabic. The suitcase contained a remarkable archive revealing the life and times of an array of leading Japanese military figures, powerful in the prewar era, who were involved in this Islam policy story. Some of the material was published in my 1995 article in Turkish, as well as the 2004 AHR article. During the mid-90s, this time a tip from a friend in the old books market of Istanbul who cheerfully confessed that nobody else but me would buy this old Japanese and Chinese material in all of Istanbul from his hands, enabled me to acquire two boxes full of Chinese and Japanese journals that abruptly stop in 1938. It turns out that the original owner was a member of the Turkish Secret Service who had been teaching language at the Japanese military academy. I discovered this fact later in the Diplomatic Record

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INTRODUCTION

Office. The Agency presumably must have removed the sensitive materials, if any, and the family having little use for Japanese and Chinese publications put it on the market. In 1994, I presented the topic of Ibrahim and the Late Meiji Japanese at the 1994 Kyoto Conference on Japanese Studies in the panel on Enigmatic Experiences of Early Twentieth-century Japan. Some encounters in this global pursuit for documents on the Ibrahim and Kokuryu¯kai connection resulted in unexpected chilling experiences that gave me a glimpse of the underside to today’s Japan’s legacy of Pan-Asianism. It was also on one of these occasions during the early 1990s, that I and my good friend Okamura Tatsuo of Osaka Kansai University had plunged into our usual foraging of old book stores in the Osaka area for prewar nationalist material that in those days at least was not easy to come by in huruhonya market. An accidental visit to an old book store near the train station in an Osaka neighborhood led us to some Kokuryu¯kai material. The store owner explained that a lot of Kokuryu¯kai material had been recently bought by a concern and that we could visit them. After a brief phone call, we met with a tall young man in a local train station nearby. We ended up going to a dingy two-floor apartment in the practically uninhabited-looking quarters near the train track. We found ourselves in a large office of what purported to be a neoright-wing organization with a Japanese flag and a samurai sword hanging on the main front wall. Shocked by this image, I noted a lot of bags full of books and old papers that were spread out on the floor. The two representatives were an elderly gentleman in Japanese male hakama, the other a younger man whose correct but icy manner already made me nervous as to why we had ended up in this strange place. I felt pangs of guilt as to why I had also dragged my innocent academic friend Okamura, who was well known in Japan for his strong liberal views and leftist criticism of the Japanese Imperial institution as well as the flag ceremonies in high schools, into this murky right-wing environment which would hardly be sympathetic towards his views. Our hosts, however, were courteous. We were provided with meishi, name cards, that explained they were members of the Genyo¯sha, The Dark Ocean Society, the precursor in fact of the Kokuryu¯kai which was the home of Japanese prewar Pan-Asianism. The cards caused both Okamura and myself to freeze on the spot: the Genyo¯sha were supposed to be safely tucked away either in the distant Meiji past or at best crumbled under the ashes of the Pacific War. There was an unreal quality to the scene, almost comical, if one could forget the tense mood of the room that was probably more a creation of our sense than anything that transpired. People were busily going about their business and were getting the room ready for some kind of a library. I was silently cursing myself for being the typical obsessive self-centered historian who is always enchanted or better, blinded, by the fetishism for documents. As our two hosts offered us green tea, they gently inquired as to why I would be interested in the Black Dragons. That I was from Turkey appeared to intrigue them. To which I answered to the best of my ability about my academic interest in Japan and Islam while pathetically trying to make sure that they understood our visit had no political connotations, and that Okamura, who had the misfortune of accompanying me on a casual furuhonya tour, had nothing to do with the affair. The two Genyo¯sha claimants and Okamura whose credentials – as far as all parties present were concerned – clearly put him in the diametrically opposite

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camp, silently exchanged name cards with a gallantry that showed their mutual recognition of the strange encounter that was being conducted under the most courteous circumstances. This is when I truly appreciated the significance of classical etiquette that was the only way all of us could manage a situation that under other circumstances could be enflamed. The atmosphere was almost like that of “samurai” rival clans in the late feudal era who had momentarily put aside their swords because of a question of honor, in this case, to save the day, I hoped it would be over mine. What is more, our hosts had already made photocopies of some pages with references to Ibrahim from the diary of To¯yama Mitsuru, the eminence grise of the Kokuryu¯kai, and provided copies of Ibrahim’s photographs taken in 1933, the year that he returned to Japan to help his Japanese Pan Asianist friends. The photograph showed him visiting the grave of Inukai Tsuyoshi, the famous politician known for his liberal parliamentarianism but also with close links to the Kokuryu¯kai who had been cut down by a group of right-wing assassins, the Ketsumeidan, a year earlier in 1932 in the well-known March 15 Incident. The assassination was one of many during the radical coup attempts to overthrow the elected government and emblaze in the Showa Restoration that would bring a committed military vanguard to power. After thanking our hosts, Okamura and I left in a calm but swift manner, with the experience remaining etched in our memory for ever as a shared strange encounter. What continues to amaze me in this bizarre episode is that while for the average Japanese historian of modern Japan in the distinguished university academy of the day in the early 1990s, the story of a maverick figure like Ibrahim involved in the diaspora politics of Japanese Asianism would have been a totally mysterious and unknown event, yet these Genyosha men were immediately able to locate some material on him within the forty-five minutes that it took us to get there from the phone call in the bookstore. They had also explained that the bags of materials were from families associated with their circle who were donating them now to this organization that planned to set up a research center and library to correct the misrepresentation of their historical role as fascists in the postwar era. I never returned to that neighborhood to confirm whether they did set up the library. But the experience was an eye-opener. To me this strange event revealed the schism that exists between the historical memory of the Japanese people according to their political views about prewar Japan. Those Japanese who harbored the Asianist construct, and this undercurrent it has to be said survives to this day, were familiar with the story of Japan and the Muslims. The distanced explanations of the academy who either narrated through the Marxist structural critic of capitalism and imperialism (with the single exception of Takeuchi Yoshimi as is acknowledged in the writings of Harry Harotuunian and Matsumoto Kenichi – again from quite opposite camps) or the Western orientation of post-war Japanese mainstream academics, and for that matter until very recently the American and European scholars of modern Japanese history, were unaware of the Japanese encounters in the Muslim world.4 Islam survived as an agenda of Japanese history for the right wing. It had disappeared from the memory of others. It also shocked Okamura and myself that there existed in today’s Japan this ambivalent social layer where some people were claiming to be descendants of the Genyosha. A subsequent visit to the small Kokuryu¯kai museum in Hakata, which was much less nerve-racking, provided more published material of the same organization with references to Ibrahim and others of the Muslim

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INTRODUCTION

world who were in Japan. The Director of the Museum dismissed the claims of the Genyo¯sha group as quite typical of some neo-right-wing elements lately. I think that one characteristic of my research interest has been to use it to bring closure on what might be called certain unrequited questions in life. It was, for example, during my sabbatical in 2000 in New York University at the Department of East Asian Studies as a Fulbright Scholar that as a result of a tip from the American historian Thomas Bender, who directed me to the New York City archives, I found the mortuary report and police file relating to the death of Prince Abdul Kerim Efendi (Efendi is the title of an Ottoman Prince). He was aged 33 and his death was recorded as a suicide that took place on August 4, 1935, in the Hotel Cadillac off 42nd street and Broadway. The involvement of Prince Abdul Kerim is addressed in the article on Japan and Islam Policy During the 1930s (2000) which is included in this volume. His tragic demise occurred following his involvement in the plot of a Militarist faction in Japan to place him on the throne of the East Turkestan Islamic Republic of Xinjiang which had been crushed under Soviet tanks and air bombs in 1934. The contents of the file which I will be using in my present book made me think that this was not suicide. Accordingly, I continued my inquiries and was soon able to locate his grave in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens, which up to that date his sons (who are still alive) did not know about. Upon returning to Istanbul I contacted Harun Efendi, his eldest, and his family, whereupon I gave the address. Recently, Turkish Public Television and Radio, TRT, did a documentary series on the exiled Ottoman dynasty members many of whom are now Turkish citizens and live there. During 2006, TRT also sent a camera team and the grandson of the deceased Prince to visit the grave of his grandfather in Queens, New York, which I arranged with the cemetery. To me that was closure, the family knew where their grandfather was buried after his mysterious death. My research on Japan, Islam, and the Turkish factor takes me back to the sixties when I lived in Japan as a young girl and explains those years to me today in terms that I did not know then, which I suppose is a kind of personal closure. The investigation brought back personal memories of conversations that I was incapable of locating in their historical context. When we arrived in Tokyo in the early 1960s the Diaspora Tatar Turks, now many of them Turkish citizens, were quite visible although I did not know how they came to live in Japan and why so many were excellent in Japanese having graduated from Japanese universities. I now know the story of their long saga escaping from the Civil War in post-Bolshevik Russia and their asylum in Manchuria which brought some to be involved in the Tokyo Mosque and prewar politics of Asianism. As a young girl I frequently visited the Tokyo Mosque, a stately Central Asian-style mosque that has been replaced with an Ottoman-style mosque just as beautiful but no longer carrying the historical legacy of the Tatar Diaspora in aesthetic form. We also visited the Turkish school, a wooden building adjacent to the mosque, formerly called the Tokyo Mohammedan School in English, and the Tokyo Mekteb-I Islamiye, or Kaikyo¯ Gakko¯ in Turkish and Japanese. During these years, I always wondered why some of the elderly Japanese with whom I would be talking would suddenly shift their standard polite conversational style that was meant to address “the American foreigner” (us non-Americans were quite used to being mistaken as Americans) to a distinctly Asianist tone when the speaker discovered that I was not American but “Turkish.” The conversation would acquire a pointedly prewar tone emphasizing the point that the Japanese and the Turks were brothers from Central Asia sharing ancient Asian nomad roots of a warrior ethos.

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Some acknowledged the admirable feats of Kemal Pasha (Atatürk) as the founder of modern Turkey. Others would reminisce about the Pan-Turanist ideal of a romantic homeland in Central Asia which the Young Turk leader Enver Pasha professed in the end when he died in battle in 1922 at the head of the Turkic forces against the Bolsheviks in the Basmaci Rebellion of Central Asia. The gist in the conversation would be that we were all part of the Asianist defiance against the Russians and that Japan’s quest for the emancipation of Asia had been misunderstood with defeat. Amazed at this extraordinary claim of brotherhood in Central Asia, since I as an Istanbuliate whose family had been living on the edge of Asia overlooking Europe by the shores of the Marmara Sea, and as far as I was concerned practically forever, I neither felt this explicit bonding with the far off exotic lands of Central Asia, nor did I frankly have sympathy toward Japan’s war aims. Everything sounded so far fetched. Today, I realize that these attitudes stemmed from prewar education that used the North Asian roots of Japanese people and fraternity with the Turks as part of Japanese nationalist ideology especially toward those regions. In fact, back then as the Turkish residents of Tokyo, we were aware of some of the illusionary aspects of postwar Japan because we knew that Roy James, the popular disc jockey media figure of the sixties, was in reality a Tatar-Turk. Many Japanese thought he was an American because of his looks, with blond hair and clear blue eyes as is common for the Tatar Turks, even though he was the son of the Muezzin (the cantor of the mosque who chants the call for prayer), with the hallowed name of Abdul Hanna Safa. This is what I came to realize was the Our Altaic brothers argument that I refer to in my articles. The second group of papers on Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and the Republic of Turkey, published between 1996 and 2006, deal with the same geography except that this time it is in terms of Japanese-Turkish relations as encounters and comparisons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The themes that I have pursued in this section, in addition to transnationality, can be described as “twilight diplomacy,” a form of inter-state relations that had to take place by circumventing the requirement of official treaties. In sum, how did Istanbul and Tokyo communicate between the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and 1924 which was the date, finally, for the inception of official relations between these two Non-Christian powers, namely Meiji Japan and Ottoman Turkey? This was the world of the role of unofficial interlocutors instead of diplomats. During my stay in Nichibunken in 1993 I was able to study the Toruko Gakan, “A Pictorial Look at Turkey,” the recollections of Yamada Torajiro¯ who was the main interlocutor in Japanese-Ottoman relations for many years. My research on this topic was published in 1996 in the SOAS Bulletin as a Japanese romantic vision of fin de siècle Istanbul and the Turks. Subsequent collaboration with Inaba Chiharu brought to light the intelligence role of Yamada’s partner Nakamura Kenjiro¯, a retired Navy officer, and owner of the Nakamura Shoten store in Istanbul that served as a meeting point for all Japanese visitors. Another question that has interested me was the mutual images of each other’s national experience. The Turkish admiration for Japan at the non-official level is well-known, but study of the relationship at the governmental level reflected the heavy weight of the unequal treaties and how each political leadership truly did not have the political “free” space to develop equitable relations. Both Japan and Ottoman Turkey were dictated to by European imperialist practice. The role of the military both as a real and as an imagined instrument of power and leadership in twentieth-century modernity is another theme that connects both

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INTRODUCTION

Japan and Turkey and still awaits further study. My article, “A Transnational History of Revolution and Nationalism” (2006), touches upon the topic. The fact that Hashimoto Kingoro¯, the military attaché in Ankara and the founder of the nationalist Young Officer’s organization of the Sakurakai (Cherry Blossom Society), that was instrumental in the Manchurian Invasion of 1931 and later military insurgency, was an enthusiast of President Ataturk’s revolutionary reforms that he witnessed in the late 1920s is an interesting point. He is said to have formulated the vision of the Young Officers Showa Restoration based on his understanding of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 that brought back constitutional monarchy and the Kemalist revolution of Turkey as a successful military-led revolution for Asian people. From ¯ kawa Shu¯mei the mastermind intellectual his point of view, Turks were Asians. O of Asianism would agree. This is not an image that would make today’ s Turkish admirers of Ataturk happy, and in view of our adamant wish to join the EU, the concept of Turks as Asian is simply not going to grow any roots. However, as far as I am concerned, the whole military component of interwar modernism in Japan and Turkey needs to be studied in more detail. My research into Meiji and Ottoman use of Western cultural forms in everyday life came out of my 1993 sabbatical in Kyoto and was published in the Japan Review in 1994. Our histories in the geo-cultural spaces on the edge of Europe or in Asia and elsewhere in the nineteenth century to this day are a product of continuous mingling and selective adaptation of Western culture. Cultural nationalism in its non-belligerent form, even if it uses anti-Western rhetoric, is really the way in which a people search for strategies to adjust themselves to the contemporary world of which we are part without giving up their identity. It means that the psychological history of Western culture beyond its perceived borders is yet to be written, in view of the fact that, in this sense, the history of Europe and the West at large does not really stop at the continental borders of the Europe but has carried on through Turkish, Japanese, and for that matter through to many other peoples outside in other geographies. Whether we like to call this process a function of modernity, in place of the once popular structural approach of Weberian modernization, or Marxist global capital, the manner of Western culture’s use of different types of syncretism and hybridism, cultural global environments tells us a lot about the mental psychological component of understanding modernity and the plight of individuals in the face of negotiating these new, layered demands upon their persona. The Ottoman Turks liked to keep the use of Western culture “close to their chest,” never to discard it, but modified it in a symbiotic unity with outward “indigenous” symbols such as the Fez (outlawed in 1924) and the Veil for women (prohibited only for women public servants in the same year). The Japanese, on the other hand, preferred to keep their Japanese and European selves formally in separate realms and shifted back and forth as the occasion required – the Wakonyo¯sai solution. Yet, in my opinion, both the Japanese and the Turks felt most comfortable in the “inner rooms” of their privacy when they could freely combine everything without a specific rational structure. It is, I suspect, that private sense of the hybrid mixture of the local and the Western global components that most people would agree comes closest to the “comfort zone” that helps the individual survive through the modern experience and not through the nicely defined categories of East / West, Tradition / Modernity, Religion / Science. My work has been influenced, as is obvious, by Norbert Elias’s concept of the Civilizing Process. I think that the necessity of immersing oneself in xxiii

JAPAN, TURKEY AND THE WORLD OF ISLAM

an “alien” Western cultural environment, which most people have had to do one way or the other, has created a shared psychology of special tension. I always find it fascinating that back in the days of bunmei kaika in Meiji Japan and the early Turkish Republic in the twenties, what many Japanese and Turkish men who were members of the bureaucratic or administrative élite first found most nerve-racking was the requirement to dance with ladies at balls. Reactions like this should not be immediately reified, some may have become used to it in time. But I find the shared reaction to be indicative of the shared stressful self-consciousness of men from both societies who were compelled to dance in a manner which they thought did not fit with their sense of traditional male dignity. Postwar Japan, which has survived as a reasonably stable democracy with an energetic debate in one and a half party politics that resembled more postwar Italy than the United States, is at the moment a more “relaxed” environment than Turkey as regards issues such as tradition versus modernity or the East / West divide. My article in 2000 on Modern National Identity has tried to address this issue. Both the Japanese and Turkish trajectories of the social engineering and political construction of modernity are nationalist and in that sense parochial experiments rather than the cosmopolitan character of many colonial experiences of the modern age which actually look more appealing and worldly today. Both polities have on many occasions demanded regimentation, corporatist obedience, and cultural uniformity from its citizens. However, in Japan I think that the high literacy and widespread education of men and women, and the achievement in the postwar civilian market-oriented economy representing some kind of equitable distribution of wealth from the fruits of capitalism managed to dampen the flames of the confrontation over cultural arguments of class and social demands. (At least until the present crisis where all of our futures is going into a long period of re-structuring – probably to remain permanently at lower levels of income for a long time.) In contrast, I think that in Turkey where the educational level is roughly that of prewar Japan and the economic development, though remarkable in the last twenty years, has not entailed a proportionate widening of the spectrum of income distribution at all levels, the heated public debate remains. With high unemployment, and a war going on next door, cultural wars of identity that are waged in the name of observant Islam and secularity are at the center of politics and society in Turkey today. Two issues come to my mind concerning the comparison of Japan and Turkey as a “modernization” experience which I suppose every Turkish academic dutifully does at some point. My joint project with Suzuki Tadashi, Binnaz and Zafer Toprak, Mitani Hiroshi, and Selim Deringil resulted in a project in the early 2000s that reexamined the seminal work of Ward and Rustow’s Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (1964).5 As a result, I have come to think that the social and cultural aspects of a society are related to the society’s interactive relationship with technology. While all contemporary societies use technology, this is not the point, only some produce it and again only some re-produce and innovate technology. Going through the usual motions of comparison, one comes up with the similarity between Japan and Turkey (nationalist, non-colonized, military-oriented societies), and then the differences – homogeneous people and culture for Japan versus the multi-cultural and multi-ethno lingual populations of the former Ottoman realm. To this list one can add postwar Japan’s privileged status of US military protection which could enable it to divert economic productivity to a civilian market economy that enabled

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INTRODUCTION

better income distribution at home. On the other hand, the harsh reality of very high proportions of military expenditure in a less productive economy in Turkey can be argued to have basically slowed down the pace of educational development (85% basic literacy, 12% college graduates), health care, social services and possibly the slow rise in per capita income. The Ward and Rustow volume did not stress the history of science and technology in both societies which I think is very important in the long run for transformative processes that I have briefly treated in the essay that was part of the volume on doing just that The Introduction of Modern Science and Technology to Turkey and Japan (1996) organized by IRCICA and Nichibunken. In my opinion an important analytical component for comparing Japan and Turkey is the desire and ability to not just import technology, which Turkey always does without too much delay, but the political desire to “re-produce” it at home which would require a whole different set of educational, cultural, and economic variables that would put emphasis on a wide spectrum of educated people with the capacity to work in the process of technological reproduction. And I think that is where the Japanese and Turkish trajectories diverged at some point in the twentieth century, though I still do not know the answers to this question. Turkish politicians who are enthusiasts of an entrepreneurial vision for success in economic development and business, always speak of the need to “reach out to technology” (teknolojiye ulasmak). When I asked an eminent politician why he had not considered the concept of “producing technology” he was sincerely surprised at the question and simply responded by saying it has always been like this since the Ottoman days “We always pay attention to the swift procurement of technology rather than its reproduction at home.” The Ward and Rustow volume has also not taken gender construction as part of the social engineering project of modernism into question, based on Binnaz Toprak’s in-depth comparison of Japanese and Turkish women, I think that the position of women in a society as a work-force, home-maker, and political symbolism, cultural stereotyping, is a major focus of analysis, like the process of technology use, to decipher the nature of the modernist project in a society. My third set of articles concern Reflections on Tokugawa Japan from Istanbul which presents articles that did not appear in the 1998 volume Even the Gods Rebel. The study of Nakano tenryo and the Takaino Village remains with me as a very important turning point in my life. When I finished the manuscript in Istanbul I thought I had come of age as a scholar because of the challenge to prepare the book without much assistance and only rare access to East Asian libraries. The first persons who read the first draft were Thomas C. Smith and Irwin Schreiner of Berkeley University of California upon whom I dropped by without any announcement during my return from Japan in 1993 with the book under my arm and pleading for their evaluation. They sent back the read copy with red ink comments liberally sprinkled on each page; the package, sent surface mail, took four months to arrive (this was before FedEx). Finally, as for the final copy to be sent for the perusal of Marius Jansen, the only printer that could do the job, given the size of the manuscript, was to be found in the state-of-the-art Physics laboratory which my good friend Gülen Aktas¸ kindly allowed me to use. The manuscript was taken to the United States by another good friend Atilla As¸kar (he was part of a research project in Princeton) who kindly ensured it reached the good hands of Marius Jansen who had encouraged publication in the first place. In 1988, I had

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published the study of local administration in Nakano tenryo¯ which is a detailed description of the way local government worked in this Tokugawa territory during the late-Tokugawa period in Turkey as part of the Bogazici Papers, which I think contributes to our understanding of the inner workings of feudal government in Japan. Tokugawa tenryo¯ in central Shinano province, today’s Nagano prefecture had a flexible form of administration that heavily relied upon the local interests of farmers and the wealthy landlord class in a manner that operated according to the rituals between the daikan, the governor, and the farmers and merchants of Nakano in step with the agrarian seasons. It is dedicated to the memory of my advisor the late Herschel Webb to whose support during all these years of tribulations trying to finish a dissertation by going back and forth between Turkey and the United States I remain grateful to this day. Frankly, as a scholar of the imperial institution and such “above the clouds” topics he was not particularly enamored with the subject of peasant uprisings, but he had thought that the local administration material was quite original. The article “The Remembrance of the 1871 Nakano Uprising in Takayama Village as a Contemporary Trauma” came out quite recently in 2008 which might invite the query why so late after the monograph had been published in 1998. I became aware of the existing trauma between different members of the Takayama (Takaino of history) community with each side, even then, blaming the other for the execution of beloved ancestors. In 1971, the whole village was still mourning the catastrophe of their history when in 1871 the Meiji authorities declared them to be “traitors to the court” cho¯teki, having taken the regional revolt of a traditional Ikki, peasant uprising, as the sign of rebellion against the state that showed more the total lack of self-confidence of the Tokyo leaders than any agenda on the part of the poor souls who revolted against what they thought was unjust government. Back in 1971, I chose not to dwell upon this point because the elders in the village were still obviously very uncomfortable with the whole issue of the community’s trauma that had been continuing for a century and dismissed my question as to where the executed peasants were buried. I do not believe in exploiting the collective memory of a community unless the members give their consent to do so in some manner. At that point, it was not that important for the uprising study where they were buried, although I would have liked to know. But developments in the meantime made it possible to discuss at length how historical memory in a village in Japan about its own modern history is vastly different to Tokyo, the great urban center, and pays attention to facts that directly relate to the status of the village which is a lesson we should remember when we talk about contemporary Japan only from the city and ignore the countryside. After many years, I had the fortunate opportunity to travel to Takaino, Takayama today, again with my friends Furukawa Sadao and Yanagisawa Satoshi and in December 1999 gave a talk on the book to the village community at the kind invitation of the educational committee. The article discusses that emotional experience for all of us. For the first time in 1999, the village members showed me the concealed graves of the executed peasants which they had avoided doing so back in 1971. What makes me truly happy is that as a consequence of the book Even the Gods Rebels, the community was finally able to finish the Rekishi hen, or the “History volume of the Village” gazetteer that came out in 2005 by dealing with the sensitive issue of the uprising through the publication of this woman from afar, an ijin in old-fashioned Japanese, living in a strange country named Toruko. The final article in the volume

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INTRODUCTION

is an essay on the status of the field in Tokugawa social/economic history that Philip Brown asked me to write as part of the special workshop and collection of papers which came out in the “Early Modern Japan” volume in 2003. The workshop was a very invigorating meeting for all of us in the field. Although today I work more in materials from the late-nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, I have a special interest in Tokugawa history which I think has helped me detect historical choices in Meiji and post-Meiji Japan. When I read Aizawa Seishisai’s Shinron, written in 1825, it made me think that much of Meiji Japanese General Staff thinking about Toruko, Turkey, as a citadel against Russia surely must also have been influenced by their reading of Aizawa’s geopolitical argument which was in a similar vein. Over the years, I have greatly benefited from the support and hospitality of many individuals and institutions. I would like to thank all on this occasion. My career began in the United States with the support of Donald Keene, Herschel Webb, and James Nakamura of Columbia University. Madeline Zelin and Carol Gluck of the same institution have been supportive of my research over the years. To all much thanks are due on the occasion of this volume. The research in this volume would not have been possible without the much appreciated timely support of Japan Foundation, International Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship, National Institute of Defense, GRIPS, Columbia University, New York. It has been a pleasure to write this essay on my writings that Paul Norbury requested for the volume for it has given me a chance to “take stock” of my life, a rare opportunity in this day and age, full of busy schedules, deadlines, duties, and so on. I am grateful for having done so because it has enabled me to remember the best, especially those who are no longer with us today, and dismiss those memories that are less so. I hope the exercise will benefit me in the coming years. The papers in this volume reflect the multiple questions in my mind about the inter-relations between Japan, Turkey, and the World of Islam as a historical experience of the last two centuries in global modern history. These are questions about the dilemma of losses and gains with modernity, transnationality, nationalism, the workings of world power over relatively weaker societies, and in the final analysis the pathos of the individual in the midst of these dislocations. Whether in Japan or elsewhere, these are processes that continue to affect us. I find the Japanese experience in all of these questions deeply intriguing for it helps explain the history of modern Japan as a phenomenon of having incorporated the global through the West and at the same time contribute to the same process by its own history. The comparison with Turkey here enables the observer to recognize specific factors that go into the conditions of constructing a new state and society in both experiences. These are writings that represent my ongoing inquiry to understand the relatively undeciphered terrain about the global history of modernity that I have studied in the context of Japan, Turkey, and the World of Islam, always interconnected with the history of the Western world. The writings in this volume are based on numerous articles and studies that I have written over the years which means some will share premises and questions. I hope the reader will forgive some of the inevitable repetition. At the same time, each article ventures to answer a distinct set of questions that I hope will be fruitful as food for thought. I am very grateful to Paul Norbury for having provided the opportunity to gather these studies which were dispersed and spread over a period between 1982 and the present

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and have been published in different outlets in many countries. The volume has conveniently allowed us to bring them together. It has allowed me to go over the material and infuse corrections as well as add unpublished material. The result is a much improved text in my opinion, but I alone am responsible for any deficiencies and mistakes that remain. Selçuk Esenbel Bogazici University, Istanbul Spring 2010

NOTES 1

Emine Esenbel, Bin Renk Bir Ömür Sefire Emine Esenbel’in Anilari (A Thousand Colors in One Life. The Memoirs of Ambassadress Emine Esenbel (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 2004). 2 Melih Esenbel, Turkiye’nin Bati ile Ittifaka Yönelisi (Turkey’s Turn Toward an Alliance with the West) (Istanbul: Isis, 2000). 3 Selçuk Esenbel, Even the Gods Rebel: The Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 1998). 4 Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Matsumoto Kenichi, “Okakura Tenshin and the Ideal of Pan-Asianism” in Brij Tankha, Okakura Tenshin and Pan-Asianism Shadows of the Past (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2009), pp. 11–21. 5 Robert E. Ward, Dankwart A. Rustow, Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).

This is an explanation for the spelling of Japanese and Turkish words. Here are a few words about the spelling of non-English words in the text. Many of the articles refer to Turkish words that are not readily part of a Japanese history publication. When used some of the Turkish alphabet signs have the following pronunciation given below. In Japanese words most of the writings have followed the romaji practice of long O and long U indicated with a macron sign. Most articles also adhere to the Japanese practice of giving the last name first for the name of individuals. S¸ – sh Ç – ch ˇ – no sound soft G. G Ü – umlaut U as in German Ö – umlaut O as in German

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❚ First published in The American Historical Review, Vol. 109, No. 4, October 2004, 1140–1170

1

Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power, 1900–1945 a

M

ost people at the turn of the twenty-first century have forgotten that there was a time in Japan before the Second World War when Japanese nationalists showed an Asianist face to the world’s Muslims, whom they wanted to befriend as allies in the construction of a new Asia under Japanese domination. The rise of Japan was a destabilizing factor that attracted Muslim activists who wanted to cooperate with the ‘Rising Star of the East’ against the Western empires, accelerating contacts between Japan and the world of Islam from vast regions of Eurasia and North Africa. When Muslim newspapers celebrated Japan’s defeat of Russia in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War as the victory of the downtrodden Eastern peoples over the invincible West, a Turkish nationalist feminist, Halide Edip, like many other women, named her son Togo. Egyptian, Turkish, and Persian poets wrote odes to the Japanese nation and the emperor.1 In the Islamic movement of Aceh, the staunch Muslim area of Sumatra that was forcibly brought under control through a Dutch pacification campaign in 1903, the Japanese example of ‘the Awakening of the East’ in 1905 engendered the topic of eager conversation to be the ‘speedy expulsion of the Dutch’.2 During the years 1900–45, the question that motivated Muslims and some Japanese was whether Japan could be the ‘Saviour of Islam’ against Western imperialism and colonialism if this meant collaboration with Japanese imperialism. Even during the 1930s, when there was little hope left for prospects of democracy and liberalism in Japan (for that matter in Europe as well), the vision of a ‘Muslim Japan’ was so compelling to many muslims in Asia and beyond, even among black Muslims of Harlem, as a means for emancipation from Western hegemony/colonial reality that it justified cooperation with Japanese intelligence overseas. Ōkawa Shūmei, the major intellectual figure of Pan-Asianism, the ‘mastermind of Japanese fascism’ in the Tokyo trials, who justified Japan’s mission to liberate Asia from Western colonialism by war if necessary, saw Islam as the means. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the relationship transformed into a major Japanese military strategy

1

JAPAN, TURKEY AND THE WORLD OF ISLAM

as the Japanese government began to implement its Islamic policy by mobilizing Muslim forces against the United Kingdom, Holland, China and Russia in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.3 In this essay, therefore, I am particularly interested in exploring the role of Islam in Japan’s global claim to Asia in order to shed light on a number of themes, personalities and events that connect Japanese history to that of the world of Islam. Despite the major role Islam came to play in Japan’s Pan-Asianist international policy, especially during the Second World War, Japanese-Muslim relations have not been studied extensively because of the boundaries in the intellectual concerns of each field. Studies of Japan that remain focused on Japan’s relations with the West and China have avoided the subject.4 Japanese scholars of the Middle East are also ambivalent.5 With some exceptions, most choose to concentrate on the study of the ‘Orient in Western regions’ and ignore Japan’s historic connections to the world of Islam. Although I must admit there is a certain ‘cloak and dagger’ character to the narrative, the subject invites our attention, for it opens a window onto an alternative, ambivalent arena of international relations between these so-called ‘Non-Western regions’ in modern history, parallel to the interstate relations forged by the formal treaties and diplomacy dominated by the Western Powers. Yet these connections were significant in the formulation of ideas and policies throughout the twentieth century, especially as the colonized sought to emancipate themselves from Western imperialist domination with Japan’s help as a world power. Japan’s relations with Muslims unfold as an enigmatic history of mostly informal contacts, transnational alliances between Japanese Pan-Asianist agents, intellectuals, diplomats and military officers, and their Muslim counterparts on a global platform: a transnational history of nationalisms that connected Japanese Pan-Asianism with Pan-Islamic currents and Muslim nationalisms.6 The central argument of this essay is that some figures in the Japanese military and civilian elite with an Asianist agenda and their Muslim friends formed an ‘Islam circle’ in Japan in the late Meiji period and had long years of interaction through personal contacts, advocating closer relations between Japan and the peoples of the Islamic world who were suffering under the yoke of Western hegemony. In favour of an ‘Islam policy’, or kaikyō seisaku, they argued for the need to gain a better understanding of Islam as a civilization belittled by Western opinion, which view had also been adopted by the new, Western-oriented Japanese government. This article argues that this long-term interaction bore fruit in the end as the Japanese government, using the informal contacts and know-how of previous years, adopted Islam-oriented policies on the eve of the Second World War. Japan’s pattern of involvement with the political activities of Muslim groups in Asia reflects twentieth-century world power behaviour that ultimately may have been party to the emergence of political Islam, possibly even in its militant forms in some areas. It has global implications that are relevant for us today. In the post-war era, the United States as a new world power had also formed close relations with Islamic currents through a global strategy of ‘Islam as a green belt against communism,’ which is seen today as having led to a ‘blowback’ in Chalmers Johnson’s terms: the ominous consequences of the 11 September 2001, attack by Al Qaeda, which led to the battle between United States-led coalition forces and the global terrorism of radical Islamic organizations.7 Yet the phenomenon of radical Islam is frequently reduced to an issue simply of cultural incompatibility with the West, as

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JAPAN’S GLOBAL CLAIM TO ASIA AND THE WORLD OF ISLAM

in Samuel Huntington’s reductionist notion of the ‘clash of civilizations’. A recent addition is the Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit accusation of ‘Occidentalism’ on the part of political Islamists, which unites the case of pre-war Japanese nationalism with that of today’s radical Islam, both interpreted as being similarly against modernity.8 By focusing on the actual historical relationship between Japanese nationalism and political Islam, through the eyes of some Pan-Islamists between 1900 and 1945 and their Japanese Pan-Asianist friends, I hope to show that simple applications of ideological explanations such as Occidentalism or Orientalism do not sufficiently explain the emergence of conflictual movements against the West and that we need to recognize how the transnational character of Pan-Islamism tied in with the behaviour of world powers during the twentieth century in this matter. I would like to discuss first what I mean by transnationality, which I interpret as an intellectual agenda in a geopolitical context, the ‘history of the international relations of nationalism’, that we frequently omit from analysis.9 Turn-of-the-century nationalist movements actually began in many cases as a transnational history of diaspora actors forced to live in many countries and cities away from the homeland of the perceived territory of the nation. Indian nationalists agitated against Britain in San Francisco and Berlin. Young Turks plotted against the despot Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in Paris. Forced into exile and hounded by the Western colonial governments or the authoritarian regimes of Romanov Russia and Ottoman Turkey, Pan-Islamic actors stand out as transnational diaspora actors who hoped for a global Muslim awakening against Western domination that would consequently aid their own cause of national liberation. The Egyptian Pan-Islamists who opposed British rule and the Pan-Turkists and Pan-Islamists of Russia who defied the autocrat tsar met in Istanbul, Kabul, and even in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Muslim circles in the cities of the Ottoman and Romanov empires, or British Egypt and India, or Afghanistan provided niches for the global network of Muslim transnational activists in anti-colonial activities.10 During the early twentieth century, Muslim activists also found Tokyo to be a conducive site for their activities. The discussion of Japanese Pan-Asianist encounters with Muslim activists shows us how the transnational history of many a twentieth-century nationalism is ‘interlaced’ with intelligence strategies and the clandestine politics of world powers: both interact on a global scale. The history of nationalism in this scenario serves as a ‘watering hole’ where intellectual history meets with intelligence. Diaspora nationalists who share the same intellectual discourse or ideological motives with the representatives of world powers could also rationalize collaboration against common enemies. Prasenjit Duara has extensively discussed the transnational intellectual concerns of early nationalisms in a way that helps to explain how Japanese Pan-Asianists and Muslim activists could initially engage in dialogue, for they shared an intellectual debate about modernity. This is so especially for those Muslim intellectuals whose nationalist objectives were integrated into a Pan-Islamist agenda for the global emancipation and awakening of Muslims, therefore enabling them to sympathize with the global Asianist message of Japanese Pan-Asianism.11 Both intellectual movements emerged with a vision to construct an alternative transnational spiritual world that would counter the existing one dominated by the Western powers. Okakura Tenshin, the intellectual founder of Pan-Asianism in Japan, constructed the ideal of ‘Asia as One’, a common spiritual civilization that paralleled the West. While sharing the general consensus about Meiji Japan’s imperial destiny, Japanese Asianists saw

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the 1868 Meiji Restoration as a great Asian awakening against backward regimes and colonialism. Similarly, Pan-Islamist intellectuals in Romanov Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, India and Iran hoped to revive the universality of Islamic civilization and construct a modernity that was suitable for Islam, an ‘awakening’ of Muslims.12 Like many other anti-imperialists and anticolonialists of the age, Japanese Asianists and Muslim political actors saw the West in its imperialist hegemonic form as their opponent ‘other’.13 Hence, it was not the founders of the new Japanese government after the 1868 Meiji Restoration but the Japanese Pan-Asianists, a rival circle also rooted in the Meiji Restoration but sceptical of the early Meiji enamour with the West for bunmei kaika (civilization and enlightenment), who ‘discovered’ Islam. It was, as Sun Ge aptly comments, Japanese Asianism’s paradox, containing both a sense of solidarity and a desire to expand, harbouring a genuine sense of crisis and an antagonism against the presence of the European and American powers, that made Japanese Asianist arguments appealing to Muslim nationalists.14 This intellectual common ground also explains why right-wing organizations such as the Kokuryūkai, the Amur River society popularly known as the Black Dragons, and the Genysha (Great Ocean Society), who were vanguards of Asianism in Meiji Japan and militant advocates of Japan’s rights in Asia, pioneered contacts with Muslims. Another important institution for collaboration between Japan and the Muslim world was the Tōa Dōbunkai, the newly established school for cultural understanding and friendship between China and Japan founded by Prince Konoe Atsumaro that also functioned as a training centre for Japanese intelligence agents against Russia.15 Both Japanese Pan-Asianists and Muslim intellectuals were concerned with the existential issue of how to be part of the modern world and benefit from its assets while preserving native cultures. Like Japanese Asianists who were profoundly critical of the imitation of European culture for its own sake, many nineteenthcentury Muslim intellectuals, especially Pan-Islamists, were critical of the extreme Europeanization of Muslim societies, and Japan’s reforms looked like a suitable model of modernity for the Islamic world because the Japanese seemed able to manage Westernization without giving up their traditions or converting wholesale to Christianity. Pan-Islamist arguments of the Ottoman intellectual Mehmed Akif as well as the Young Turk Abdullah Cevdet stressed Japan’s preservation of a spiritual culture in harmony with modern reforms that did not bow to Western imperialism. The Pan-Islamist and Pan-Turkist Tatar intelligentsia of Romanov Russia shared these ideas. The devout even wanted to convert the Japanese to strengthen the world of Islam.16 The Arab world joined this sympathy towards Japan. Mustafa Kamil, Ahmad Fadzli and many other Pan-Islamist intellectuals in Egypt published popular books on Japan as the rising star of the East that became integral to their anti-British nationalist discourse.17 However, compared to our image of Japanese Pan-Asianism as anti-Western propaganda during the Second World War, or today’s anti-Western militant Muslim rhetoric, pre-war Japanese Pan-Asianism and the Muslim enthusiasm for Japan combined ideas of nationalism and liberalism that were not exclusive. Muslim admiration for Japan, whether couched in strongly nationalist or in Pan-Islamist terms, praised Japan’s nationalist goal of using Western civilization to counter European imperialism, and its steps towards becoming the first constitutional monarchy of Asia. For many Muslim intellectuals, Japan’s victory over Russia was ‘the triumph of constitutionalism over Tsarist despotism’, and the Meiji Constitution

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of 1889 was the reason for Japan’s swift progress against Western imperialism.18 The ardent Egyptian nationalist Pan-Islamist and admirer of the Meiji Constitution, Mustafa Kamil, proclaimed ‘We are amazed by Japan because it is the first Eastern government to utilize Western civilization to resist the shield of European imperialism in Asia.’19 For both intellectual worlds, constitutionalism was still the litmus test of modernity, linking nationalism to universal ideals of human liberty and emancipation.20 Like Mustafa Kamil, Tokutomi Sho, a leading liberal in the Meiji era with Asianist views who was to befriend Muslim activists visiting Japan, supported a Western-style parliamentary government, although later he became an ultranationalist serving military governments.21 Ottoman records note that the Japanese authorities ‘responded’ to this Muslim intellectual admiration for Japan, and especially the Muslim jubilation over Japan’s victory in 1905, in order to make use of it for Japanese imperial interests.22 Japan was on its way to becoming a significant power after its military victories in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War and the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War. Diplomatic recognition of Japan as a world power with European status came with the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance.23 But Japan as a global newcomer could not establish direct diplomatic relations with the multiethnic population of about 100 million Muslims in vast regions of Eurasia and Africa, most of whom were colonized or under the hegemony of Russia, Great Britain, France or Holland. Even Qing China, though a weak power, traditionally dominated the Chinese Muslim Huei and Turkic Uighur minorities.24 Only Ottoman Turkey, the seat of the Sunna Caliphate, remained as the sole Muslim world power that, although weak, had some influence in global politics. But with porous borders vulnerable to crossings and intelligence activities, the Ottoman, Iranian and Afghan Muslim polities were politically compromised states, surviving between the interests of the Russian and British empires. Stifled under the constraints of the ‘unequal treaty’ regimes dictated by Western international law, this was a world of twilight diplomacy where relations were conducted informally in order to avoid signing new treaties entailing further compromises to foreign interests.25 Despite Ottoman public empathy after the Japanese victory in 1905, Sultan Abdülhamid II and the Ottoman ministers treated the Japanese who visited Istanbul generously in the name of ‘Asian solidarity’ but practised twilight diplomacy to the hilt by firmly refusing the persistent requests of the Meiji government to sign a treaty of unequal privilege.26 Thus Japan’s relations with the world of Islam began as transnational contacts and clandestine activities through the informal meetings of individual diplomats, visitors, intellectuals, military men and agents, frequently with Pan-Asianist agendas, and Muslim sympathizers. The life of Abdürreşid Ibrahim (1853–1944), a Russian Tatar journalist and opposition political activist who became a well-known and respected Ottoman Pan-Islamist intellectual, represents the multifaceted, transnational nature of this Muslim-Japanese rapprochement.27 Ibrahim’s life-long collaboration with Japanese Pan-Asianists also had a direct bearing on the global Muslim political agenda of alliance with Japan against the hegemony of the West and possibly encouraged the Japanese along this line. A religious cleric (imam) and judge (kadi), Abdürreşid Ibrahim became a major figure in the political and intellectual activities of the Kazan region, the centre for nationalist and reformist currents among Muslim Turkic subjects of the late Romanov empire. Pursuing nationalist aims at home, Ibrahim advocated Pan-Islamism abroad and the formation of a global network of Islamic peoples

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JAPAN, TURKEY AND THE WORLD OF ISLAM

to oppose the Western empires. This ‘fiery religious preacher’, in the words of later OSS reports, became a close friend of the Japanese military attaché Colonel Akashi Motojir, mastermind of Japanese intelligence in Europe during the Russo-Japanese War. Ibrahim’s ‘fated marriage’ with Japan began with a visit to Tokyo in late 1908. He stayed for about five months and formed a close alliance with the Kokuryūkai, which was already involved in Sun Yat-sen’s revolution and other Asian nationalist movements.28 Ibrahim’s publications reveal Tokyo in 1908 to have been a haven for Muslim activists seeking collaboration with Japan against Western powers. Besides Ibrahim, there was the Egyptian nationalist army officer Ahmad Fadzli Beg (1874–?), who was exiled in Tokyo after leaving Egypt because of his anti-British activities. Among the Indian émigrés, Mouvli Barakatullah (1856–1927), the well-known Pan-Islamist anti-imperialist, was teaching Urdu at Tokyo University. The three men collaborated in an English-language paper, Islamic Fraternity, which espoused Pan-Islamist and Pan-Asianist ideas and was later stopped by the Japanese authorities under British pressure. Ibrahim and Barakatullah’s activities show us that there were Japanese Asianists interested in spreading the message of Japan in Muslim Asia. Ibrahim translated Asia in Danger, a pamphlet by Hasan Hatano Uho (1882–1936), one of the pioneer Japanese Pan-Asianists who adopted a Muslim name. Widely distributed in the Islamic world, it had disturbingly vivid photos of beheadings, tortures and massacres conducted by Western imperialist forces in Asia. A graduate of Tōa Dobūnkai, Hatano argued that Japan and the Ottomans, the two sentinels of the Asian continent, could prevent European imperialist activities in Asia. Ahmed Ariga Bunyar (1868–1946) made an interesting synthesis between pure Shinto and Islam, seeing a similarity in the Shinto belief in the originator god and the Islamic concept of Allah.29 In 1909, Ibrahim returned to Istanbul with Kokuryūkai support, visiting Muslim communities in China and British and Dutch colonies to spread the message that Japan would be the future saviour of Islam. In his Istanbul-based editorials, the Java Letters, Ibrahim assured an Indonesian friend, a notable ulema of Borneo, that in ten years Japan would come to liberate Muslims from the Dutch yoke. His friend replied that he had helped Ibrahim’s Japanese friends purchase 26,000 hectares of land in the areas under Dutch rule.30 Ibrahim’s activities were the seeds which led to training Japanese agents to be sent to the Muslim countries under Muslim identity, a tactic that the military authorities were to use during the Second World War. On his way back to Istanbul in 1909, Ibrahim met Yamaoka Ktar (1880–1959), a member of the Kokuryūkai in Bombay, whom he claims to have converted en route to Istanbul. The two comrades visited Mecca and Medina, where ‘Omar’ Yamaoka became the first Japanese pilgrim to visit the holy lands and formed contacts with Arab leaders on behalf of the Japanese Empire. With Ibrahim’s help, Omar gave conferences in Istanbul, especially to PanIslamist Tatar students on Japan’s pro-Islam message and the Ajia Gikai (Asian Rewakening Society), Japan’s new pro-Islam organization. Yamaoka continued networking among Chinese Muslims and trained future Muslim Japanese agents such as Hadji Nur Tanaka Ippei. Yamaoka’s account of his experiences, Arabia jūdanki, is the first Japanese account of the Arabian Islamic world detailing the Japanese Pan-Asianist rationalization for an Islamic orientation combining Asianism, patriotism and anti-imperialism. As the first Japanese Muslim pilgrim, he advocated that

6

JAPAN’S GLOBAL CLAIM TO ASIA AND THE WORLD OF ISLAM

the government adopt kaikyō seisaku. Yamaoka justified his conversion to Islam, as would Japanese Pan-Asianist agents of the future, as a patriotic duty to the emperor. He recommended that ‘young Japanese . . . go out in the world and exert the pioneer spirit of the Japanese warrior ethos to help the pitiful people of the Orient and the Occident and to turn their gaze towards the region of western Asia’. Yamaoka lamented the frivolous demoralizing and superficial Westernism of the Meiji era, by now a scapegoat. His daring journey in the Arabian desert was part of his duty to perfect the mission of the Empire of the Rising Sun.31 Ibrahim’s early argument for an alliance between Japan and the Muslim world negotiated with this Asianist agenda. In an interview he gave to the Foreign Affairs Editorial Committee in the Japanese Foreign Ministry on 21 March 1909, Ibrahim argued for the need to liberate ‘Tataristan’ from Russia. Japan, he said, was a model of modernity from which to learn. Stressing that nearly 100 million Muslims living in Russia, China, India and Turkey offered Japan a potent social base, he introduced the demographic argument for Japan’s Islam policy that was later used by Japanese Pan-Asianists. Even though he used the term wakonyosai (Japanese spirit Western technology) to describe the Japanese model, like Mustafa Kamil, Ibrahim praised Japan for its constitution and liberty that, unlike the despotism of Russia, made Japan a progressive and modern country. Among the works that Ibrahim published in Istanbul in 1910–11, the book Alem-i Islam ve Japonya’da Intisari Islamiyet (The World of Islam and the Spreading of Islam in Japan) details the Muslim argument for Pan-Islamism’s rapprochement with Pan-Asianism.32 Ibrahim advocated a concerted missionary effort to convert the Japanese to Islam, which would guarantee Japan’s new role as the saviour of Islam. In contrast with Yamaoka’s justification of conversion for empire, Ibrahim’s desire to convert the Japanese was theologically in keeping with Islamic tradition, especially the Sunna orthodox sect’s claim that the leader of the Islamic world would protect against ‘the land of war’, meaning the lands of infidel Christians. His argument was that if the Japanese converted in large enough numbers they would help liberate Muslims from Western oppression. Equally striking, however, is his pragmatic argument that a rapprochement between Japanese and Chinese Muslims would enable Japan to penetrate the Chinese market, bringing solid economic gains. According to Ibrahim, China is Japan’s natural market, but there is undeniably great hatred between the Chinese and the Japanese. The only way for Japan to successfully penetrate the Chinese market is for her to establish close connections with the Chinese Muslims. Their economic constraint will cause the Japanese to incline towards Islam. If the Japanese converted to Islam, they will conquer a third of Asia . . . If our ulema can guide the Japanese down this path, there is no doubt that there is great talent among them for potentially accepting Islam. But if we simply invite them to salvation we may be sure that no one will be convinced.33

As a Pan-Islamist, Ibrahim was concerned with the reform of contemporary Muslim culture to recapture the ideal Islam in a modernity compatible with Islamic values. Here, Ibrahim presented an ideal image of Japan as a model for Muslim reform that was even more ‘modern’ than the Christian Romanovs and the Muslim Ottomans. With great enthusiasm he introduced Japan’s modern institutions to the readers: the Historical Society of Tokyo University (engaging in

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scientific history), women’s schools (educating modern wives devoted to family and country), the Japanese postal service (much better than the Russian one), Kabuki (the epitome of a national tradition in theatre), even Cintan pills (very good for digestion). Ibrahim did not see the Japanese as ‘pagan-infidels’; rather Japanese men and women were clean, studious, moral and upright folk who would be perfect Muslims if they converted to Islam. The emphasis was not on preserving the old, but rather on renovating custom to construct a nation.34 However, Ibrahim’s text on modernity, Japan and Islam also reveals the overlooked connection between the realm of ideas and military intelligence that we encounter frequently in the twentieth century: here transnationalism meets with intelligence. He describes a seven-hour meeting about prospects for the unification of the East, held on a night in 1909 with Japanese military officers who spoke excellent Russian. Ibrahim claims that he proposed a forty-one-article programme of collaboration with Muslims around the world, including those in China, Java and India.35 What was significant for the future was Ibrahim’s claim that his exchange of ideas with Japanese Asianists resulted in a blueprint for Islam policy, kaikyōron or kaikyō seisaku, a term already used by Yamaoka in his book. There is a photograph in Ibrahim’s book taken in a girl’s school where the slogan kaikyōron is already visible on posters hung behind the podium from which he speaks. So far, neither in Ibrahim’s text nor that of Yamaoka, does kaikyō seisaku refer to a formal foreign policy of the Gaimushō (Japanese Foreign Ministry), but to the hope for a future policy. The term is used to express the need for a desirable Japanese sympathy towards the plight of Muslims suffering under Western imperialism and colonialism and the consequent need to contact Muslims with this agenda.36 The Japanese figures surrounding Ibrahim in 1909 were to form an ‘Islam circle’ in the 1930s, a lobby of those in favour of encouraging close relations between Japan and the Muslim peoples. This lobby included the Pan-Asianist intellectual Tokutomi Sho (1863–1957), Uchida Ryōhei (1874–1937) and Tōyama Mitsuru (1855–1944), founders of the nationalist organization Kokūryūkai, Ibrahim’s host in Japan, and other military and intelligence figures associated with the Tōa Dōbunkai. Count Okuma Shigenobu (1838–1922) and Inukai Tsuyoshi (1855–1932), two liberal parliamentarians who were vehement opponents of Meiji oligarchs, were surprising members. Although they are better known as advocates of parliamentary democracy, both politicians upheld an Asianist perspective in foreign relations and, as we can glean from Ibrahim’s memoir, were part of the Kokūryūkai network within the political and military elite. Both continued to support the cause of Muslim émigrés and helped Ibrahim and other political activists throughout their lives.37 The climax of Ibrahim’s memoir is his account of a ceremony marking the founding in 1909 of the Ajia Gikai (Asian Reawakening Society), which was to be the propaganda arm of Japan in the Islamic world. The society accepted the deed to a mosque in Tokyo in the office of Tōa Dōbunkai, whereupon the Japanese and Muslim participants signed the scroll of an oath pledging commitment to the PanAsianist Islamic cause.38 During the Second World War, the OSS was to term this oath the ‘Muslim Oath’ that proved Japan’s long-term conspiracy of infiltration among world Muslims to incite a revolt against the West. In hindsight, the claim that the oath represented a Japanese ‘conspiracy’ reflects the war psychology of the OSS; nevertheless, the oath enables us to trace the links between the rise of Asianism in the late Meiji era and its subsequent revival in the late 1930s, in the

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militarist context of the period. Japanese collaboration with the Muslims of Asia was hardly a ‘secret conspiracy’—at least not to the turn-of-the-century educated public in the Ottoman and Romanov worlds who had access to Ibrahim’s popular book.39 The participants who signed the 1909 scroll were members or close associates of the Kokuryūkai, who were active in Japanese nationalism and imperialism. Ohara Būkeiji (1865–1933) was a lieutenant colonel in the army who had been active in China during the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, in the 1911 Chinese revolution and in Manchuria; he died in 1933, organizing a Chinese rebellion. Tōyama Mitsuru (1855–1944), the spiritual head of the Kokuryūkai, was the éminence grise of the Japanese ultranationalist movement and continued to be a major covert figure in the nationalist and militarist politics of pre-war Japan. Nakano Tsunetar and Nakayama Yasuz were Kokuryūkai activists. Among three Chinese Muslims who signed the oath, Wang Hao-jan was the founder of the Chinese Muslim Mutual Progress Association in 1912 and later continued supporting Japanese interests. The 1909 oath appeared in Japanese for the first time in 1938 when Wakabayashi Nakaba, an Islam expert who served the military policies of the late 1930s, published it in his book kaikyō sekai to nihon (Japan and the World of Islam). Wakabayashi presented the story of the oath as part of a propaganda narrative claiming that Japan’s ties to Islam went back to the Meiji period. The photograph of the oath scroll published in his book (plate 2) shows the additional signatures of the liberal politician Inukai Tsuyoshi, Captain Aoyanagi Katsutoshi, Yamada Kinosuke and Kōno Hironaka, of the Kokuryūkai.40 The Kokuryūkai publication Tōa senkaku shishi kiden (Biographies of Pioneer Patriots of East Asia), which was published in 1936 to record the careers of hundreds of Kokuryūkai ‘patriots’ who worked for the Asianist cause of the Japanese Empire following the Restoration, adds drama to the story. It cites an article in Tokyo Asahi newspaper that reported that members of the Kokuryūkai had helped build a temple on Zhon Jiang mountain in Antung prefecture in Manchuria, in which they deposited the 1909 oath. The version cited here begins with Ibrahim’s calligraphy of the Koranic saying, ‘O humankind unite.’ Nakano Tsunetarō wrote: ‘If we have a speck of treachery in our hearts, may all the gods of heaven and earth punish us with their sacred wrath.’ Ibrahim added another line from the Koran: ‘We pledge not to waver from our promise in the eyes of God.’ The text is the perfect aesthetic amalgam of Islam and Japan, combining Arabic and Japanese calligraphy.41 The different versions of the oath, which were presumably signed in 1909 during Ibrahim’s visit, represent the Pan-Asianist vision of Japan’s global claim to Asia through Islamic activism that was already widespread in the Muslim world. The texts enable us to trace the links between individual actors and ideas in the world of Islam and the Japanese Asianist world. The second phase of Japan’s relations with the world of Islam can be recognized in the period after the First World War and the 1917 (October) Revolution, when the Japanese authorities made use of previous contacts between Japanese Pan-Asianist figures and Muslims, in addition to new ones, to practise its Islam policy politically and militarily in a more systematic manner. Crowley notes that the October 1917 Revolution elicited a virulent anti-communist reaction among Japanese military authorities.42 The Pan-Asianist and Muslim platform acquired a military-oriented anti-communist right-wing character unlike the Meiji dialogue between Pan-Asianism and Pan-Islam, which had argued for a liberal and nationalist Asian awakening. Practised as a parallel, somewhat clandestine

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strategy, Islam policy developed as part of the Asianist foreign policy orientation within the political and military elite that was rival and coeval to the Gaimushō’s ‘internationist’ foreign policy adhering to Japan’s rights within the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and various treaty agreements with the Anglo-American powers.43 Those with vested interests in Manchuria, particularly the South Manchurian Railway, and elements of the Kwantung Army were the first to start thinking of Islam as a ‘citadel’ in Central and North-East Asia against Soviet communism—a pre-war Japanese version of the later Cold War strategy of the CIA in which Islam constituted a ‘green belt’ against communism. The ‘citadel policy’ is first ascribed to Matsuoka Yōsuke (1880–1946), the foreign minister who was responsible for Japan’s Axis alliance during the Second World War. Matsuoka is thought to have developed this policy as a result of his early contacts with Russian Tatar Muslim emigres who settled in Manchuria during the 1920s, when he was president of Mantetsu, the South Manchurian Railway.44 One component of this citadel idea was the ‘our Altaic brothers’ argument, recognizing a special historic link between the Japanese and North Asian peoples speaking Altaic languages, which formed the ideological frame that brought together Japanese military elements and Muslim collaborators, the image of the ‘Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent’ as future partners. Imaoka Jutarō, a specialist on Central Asia and Islam in the Gaimushō, reported the discussion of this strategy in the Foreign Ministry in 1937 and spelled out the argument, which became one of the major geopolitical strategies against Soviet power. Imaoka argued that the Soviet Union was doomed in the face of the ‘nationality problem’ of the Turkic populations of the Kazak, Ozbek, Turkmeni and the Uigur. These people constituted a geographical crescent of Altaic Muslims, organized to resist the communist threat from Manchuria to the hinterland of Central Asia via North West China and Inner Asia.45 The intellectual roots of this policy perspective are traceable to the Asianist and historiographic discourses of Shiratori Kurakichi, who argued in the late Meiji period that there was a historic connection between the Japanese people and the Altaic culture of North Asian nomads.46 The Altaic argument had surfaced during Ibrahim’s visit when Tokutomi Sōho, the liberal Asianist journalist and editor of the paper Kokumin, introduced him to Japanese readers as ‘our Tatar elder brother from Russia’, and the politician Hayashita, who had just returned from Mongolia, introduced him in the Japanese Diet as ‘our Tatar brother of Genghis Khan descent’.47 A fully-fledged version of the ‘citadel’ perspective surfaced much later, in 1939, when the bond between Asianism and Islam against communism and the Soviet Union was discussed during the debate in the Diet over a proposed new Religion Law (shūkyō hō). All parties agreed that Islam should be incorporated in the spirit of the law; the question was whether it should be listed as one of the official religions of Japan, along with Buddhism, Shinto and Christianity. General Araki Sadao, the Minister of State and Education—the major figure in the military upheaval of the early 1930s—was responsible for defending the government’s position, which acknowledged Islam but did not favour citing it in the law. Araki and others in the cabinet were apparently concerned that listing Islam as a religion of Japan would alarm the Soviets even more than they already were over Japanese outreach among Central Asian Muslims. The right-wing Baron Hiranuma cabinet pushed for an active pro-Islamic government policy that would officially recognize

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Islam-oriented agencies but wanted only a general reference to ‘religions other than Shinto, Buddhism and Christianity’ in the new law. Some opposed the suitability of Islam as a religion. Even those arguing in favour of an Islamic factor in government policy used a political argument, avoiding the religious issue. The popular defence was the demographic argument that the 300 million Muslims of the world were potential allies in achieving Japan’s destiny, the familiar refrain of Ibrahim. For the debaters, Muslims constituted ‘an anti-communist block the same as us,’ and the Muslims along China’s border with the Soviet Union constituted ‘the first line of our common defence against Russia’. Araki acknowledged that ‘Islam is a religion which is very necessary for our national policy in today’s mainland.’ He noted that ‘with respect to the use of religion as an international policy against the Soviet Union, Islam in the mainland constitutes the base from which to form an international movement’. Rather than theology or civilizational issues, the crucial concept was that of Islam as an international movement that could contain communism.48 Japanese Pan-Asianist interaction with the world of Islam illustrates the way exiles can provide the fertile transnational environment for integrating diaspora political and intellectual concerns with world power interests. Alexandre A. Benningson and S. Enders Wimbush note that while the revolution destroyed any hopes for a liberal or even leftist Pan-Islamic agenda in Russia, some of the survivors of Leninist and Stalinist oppression became right-wing anti-communists in diaspora.49 Japanese empire-building in Manchuria provided a haven for many émigrés from the former Romanov and Ottoman empires. Rejected by the Soviet Union and the Republic of Turkey, Muslim Tatars, former Young Turk officers and intelligence men, even Ottoman loyalists joined the diaspora of Pan-Islamists and Pan-Turkists under Japanese protection. Some had been involved in the Basmaci uprising of the Turkic populations in Central Asia in 1922, led by the exiled Young Turk leader Enver Pasha. Most were from the Kazan and Bashkir regions near the Volga river, where Tatars such as Ibrahim had lived. Together with the 100,000 White Russian émigrés, around 10,000 Tatars settled in the Far East. During the 1920s and 1930s, close to 1,000 relocated to Japan. Joining Muslims from British India and the Dutch Indies, the Tatar emigres formed the bulk of the Muslim community of Japan.50 For the Japanese military in Manchuria, this émigré population was the ‘fertile ground’ from which to launch army strategies with respect to Islam policy in North West China and Inner Asia, thus actualizing some of the discussions held during Ibrahim’s visit. Nishihara Masao, an intelligence officer during the 1930s, explained the military view of the matter in his 1980 account of intelligence operations out of Harbin. He stated that: from 1931 and 1932 on, the army developed a deep interest in the Islam question and thought that if we could ride the religious communal solidarity of these people, it would promise a very beneficial agitation and operational strength. Thinking this way, since there was a very large population of Russian Muslim émigrés in Manchuria, they could be used in anti-Soviet intelligence.51

The career of M. G. Kurban Galiev (1892–1972) (Muhammed Abdülhay Kurban Ali, in Turkish), a Turkic-speaking Bashkir militia leader and imam of Tatar émigrés

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in Manchuria, succinctly represents the role of the Muslim diaspora as ‘our Altaic brothers’ in the implementation of Japanese military and intelligence strategy in North Asia against the Soviet Union and China. Komura notes that Kurban was quite successful in using this argument to start a dialogue about Japanese origins in North Asia with the Imperial Way officers, the kōdō faction, young officers grouped around Generals Araki Sadao and Mazaki Jinzaburō who regarded Russia as Japan’s main enemy.52 (plate 3) Shimano Saburo, a Russia expert and an agent of Mantetsu, provides us with an account of Kurban Ali’s introduction to Kita Ikki, the Japanese nationalist intellectual who was central to the radical nationalist revolution views of the Imperial Way. Shimano claims that Kita was enthusiastic about the prospects of an independent state in North Asia that would liberate the Muslims of the Soviet Union and encouraged Kurban to take the lead. Kurban continued his activities in Japan with the support of the Imperial Way circle, which was subsequently responsible for the coup attempt of 1935 and the 26 February 1936, uprising. The Kokuryūkai again protected the Tatar Muslim émigrés, for whom it was the protection of a ‘cornered bird that flies into one’s bosom’.53 During the Manchurian invasion of 1931, Kurban Ali networked among Muslim minorities, mostly Chinese Muslims in Manchuria and China whom the Japanese targeted as a potential proJapanese group to counter anti-Japanese Chinese nationalism. Hadji Nur Tanaka Ippei (1882–1934), who had been trained by Omar Yamaoka as an Islam expert agent, was his close partner. Another was Chang Te-ch’un, a mainland Muslim from Manchuria who collaborated with the Japanese and became imam of the modern mosque in Mukden that was constructed with Japanese support. Kurban Ali also worked for the Japanese authorities in anti-Soviet intelligence, primarily as a propaganda and language expert in Russian and Turkish. He launched the Tokyo Mohammedan Printing House in 1927 and pioneered the Tokyo Mosque project, which was completed in 1938 with Japanese support.54 (plates 4 and 5) The aftermath of the 1931 Manchurian invasion, engineered by the members of the Kwantung Army, was a turning point in Islam policy strategies, which became visible as Japan’s Asianist foreign policy accelerated with the crumbling of relations with the Anglo-American powers. Muslims from many parts of the world flocked to Japan in 1933. Ibrahim, claiming to have been invited by his Japanese friends, returned to Japan from Turkey. Another arrival was Ayaz Ishaki, a well-known Pan-Turkist literary figure and political activist with secular, nationalist views. Ayaz Ishaki immediately organized a new Tatar émigré organization named the Idil Ural Society of Japan. The connection to Ottoman loyalists and Pan-Turkists was represented by Muhsin Çapanoğlu, an anti-Kemalist figure who was part of the Turkish diaspora after the founding of the republic, a friend of Kurban Ali’s from Paris, who taught Turkish first in Manchuria and then in a Tokyo military school. Mehmed Rauf Kirkanahtar of the Turkish Secret Service also arrived in 1933 and began teaching Arabic and Turkish in Tokyo. Musa Carullah Bigiyef of Kazan, probably the best scholar of Islamic jurisprudence in his generation, ended up in Japan in 1938, invited by Ibrahim to help educate the Japanese and participate in missionary activities on their behalf in China and South East Asia.55 The collaboration between Japanese Asianists and Turkists in the world of Islam manifested itself for the first time in a concrete attempt to implement the ‘citadel against communism’ in North Asia and drive a wedge between Manchuria and China by supporting the Uighur Muslim nationalist ferment for an independent

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Turkestan as a buffer zone against the Soviet Union and China. There was a plot to enthrone an exiled Ottoman prince, Abdül Kerim Efendi (1904–35), as the head of an independent Muslim state in Inner Asia. Japanese newspapers reported that on 20 May 1933, the prince arrived in Japan from Singapore at the invitation of Lieutenant General Kikuchi Takeo and Prince Ichij, both members of the House of Peers famous for their Asianist and ultranationalist views and their links with the Kwantung Army.56 The Turkish and Soviet embassies immediately protested Kerim’s arrival in Tokyo as a plot to establish a ‘Muslim Manchukuo’—another Japanese puppet regime in Inner Asia.57 A Japanese Foreign Ministry account of the incident written in 1934 blamed the Kwantung Army gunbu, military elements, Kurban Ali supporters, the Kokuryūkai and the Sanbōhombu (the General Staff), disassociating the Foreign Ministry from responsibility for the invitation. However, Foreign Minister Hirota Kōki gave verbal assurances to the Turkish embassy about the matter.58 The controversial scheme had hoped to incorporate the Turkic regions of East Turkestan (Xinjiang province of China) and the Chinese Muslim regions of the northwestern provinces of Gansu and Ningsha under a pro-Japanese regime. After the Manchurian invasion of 1931, Japan’s defiant march out of the League of Nations in 1933 went hand in hand with the Kwantung Army’s invasion of Jehol and North China in order to construct a buffer zone between Manchuria and the Soviet Union and China.59 The same year, the rebellion of the Turkic Uighur population in Xinjiang, which had begun in 1931, culminated in the declaration of the Turkish Islamic State of East Turkestan (Şarki Türk Islam Cumhuriyeti). The Turkestan rebellion briefly united former Young Turks and Pan-Islamist figures from many countries who slipped into Xinjiang from Afghanistan to join the fight.60 In the end, the project dissolved because of differences of opinion among the Japanese authorities, who gave up plans for a direct invasion of Inner Asia. But the Japanese did provide some arms and intelligence support during the rebellion.61 During the summer of 1934, the Muslim rebellions were crushed under Soviet intervention. In September, Prince Abdül Kerim arrived quietly in New York, where a year later he apparently committed suicide, an event still clouded in mystery.62 What is significant about this failed transnational plot is its ‘mutuality’ and ‘interactive’ nature; it was not just a case of Japanese machination, as Owen Lattimore thought at the time. Turkic rebels in Xinjiang and members of the Turkish and Tatar diaspora desperately tried to activate Japanese support for their cause when it seemed that Japanese military interests might lend a receptive ear. Muslims sought the help of Japan for the Xinjiang rebels and contacted Japanese military attachés in Ankara, Istanbul, Kabul and Cairo. Like Ibrahim and Kurban Ali, visitors brought plans to topple the Soviet Union or Britain or both. In 1936 Tewfik Pasha of Saudi Arabia, who had fought in the Turkestan rebellion since 1931, gave two extensive interviews to the Foreign Ministry regarding a Pan-Islamist plan to overthrow British rule in Asia. The Japanese authorities may not have directly used the plans of such political figures, but an ample number of diaspora ‘advisers’ helped flesh out Japanese military strategies of the future.63 The Pan-Asianist Ōkawa Shūmei (1886–1957), the most important intellectual advocate of pre-war Japanese nationalism, emerges as the major figure in the ‘interactive’ intellectual and political process that brought Islam to the attention of Japanese nationalism and militarism during the 1930s.64 The ‘father’ of Japanese

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Pan-Asianism, rival to Kita Ikki, Ōkawa Shūmei was an expert on Islam and translated the Koran during his post-war internment in Sugamo Prison and later in a mental ward, having studied classical Arabic under Ibrahim. The clinical description of his hallucinations while under psychiatric treatment attests to Ōkawa’s unification of Islam and Pan-Asianism: Ōkawa saw ‘Mohammed dressed in a green mantle and white turban … he states there is only one God: and Mohammed, Christ and Buddha are all prophets of the same God.’65 Ōkawa saw Islam as a critical factor in the realization of Pan-Asianism under Japanese aegis. The political challenge of Pan-Islamism and Muslim nationalisms to Western domination was a turning point in modern history because it destabilized the Western world order. For Ōkawa, modern history in Asia was that of European colonialism and Asiatic efforts to revive Asia. Seike Motoyoshi argues that Islam appealed to Ōkawa because it was a universal religion: it could become the basis for a global movement that did not depend on the nation-state in order to challenge the West in this conflict. PanIslamism constituted a supranational dynamic, an Islamic ‘international’ that would shake the hegemony of the West.66 Ōkawa’s studies stand out because he perceived the dynamics of modernity in contemporary currents of the Islamic world, a view antithetical to the European Orientalist perspective, critically discussed by Edward Said, which characterized the Islamic world as a classical, premodern civilization that profoundly differed from the modern West.67 In Kaikyō gairon, a collection of lectures published in 1943 to help the war effort, Ōkawa notes that Islamic civilization was part of the history of the Western world that had fallen into a state of stagnation and decline with the rise of the modern West, stressing, however, that the Muslim nationalisms and Pan-Islamism represented the new awakening of the Islamic world. Ōkawa argued that Japan should harness this force to challenge the West and construct modern Asia.68 However, he also criticized the mistakes of the Young Turks and Kemalists and the Indian nationalists, who had allowed too much Europeanization which Japan should avoid.69 Ōkawa’s intellectual discourse is significant because it influenced Japanese government praxis concerning Islam policy in the late 1930s. He pioneered the establishment of Islamic area studies supported by the Army, Navy and the Gaimushō in line with their Asianist interest in the Islamic world.70 In 1938, he founded a special training school, the Zuikry, for young Japanese Asia experts, with the support of the Foreign Ministry’s intelligence division. What Ōkawa put into practice were two divergent ideas for the education of Japanese youth that combined a policy of ‘pure Japaneseness’ at home and Asianist education abroad. The school recruited about twenty young men ‘of intelligence from a provincial background’ uncorrupted by the Westernized culture of Japan’s cities. Inculcated in patriotism through devotion to the emperor and Japanese culture, those he recruited were to lead the country out of decadence. Discarding European cosmopolitanism, they were, however, to be Asian ‘internationalists’ with a political agenda to work towards Asian liberation by fostering friendship for the sake of the Japanese Empire. During the war, Ōkawa lectured daily on colonial history and Islam at the Zuikōryō, which became known as Ōkawa’s ‘spy school’.71 The school’s curriculum represented the perfect amalgam for inculcating Japanese youth in ‘pure Japaneseness’ together with Islam policy as an Asianist strategy. Students received intensive training in European languages and in Turkish, Persian and Arabic in addition to colonial history and modern Asian and Islamic studies.

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Experts such as Naitō Chishū, the first Ottomanist of Japan, Okubo Kōji, an expert on Central Asia and Turkic affairs, Kobayashi Hajime, the first Japanese student to study in Al Azhar of Egypt, and Izutsu Toshihiko, an eminent scholar of Islamic philosophy, provided the language training. The educational vision even extended to ethics and manners to counter corruptive cosmopolitanism. The aristocrat Tokugawa Yoshichika (1886–1976), who was a close associate of Ōkawa, an expert in Malay culture, and a friend of the anti-British sultans of that colony (and who later became governor of Singapore during the Japanese occupation), taught ethics and manners to the young provincial agents, grooming the new Japanese youth for their cause.72 During 1938, the Japanese government started to implement its Islam policy by creating the Dai Nippon Kaikyō Kyōkai (The Greater Japan Islamic League, hereafter DNKK) with the support of the Gaimushō, the Army and the Navy. The DNKK was the official Islamic organization of Japan until the end of the Second World War. Its main purposes were the promotion of Islamic studies, the introduction of Japanese culture to the Muslim world, the development of mutual trade ties, cultural exchange and policy research. The DNKK undertook propaganda work, organized an exhibition of Muslim culture in Matsuzakaya department store, and worked hard for the Diet’s recognition of Islam. General Hayashi Senjūrō, who had supported the Manchurian invasion, became president. The ‘everlasting’ Ibrahim, whose photographs were used widely in Islam-oriented propaganda publications, became the Muslim leader.73 (plate 6) The Japanese government’s adoption of an Islam policy as part of its Asianist foreign policy of Japan was symbolized by the Tokyo Mosque, a beautiful building in classical Central Asian architectural style that was opened in 1938 in YoyogiUehara. A description of the opening ceremony, which was attended by the Japanese military-civilian elite and international guests, exposes Japan’s Islam policy on the eve of the Second World War: On 12 May 1938, the attention of the Muslim world was fixed on the capital of Japan. The occasion was the dedication of the mosque, the first of its kind to be opened in Tokyo. It was a notable occasion in more ways than one. A skilful build-up had commenced months in advance. Delegates had been invited from the various Islamic countries, with all expenses covered. Representative Japanese were in attendance to extend to the guests the official welcome of the government. The date was bound to impress itself on the memory of many millions of Muslims all over the world, for it coincided with the birthday of Muhammad. Thus the birth of the Prophet and dawn of a new era for Islam under Japan had been brought into suggestive association74 (plate 4).

Those present at the ceremony were evidence of the coalition between the Japanese Asianists and Muslims that had begun with the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and had now become part of the Japanese claim to Asia. Abdürreid Ibrahim conducted the prayers. Tōyama Mitsuru, the dark figure of Japanese nationalism from the Meiji era, cut the ribbon. In the ceremonial photograph taken, Admiral Ogasawara Chosei, a familiar figure at such Asianist-Islam events, sat in the centre with Ibrahim and Tōyama, the ‘elders’, on either side. The crown prince of Yemen, Husain, was present, having recently arrived to appeal to the Japanese Diet for the recognition

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of Islam. Other envoys came from the holy city of Mecca. There were Chinese Muslims, Muslim émigrés from the Soviet Union, and the Italian ambassador. Beneath the ceremonial surface, the Japanese government’s Islam policy reflected the interconnection between domestic political conflict and international affairs. Noteworthy was the absence of the Turkish envoy, a result of the quiet conflict over the Abdul Kerim incident that had threatened Ankara’s republican secularism. In place of Kurban Ali, the pioneer of the mosque project, who was purged with the Imperial Way faction, Ibrahim, ‘Ōkawa’s teacher’, became the official imam of the Tokyo Mosque. He was the source of much Japanese propaganda towards Asian Muslims throughout the war years. Symbolically, the opening of the mosque represented the beginning of the final stage of Japan’s global claim to Asia through Islam as a policy of war75 (plates 5 and 6). In hindsight, Japanese involvement among Muslims from the Meiji period through the Shōwa era reveals an alternative pattern of ‘international relations’ not registered in treaties. Diplomacy was conducted through informal go-betweens. Japanese Asianist agents entered into the informal transnational network of Muslims across many different countries. Agents such as Yamaoka, Shimano and Komura chose to live in the mosque compounds in the Muslim quarters of cities and villages in Russia, China and Inner Mongolia, frequently in disguise. Japanese religious pilgrimages to Mecca served as a means of contact between the Japanese authorities and Muslims. Omar Yamaoka, Ibrahim’s associate and the first Japanese convert to Islam, had begun this form of networking in 1910. Hadji Nur Tanaka Ippei, the expert on Chinese Islam and friend of Kurban Ali, had followed this pattern with a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1924 (plate 7). During the pilgrimages to Mecca in 1934 and 1936, a new crop of Muslim Japanese agents had been initiated into the strategy of Islam policy. Many of this younger generation of agents who served in the Pacific War had been trained in Islam by that older generation. Others had received training in Ōkawa’s ‘spy school’. They wore Muslim attire and took appropriate Muslim names such as Muhammad Saleh Suzuki Tsuyomi, sometimes referred to as ‘Hadji Saleh’. Others were Hadji Yamauchi, Muhammad Abdul Muniam Hosokawa Susumu, Muhammad Abduralis Kori Shozo and Muhammad Nimet Enomoto Momotaro. All declared their entry into the faith in order to serve their country. Gaimushō telegrams show that Japanese agents in Muslim guise recruited Muslims in Mecca and Medina willing to work for Japan in future operations and arranged for their entry into Japan through the diplomatic legation in Cairo or Istanbul.76 (plate 7) The story of Japan and the world of Islam concludes with the Japanese military’s use of Islam policy, derived from Ōkawa’s vision, in the 1942 South Seas invasion of the Dutch Indies. Studies of the invasion and occupation of the Dutch Indies have discussed the use of Islam for the social and cultural mobilization of Indonesia as a wartime phenomenon. But this article shows that the long years of Japanese Pan-Asianist intellectual and military involvement with Islamic affairs bore fruit in the engagement against Western colonialism. In the field, Japanese Muslim agents organized the local Muslim leaders and communities to aid the initial entry of Japanese military forces. During the Japanese occupation, military authorities made extensive use of the local ulema, who had felt suppressed under the Dutch, in a drive to give an Islamic character to occupation policies. Even the ‘venerable fiery preacher’, the ninety-year-old Ibrahim, broadcast

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war propaganda on behalf of Japan to the Indonesians, as he had in 1909. The 14 June 1942 Shanghai Times headline read ‘Japan Muslims Confident of Nippon Victory’. Once the admirer of Japan’s constitution and superiority to Romanov despotism, Ibrahim’s rhetoric now was fully in keeping with a warlike interpretation of Jihad: ‘Japan’s cause in the Greater East Asia War is a sacred one and in its austerity is comparable to the war carried out against the infidels by the Prophet Muhammad in the past.’ The Crescent and the Rising Sun, in Harry J. Benda’s terms, became the core of Japan’s occupation, which momentarily made it ‘acceptable’ to Indonesians hoping for emancipation from Dutch colonialism. Many Japanese Islam organizations have survived in the post-war era as part of Indonesian Islam77 (plate 5). The question remains as to the effect of Islam policy in this quagmire. While Indonesian nationalist leaders were disillusioned with the Japanese colonial exploitation, nonetheless, Japan’s dive into the militarist power politics of empirebuilding as a ‘rough player’, in the words of John Dower, accelerated the destruction of the Western empires in Asia.78 This effect can be traced directly in the case of Indonesia, where Hadji Saleh Suzuki and other Muslim Japanese agents acted as the vanguard of the invasion. Significantly, their point of entry was the staunch Muslim Aceh region of north Sumatra, occupied by the Dutch in 1903, admirer of Japan in 1905, and the centre for radical Muslim agitation ever since. In 1945, Suzuki trained local Indonesian youths as a militia on the eve of surrender to ensure their capacity to fight against the imminent return of the colonial Dutch authorities. The name of Suzuki’s guerrilla organization was Hezbollah, the faction of God—a name that stops us in our tracks.79 The Hezbollah participated in the guerrillas fight during the Indonesian war for independence against the Dutch until 1949. This Japanese Asianist baptism of the politically engaged name Hezbollah reinforces the message that the militancy of twentieth-century Islam in Asia is not simply indigenous to the Islamic world. It had an interactive transnational history with Japanese Asianism. Although Japanese Pan-Asianism and political Islam shared a critique of the West that helped create dialogue between them, in the end, Japan’s use of Islam represents the same process as that of contemporary Western powers: linking intelligence strategies and cultural studies so that knowledge serves the interests of world power.80 A major concern of this article has been the relevance of this historical experience for today. I suggest that Japanese involvement with political Islam helped implant world power intelligence networks within the transnational Muslim diaspora in Asia that influenced their politicization. Japanese Pan-Asianism collaborated with Muslim actors on the basis of an anti-colonial stance against the Western empires. It helped to evict the Dutch at the end of the war and bring Indonesian nationalists to power. Kurasawa argues the Japanese occupation accelerated the modern organizational potency of Islam in that country. Paramilitary training, or collaboration with the staunch Muslim Aceh rebels who are still the bastion of radicalism, perhaps incited awareness of their global significance. The Japanese Army’s use of Islam in North Asia against Chinese nationalism ceased with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. But the Japanese Army’s strategic policy to use Islam as a ‘citadel against communism’ against the Soviet Union was a different matter. This pre-war Japanese Army intelligence strategy of anti-communism heralded the post-war United States global strategy.81

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The Japanese Empire’s use of Islam for ‘Asian Awakening’ or as a ‘citadel against communism’ blurs the simplistic arguments of Huntington or Buruma for the clash of civilizations or antimodernism as the basis of both pre-war Japanese nationalism and today’s radical Islamic movements. Neither the Japanese Asianists nor the Pan-Islamists in this partnership were antimodern or crudely anti-Western. Not desiring a return to the past, they were part of new, dynamic transnational currents at the turn of the twentieth century that revolted against Western hegemony. Later, when they lost their reformist and liberal vision, their object was to construct modern Asia anew, after destroying the colonial West. Ōkawa Shūmei’s argument about the transnational political potential of the Islamic world for destabilizing Western interests was distinctly modern, though dangerous. Unlike Lawrence of Arabia, who served the British Empire by inciting the Arab revolt, and Snouck Hurgronje, the Dutch expert on Islam for whom conversion represented an undesirable melting into the Orient, Japanese Pan-Asianist Muslim agents tactically justified religious conversion, some even claiming sincerity.82 In the case of Ōkawa, Islam became integral to the Asianist invention of the modern self that rejected the Orientalist paradigm. A final note. Edward Said, in an optimistic strain, once wrote about the émigré ‘whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes and between languages as the source of exilic energies which can articulate the predicaments that disfigure modernity’. The Japanese experience with Islam, however, is an early twentieth-century example of how transnational diasporas, ‘wounded birds that fly into bosoms’, can be inherently vulnerable to global power interests and as such is worthy of reflecting upon in this day and age.83 Political actors such as Ibrahim, Kurban Ali, and Tewfik Pasha had voluntarily come to the doorstep of Japan when it was the rising star against the imperialist West. World power politics mutated their former intellectual vision of a reform and modernism suitable for Islam inspired by the Japanese exprience. By 1941, the diaspora in search of a liberator had become an instrument of Japan’s propaganda and intelligence in Asia. Away from his family, which was dispersed between Russia and Turkey, Ibrahim died in Tokyo in 1944 at the age of ninety-two, and was buried with an official ceremony attended by Japanese dignitaries and local Muslims. Kurban Ali, arrested by the Soviets in 1945, died in a Siberian prison camp in 1972. Some Tatars emigrated to Turkey, becoming Turkish citzens. Others went to the United States. Few chose to remain in Japan. But their identity as Tatars, Muslims or Turks no longer fit the American orientation of post-war Japanese society, which developed amnesia about its pre-war Asianist past. Japan and the world of Islam became a forgotten political legacy.84

NOTES * Originally published The American Historical Review, Vol. 109, No. 4, October 2004. 1 Muslim celebration of Japan’s victory was part of global enthusiasm for Japan by all those oppressed under Romanov Russia or any kind of authoritarian power. See Marius Jansen, The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen (Stanford, Ca., 1954), for Chinese Nationalists and Japan; Ben-Ami

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2

3

4

5

6

Shillony, The Jews and the Japanese: The Successful Outsiders (Rutland, Vt., 1991), 143–50, for Jewish support; Ewa Palasz Rutkowska, ‘Major Fukushima and His Influence on the Japanese Perception of Poland at the Turn of the Century’, in Bert Edstrom, ed. The Japanese and Europe: Images and Perceptions (Richmond Surrey, 2000), 125–34, for Polish patriots collaborating with Japan; Olave K. Falt and Antti Kujula, eds. Akashi Motojiro Rakka Ryusui: Colonel Akashi’s Report on His Secret Cooperation with the Russian Revolutionary Parties during the Russo-Japanese War, translated by Inaba Chiharu (Helsinki, 1988), 177–97, for the Finnish underground; Renee Worringer, ‘Comparing Perceptions: Japan as Archetype for Ottoman Modernity, 1876–1918’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2001, 31, for the Muslim Enthusiasms. Worringer, ‘Comparing Perceptions’, 356. For seminal work on this subject, see Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun (The Hague, 1958), 4–21, on Dutch obsession with Islamic awakening and the effect of the Middle East, Japanese impact among rebel Aceh groups, and Japan as an inspiration; Deliar Noer, The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia 1900–1942 (Kuala Lumpur, 1978), 28–29, for Aceh quotation. See George Lipsitz, ‘ “Frantic to join . . . the Japanese Army”: Black Soldiers and Civilians confront the Asia Pacific War’, in T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds. Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham, N.C. 2001), 347–77, for the Japan connection to African-American antiracist and antiwar movements in the United States. Harald Fuess, ed., The Japanese Empire in East Asia and Its Postwar Legacy (Munich, 1990), 10, for ‘if necessary by war’; Hiroshi Shimizu, ‘The Japanese Trade Contact with the Middle East: Lessons from the Pre-oil Period,’ in Kaoru Sugihara and J.A. Allan, eds., Japan in the Contemporary Middle East (London, 1993) 27–54, on pre-war Japanese relations with the Middle East. See Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York, 2000), 25–59, for area studies as dinosaur. Hence the subject of Japan and Islam is corrective of the distortion in the field of Japanese studies that posits itself within the binary opposites of Japan and the West. Kawamura Mitsuo, ‘Sen zen nihon no isuramu chūtō kenkyū shoshi: Shōwa san jūnendai o chushin ni’ (The Short History of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in Japan as Case of the 1930s), Annals of Japan Association for Middle East Studies 2 [hereafter AJMES ] (1987): 409–39, for criticism. Post-war secondary sources on the subject remain few. For basic treatment of the history of Japan and Islam by an insider who served in Inner Mongolia, see Komura Fujiō Nihon isuramu shi (Tokyo, 1988) for the pre-war account, Wakabayashi Nakaba (Han), Kaikyō sekai to nihon (The World of Islam and Japan) (Tokyo, 1938); for recent work on cultural perspectives, Sugita Hideaki, Nikon jin no chūtō hakken gyaku enkinhōno naka no hikaku bunkashi (Japanese Discovery of the Middle East Reciprocal Comparative Cultural History) (Tokyo, 1995); for an engaging popular account, Tazawa Takuya, Musurimu Nippon (Tokyo, 1998); Nakamura Kōjirō, ‘Early Japanese Pilgrims to Mecca’, Orient 22 (1986): 47–7; Selcuk Esenbel, ‘Japanese Interest in the Ottoman Empire’, in Edström, The Japanese and Europe, 95– 124, especially 96–101; and Selcuk Esenbel and Inaba Chiharu, eds., The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on the History of Japanese-Turkish Relations (Istanbul, 2003); Hee-Soo Lee, Islam ve Türk Kültürünün Uzak Doğu ’ya yayılması (The Spreading of Islam and Turkish Culture to the Far East) (Ankara, 1988). Also noteworthy are Worringer, ‘Comparing Perceptions’; Cemil Aydln, ‘The Politics of Civilizational Identities: Asia, West and Islam in the Pan-Asianist Thought of Ōkawa Shūmei’, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2002; Nadir Özbek, ‘Abdürreşid ibrahim (1857–1944): The Life and Thought of a Muslim Activist’, M.A. thesis, Bogazici University, 1944; and Hüseyin Özkaya, ‘The use of a Novel as a Source for the Study of Turkish-Japanese Relations: Shiba Shirō’s Kajin no Kigu (Chance Meeting with Beautiful Women)’, M.A. thesis, Bogazici University, 2004. Japanese sources for this essay are primarily from the Diplomatic Record Office (Gaikōshiryōkan) of the Japanese Foreign Ministry (Gaimushō) dealing with religious and missionary activities in the home country and abroad: Gaikōshiryōkan, Tokyo, Honpō ni okeru shūkyō oyobi fukyō zakken (Miscellaneous documents on religious and missionary activities in the home country), 1.2.1.0.1. 1–2 (hereafter Honpō), and Kakkoku ni okeru shūkyō oyobi fukyō kankei

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zakken (Miscellaneous documents on religious and missionary activities abroad in other countries) 1.1.0.2. 2–5 (hereafter Kaku). Primary sources in English are mainly from the National Archives, Washington, DC, microfilm version in the Library of Congress. Office of Strategic Services, R & A reports no. 890, Japanese Infiltration among Muslims Throughout the World (May 1943); no. 890.1, Japanese Infiltration among Muslims in China (May 1944); no. 890.2, Japanese Attempts at Infiltration among Muslims in Russia and Her Borderlands (August 1944) (hereafter OSS with number). 7 The post-war involvement of the United States in using the forces of political Islam and its Pan–Islamist themes against the Soviet Union as a ‘green belt’ against communism has been shown to have been a dangerous liaison. In particular, the use of radical Muslims as an armed force to resist the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 triggered the militarization of transnational Islamism. See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, Conn. 2000), and Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York, 2000). 8 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993): 22–49; Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma, ‘Occidentalism’, New York Review of Books, 17 January 2002. 9 For transnational and global Islamism as history of international relations that fits my understanding, see Anthony Best, Jussi M.Hanhimaki, Joseph A. Maiolo, and Kirsten E. Schulze, International History of the Twentieth Century (London, 2003) 438–39; for transnational nationalism, Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, 1996), 3; for conflict with the nationalism of nation-states, Duara, ‘Transnationalism and the Predicament of Sovereignty: China, 1900–1945,’ AHR102 (October, 1997): 1030–51, esp. 1030. Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism: A Study of Irredentism (Hamden, 1981), 1–7, 176–90, discusses the failure of Pan-Turkism in the nation-state. My article sees the significance of the movement as part of global history or international history outside of the nation-state but within world power strategies. Pan-Turkism grew from the intellectual movements of Turkic Russian Muslims in Central Asia at the turn of the century that challenged Pan-Slavism. Émigré-Pan-Turkist intellectuals had been the source for the emergence of Turkish nationalism in the late Ottoman period, but after the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the regime of Kemal Ataturk discouraged Pan-Turkist activities as being incompatible not only with the good relations Ankara had formed with the Soviet Union but also with the Anatolian-based concept of Turkish citizenship. For a discussion of transnationality in its greater social and economic contexts see Linda Basch, N.G. Schiller and C.S. Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Luxembourg, 1994) and Duara, ‘Transnationalism’, 1031. 10 Selim Deringil, ‘Legitimacy Structures in the Ottoman State: The Reign of Abdulhamid II (1876–1909)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 23 (1991) 343–59. Indonesian students from Ottoman schools claimed they were ‘white Europeans’ back in the Dutch Indies because they had Ottoman passports. The Ottoman Empire had been recognized as essentially a ‘European power’ with the Treaty of Paris after the Crimean War. Indian nationalists lived in Istanbul while on the run from British intelligence and contacted German intelligence to move on to Berlin. 11 For transnational nationalism as intellectual discourse and transcendental vision, see Duara, Rescuing History, 1–3. 12 For Pan-Asianism in Japan, see Christopher W.A. Szpilman, ‘The Dream of One Asia: Ōkawa Shūmei and Japanese Asianism’, in Harald Fuess, ed., The Japanese Empire in East Asia, 49–64. Pan-Islamism in the form of reformist and modernist movements debated utopian and nationalist objectives in the nineteenth century and took the form of transnational movements against Western imperialism and colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century. The late nineteenth-century pioneers were Jamal al-Din al-Afgani (1839–97) of Iran and Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935) and Muhammad Abdu (1849–1905) of Egypt. See Anthony Black The History o f Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present (Edinburgh 2001); J. M. Landau, The Politics o f Pan-Islamism: Ideology and Organization (Oxford, 1990); Azmi Ozcan, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain (1877–1924) (Leiden, 1997), 23–40; and Serif Mardin, The Genesis o f Young Ottoman Thought (Princeton, NJ 1964).

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13 See Tetsuo Najita and Harry Harootunian, ‘Japanese Revolt against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century’, in Peter Duus, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 6: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1995), 714; Su Ge, ‘How Does Asia Mean? (Part I)’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies I (2000): 13–47, especially 15–17, 20–21, 27. 14 Su Ge, ‘How does Asia Mean’, 14. 15 The Kokuryūkai was founded in 1901 by Uchida Ryōhei and was connected with the Genyōsha. Tōyama Mitsuru was its spiritual leader. The Kokuryūkai subscribed to ideas of harmony between East and West, revival of the martial spirit, educational reform and overseas expansion. Its members had relations with the military and some civilian businessmen and worked in close contact with the army as intelligence agents and interpreters. They were involved in the Chinese Nationalist Revolution. Some had considerable influence over Japan’s China policy. After the First World War, the society became involved in the suppression of labour and socialist movements. It was accused of militarism and fascism by the US occupation government and purged in 1946. For the Kokuryūkai and Genyōsha, see E.H. Norman ‘The Genyosha: A Study in the Origins of Japanese Imperialism’, Pacific Affairs, 17 (September 1944): 261–84. 16 After the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese military authorities perceived the Muslim world’s enthusiasm for Japan’s victory against Russia as potentially helpful in advancing Japan’s interests. See Deringil, ‘Ottoman Japanese Relations in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Esenbel, Rising Sun, 42–8. The Ottoman governor and the Sixth Army in Baghdad reported to the Istanbul authorities that Japanese officers and some intellectual figures were sounding out pro-Japanese local opinion in Iraq for the commercial and political interests of Japan; for conversion propaganda, see Worringer, ‘Comparing Perceptions’, 99. The Japanese may have encouraged the propagation of the image of the ‘Rising Sun’, or the ‘Rising Star of the East’, in the publications of the Islamic world, even spreading the popular rumour that the Japanese emperor might convert to Islam. For Young Turks Abdullah Cevdet, Ahmet Riza, and Japan, see Worringer, ‘Comparing Perceptions’, 203–17. 17 See Sugita, Nihon jin, 220–4; Worringer, ‘Comparing Perceptions’, 34–8 especially. 18 See Worringer, ‘Comparing Perceptions’, 36–7, for constitution. 19 See Worringer, ‘Comparing Perceptions’, 34, for Western civilization as a method against Western imperialism. 20 For an Arab critical view of how Japan misused this liberal Pan-Asianism for its own expansionist designs, see Bassam Sibi, Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry (New York, 1971), 261, cited in Worringer, ‘Comparing Perceptions’, 38. 21 John D. Pierson, Tokutomi Sōho 1863–1957: A Journalist for Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ, 1980), 11, 76, 106–14. 22 Deringil, ‘Ottoman’, 47. 23 W.G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism 1894–1945 (Oxford, 1987), 69–85. 24 Shimizu in Sugihara, Japan, 32–3. Japan’s diplomatic relations with Turkey began in 1924, resulting in the only Japanese embassy in the Middle East during the interwar period. Afghanistan, Iran and Egypt had to wait as late as the mid-1930s. In the case of Western mandates such as Egypt and Lebanon, the Japanese legations had to work within their administration. Japan’s relations with Pakistan and Indonesian Islam had to wait for the end of the British and Dutch colonial empires in the post-war period. 25 See Best, International History, 80–106 for an overview of Western imperialism and colonialism. I prefer the term ‘politically compromised’, for I do not think the popular term ‘semicolony,’ referring to the hegemony of the Western powers over Iranian, Ottoman or Chinese empires that reduced them to a vulnerable and weak state, sufficiently explains the autonomy of inner circles of political power elites in these noncolonized polities. The weak governments may have bowed to Western pressure and intervention on numerous occasions but while they lasted, their political elite acted as the decision makers of their modern experience, unlike the Western colonial governments that dictated the framework of the colonial modern experience. 26 The Ottoman government treated Japanese diplomatic overtures politely, greeting Meiji aristocrats with profuse expressions of Asian solidarity and generous doses of royal medals. The late nineteenth-century Sultan Abdulhamid II even sent an imperial frigate to exchange

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27

28 29

30 31

32

33 34

35 36 37 38

goodwill messages with the Meiji emperor. See Worringer, ‘Comparing Perceptions’, 47–114; Selçuk Esenbel, ‘A Fin de Siècle Japanese Romantic in Istanbul: The Life of Yamada Torajjrō and His Toruko Gakan’, Bulletin of SOAS 59 (1996): 237–52. Ibrahim’s career is typical of this generation of ‘revolutionary globe trotters’, roaming from city to city in search of collaboration and networking. Although he published mostly in Ottoman Turkish or Tatar and Russian, Ibrahim argued that publishing in classical Arabic made it possible for Muslims as far away as China, Indonesia, Russia and the Middle East, who did not share a common ethnic language, to participate in the debate on the contemporary issues and problems of Islam. This is an important idea that the Japanese authorities also adopted during the 1930s when they started an active pro-Japanese propaganda effort towards the Muslim world. See Mahmud Tahir, ‘Abdürreşid ibrahim 1857–1944’, Central Asian Survey 7 (1988): 135–40. For biography, recent groundbreaking research on Ibrahim has been done by Esenbel, Nadir Özbek, Ismail Türkoglu, Hayrettin Kaya, Ahmet Ucar and François Georgeon. See also special file Özel Dosya Abdürreşid Ibrahim (1), Toplumsal Tarih 4 (July 1995): 6–29; and (2) Toplumsal Tarih 5 (August 1995): 6–23; Özbek, ‘Abdürreşid ibrahim’. For Ibrahim and Pan-Turkist Zeki Velidi as Volga Tatar identity in transformation through an Islamic political formula, see Şerif Mardin, ‘An Islamic Political Formula in Transformation: Islam, Identity and Nationalism in the History of the Volga Tatars’, in Charles E. Butterworth and I. William Zartman, eds., Between the State and Islam (Cambridge, 2001), 59–58; OSS, R&A 890.2, 15–26, appendix 63, 80. See Kokuryūkai, Kokuryūkai sanjūnen jireki (The Thirty-Year Record of the Kokuryūkai) (Tokyo, 1930), 17, 21 for references to Ibrahim and his son Munir; Jansen, Japanese, for the close connections between Sun and Kokuryūkai. See El Mostafa Rezrazi, ‘Dai Ajiashugi to nihon isuramukyō: Hatano Uho no chōhōkara isuramu e no tabi’ (‘Pan-Asianism and the Japanese Islam: The journey of Hatano Uho from Intelligence to Islam’), AJMES 12 (March 1997): 89–112, for Barakatulah, Hatanō, and Ariaga; Worringer ‘Comparative Perceptions’, 144–45, for translation of Asia in Danger into Ottoman Turkish (Asya Tehlikede). Bogazici University (former Robert College) Library collection has a copy. For Dōbunkai see Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937 (Princeton, NJ, 1989), 210–71, for details. There is a reference to a Hatanō Yōsaku, based in Urumchi (Tihua) between 1905 and 1907. For Java letters, see Ahmet Uçar, Toplumsal Tarih 20 (August 1995): 15–17. Yamaoka Kōtarō, Sekai no shimpikyō Arabia jūdanki (The Mysterious Region of the World; The Record of the Pilgrimage to Arabia) (Tokyo, 1912), 1–2; for Yamaoka Kōtarō, see Nakamura Kōjirō, ‘Early Japanese’, 47–57; Sakatomo Tsutomu, ‘The First Japanese Hadji Yamaoka Kōtarō and Abdürreşid Ibrahim’ in Esenbel, Rising Sun, 105–21. Gaimushō, Gaikōjihō 137, 1909, Tatarujin dokuritsu no kibō, 26–33, for interview; Abdürreşid Ibrahim, Alem-i Islam ve Japonya’da Intisar I Islamiyet (The World of Islam and the Spreading of Islam in Japan) 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1910–1911); Japanese translation by Komatsu Kaori and Komatsu Hisao, Caponya (Tokyo, 1991; modern Turkish version, Mehmet Paksu, ed., Yirminci Asrin Baslarinda Islam Dünyasıve Japonya’da islamiyet (The World of Islam at the Turn of the Twentieth Century and Islam in Japan) (Istanbul, 1987). Ibrahim, Alem, 319–21, for conversion. Ibrahim Alem, 248, 358, 370, for Ibrahim’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Japansese as an ideal people for conversion and the adaptation of the Japanese mode for modernity, the wakonyosai (Japanese spirit Western technology) for Islamic modernity in the case of women’s education, electric lights, postal service, historical society and medicine. Ibrahim, Alem, (354–64, 359, 366–7, 392–4, 401, 413, and 427 for meeting. Ibrahim, Alem, for photograph with Kaikyō seisaku slogan. Ibrahim, Alem, 201–204, 265 and 327 for Ōkuma and Inukai. Ibrahim, Alem, 200, for oath and signers. Indian Muslims were present but did not sign. Forthcoming Modern Middle East Sourcebook Project (MMESP) has a section on PanAsianism, and Renee Worringer has translated Ajia Gikai’s statement of purpose as it appeared in an Ottoman journal; see Worringer, ‘Comparative Perceptions’, 143–4. The society would

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39 40 41 42

43

44

45 46

47

48

49

50 51

strive to arm and protect Asians whose morality was sound, whose customs were admirable, whose nature was peaceful, and whose thinking was correct. Ajia Gikai claims to have funded the education of Ibrahim’s son Münir’s education in Waseda University. See the following sources for versions: Ibrahim, Alem, photograph; Kokuryūkai, Töa senkaku shishi kiden (Biographies of Pioneer Patriots of East Asia) (Tokyo, 1936), 351–2; Wakabayashi, Kaikyö sekai, photograph; OSS, R&A, 890.2,3. The identification of names from the 1909 oath in Ibrahim’s Alem and later Japanese versions in Wakabayashi, Kaikyō sekai, and Kokuryūkai, Töa senkaku, is gleaned from the biographies on OSS, R &A 890.2, appendix. Töa senkaku shishi kiden, 351–52. See James Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy 1930– 1938 (Princeton, NJ, 1966), 111. Crowley explains that the operations division of the general staff, especially Generals Araki Sadao and Hata Shunroku, loathed communism. By 1931, the operations division was convinced that Japanese-Soviet conflict was inevitable. See Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War 1941–45 (Cambridge, 1981), 2, for internationalism of Gaimusho; Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, 1999), 44–9 for Asian orientation of the military-civilian elite. Shimano Saburōdenki kankōkai, Shimano Saburō: Mantetsu sōren jōhō katsudōka no shōgai (The Lives of Soviet Intelligence Experts of Mantetsu) (Tokyo, 1984), 463–4; Matsuoka Yōsuke denki kankōkai, Matsuoka Yōsuke sono hito to shōgai (Matsuoka Yōsuke, the Person and his Life) (Tokyo, 1974) 719–20 for a discussion of Matsuoka’s Islam policy and relations with Tatar émigrés. Honpō, 1937, 12 month, 6–13 day, Kaikyō kenkyūkai, Imaoka Jüichirō, 472–99, report on Soviet and Chinese Xinjiang Muslims as pro-Japanese. I have drawn on Stephan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley, Ca, 1993), 88. Tanaka shows that Japanese historiography at the turn of the twentieth century debated the special bonds between the Japanese and the Altaic peoples. Shiratori Kurakichi, the founder of the field of tōyō-shi, Oriental history, advocated the view that Japanese history was distinct and separate form both Westerrn history (seiyō shi) and Oriental history, which encompassed the Sinocentric world. Shiratori also argued that Japan’s historical roots were North Asian and therefore distinct form the southern cultural zone of China; Japan had a special link with the Altaic nomadic cultures of Inner and Central Asia. Ibrahim, Alem, 216, 317. Ibrahim’s 1911 memoir itself presents the Altaic argument for his Turkish-reading audience as he narrates how the Tatars are similar to the Japanese, who also sit on the floor and eat around a hearth fire and who hold festivals similar to the traditional Central Asian Sabantoy spring celebration, and so on. Shakai mondai shiryōkenkyūkai, Teikoku gikaishi (Records of the Imperial Diet) Dai ikki Dai 34 maki (Tokyo, 1978) 74th session of the Diet, 1939 Kizokuin (House of Peers) and Shūgiin (House of Representatives) meetings summary, 216–17; Kampō, Dai ikki Dai 37 maki, Showa 14 (1939) February nineteenth day Kizokuin debate, 381; Kampō, Dai ikki Dai 37 maki, Showa 14 (1939) 24 February day Shūgiin debate, 64–8. See Alexandre A. Benningson and S. Enders Wimbush, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World (Chicago, 1979), 20–30, for leftist and liberal Pan-Islam in Russia and the shift to right after 1918. Sultan Galiev was from the same Kazan region as Ibrahim and was a major leftist revolutionary who strove to found a Marxist Islamic Soviet in Tataristan. Japan was his inspiration, reflecting the legacy of the Ibrahim generation of Tatar intellectuals. The project was crushed by V.I. Lenin. Later Galiev was exterminated by Joseph Stalin during the purges of Central Asian party leadership in 1934. Kamozawa Iwao, ‘Zai nichi tataru jin ni tsuite’ (On Tatars in Japan), 1, Bulletin of Faculty of Letters Hōsei University no. 28 (1982): 27–56; Bulletin o f Faculty o f Letters Hosei University, 2:29 (1986): 223–302, 228–29. Nishihara Masao, Zenkiroku Harubin tokumukan: Kantogun jōhōbu no kiseki (The Complete Record of the Harbin Special Agency: The Footsteps of the Kwantung Army Intelligence Division) (Tokyo, 1980), 23.

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52

Kurban Ali was a commander of the Bashkir militia that fought near Yekaterinburg, where the Romanov royal family was murdered after the October Revolution. After leading his community across the Central Asian highlands via the Trans-Siberian Railway, Kurban Ali collaborated briefly with White Russian forces in the Far East. An advocate of the ‘Altaic brothers’ argument justifying cooperation between Japan and the Turks of Central Asia, he represented a collage of Bashkir, Muslim, Turkoman and Turkish identities, interchangeable and complementary at the same time. Shimano notes he reported the details of the murder to Matsuoka. A letter written, in Russian, by Kurban Ali in September 1922 to unidentified Japanese authorities churns out the ‘Altaic brothers’ argument; see M.T. 1.2.1. numbers 03676–03694, September 1922. Miscellaneous documents relating to the foreign policy of various countries: Persia, China, Afghanistan, Turkey. Reel 35. Library of Congress Microfilms on Japanese Government Documents; Komura, Nihon 71. That Colonel Hashimoto Kingorō, the famous coup plotter of the 1930s and founder of the Sakurakai group of Imperial Way young officers to debate the Showa Restoration, had become an admirer of Kemal Atatürk as a revolutionary military leader while he was a military attache in Ankara might have reinforced this ‘Turkish factor’. 53 Shimano, Shimano Saburō, 439–45, 460–7, for Kurban, Matsuoka and Imperial Way officers; Matsunaga Akira, ‘Ayaz ishaki and the Turko-Tatars in the East’, in Esenbel, Rising Sun, 197–215, for Kurban’s close relations with General Shitennō Nobutaka, the pro-German head of Harbin intelligence, and Vice-Admiral Ogasawara Chose, who was part of the right wing circle in the Navy. Komura, Nihon, 59–60, for Muslims with Ōkuma and Inukai and comment ‘kyūchō futokoro ni haireba’ (cornered bird that enters bosom). For general treatment of military factions in Japan, see Richard Storry, The Double Patriots: A Study o f Japanese Nationalism (Boston, 1957); George M. Wilson, Radical Nationalist in Japan: Kita Ikki 1883–1937 (Cambridge, 1969); Ben-Ami Shillony, Revolt in Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936 Incident (Princeton, NJ, 1973). 54 Backed by Asianist politicians and military supporters, in 1927, Kurban Ali founded the Tokyo Mohammedan School (Tokyo kaikyō gakkō) in Sendagaya Yoyogi-Uehara, next to the Tokyo Mosque, serving Tatar émigré children. In 1928, he became president of an official Federation of Muslims of Japan (Nihon Kaikyō zoku renmei), and in 1929 he set up the Tokyo Mohammedan Press (Tokyo kaikyō insatsusho), which continued to publish Japan-oriented Islamic texts until the end of the Second World War. Its most interesting publication in Turkish was the journal Yani Yapon Muhbiri (News on New Japan), which in 1933 began to provide news on Japanese society and culture for the Tatar emigre community in the Far East. The press published in Arabic as well, notably a beautifully printed and bound Koran that was disseminated to the Arabic reading public of the Islamic world as proof of Japan’s support for Islam. Like Ibrahim, Kurban Ali argued that publishing in classical Arabic—the literary language of religious education in China, South East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East— allowed for the global circulation of Pan-Asianist arguments in favour of Japanese cooperation with Islam in these regions. For information on Kurban Ali’s career in Japan, see, OSS, R&A 890.1, 97; Komura, Nihon 78; Shimano, Shimano Saburō, 63; Honna file, 1.S9210–3, Ōbei kyoku dai ikka tokugai-dai 6366, Showa 7 (1932), 12 month, 20 day, 20. 55 Ibrahim became a member of the Young Turk Special Agency (Teşllat-l Mahsusa) during the First World War. In line with his Pan-Asianist view, he organized the Asya Taburu (Asian Battalion) from the Romanov army Tatar ex-prisoners of war, which fought on behalf of the Ottomans against the British. During the war, Ibrahim tried to foment rebellion against the British in Afghanistan. He also aided Tatar civilians, stuck between the Red Army and White forces in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, to emigrate to Turkey. For Ibrahim’s later career, see special file, Abdürreşid ibrahim (1), Toplumsal Tarih 4 (July 1995), 6–29; also same in (2) Toplumsal Tarih 4 (August 1995), 6–23; for Ayaz Ishaki, see Komura, Nihon, 96: Honna. French paper Tribune Libre article on Çapanoglu (misspelled as Çobanoğlue), 17 April 1935, 284; Kaomura, Nihon, 96; Mehmet Görmez, Musa Carullah Bigiyef (Ankara, 1994), 47, for biography. 56 Tokyo Nichi Nichi English version 21 May 1933; Tokyo Nichi Nichi Japanese version 22 May 1933.

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57 OSS R&A 890.1 15 May 1944, 114–19. The international press covered the prospects for the plan to enthrone the Turkish prince if the Muslim rebellions in Inner Asia were successful. While the Soviet papers Pravda and Izvestia attacked the Japanese conspiracy for a second ‘Muslim’ Manchukuo in Inner Asia, Filastin, the Palestinian nationalist paper in British Palestine, claimed great interest in the eventuality. The journals Oriento Moderno in Italy, Trans Pacific in Tokyo, and al-Mokattam of Cairo offered mixed reports both confirming and denying the prince’s prospects. 58 Honpō, Showa 9 (1934) chosa, Zai honna kaikyōtō toruko tatarujin funsō mondai (Research Concerning the Kurban Ali and Ayaz Ishaki Fight and the Problem of Prince Abdul Kerim’s Visit to our Country), 59–67. 59 See James William Morley, The China Quagmire: Japan’s Expansion on the Asian Continent 1933–1941: Selected translations from the Taiheiyō sensō e no michi: kaisen gaikō shi (New York, 1983), 3–302, for a survey of the Jehol invasion, and the designs on North China. 60 For the East Turkestan rebellion between 1931 and 1933, and later again in 1936, see Owen Lattimore, Pivot o f Asia (New York, 1975); Lars-Erik Nyman, Great Britain and Chinese, Russian and Japanese Interests in Sinkiang, 1918–1934 (Malmo, 1977); Allen S. Whiting and General Sheng Shints’ai, Sinkiang: Pawn or Pivot? (East Lensing, MI, 1958); Andrew D.W. Forbes, Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: Political History o f Republican Sinkiang 1911–1949 (Cambridge and New York, 1986): and Komura, Nihon 80. 61 Shimano, Shimano Saburō, 468. 62 New York Times, 4 August 1935, 21. 63 Honpō, Vol. 1, Kuwajima kyokushō ni tai suru Tewfikku no danwa yōshi, Showa 11, 4 month, 16 day, 324; Honna, Vol. 1, Tewfikku el Sherifu noken, Showa 11, 5 month, 21 day, 329. 64 See Ōkawa Shūmei, Kaikyō gairon (Tokyo, 1943), for his perspective on Islam; Aydın, ‘Politics’, for a study of the thought of Ōkawa Shūmei, Kaikyōgairion (Tokyo, 1943), for his perspective on Islam; Aydın, ‘Politics’, for a study of the thought of Ōkawa on Asia and Islam. 65 Awaya Kentarō, Yoshida Yutake, eds., Kokusai kensatsu kyoku jimmon shirabe shō (International Prosecution Section Interrogation Records) (Tokyo, 1993), Vol. 23, 373–4. Hereafter IPS. 66 See IPS, Vol. 23, 304, 318, 409, 429 for interrogation; Seike Motoyoshi, Senzen shōwa nashonarizumu no shōmondai (Problematics of Prewar Japanese Nationalism) (Tokyo, 1995), 239–43, for Islam as a transnational ideology. For a succinct treatment of Ōkawa and PanAsianism, see Christopher W.A. Szpilman, ‘The Dream of One Asia: Ōkawa Shūmei and Japanese Asianism’ in Haralad Fuess, ed., The Japanese Empire in East Asia, 49–64. 67 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). 68 Ōkawa Shūmei, Kaikyōgairon (Tokyo, 1943), 1–13, Ōkawa agreed with the British scholar Gibb, who also saw a historic link between the world of Islam and the West until the Renaissance. 69 IPS, Vol. 23, 429. 70 Kaikyō Gairon, a collection of his lectures in the late 1930s, was published in 1943 to help the war effort. Ōkawa wrote in the introduction: ‘Now that the Great Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere includes a great number of Muslims, it is necessary for our nation to obtain knowledge of Islam.’ See Aydın, ‘Politics’, 180–90, for Islamic studies; Awamura, ‘Short History’, 409–39. The first crop of Japan’s specialists on Islam, Central Asia and the Middle East began their careers in a feverish atmosphere of Islam policy discussions that were integrated into new Asian internationalism. Many continued to be eminent experts in Islamic studies in the postwar period. These scholars included Naitō Chishū (1886–1950), the foremost authority on Ottoman Turkish history in pre-war Japan; Ōkubō Kōji (1888–1950), a Turkish-language expert specializing in Central Asian studies; Kobayashi Hajime (1904–63), the first Japanese specialist in Arabic studies, who studied in the famous A1-Azhar University of Egypt with the support of Ōkawa; and Izutsu Toshihiko (1914–93), Japan’s foremost expert on Islamic philosophy, who later continued to teach at Keio University in Japan and McGill University in Canada. These men used their knowledge during the war years as language instructors, or preparing military reports, manuals and propaganda materials, as well as working at such scholarly institutions as Kaikyō kenkyūjō, established under the auspices of the Foreign Min-

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71 72 73

74 75 76

77

78 79

80

istry. Ōkawa Shūmei kenshōkai, Ōkawa Shūmei nikki (The Diary of Ōkawa Shūmei) (Tokyo, 1986), 521–2 for school. Ōkawa, Nikki, 521–2. Ōkawa Shūmei kenshōkai, Ōkawa Shūmei nikki (The Diary of Ōkawa Shūmei) (Tokyo, 1986), 521–22 for school. Ōkawa, Nikki, 521–22. Dai Nippon kaikyō kyōkai no shimei ni tsuite (Concerning the mission of the Greater Japan Islamic League) (Tokyo, 1939); see also Aydın, ‘Politics’, 192–8. Aydın sees the DNKK as different from Ōkawa because it advocated a pragmatic, policy-oriented perspective to obtain Muslim aid for Japan. But Ōkawa’s argument for Japanese collaboration with Pan-Islamism as a global force provided the theoretical frame. Both also focused on Asian Islam on the Chinese mainland and under Britain and Holland rather than on the anti-communist line of the earlier years, which had targeted the Soviet Union. OSS reports treat Ibrahim as a figure of nemesis for this anti-Western quest but also describe him in a tone of respect with adjectives such as ‘venerable’, ‘everlasting’ and ‘fiery preacher.’ OSS, R&A 890, 1. Shimano, Shimano Saburō, 470–2. Identification of participants is from a photograph of the opening in the possession of Ibrahim’s family; I am grateful to Ms Müge Isker Özbalkan, the great-granddaughter of Ibrahim, who provided a copy for my use. See Shimano, Shimano Saburō, 444–6, for himself and Yamaoka living together in Russia, mainly in Muslim quarters; Komura, Nihon, 111–16, for Inner Mongolia; Wakabayashi, Kaikyō, 121, for new Japanese Muslim agents; Honna, Showa 13 (1938) 3 month, 16 day [telegram from Consul General in Cairo to foreign minister Hirota Kōki on Turkestani pilgrims who joined the Suzuki’s Japanese pilgrim group in Mecca and were to go to Japan with them], 163–4; Honpō, Nihon kaikyōtō no Arabiya ryōkō keiryaku ni kan suru ken (Concerning the Arabia Journey Plan of the Japanese Muslim Group), Showa 11 (1936), 6 month, 25 day, telegram 331; Kaku, telegram 18, Manshū koku jin Chō nyūkoku kyōka no yumu narabi ni Suzuki ichi gyō no Mekka jūnrei shuppatsu kijitsu toriawase no ken, Showa 13 (1938), 1 month, 26 day, Ki den 23 go ni kanshi kaikyōtō no honpō tōrai ni kanshi jōryoku hō no ken (Concerning Inquiry to Set the Date for the Departure of the Suzuki Group on a Pilgrimage to Mecca and whether Mr Ch’ang of Manchukuo Citizenship will have Permit for Entry into the Country), 155–64. This might be the same Manchurian Muslim who was a close associate of Kurban Ali. For ulema and Islam as means of mobilization, see Aiko Kurasawa, ‘Mobilization and Control: A Study of Social change in Rural Java 1942–1945’, Ph.D. dissertation, 1988, Cornell University; for cultural policies, Grant K. Goodman, ed., Japanese Cultural Policies in Southeast Asia During World War Two (New York, 1991). The seminal study of the Japanese use of Islam in Indonesia that discusses the history of Japan and Muslims in the Dutch Indies is Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising sun (The Hague and Bandung, 1958). See Paul H. Kratoska, The Japanese Occupation of Malaya: A Social and Economic History (London, 1998), 135, for propaganda directed toward the Muslim community in Malaya by ‘Imam Abdarashid Ebrahim, patriarch of the Tokyo Mosque’ and ‘the respected patriarch of the Muslim world’; Honpō 1, 1100, for Shanghai Times 14 June 1942, headline. John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1993), 178. See M.A. Aziz, Japan’s Colonialism and Indonesia (The Hague, 1955), 200–208; Anthony Reid and Oki Akira, eds., The Japanese Experience in Indonesia: Selected Memoirs of 1942–1945 (Athens, Ohio, 1986), 70–110, on Hadji Saleh Suzuki’s Hezbollah, 239, 304; for Major Fujiwara Iwaichi’s intelligence operation on the field in Sumatra and Inoue Tetsuro on the Aron rebellion in East Sumatra, 9–30. See Heng Teow, Japan’s Cultural Policy Toward China, 1918–1931 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). However, as See Heng Teow’s study has shown, Japan’s cultural policy towards China was significantly more visible, and it is the better remembered part of Japanese cultural imperialism today. Another comparison would be to the religious policy practised by the Japanese authorities in Inner Mongolia, as shown by Li Narangoa in her painstaking study of Japanese religious policy in Mongolia; see Li Narangoa, Japanische Religionspolitik in der Mongolei 1932–1945: Reformbesttrebunden und Dialog zwischen japanischem und mongolishchem

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81 82 83 84

Buddhismus (Wiesbaden, 1998). However, Islam did not have a religious connection to Japanese society, whereas Buddhism did. Hence the Japanese did not attempt to reform Islam as they attempted to reform Mongolian Lama Buddhism through the cooperation of Japanese Buddhist temples such as Nishi Honganji. See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, Conn., 2000), for the case in Afghanistan. On agents see Said, Orientalism, 210, 224–5, 241; Elizabeth Monroe, Philby o f Arabia (Ithaca, NY, 1998), 151–62. One exception would be Kim Philby’s father John Philby, who converted to Islam in 1931 and became Sheik Abdullah. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1994), 403. Roy James, who was a popular media figure in 1960s Japan, most likely would not have received such acclaim if it were known that his given name was Ramadan, the holiest of months in the Islamic calendar. James (who spoke stilted English but had the physical appearance of a Westerner) was the son of a religious cleric serving the Tokyo mosque who was a member of the emigre community from Russia.

27

❚ First published in Bert Edström (ed.), Turning Points in Japanese History, London, Japan Library (RoutledgeCurzon), 2002, pp.180–214.

2

Japan and Islam Policy During the 1930s a

T

he 1920s may have been the time of liberalism and internationalism for many in the Japanese public but from the perspective of the Islam-oriented Japanese of the Asianist and army circles who had already formed contacts with Muslim activists during the Meiji period because of the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–5, it was a time for cultivation of contacts along the lines of Islam policy [kaikyō seisaku], an idea put forth first with the 1909 visit to Japan of Abdürreşid ibrahim, the Russia Tatar cleric Pan-Islamist activist.1 During the early years of the 1920s, the Japanese military authorities in Manchuria had contacts with particularly the Pan-Islamists and Pan-Turkists of the Romanov and Ottoman dynasties, the old world empires which had been destroyed as a result of the First World War, known as the Great War. The present essay introduces aspects of the second stage of Japanese and Islam-oriented activities during the Taishō and Shōwa periods that is part of research in progress on the subject. Based primarily on sources in the Gaikō shiryōkan, the Diplomatic Record Office of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dealing with religious and missionary activities in the home country and abroad, this essay juxtaposes contemporary Japanese accounts of these events with others. A major contrast is found between the Gaimushō [ Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs] records and the intelligence reports of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War dealing with Japanese infiltration among Muslims that have been declassified since 1983. The OSS reports dramatically portray the history of Japanese Muslim relations as a grand conspiracy from the Meiji period, understandably because they were written with the purpose of deciphering the intentions and actions of the enemy during war. The Japanese documents of course reflect no conspiracy as such but on and off talk about the same events in a patchy manner, being fairly contemporary accounts of the events involving Japanese policies toward the Islamic world during the 1920s and 30s, later dealt with in OSS reports written during the 1940s. One surmises from an overview of the documents that during the early 1930s the Gaimushō appears quite distanced to any machinations in favour of an overseas Islam policy, which in the documents is indirectly ascribed to military elements [ gunbu], or the available sources can be interpreted that way today. But Gaimushō telegrams and research reports of the late 1930s exhibit an increased advocacy for Islam policy from the ministry as well.2

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As the newly-founded Soviet Union and the Turkish Republic rejected the ideological currents of their respective ancient regimes, the Kokuryūkai, the Amur River Society of Japanese Asianist nationalism, and the military authorities in Manchuria such as the Kwantung Army and the Mantetsu, the South Manchurian Railway research organization of Japanese empire building, provided haven to émigrés from these empires. Manchuria became an indefinite home to Russia Muslim Tatar émigrés who came in with the White Russians, but they were not alone. Former Young Turk officers and intelligencers of the now defeated German-Ottoman alliance of the First World War, men no longer officially welcome in the Turkey of Kemal Atatürk, now sought Japanese help. Ottoman royalists of the now defunct Ottoman empire replaced by the secularist revolution of Kemalism also were to appear in the Far East in search of a last political hope of restorationism. This was a Diaspora of Pan-Islamists—Pan-Turkists primarily of the Turkish world who had played out their political careers during the Great War. Some had been also party to the Basmaçi uprising of Turkic populations in Central Asia in 1917–22 led by the exiled Young Turk leader of the Ottoman government, Enver Pasha, who had gone to Central Asia to organize a military uprising against the Bolsheviks in a last stand of the Pan-Turkist cum Pan-Islamist vision of the First World War. After Enver Pasha died, literally in a single-handed charge, galloping towards a line of Bolshevik machine-guns in the middle of nowhere in today’s Tajikistan, some of his comrades in arms came to the Far East as part of the Muslim population which spilled over from the turbulent revolutions and national conflicts of the age.3 After the 1917 October Revolution and the Siberian Expedition, the Japanese authorities in Manchuria and Japan accepted a sizeable Russian Muslim émigré population as part of the large White Russian emigration with the end of the Siberian Expedition in 1922. Most Russian Muslims were Tatars from the Kazan region east of Moscow who had already had had close contacts with the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War and the Bashkir area to the south. Some émigrés from the Bashkir area, south of Kazan, were members of the local militia, which had supported Czech troops and had fought with the White Russian Cossack armies against the Red Army during the civil war after 1917. Defeated by the Bolsheviks the Bashkir militia leaders had retreated into Central Asia with their families. They ultimately found asylum in Manchuria. Together with the White Russian émigrés, the Tatars settled mostly in Harbin and Mukden and began small family businesses selling leather goods and clothing. By the early 1930s, of the roughly 10,000 Tatars living in the Far East, about one thousand Tatar émigrés had relocated to Japan, forming the bulk of the émigré Muslim residents of the home islands consisting also of British Indian Muslims, and some Indonesians from the Dutch Indies.4 For the Japanese circles this émigré population was now to became the initial fertile ground to launch Japanese army strategies with respect to Islam policy in Asia, particularly Northwest China and Inner Asia during the Taishō (1912–26) and early Shōwa periods during the 1930s. A former intelligence officer of Harbin intelligence, Nishihara Masao, succinctly explains in his 1980 account of the Harbin intelligence in the 1930s the military view of the matter. He states: … from 1931, 1932 on, the army developed a deep interest in the Islam question, and thought that if we could ride the religious communal solidarity of these people, it would promise a very beneficial agitation and operation strength. Thinking this

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way, since there was a large population of Russian Muslim émigrés in Manchuria, they could be used in anti-Soviet intelligence. The army held the view that it could cultivate a new fertile heavenly land through Islam [shin tenchi].5

As Louise Young has noted, the term tenchi was frequently used for Manchuria as the fertile heavenly land of the Japanese empire but it is used by Nishihara for presenting a military perspective on the Muslim regions of the provinces adjacent to Manchuria. He writes of how a Muslim squadron was set up along with the White Russian forces in Manchuria and how a secret training camp was established in the mountain valley south of Harbin to train Muslim agents operating in China and border areas, flown to their missions from the air-base. The army also set up schools in Harbin for the languages of the provinces with Muslim populations.6

OUR ALTAIC BROTHERS A September 1922 letter from a M. G. Kurban Galiev (Turkish: Muhammed Abdulhay Kurban Ali, 1892–1972), a Bashkir leader and imam (cleric) of Tatar émigrés in Manchuria, sent from Mukden to unidentified authorities in Japan represents the discourse of the case for cooperation between the Japanese and the Turks of Central Asia that surrounds this strategic vision. In the letter are found terms such as ‘common Altaic roots’ that are already familiar in the sources on the interaction between Japan and the Turkish world during the Meiji period, but the letter also formulated practical suggestions in terms of a strategic cultural policy for Japan. Kurban Ali addresses the letter to an unidentified ‘excellency’, kakka. Written in Russian, the letter was translated into Japanese and now is deposited in the Gaimushō files for Meiji and Taishō documents on Japanese-Turkish relations.7 One assumes that it was addressed to the foreign minister or a person of very high rank in the Japanese government as the term kakka is an honorific used for members of the aristocracy or top bureaucracy. Kurban Ali starts off with stressing the importance of Japanese-Turkish friendship in cultural and economic matters that will contribute to the founding of a world of equality and of humanity based on the principle of just world humanism [seigi sekai jindōshugi]. Noting the challenging task of the future that requires the construction of a new world after the war, here Kurban Ali’s argument continues in a vein of an eclectic combination of Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism that appealed to Pan-Asianists in Japan, assuring that the vast Turkish populations in the Euro-Asian and North African continents befriended by Japan will aid the achievement of a just future for the peoples of Asia under the leadership of Japan. The letter is written in the context of the early years of the Bolshevik revolution referring to the national question of the independent Turkic Republics. Explaining that the Turkoman peoples of Russia, namely the Turkestanis, Kirgiz, Bashkir, Tatars, Azerbaijanis, Crimeans, who are all trying to determine the destiny of their peoples with independent republics, Kurban Ali argues also that Turkey has already proven itself with a national movement and the strength of its armed struggle, referring to the national liberation war that was still being waged in Anatolia under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk against the terms of the Versailles Treaty after the First World War. So, the economic crisis and the

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spiritual impoverishment of Europe is an asset for the rise of the Turkish people with whom Japan should ally. Having outlined a mega-project of a Japanese alliance with the struggle of the Turkish peoples presented in these Pan-Turkist terms, Kurban Ali finishes his letter with practical suggestions of immediate relevance that will aid Japanese understanding of this world which carries potential for the future of Japan. He recommends the beginning of the study of Turkish language and culture in government schools of Japan. Japan should train Orientalists [tōyō gakusha] beginning with Tōkyō gaigo gakkō (today’s Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, or, popularly Gaigodai) which should set up a Turkish language program. That Turkish is written in the Arabic script (to be changed to the Latin alphabet in the Republic of Turkey in 1928) will also provide entry for Japanese scholars into the written languages of the Islamic world such as Arabic and Persian. Kurban Ali promises his utmost ability to help find suitable instructors and select textbooks. He also submits two documents, one on the dialects of the Turkish language, the other a review of the study of Turkish languages in Russia. This letter is quite interesting for many reasons. First, it does outline in a gist the rhetoric of the collaboration between Kurban Ali and others like him with the Japanese authorities from now on, placing emphasis on the special privileged role that Turkish elements could play in an overall rapprochement of Japan with the world of Islam. The letter reflects a rather specialized knowledge of Japan for a man who had just arrived from Russia. One wonders whether there was an element of Kurban Ali being used as a gaiatsu factor for Japanese authorities in Mukden who would want to use him as a means with which to start Turkish studies at Gaigodai that would be in line with their interests. Finally, these ideas are translations into political rhetoric of the historical argument of the late Meiji founder of Oriental history, Shiratori Kurakichi, on the special bonding between the Japanese people and the Altaic nomads of North Asia which has been discussed in the study of Stefan Tanaka on Japan’s Orient. We meet this rhetoric fusion of Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism with the Shiratori vision over and over again in the course of events concerning this Asianist world of Islam policy.8 The letter-head and various signatures of the letter represents for us the question of identities in this time of upheaval in a Diaspora environment. Kurban Ali used writing-paper with the letter-head being a seal with a star and crescent that explains in Turkish Irak Sarkiyc Müslüman Milletleri ve Mümessilleri Surasi with also the English title Connciell of Moslem Representatives in the Far East. At the end of the Japanese translation, the writer is identified as the representative of the Bashkir peoples. Even the translation is problematic in terms of determining the identity of these people. The translator crossed out the original word Turkoman, referring to the tribal name of the Turkish-speaking population, throughout the text and changed it to torukojin meaning Turkish people that refers to a general national identity that would unite different ethno-tribal divisions. In many respects the letter itself indicates a search for identity as a result of the Diaspora’s political interaction with Japanese strategy, in this case from a White Russian Muslim—which is how Kurban Ali and the other Tatar émigrés are referred to in the Gaimushō documents—to the ethnic identity of Tatar–Bashkir, and finally the general national identity of belonging to the Turkish world, all of which will result in the category of Muslims of Japan, Nihon kaikyōzoku.

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From now on, Kurban Ali began working for the rapprochement between Japan and the Turkish world which was supposed to aid Japan’s entry into the world of Islam for the army and Mantetsu authorities. Similar to Abdürreşid ibrahim, Kurban Ali had been drawn to Japan because of the political turmoil in Russia, and now he became the pioneer émigré figure who started to institutionalize the Islam-oriented policy of the Japanese authorities. Like Ibrahim, Kurban Ali also was a member of the Tatar Muslim community of Russia and belonged to the Bashkir peoples who lived south of Kazan city along the river Volga. He had been educated as an officer of the Tsarist army, but now claimed the identity of being a religious cleric, imam, of the Diaspora Tatar community. During the civil war after the October Revolution in 1917, Kurban Ali had been one of the Bashkir militia commanders who fought in the Yekaterinburg area where the members of the Romanov dynasty had been murdered, which he reported in detail later to the Japanese authorities. Subsequently, Kurban Ali and his community of Bashkir émigrés crossed the Central Asian highlands using the Trans-Siberian Railway under great duress. Sources on his career suggest that Kurban Ali continued to have close relations with the forces of General Ataman Semenov, who was supported by the Japanese during and after the Siberian Expedition, and was the commander of the White Russian forces in the Far East. A later Gaimushō report of 1937 dealing with Islam in Japan and Islam policy toward the Soviet Union prepared by a special affiliate [sokutaku], Imaoka Jūtarō, who appears to have been in favour of a Japanese active Islam policy in North Asia, tells us that Kurban was a close collaborator to Colonel Porochikov who was the adviser of the Shiberia minzoku kyōkai, the Siberian Peoples Association.9 The diary of Shimano Saburō, a Russia expert agent of Mantetsu, discusses the circumstances of Kurban Ali’s introduction to the Asianists and the Kwantung Army Imperial Way [Kōdōha] young army officers in the early 1920s who would literally charge into Japanese politics in an attempt to topple the civilian government and into Manchuria at the same time in the early 1930s.10 On the eve of the October Revolution of 1917, Shimano had lived in Russia with Omar Yamaoka, who had become the first Japanese Muslim pilgrim in 1909 to visit Mecca and Istanbul with the help of the Tatar activist Ibrahim on his return trip from Japan. Shimano and Yamaoka lived together in the Tatar Muslim neighbourhoods of St Petersburg that appears to have formed a convenient cover for their intelligence-gathering activities. Shimano who personally experienced the eruption of the October Revolution, in later years was strongly critical of the Soviet regime.11 Shimano explains to us that he was put in charge of Kurban Ali during the latter’s visit to Tokyo in 1925 with the request of Ioki Ryōzan, the editor of the nationalist journal Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, noted for his Pan-Asian views. Subsequently, Shimano helped Kurban Ali form contacts with well-known figures of future Asianist and militarist events many linked to the Kokuryūkai, the Amur River Society, which was the main nationalist Asianist organization that had hosted Abdürreşid ibrahim, the Russian Tatar political activist who had visited Japan earlier in 1909. Ibrahim’s visit was a result of his contacts with Colonel Akashi Motojirō, the Japanese military attaché in St Petersburg and head of Japanese intelligence in Europe during the Russo-Japanese War. Similar to Kokuryūkai involvement with Sun Yat-sen during the Meiji period, the Japanese Asianists had also begun contacts between the Japanese and political activists such as Ibrahim from the Muslim world and the same circle continued to sponsor Kurban Ali and other Muslim Diaspora figures in

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Japan as part of a policy to ally Pan-Asianism with the Islam factor in Asia against the Western powers. From now on Kurban Ali’s circle in Japan was made up of Baron Hiranuma Küchirō, Hirota Kōki, Inukai Tsuyoshi, Tōyama Mitsuru, Sugiyama Shigemaru, Tanaka Güchi, and Matsuoka Yosuke.12 (plate 8) The 1937 Gaimushō report comments that Kurban Ali had staunch support of powerful figures in the political world such as Baron Hiranuma, and figures from the army and Mantetsu, citing the names of Vice-Admiral Ogasawara Naganari of the navy as well as Jitsukawa Tokijirō, Suda Masatsugu, and Matsubayashi Makoto, all three Russia experts working for Mantetsu as part of Kurban’s crowd. In a forthcoming article, Matsunaga Akira notes that in Harbin Kurban Ali sometimes met Colonel Shitennō Nobutaka, a military figure later known for his pro-German right-wing views, who was the head of the Harbin Special Service Agency during the Russian civil war, to provide information on the Soviet Union.13 Shimano describes how he finally introduces Kurban to Kita Ikki, the nationalist intellectual who was central to the Kōdōha perspective of the radical young officers who will be spearheading political upheaval at home and the Manchurian Invasion abroad in the next decade. According to Shimano’s account Kita Ikki encouraged Kurban to work for the foundation of an independent Muslim Turkic state somewhere in Central Asia and the Far East that would help disintegrate the ominous spectre of communism in North Asia under the Soviet regime. Shimano claims that Kita Ikki’s contacts in the army and in the Gaimushō started a flow of financial support through the agency of Shimano for the activities of Kurban Ali that actually continued until the execution of Kita Ikki in 1937 that corresponded to the demise of the Imperial Way faction from Japanese military politics. It would appear that the regular flow of money came from Sugiyama of the Kokuryūkai and was passed on to Shimano through a fellow traveller in the Gaimushō.14 The visiting rounds of Kurban Ali during this period resembled that of other political activist émigrés visiting the known figures who were Asianists or closely connected to them. In 1920 he had visited Japan for the first time with ten Bashkir youth and had met Ōkuma Shigenobu, President of Waseda University, an elder statesman [genrō] and doyen of parliamentary politics in Japan who always showed a special attention to Asian nationalist visitors and had also welcomed Ibrahim back in the Meiji period. We understand that during Kurban’s 1922 visit he also brought ten Bashkir youth to be introduced to the Japanese parties in question. A photograph of Inukai Tsuyoshi with Muslim visitors of those years includes Kurban Ali and the young Bashkirs.15 In the words of Tōyama Mitsuru, the so-called spiritual head of the Kokuryūkai who had hosted Ibrahim in 1908, the Kokuryūkai attitude toward the Tatar émigrés such as Kurban Ali was pretty much a case of the protection of a wounded bird that flies into one’s bosom.16 Having received financial support from the Japanese authorities, Kurban Ali took steps to bring about the integration of a pro-Japanese Muslim entity into the agenda of the Japanese empire. He visited Japan again in 1925, this time with Zhang Dechun [Chang Te-chun], the imam of the Mukden mosque who was later to be a major figure in the pro-Japanese Muslim organization set up in Manchuria in the 1930s. In 1927 Kurban Ali founded the Tōkyō kaikyō gakkō known as the Tokyo Mohammedan School in Sendagaya Yoyogi Uehara, next to the Tokyo Mosque that was constructed in 1938. The school served Tatar émigré children

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with a modern curriculum of science, mathematics, history, and religion, adhering to the reformist new schools established for the Muslim subjects under Romanov rule (plate 9). In 1928, Kurban founded and became the president of the Nihon kaikyōzoku renmei, the Federation of Muslims of Japan. On 3 October the same year, the organization held the first congress of Muslim émigrés of Japan [Bōmei kaikyōzoku zenkoku daiichiji taikai] in Tokyo, expressing support for the Japanese empire in the familiar Altaic common heritage terms. In 1929 Kurban Ali set up the Tōkyō kaikyō insatsusho, the Tokyo Mohammedan Press, which became an active outlet for the publication of religious and cultural books and materials on Islam. Although most publications were in Turkish, the press also published in Arabic. The most interesting publication in Turkish was the journal Yani Yapon Muhbiri [News on New Japan] that began in 1933, which was published in Kazan Turkish providing news on Japanese society and culture for the benefit of the Tatar émigré residents.17 (plate 10) What is important for understanding the political and cultural perspective of Kurban Ali’s efforts is the decision to use the Arabic script in Turkish-language publications which he had advocated in his letter of 1922. It represented the desire to convey the Pan-Islamist ideological message to the Turkish Tatar Diaspora in step with the Japanese agenda toward Islam. The Arabic script had been abolished in the Turkish Republic one year before, in 1928, in order to sever the new Kemalist regime from the political and cultural current of the Ottoman Islamic past. On the other hand, one should remember that classical Arabic was not only the language of the Arabs of the Near East, but also the coveted cultural language of the educated classes and the religious clergy among the Indonesians and Chinese Muslims of Asian Islam. Hence, publishing in Arabic indicated a desire to convey a positive image of Japan among Asian Islamists as well as in the homeland of the religion in the Near East. The Arabic-type letters were brought from Egypt to Tokyo with the financial assistance of a Japanese businessman supporting Islamic causes. Shimano, who tends to have an inflated sense of his self-importance, claims that he was personally responsible for the procurement of these letters.18 (plate 10) The Tokyo Mohammedan Press, as a result, published Arabic materials for religious observation along with the Turkish-language publications. Especially noteworthy is the beautiful Koran whose publication now became an important means of Japanese propaganda in the Islamic world. Gaimushō telegrams report on the positive reception of the Tokyo-published Koran by members of Egyptian loyalty. Prince Omar Tosun, known for his anti-British views, wrote a letter of gratitude inquiring about proselytizing Islam in Japan, addressed to El Cheikh Mohamed Abdel Hay and referring to Kurban Ali as imam and professor in Tokyo. The letter was printed in the newspaper Al-Ahram on 29 January 1935. Hence, the choice of Arabic letters was significant for it expressed the close affinity that the Japanesesupported Islamists desired with the Arabic-reading Islamic world.19 Kurban Ali began a series of public lectures in Japan and Manchuria to explain about the Muslim way of life and religion to the Japanese public that tended to be either oblivious to Muslim culture or had a negative impression derived from the Meiji culture of modernism. His partner in public activities spreading knowledge on Islamic culture to the Japanese public was Haji Nur Tanaka Ippei, the second ostensible convert to Islam who was a student of Omar Yamaoka, the first Japanese pilgrim to Mecca and Medina who had been introduced to the Arab authorities in 1910 by

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the Pan-Islamist Ibrahim. Tanaka Ippei was an expert in Chinese studies from the Taiwan gakkō [Taiwan School, later Takushoku University], and had visited Mecca as a pilgrim in 1924, and was on his way to becoming a major specialist of Chinese Islam. Employed by the Mantetsu and the Kwantung Army as a specialist in Islamic affairs, Tanaka was an associate of Ōkawa Shūmei at Takushoku University, who formed a second orbit of militarist politics and Asianist intellectual activity similar to Kita Ikki. (plate 7) Tanaka died in 1934 after a second exhausting pilgrimage during 1933 to Mecca where he had accompanied a new generation of young Japanese Muslim agents who were trained for operations among Islamic populations. Ōkawa wrote the preface to Tanaka’s valuable translation of a Qing dynasty work by a Chinese Muslim on Islam, Liu Jielian [Liu Chieh-lien] entitled Tenpōshisei jitsuroku [The real record of the holy land of Arabia] (1941). The preface is valuable for an understanding of the combination of a Japanese Islam policy with a shared strong commitment to Pan-Asianism in the minds of Ōkawa and others like him. Ōkawa explains that the literature on Islam found in Japan consisted simply of translations by Europeans but this work had special value because it was the Chinese Muslim classical translation of an Arabic manuscript which was now translated by a Muslim of ‘our country’. Referring to Tanaka, Ōkawa explained that the translator was a pioneer [senkakusha] of the revival of Asia who advocated the Great Asia message. On his deathbed Tanaka apparently uttered words to the effect that the rise of Asia could not be achieved without a study of Islam. The book was published posthumously by the official arm of the government for Islamic activities, the Dai Nippon kaikyō kyōkai which was established in 1938 and headed by General Hayashi Senjūrō who also wrote a calligraphy to the preface of the book.20 Kurban Ali’s activities during the Manchurian Invasion in 1931 intensified to prop up Chinese Muslim support in Manchuria and Northwest China for the Kwantung Army. With the aid of the Mantetsu, men like Shimano, Kurban, the Manchurian Chinese Muslim imam Zhang, and Tanaka Ippei founded the Manshū kaikyōkyō shinkai [Federation of Manchurian Muslims]. The Mukden mosque headed by Zhang was a modern building constructed with Japanese support.21 Kurban Ali apparently organized the declaration of about fifteen Manchurian Muslims representing the Muslim communities in 1932 for the establishment of an independent Manchurian state and exerted efforts on behalf of Japan against the League of Nations. Shimano tells us that Kurban was also instrumental in forming contacts with the Chinese Muslim warlords in the Gansu province on behalf of the Japanese during the rebellion of Chinese Muslims in the early 1930s.22 So far, the story of Kurban Ali shows us the ideas and the web of ties that connected a group of like-minded Japanese figures within various agencies, the army officers of Kōdōha Imperial Way vision and the Mantetsu staff primarily resident in Manchuria and in charge of intelligence activities, Asianist intellectuals such as Kita Ikki, and few friends in the Gaimushō, politicians like Inukai, Tanaka Güchi, and Ōkuma who were part of this world of Asianist-prone nationalism. The Russian world was Kurban’s medium of communication as in the case of other Pan-Islamists and activists from the Tatar Turkish world. The Tatar émigrés, who in due course became fluent in Japanese, for a long time communicated with the Japanese in Russian, usually through the agency of Russia experts of Mantetsu and intelligence.

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MATSUOKA YŌSUKE’S PRESS CONFERENCE IN ISTANBUL The question remains, however, who was responsible for this Islam policy activity in the Taishō to early Shōwa years and what it would lead up to. It was certainly not the top echelon of the Gaimushō for the documents and reports about kaikyō seisaku as such really start becoming noticeable after 1934, not earlier. As for the military authorities, there are references in a number of reports written about Islam policy in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia as an intelligence strategy in the early 1930s but one wonders who started all this, or, maybe it was simultaneous in military and civilian circles. The OSS reports exclaim the most ambitious analysis of the relations between Japan and the world of Islam at this point as a hundred years of conspiracy against the West. While some of the OSS narrative is confirmed by contemporary sources to these events concerning Japan’s involvement in the world of Islam, one has to take into account that the reports do exhibit the intense warorientation of those years that benefits from a tempered comparison with other sources. The accounts of Komura and Shimano point in the direction of Matsuoka Yōsuke, the head of Mantetsu in the early years in his career, who later rose in the foreign ministry as the militant mastermind of Japan’s entry into the Axis alliance with Germany and Italy. Matsuoka was to become the foreign minister of the war years and was sentenced to execution by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East after Japan’s surrender. Shimano says that he introduced Kurban Ali to Matsuoka probably during the latter’s visits to Tokyo in the early 1920s. Matsuoka apparently paid careful attention to Kurban Ali and another Tatar commander Bikmef’s detailed account of the events of the Russian Revolution including the murder of the Tsar family in Yekaterinburg, and the turmoil of the Russian army at the front which in their opinion caused the revolution. The general tone of these discussions was that the revolution was the result of a successful conspiracy rather than economic crises. Shimano claims that when Matsuoka became the head of Mantetsu which would be the years from 1921 to 1927 he began this kaikyō seisaku policy.23 Matsuoka was the vice president of Mantetsu 1927–29 and served as its president between 1935 and 1939. We understand that when Matsuoka was in Dairen, he moved Kurban Ali there and together with Miyazaki Masayoshi (probably an army man, possibly military attache in Afghanistan during the late 1930s) began kaikyō seisaku activities. According to Shimano, the plan was to engage the chiefs, or community leaders of Muslims living in Xinjiang [Sinkiang], Gansu, and Shaanxi [Shansi] provinces primarily inhabited by Turkic and Chinese Muslim communities as a ‘citadel of Asia against communism’ to protect Manchuria and Japan in the event of Soviet aggression. Financially supported by Mantetsu, Kurban Ali went to Tianjin [Tientsin], Beijing, and Kalgan to negotiate with the local Chinese Muslim warlords about cooperating with the Japanese authorities in Manchuria. He also contacted the famous four Ma families, including Ma Zhongyin, the infamous young Chinese Muslim warlord of Gansu to bring the message of collaboration with Japan.24 At the same time, during 1932, Matsuoka Yōsuke visited Istanbul, arriving on 25 December by the Simplon Express from Geneva. According to the dispatch of Charles Sherrill from the US embassy in Istanbul headed by Ambassador Joseph

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Grew who was on his way to his new post as ambassador in Tokyo, Matsuoka, who at this time was the head of the Japanese delegation at Geneva, spent two full days in the city. No one there seemed to know the cause for his visit. The dispatch enclosed two reports on an interview with him at a press conference held in Pera Palace which was published in the local French-language papers Republique and the Journal d’Orient. Matsuoka explained that his visit was of a purely tourist nature, taking advantage of Christmas vacation at the League of Nations. Carefully emphasizing the personal nature of the visit, Matsuoka apologized for not visiting Ankara, the capital of the Republic. Assuring the press of his high sentiments for the Turkish nation, Matsuoka wished for amicable relations between these two great nations which occupied the two extreme ends of the Asian continent, a classic metaphor in Turkish-Japanese relations. Assuring the audience of good relations with the United States despite the rumours circulated by the Chinese, Matsuoka discounted the possibility of war. The press conference ended with Matsuoka expressing the proIslam stance of Japan. He explained that historical research had proven that the Manchurian people were descendants of the ancient Tunguz of the East and that in Manchuria there were 178,000 Mohammedans with whom he had personally very close rapport, notifying the audience of the amicable relations between the Japanese and the Muslims.25 Avoiding a visit to Ankara, the new Republican capital, Matsuoka was using Istanbul, the former centre of the Ottoman caliphate, as a suitable site to disseminate an Islamist message to the Turkish public as well as to Muslims abroad. The Tunguz of the East comment probably appealed in turn to the ideas of Pan-Turkism in vogue among some nationalists in Turkey, and Russia, which claimed that the Tunguz as well as other nomad Altaic peoples of Central and North Asia were kindred to the Turks and that all of them had lived together in the past in an original homeland, the Turan somewhere in Central Asia. The Japanese commitment to the Ottoman tradition lingered even in Japanese documents. Gaimushō telegrams from Istanbul even into the late 1930s identify the city in Japanese as the imperial capital, Kunfu, the term used for the city during the Ottoman period. Politically, Matsuoka’s visit was probably intended to make it possible for him to consult over intelligence matters. Istanbul was designated as the main centre for Japanese information gathering about Russia in addition to Madrid that was the centre for Japanese intelligence in Europe. The periodic conferences in Istanbul of Japanese diplomats from the region usually alarmed the Ankara government as it might be construed as anti-Soviet activity.26 Istanbul always had been the seat of Japanese army and navy intelligence since the Meiji period. Japanese military attachés were usually resident in Istanbul during these years rather than Ankara. It is also incumbent for the analysis of this story that major figures of Japanese intelligence who also happened to be active leaders of the militarist politics in Japan were attachés in Turkey. Before Matsuoka’s visit, Colonel Hashimoto Kingorō, the coup maker of the 1930s who was from the Russia division of the Army General Staff, had been assigned to Turkey as the army military attaché and stayed there between 1927 and 1930. Claiming to be deeply moved by the Kemalist revolution which he observed, the Turkish Republican Revolution apparently became some kind of a model of inspiration for Hashimoto. He advocated a revolution in Japan by a military leadership similar to the case of Kemal Atatürk to correct Japan’s

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incomplete Restoration.27 After Hashimoto, Iimura Jō, later Lt. General, was the military attaché in Ankara 1930–32, again, a figure who will appear regularly in the future as a participant in Islam policy activities. The stance of the Ankara government showed the problems that Japanese Islam policy faced in ideological and strategic terms with the Turkish Republic despite the fact that the whole agenda was based on the desired rapprochement between Japan and the Turkish world. Probably for the very same references, Matsuoka’s refusal to visit Ankara was met with cold disapproval by Foreign Minister Tevfik Rüstü Aras who represented the official Turkish foreign policy of close alliance with the Soviet Union which derived from the collaboration of both revolutionary regimes after the First World War against Britain. Turkish foreign policy pursued a policy of balance of power between Britain and the Soviet Union. The Turkish government had also stayed clear of any support of Japanese actions in the Far East. Furthermore, any references to Islamic internationalism, use of Istanbul, the former imperial capital, would be anathema to the radical secularist policies of the Kemalist regime which had just abolished the caliphate and other elements of Islamic culture. According to Sherrill, Aras in a chiding telephone conversation with the chargé d’affaires of the Japanese embassy, with Sherrill present in the room, expressed the government’s surprise at the inability of Matsuoka to visit Ankara. The gesture which put Sherrill at ease, diplomatically disassociated the Republican authorities from the implications of Matsuoka’s press conference and, by inference, from Japanese policies in Manchuria. Interestingly enough, in a later meeting on 19 January 1933, Aras thanked Sherrill for advising him to refuse the Soviet ambassador’s suggestion that Turkey recognize Manchukuo and, although not clear on this point, implied that Turkey would go along with the United States about the Lytton Report.28

REBELLION IN INNER ASIA Matsuoka’s sudden visit to Istanbul has to be evaluated in conjunction with the developments in Manchuria, Northwest China, and Inner Asia between 1932 and 1933 in order to understand why references to Islam intensified at this time. It must be remembered that the independence declaration of Manchukuo was issued on 1 March 1932, during which time the Kurban Ali group intensified Islam-oriented pro-Japanese activities in Manchuria. Upon Matsuoka’s return, Japan walked out of the League of Nations on 24 February 1933, which went hand in hand with the Kwantung Army invasion of Jehol and North China in the early months of 1933. These events activated the local Islam-based intelligence operations in Northwest China, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolian, the so-called Muslim fertile land policy referred to by Nishihara. In Inner Asia and Northwest China, Muslim rebellions erupted during this period and intensified in 1933 which coincided with the surfacing of Japanese Islam policy under Matsuoka. Commensurate to the Manchurian Invasion of 1931, the Turkic population in Xinjiang, or Chinese Turkestan, rose to rebellion with the Kumul uprising of 4 April 1931, that was continuing full force. On 12 November 1933, the leaders of the rebellion, Hoca Niyaz and Yolbars Khan of Kumul and Mehmed Emin Bugra of Kashgar, declared the Turkish Islamic State of East Turkestan (Sarki Türk Islam Cumhuriyeti), an event suggested to have been encouraged by the British to

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contain Soviet influence. The Turkestan rebellion briefly forged together during 1933 while numerous characters of the Pan-Islamist scene slipped into Xinjiang from Afghanistan to join the fight. Among them were Tevfik Pasha, the former minister of King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, known for his Pan-Islamism. (plate 12 ) Tevfik Pasha later went briefly to Japan with the help of Kitada Masamoto, the Japanese ambassador in Afghanistan who was closely monitoring the situation and apparently was an advocate of extending Japanese support to the Xinjiang rebels.29 Strange Turkish types appeared on the highlands of Turkestan: a Dr Mustafa Ali of Izmir, apparently an anti-Kemalist exile known for his Pan-Turkist views, and Mustafa Nedim, actually Colonel Nedim Kaytmaz of Istanbul who is understood to have gone to Xinjiang unofficially, and the most mysterious of them all, Kemal Kaya, a former Ottoman officer educated in Germany who had fallen prisoner to the Russians.30 The latter had escaped from his Russian prison, and may have returned back to Istanbul but later slipped into Afghanistan. Finally, during the 1930s, he ended up being the military commander of the Chinese Muslim warlord Ma Zhongyin of Gansu, training his troops in modern warfare, apparently with some success. All were former Young Turks, some had been with Enver Pasha in the Basmaçi rebellion of Central Asia back in 1922. And now they came back through Afghanistan to fight with the rebels of Chinese Turkestan. In 1933, the Kumul uprising was in trouble, however. Upon the plea of a desperate Yolbars Khan, one of the rebel commanders, Ma, who apparently had grandiose visions himself of becoming the sultan of Inner Asia, decided to help the Turkic rebels who were besieged with Chinese nationalist forces. The general marched off in full force to Xinjiang to enter the foray which for the moment became a Sino-Turkic Muslim upheaval. The Xinjiang upheaval was brief, however. In April 1934, Soviet forces crushed the Turkestan rebellion, aiding the authority of the local Chinese governor. Later, in 1936, the Turkish would rebel again under General Mahmud Muhiti who is thought to have had Japanese support. Finally, in 1944, the Ili rebellion was the last of the Muslim rebellions of Chinese Turkestan. Geographically isolated, the Chinese Turkestan Muslim rebellions in Xinjiang province were crushed with Soviet and Chinese collaboration.31 The OSS reports stress direct Japanese planning of the Muslim rebellions which would be in line with the citadel idea of Matsuoka cited by Shimano. Japanese investigators travelled to Xinjiang and wrote a number of reports on the conditions of the area since the late Meiji period, the latest ones dealing with the 1920s and 1930s. The Japanese motive was to develop economic and political contacts in the area, as a possible use for Japan to stop the southward expansion of Russia from Siberia. Contemporary observers such as Owen Lattimore and General Sheng Shicai [Sheng Shih-tsai] agreed that there was quite a lot of Japanese machinations in the revolts in the form of agents who trained troops and financial support, although Wu Aiqin [Aichin Wu], the representative of the Nanjing government, tended to discount claims of their importance.32 Whether the Japanese planned the whole Xinjiang operation is debatable, however, but it is clear that Japanese agents were active in the province. A close associate of General Ma was discovered to be Onishi Tadashi, a Genyōsha [Great Ocean Society precursor to the Kokuryūkai] man who also was an adviser in Ma’s camp together with Kemal Kaya. Onishi had been sent to North China collecting intelligence for some time and had ended up helping Ma’s military.

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A study by Nyman reveals that Colonel Nedim Kaytmaz bought arms from Japan, although we do not know quite how, and trained the rebel armies of Hoca Niyaz in Khotan. According to Gaimushō documents studied by Whiting and Forbes, a Major Imada of the General Staff and another unidentified officer, plus Minister Ariyoshi Akira of Shanghai tried to enter Xinjiang during the rebellion.33 Shimano, who minces no words about any matter, evaluates the question of Kwantung Army kōsaku, a popular military term meaning cultivation activities including propaganda and intelligence, concerning Xinjiang. He explains that it was a policy in preparation which, however, was scuttled by Colonel Itagaki Seishirō, one of the major figures in the Manchurian Invasion of 1931. Shimano tells us that a Colonel Ishimoto of the Kwantung Army General Staff wanted help from Shimano to draw a strategic map of Xinjiang and prepare a report on the area. The objective was that this would be needed in the future in the event a war broke out, to stop the advance of Soviet Russia into the Far East. Again, using Kurban Ali’s contacts within the Tatar émigré community as well as White Russians, Shimano procured the help of a former artillery general, ‘Banjin’, whose mother was Turkish to do the map. With the help of other émigrés, Shimano claims he prepared a classified report on the military strategic value of Xinjiang, Shinkyōshō no senryakuteki kachi. Apparently he also prepared a Central Asia battle plan upon another request by Major General Obata Hideyoshi of the Kwantung Army, again using Kurban Ali’s acquaintances from the Russian army. All of this sounds convincing as an account of policy preparation, but the dating of these events remains vague as the Xinjiang rebellion erupted first 1931–34, and again in 1936. For the second report, for example, Shimano says that by the time he finished it, Matsuoka became a minister which would mean quite late in 1940, and that he took a copy with him, but none of this really proves much. In sum, there was collaboration between elements of Japanese military and intelligence and the participants of the Turkic rebellion in Xinjiang, with Kurban Ali and others in the Russia Muslim Tatar Diaspora aiding the formulation of possible strategies for the future of the Muslim regions in Inner Asia if the rebellions were successful. Japanese involvement in the Turkestan rebellion was clandestine and indirect.34 (plate 13)

MUSLIMS FLOCK TO JAPAN The vision in the strategic expectation of the Japanese participants and their collaborators in this scheme is more important than what was accomplished in the end. The distance of Inner Asia from any significant Japanese military force nearby simply made a major operation such as in Manchuria or even North China unfeasible. Unlike the assumption of the OSS reports that point to the rebellion as a conspiratorial plan of the Japanese militarists, the rebellion in Xinjiang also, however, appears to have actually stemmed from the initiative of the indigenous Muslim warlords and commanders, who sought Japanese help. Rather than being a sole Japanese plan of aggression as had been the case in Manchuria, in this case, the Japanese militarists were collaborating with a nationalist movement already fermenting in the province. Pan-Islamist and Pan-Turkist figures in Ankara and Cairo actually contacted the local Japanese military attachés to seek aid for the Turkestan rebellion in Xinjiang.35

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All in all, the Japanese military and Asianist figures who were using the Islam policy line had great expectations for the year 1933 that makes it a turning point in the accumulation of activities towards, the use of an Islam policy. Within a year after the Matsuoka press conference in Istanbul, during 1933, Muslim activists from many parts of the world started flocking to Japan. On 12 October 1933, the experienced Pan-Islamism activist Abdürreşid ibrahim, who had been the pioneer of Japanese- Muslim formulation of an Islam policy back in 1909, arrived in Japan again (plates 14 and 15). The career of Ibrahim, after his visit to Japan in the late Meiji period, is worth citing here, for it represents the character of the Japan and Islam connections which had begun in the late Meiji Romanov-Ottoman worlds, and now it looked as if these contacts were being revived. By 1933 Ibrahim was an elderly man of 84, whose life since his visit to Japan back in 1908 had been typical of the revolutionary activism of his generation being involved in one battle and conflict after another. Having fought against the Italians in Libya, Ibrahim worked as an Ottoman special agent during the First World War. The Kokuryūkai records show that the society continued to have contacts with him, noting his activities as a special agent during the war. His son, Munir Bey who had graduated from Waseda University in 1911, probably the first Turkish-speaking student in Japan, had been working in Japan and later in Turkey, but kept clear of his father’s political activities and ideology.36 Between 1920 and 1923, Ibrahim had been active in the political turmoil during the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution and had acted as a conduit in relations with the Turkish authorities, also helping to expedite the emigration of the destitute Muslim population to Anatolia. During this period, Ibrahim appears to have also briefly visited Xinjiang. After the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Ibrahim went to Mecca, again on an ostensible religious pilgrimage in 1924, and is thought to have met with Tanaka Ippei, the companion of Kurban Ali during these years, who is said to have forwarded an invitation to Ibrahim to come to Japan. After 1924, he was forced into house arrest by the new secularist regime in Ankara which distrusted his PanIslamist views. Forced to live in Resadiye, a central Anatolian village of Siberian Tatar settlers, he, however, was allowed to leave Turkey in August 1933 with a Republican passport. First he visited Egypt, then sailed to China from the Hijaz in Saudi Arabia, and visited the Tatar community in Mukden. On 12 October 1933, Ibrahim arrived in Tokyo met by many Japanese friends and local émigrés.37 The same year, Ayaz Ishaki, a Pan-Turkist well-known literary figure and political activist with strongly secular nationalist views arrived in Tokyo. Similar to Ibrahim and Kurban Ali, Ayaz was also from the Kazan milieu of Turkist and Islamist activities of Romanov Russia, and had supported the Bolsheviks briefly as a socialist, but now was living in Diaspora in Berlin. Upon his arrival in Japan, he immediately organized a new Tatar émigré organization, the Idil Ural Society of Japan, which was originally founded among the Tatar community of Manchuria. The society soon surfaced as the arch-rival of that of Kurban Ali whose Pan-Islamist line was adamantly opposed by Ayaz and his followers among the émigré community, indicating that not all émigrés were united in supporting Kurban Ali’s Islam-oriented activities that had up to now been encouraged by the interested Japanese parties. The Gaimushō records tell us that conflict arose between the two groups which even led to a fight during a meeting in Izumibashi organized by the Ayaz party on

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11 February 1934.38 Muslim activists of numerous movements arrived in Japan during 1933 in expectation of a political career within the émigré community. One of the most respected scholars of Islamic theology of his day, Musa Carullah Bigiyef who was actually from Russia thus showing again the link of the Russia Muslim political Diaspora to Japan after the October Revolution, came to Japan in 1938 upon the invitation of Abdürreşid ibrahim. His objective was to help educate the Japanese in Islamic subjects and to participate in missionary activities in China and Southeast Asia.39 The political émigrés in Japan were not from the Turkic world alone but figures who were part of the concurrent Muslim rebellion in Xinjiang, especially after the demise of that revolt in 1934. The Gaimushō records indicate that Tevfik Pasha, the former minister of King Ibn Saud who had been fighting as a commander in the Turkestan rebellion since 1931, now gave interviews in 1936 to the foreign ministry and revealed a Pan-Islamist plan to topple the power of Great Britain in Asia.40 (plate 12) The Turkestan connection is apparent in the case of Muhsin Çapanog-lu, apparently a friend of Kurban Ali from Paris, known to be a part of the Ottoman-loyalist Diaspora, who now started teaching Turkish in a Tokyo military school.41 This Muslim enthusiasm with Japan also contained a mixed bag of motives that remain under shadows at the moment which the records do not acknowledge readily. Unlike the typical Diaspora personalities, Mehmed Rauf (Kirkanahtar), an active member of the Turkish secret service of the Republic, also arrived in Tokyo in 1933 and started teaching Arabic and Turkish in Tokyo.42 The story demands further study but suffice it to say, even in today’s Turkey, the present-day National Intelligence Service authorities had found it expedient to delete sensitive materials from Mehmed Rauf’s personal library before it was sold in Istanbul’s second-hand book market after his death.43 Both Whiting and Lattimore noted Japanese military attachés in the major capitals of Ankara, Kabul, and Cairo contact Muslims who were interesting in going to Japan and wanted Japanese help for their own political agenda.44 Lattimore notes that by the 1930s, Japanese interest in Muslim lands and Muslim politics had been systematically organized. Contacts were made in Turkey and Iran as well as in Xinjiang, and also among Chinese Muslim in China proper.45 In view of the fact that Hashimoto Kingorō had been the military attaché in Ankara between 1927 and 1930, subsequently to be replaced by Iimura Jō between 1930 and 1932, it is likely that such contacts were instrumental in the case of Turkey. A later Gaimushō study on Islamic organizations in Japan reports that Iimura knew Ibrahim and his son Munir very well.46 Here, Japanese pilgrimages to Mecca served as the means of contact for the Japanese authorities interested in this Islam connection with Muslims. Omar Yamaoka who had been introduced to the Arab authorities in Mecca in 1910 had begun this form of networking. Later, Tanaka Ippei, the student of Yamaoka and again one of the first experts on Chinese Islam, had followed with his pilgrimage in 1924 when he probably met Ibrahim. This was an interesting strategy of religiopolitical character typical of much of what the Japanese Asianist circles saw as Islam policy. Japanese pilgrimages of Asianist intelligence figures continued in 1934, and 1936, twice in a row which was organized by the experienced Tanaka Ippei, who died after the 1934 pilgrimage, accompanying young Japanese students of Islam who would become involved in Islam-oriented activities in the future. On such occasions,

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Japanese Muslims frequently accompanied by Muslims from China and Manchuria would pitch their tents next to that of Turkestanis and other nationalities, some of whom were recruited to help the Japanese activities among Asian Muslims. Such Japanese pilgrimages to the holy cities of Islam were naturally used as propaganda material to give weight to the Japanese claim to be the saviour of Islam in Asia. In 1938, for example, the Japanese pilgrims who went with the Manchurian Chinese Muslim Zhang, who may be identical with the one who worked with Kurban Ali in Manchuria, contacted Turkestanis from Xinjiang in Mecca who returned back to Japan with them.47

A SULTAN FOR INNER ASIA? The comparison of the Japanese hand in the Turkestan rebellion in Xinjiang during 1933, with the previous Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the declaration of Manchukuo in 1932, was then and still is today also imminent. Despite the obvious differences between the two events, there is still some resemblance in the grand outline of the Islam-oriented strategy during the Turkic rebellion and the main model of Manchukuo. As historical events go, the Manchukuo model for a Japanese Islam policy in Xinjiang really strikes home in 1933 with the arrival of the 29-year-old Prince Abdül Kerim Efendi (honorific title for an Ottoman prince), the grandson of the well-known Pan-Islamist Sultan Abdülhamid II who had formed relations with Japan in the Meiji period. On 20 May, 1933, the prince arrived in Kobe from Singapore. He had been living in Damascus with his father Prince Selim and other members of the dynasty under difficult circumstances after the forced exile of the Ottoman dynasty from Turkey in 1924 by the Republican regime of Kemal Atatürk. The Tōkyō nichi nichi carried the news of his arrival both in the Japanese and in the English versions of the newspaper. The English version reported that the Turkish nobleman and high Mohammedan priest Prince Abdül Kerim was on a visit to Japan for furthering Turkish–Japanese relations. The invitations mentioned in the article are noteworthy. The prince had been invited to visit Japan by Lt. Gen. Kikuchi Takeo and Prince Ichijō, both members of the House of Peers. Both figures were very much members of the inner circles of the ultra-nationalist Asianist circles of the day with close links to the Japanese Kwantung Army forces that had concocted the Manchurian Invasion. After graduating from the Army Academy, Kikuchi joined the General Staff Headquarters and became the head of intelligence in Mukden in 1924 and was later the demagogue in the House of Peers leading the attacks on Professor Minobe Tatsukichi for his organ theory of the emperor that marked the end to freedom of thought in Japanese universities. Prince Ichijō of the Fujiwara lineage of Kyoto was a navy colonel, but more significant for this event is that he was also the president of the famous Zenrin kyōkai [The Good Neighbourhood Society], the association which was active in intelligence and language training for Inner Mongolia at the time.48 Joseph Grew, the US Ambassador, probably felt the news was of sufficient importance to include the newspaper clipping about the prince in his papers. Grew had been ambassador in Ankara before his Tokyo appointment and because of his close friendship with the new republican elite he must have been quite aware of the political sensitivity the visit of an exiled Ottoman prince would create for the Turkish authorities who were concerned about the danger of restorationism.49

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Two photographs of the prince appeared in Japanese newspapers, one on the day of his arrival, in the Japanese version of Tōkyō nichi nichi on 22 May 1933, showing him as a bespectacled young man with an intense expression, the other in the Asahi newspaper the same year when the prince participated in the celebrations of a religious holiday by the kaikyōto Muslim peoples of Japan. From the photograph it is clear that Kurban Ali is standing in front of the seated party and facing the prince, who is seated in the centre, and is conveying the gratitude of the community. On two sides of the table are Tatar émigrés and at the far end are two Japanese officers in uniform, who are unfortunately not identified in the text, and their faces remain so much in the shade that they are not recognizable today as well, quite apropos to the character of the event itself that has a shady side.50

THE OSS ACCOUNT Let us now trace the story of the prince from the OSS report of 1944, actually written ten years after the event, which presents the story as part of Japanese conspiracy. The OSS report relates the Tass reports, and the Pravda, Izvestia alarmist news about another Manchukuo in design by Japanese militarist aggression in North Asia, this time to set up a pro-Japanese state somewhere in central Xinjiang, Chinese Turkestan, and possibly sections of Russian Turkestan as well. The international press, especially Filastin, a nationalist paper of Jaffa in British Palestine, and the journal Oriento Modemo, reported regularly on the imminent plan to enthrone the prince if the Muslim rebellion by the Chinese Muslim General Ma Zhongyin and if the Khotan–Kashgar rebellion of the Turk population in Xinjiang were ever to be victorious. From the beginning the conspiratorial side to the story is unclear, however. The prince immediately denied the plot in an interview with the Englishlanguage Tokyo weekly, Trans-Pacific, 27 July 1933, and later as if to counter the growing snowball of rumours he wrote a letter from Shanghai which appeared in the Cairo daily, Al-Mokattam, 1 January 1934. The letter is a strange mixture of denial and affirmation, accusing the Soviets of responsibility for spreading the rumours that began with his arrival in Tokyo. The rumours he objects to caused protests lodged not only by the Soviet but also by the Turkish envoy to Tokyo. Criticizing the Turkish protest, the prince bitterly remarks that the Turkish diplomat might have at least been constrained by considerations of common race from hampering a movement looking towards the liberation of thirty million Turks from the Russian yoke, even if this movement were after all, merely hypothetical.51 The account in the OSS report is a good indication of the problems that Matsuoka’s press conference in Istanbul, alluding to Japanese-Muslim friendship under the aegis of Manchukuo and the whole scenario of the prince, presented in terms of real-politik: the conflict of interest between Japan, the Soviet Union, and the Turkish Republic handicapped the rapprochement between Japanese Asíanism, military policies, and the Diaspora of Islamism and Turkism. According to the OSS report, there were connections that indicated Japanese designs for a possible Muslim entity in the Inner Asian frontier zone. During his travels in China and Manchuria the prince was accompanied by the above-mentioned Muhsin Çapanog-lu, the Diaspora Turk who was a close friend of Kurban Ali, teaching in a school in Manchuria and later to teach for the Japanese military. From July 1933, the prince lived in Shanghai throughout most of the Xinjiang rebellion. His movements were

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duly reported by the Chinese and the Soviet press, claiming that propaganda bills issued by the Xinjiang Muslims in Tokyo were being distributed by Xinjiang. By March 1934 however, while the prince was still in Shanghai, Ma’s rebellion collapsed and during the summer of 1934 the Soviets crushed the East Turkestan Republic movement by assisting the forces of Governor Sheng Shicai. On 9 May the prince attended a conference of the Muslim émigré community of Kobe including Tatars, Turks, Kirghiz and other residents in East Asia, which was said to have as its object the establishment of an Islamic Kingdom made up of districts in Xinjiang and Russian Turkestan, but it was already wishful thinking by now.52 The end to these dramatic turn of events was tragic. In September 1934 the prince arrived in New York. What unfolded remains a mystery. According to a report in the New York Times, 4 August 1935, the 31-year-old prince had been living a life of poverty in New York for one year and was found dead having committed suicide, presumably in a Hotel Cadillac on Broadway and 43rd street in a poor section of Manhattan. Reported immediately as big news in the New York Times of 4, 7, and 11 August, the story of the prince’s suicide is narrated in cloak and dagger terms of a Hollywood film taking on an oriental tragedy. The newspaper reports weave into the story an unhappy love affair and the strange image of the prince having committed suicide seated as if in prayer with his legs crossed under him. The newspaper report claims that in a note addressed to Police Commissioner Valentine written in Turkish script, the prince said he was ill and had failed in his efforts to marry a rich woman and thus to restore his dynasty to a throne. Noting that the prince registered at the hotel at 12:55 AM and at 2 AM sent a messenger with a note to a Miss Alice De Stefano of Bronx informing her that he intended to kill himself. According to later news items the funeral of the prince had taken place in New York with few attending and the body was later shipped to Beirut, where his family was living in exile. On the other hand, the original documents written right after the event and before the report in the New York Times tell a different story. The report of the chief medical examiner of New York and Patrol Officer John Donellan of the 18th Precinct, who identified the body, do not mention the prayer position of death, which would appear to be physically difficult. Donellan just states that the deceased was found dead. Most important, he writes that no suicide notes were found. However, later, in the New York Times report of 4 August, a Detective Rehman who had been assigned to the case had the note addressed to Commissioner Valentine orally translated at the Turkish consulate. In addition to the love story, Rehman said that the prince’s trip to China was also in connection with an attempted Restoration. It is clear that the suicide note was not in the hotel room and surfaced later from undisclosed sources. In hindsight it also strikes as odd that the prince would address his letter to Commissioner Valentine and not to a member of his family, coupled with the fact that he would address him in Turkish rather than writing the letter in French which was at the time the lingua franca of the Ottoman family.53 The circumstances of the evidence leads one to believe that the whole story in the New York Times, which the OSS report took on later in 1944, also about the manner of suicide and the note, is not reliable. The death of the prince invites the question as to whether it might be foul play as members of the Ottoman family continue to believe, or simply the irresistibility of journalistic orientalizing, or both; at this point these questions cannot be answered.

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Regardless of the circumstances of the prince’s death, however, the importance of the event lies in the general consensus at the time that it was another Japanese plot to set up a Japanese heavenly kingdom of Islam somewhere in Northwest China to Inner Asia. If ever the 1933 rebellion in Inner Asia came to something, the Japanese military authorities would benefit in strategic terms. On 26 February 1934, Joseph Grew talked to Nebil Bey (Bati), the Turkish ambassador about the matter. Their talk reveals the evaluation of the event at the time. Nebil Bey noted the difficulty of talking to the Americans because the Japanese make note of it. Interesting points of this conversation is that Nebil Bey gave more weight to the role of General Hayashi Senjūrō, whom he describes as more dangerous than General Araki Sadao whom he described as a man of theory and abstract ideas and therefore not prone to war. In 1934 Araki, who was seen as the leader of the Kōdōha Imperial Way faction, had just been replaced by Hayashi. Both men were directly involved in the Manchurian Invasion, but Hayashi was ultimately to come to a position of power in the military after Araki’s clique had been eliminated by the 26 February 1936, young officers uprising: Nebil Bey explained that the Japanese policy was to decentralize China and create independent units with Japanese participation. Hayashi was thinking of an encircling movement through Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan. A curious comment is that this plot was opposed by the British who had set up a republic in Kashgar and had supported a rapprochement with Turkey. Noting that the Mongolians were too proud of their independence to fuse with Manchukuo and that the Japanese were building roads in Manchuria, the conversation reflected the prevalent opinion in the diplomatic corps at the time.54

THE GAIMUSHŌ ACCOUNT The Japanese foreign ministry records for 1933 tell its side of the story in a way that confirms some of the above scenario, showing us the inside discussions in the wake of the diplomatic crisis that the visit of the prince caused in Tokyo. A 1933 Gaimushō research report classified at the time narrates in detail the problem caused by the prince, based upon discussions with a member of the Turkish embassy and including the personal conclusion of the person who prepared the report. What is noticeable is the impartial tone of the report disassociating as much as possible the foreign ministry from the whole issue that is shown to be the operation of the military and Asianist figures. The report reveals the disagreement between the Turkish authorities and the Diaspora activities sponsored by the Japanese. The report shows that the foreign ministry knew quite well of the Kokuryūkai, Baron Hiranuma and Kwantung Army responsibility for the invitation of the prince.55 The report details that while Fuad Bey, the earlier chargé d’affaires of the Turkish embassy, initially welcomed Kurban Ali, the latter had not been welcome in the embassy for quite a while ever since he tried to present himself as a representative of the embassy in the Ajia minzoku taikai [The Conference of Asian Nations] five-six years earlier in Nagasaki. The report relates the conversation in 1933 between Nebil Bey of the Turkish embassy, who replaced Fuad, and Minokawa Tokijirō, who was a Kokurūkai member, an agent, and a member of the Baron Hiranuma circle. Jitsukawa apparently visited the embassy and told that the recent arrival of the prince in Japan was purely for tourism and in no way related to a restorationist movement. The embassy response was that essentially the

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sultan was a traitor who sold his country to Britain. To perform such sensational activities on the occasion of this his arrival in Japan would leave a disagreeable impression upon the Turkish government, so it would be expedient to have him depart quickly. The report continues to note that, in response, Jitsukawa said that Japan had always shown an attitude of tolerance providing a place of asylum to revolutionaries from the Philippines to the revolutionaries from China. Some days later the story about the prince being in the employ of the Japanese government and the puppet of the Xinjiang independence movement splashed. Having discerned that the prince had been invited while in Singapore by some Japanese schemers and that Kurban Ali seemed to be involved in this as well, the embassy unofficially demanded the prince’s departure, but upon his arrival in Shanghai wild rumours arose that the prince would go to Xinjiang with Japan’s help to found a second Manchukuo. The embassy member concluded that the issue was closed once and for all when Foreign Minister Hirota Kōki, who could not easily dismiss the rumours, unofficially announced that they were unfounded, which indicates that the Gaimushō gave unofficial assurance to the embassy about the matter. The person who prepared the report concluded with an assessment of the stand of all the parties in question regarding the Islam agenda. He noted that Kurban Ali’s faction was backed by the military (mainly the Sanbō honbu, the General Staff), the police, and civilian right-wing organizations. The Ayaz Ishaki faction was backed by the Turkish embassy, and the Kobe mosque congregation was notably following Imam Shamugunov, a Tatar émigré figure. While it was hard to distinguish clearly between the factions because of rumours, the report notes that Kurban Ali’s faction was being (financially) supported by the authorities and the right wing, while the Ayaz Ishaki faction was supported by the Turkish embassy, the resident Indian Muslims, and those outside of the government who were related in some way to Islam. The conclusion of the report is instructive for the Gaimushō evaluation of the conflict between the embassy and Kurban Ali’s activities related to the prince that outlines the major ideological issues of the question. It noted that the Turkey of Kemal was absorbed in the internal problem of Europeanization reforms and did not have the time to be concerned with grand international policies such as Pan-Islamism, Pan-Turkism, Pan-Turanism, and the like. And it disliked to an extreme the caliph and sultan. With respect to Islam, too, the regime had been quite merciless in its handling. The rise of Islam might revive memories of the sultan caliph and be the base for the possible restoration of the sultan. Because there was this fear, Kurban Ali who advocated Islamism strongly and was anti-Soviet, was a little awkward for Turkey that had special friendly relations with the USSR. The report is a good indication of the problems that Matsuoka’s press conference vision in Istanbul and the whole scenario of the prince presented in terms of real-politik to the Gaimushō which appears to have been stuck with yet another fait accompli from the gunbu or military elements who had invited Prince Abdül Kerim. The chess game between Japan, the Soviet Union, and the Turkish Republic impeded the links between Japanese Asianism, military policies, and the Diaspora of Islamism and Turkism. More to the point, there was no Islamic victory in Xinjiang or elsewhere nearby by the end of the summer of 1934.

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CONCLUSION The year 1933 was a turning point in Japan’s Islam policy for Matsuoka Yōsuke and the military elements behind the Manchurian Invasion of 1931 who were banking on a military victory of the Turkestan rebellion in Xinjiang that would protect Manchuria as a buffer zone between China and the Soviet Union. The Islam policy described above was directed against Chinese nationalism on the one hand by organizing a pro-Japanese lobby in Manchuria, and against Soviet communism on the other by supporting anti-communist elements especially among the Muslim Diaspora and the scenario of the sultan for Inner Asia. But the policy failed, which is part of the reason why we do not know of it very much today. The policy remained a gamble, an ambition with some clandestine activity. What is interesting for us today is probably what was envisioned rather than what was accomplished in the end, for the Japanese interest in the political currents fermenting in the Muslim world, in this case, in North Asia, illuminates the networks, contacts, and motivations which had begun back in the turn of the century Meiji period and represent a ‘longue durée’ history of Japanese nationalism’s entry into the world of Islam into the Taishō period of the 1920s and the Shōwa period of the early 1930s. There is also an interplay of ideology with strategy that ought to be discussed. The Altaic brothers argument of the Japanese Asianists appears to have compatibly fused with the Pan-Turkism of Russia Muslim Tatars as expressed in Kurban Ali’s letter and the Pan-Islamism of Abdürreşid ibrahim and the fighters in Urumchi highlands such as the Arab commander Tevfik Pasha. At the same time this mixture formed the rational for going forth with the strategy of bringing in a sultan for Inner Asia among other things. What Owen Lattimore and the later OSS reports painted in strong colours as a Japanese conspiracy plan was part of the story. Actually, what surfaces as a suggestive theme in this story as presented in this essay is that Japan’s Islam policy exercise was a two-way street with a PanIslamist and Pan-Turkist movement in a precarious Diaspora existence by now trying a last stand for victory with Japanese help, a vision that had its origins back in the late nineteenth century. That some Muslim elements in North China and Inner Asia were already active in a political quest for nationalist and Islamist objectives made Japan’s Islam policy in part a response to an already fertile environment—a point that is significantly different from the pure Japanese conspiracy view of the OSS wartime reports. Soviet and Turkish Republican intervention in this visionary movement of alliance between Japanese Pan-Asianism and Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism that was interlaced with military strategy seems to have helped nip in the bud any possibilities for success to these currents that threatened the national interests of these two new revolutionary regimes. After the demise of the Xinjiang affair, we will see that the Japanese Asianist military circles in Japan that by now are firmly entrenched in the need for exercising an Islam policy for Japan will shift their gaze down south. Finally, the account of aspects of pre-war Japanese involvement with the nationalist currents during the early 1930s, in the strategically sensitive regions of Central and Inner Asia of today, induces some of this cloak-and-dagger story of the past to transcend beyond its time as a referential background to the global problematic of the present. The Japanese Asianist idea that Islam can become a citadel in Asia against communism which in the case of Japanese strategy was played out with

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Kurban Ali, Ibrahim, and the other Muslims in exile, the Diaspora communities, and the indigenous Muslims who were living in East Asia, was to become a Cold War strategy for world power interests until recent times.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beasley, W. G. 1981. Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carrère d’Encausse, Hélène. 1988. Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolution in Central Asia. London: I. B. Tauris. Esenbel, Selçuk. 2000. ‘Japanese Interest in the Ottoman Empire’. In The Japanese and Europe: Images and Perceptions, edited by Bert Edström. Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library, 95–124. Forbes, Andrew D. W. 1986. Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: A Political History of Republican Sinkiang 1911–1949. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Gaikō shiryōkan [Diplomatic Record Office, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs): Honna ni okeru shūkyō oyobi fukyō zakken [Miscellaneous documents on religious and missionary activities in the home country], I. 2.1.0.1.1–2. Kakkoku ni okeru shūkyō oyobi fukyō kankei zakken [Miscellaneous documents on religious and missionary activities in other countries], 2.1.0.2. 2–5. [Grew, Joseph]. Joseph Grew Papers, Harvard University. Görmez, Mehmct. 1994. Musa Carullah Bigiyef. Ankara: Türkiye diyanet vakti yaymlari, 125. Kamozawa Iwao. 1982, 1986. ‘Zainichi tatarujin ni tsuite’ [On Tatars in Japan]. Bulletin of Faculty of Letters, Hosei University 28: 27–56; 29: 223–302. Kokuryūkai 30 nen jireki [The 30 years history of the Kokuryūkai]. 1930. Tokyo: Kokuryūkai. Komura Fujio. 1988. Nihon isurāmushi: Senzen senchū rekishi no uagare no naka ni katsuyōshita Nihonjin musurimutachi no gunzō [A history of Islam in Japan: The group of Japanese Muslims who were active in the process of the history before and during the war|. Tokyo: Nihon isurāmu yūkō renmai. Kurban Galiev letter, Sept. 1922, 03676–03694, Library of Congress Microfilms on Japanese Documents, M.T 1.1.2.1.2. Lattimore, Owen. 1950 (1975). Pivot of Asia: Sinkiang and the Inner Asian Frontiers of China and Russia. Reprint ed. New York: AMS Press. Liu Chieh-lien [Liu Jielian]. 1941. Tenpōshisei jitsuroku [The real record of the holy land of Arabia]. Trans. by Tanaka Ippei. Tokyo: Dainihon kaikyō kyōkai shuppanbu. Matsunaga, Akira. ‘Ayaz Ishaki and the Turko—Tatars in the Far East’. In The Rising sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on the History of Japanese Turkish Relations, edited by Selçuk Esenbel and Inaba Chiharu. Istanbul: Bogazici University Press. Matthews, Tony. 1993. Shadows Dancing: Japanese Espionage Against the West, 1939–1945. London: Robert Hale. Municipal Archives, New York City: File on Prince Abdül Kerim. National Archives, Washington, DC. Relations Between Japan and Turkey 1930–1939: Charles H. Sherrill to Secretary of State, Dec. 27 1932. Charles H. Sherrill to Secretary of State, Ankara, Jan. 19 1933. New York Times. 1935. 4 Aug., 7 Aug., 11 Aug. Nishihara Masao. 1980. Zenkiroku Harubin tokumu kikan: Kantōgun jōhōbu no kiseki [The complete record of the Harbin special agency: The tracks of the Kwantung Army intelligence section]. Tokyo: Mainichi shinbünsha. Norman, E. H. 1944. ‘The Genyosha: A Study in the Origins of JapaneseImperialism’, Pacific Affairs 17: 261–84. Nyman, Lars-Erik. 1977. Great Britain and Chinese, Russian and Japanese Interests in Sinkiang, 1918–1934. Lund Studies in International History, 8. Stockholm: Esselte Studium. Office of Strategic Services, R&A reports: No. 890, ‘Japanese Infiltration Among Muslims Throughout the World’ No. 890.1, ‘Japanese Infiltration Among Muslims in China’

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No. 890.2, ‘Japanese Attempts at Infiltration Among Muslims in Russia and Her Borderlands’ Shillony, Ben-Ami. 1973. Revolt in Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936 Incident. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Shimano Saburō denki kankōkai, ed. 1984. Shimano Saburō: Mantetsu Soren jōhō katsudō no shōgai [Shimano Saburō: The life of a Mantetsu Soviet intelligence activist]. Tokyo: Hara shobō. Storry, Richard. 1957. The Double Patriots: A Study of Japanese Nationalism. London: Chatto & Windus. Tanaka, Stefan. 1993. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Tazawa Takaya. 1998. Musurimu Nippon [Muslim Japan], Tokyo: Shōgakukan. Turkoglu, Ismail. 1995. ‘20 Yüzyilda Bir Türk Seyyahi Abdürreşid ibrahim’ [A Turkish traveller in the twentieth century, Abdürreşid ibrahim], Toplumsal Tarih 20, August: 6–10. Whiting, Allen S., and General Sheng Shih-tsai 1958. Sinkiang: Pawn or Pivot? East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Wu, Aitchen K. 1940 (1984). Turkistan Tumult. Reprint ed. Hong Kong and New York: Oxford University Press. Young, Louise. 1998. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zenkovsky, Sergej A. 1960. Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Zenrin kyōkai, ed. 1981. Zenrin kyōkai shi: Uchimōko ni okeru bunka katsudō [A history of the Zenrin kyōkai: Cultural activities in Inner Mongolia]. Yokohama: Nihon mongoru kyōkai.

NOTES 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

See Esenbel (2000) for a treatment of the story of Ibrahim and the Meiji encounter between the Japanese and the world of Islam. Honpō ni okeru shūkyō oyobi fukyō zakken [Miscellaneous documents on religious and missionary activities in the home country], I. 2.1.0.1. 1–2, Kakkoku ni okeru shūkyō oyobi fukyō kankei zakken [Miscellaneous documents on religious and missionary activities in other countries], I. 2.1.0.2. 2–5. Gaikō shiryōkan [Diplomatic Record Office, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs], hereafter referred to as Honna and Kaku. Office of Strategic Studies, R&A reports number No. 890, ‘Japanese Infiltration Among Muslims Throughout the World’; No. 890.1, ‘Japanese Infiltration Among Muslims in China’; No. 890.2, ‘Japanese Attempts at Infiltration Among Muslims in Russia and Her Borderlands’. Hereafter referred to as OSS with number. I would like to thank Tamamoto Masaru who drew my attention to these interesting sources about the subject which were prepared between 1943–44. Carrère d’Encausse (1988: 54–79); see also Zenkovsky (1960: passim) for Pan-Turkism and Pan-lslamism. Kamozawa (1982, 1986); Shimano Saburō denki kankōkai (1984: 449). Nishihara (1980: 230). Young (1998) for shintenchi, ‘fertile heavenly land’: 5; Nishihara (1980: 230). Kurban Galiev letter, Sept. 1922, 03676–03694, Library of Congress Microfilms on Japanese Documents, M.T. I.I.2.1.2. Tanaka (1993: 88–9). Honpō, Ōa dai-ikka, Sokutaku Imaoka Jûtarō kaikyō kenkyūkai, Waga kuni ni okeru Isura-mu kaikyō undōsha ni tsuite (Shōwa 12 [1937] 12 month 6–12 days: 49). Hereafter quoted as Honpō, Gaimushō 1937 report. See Beasley (1987: 17–97), on the Kita Ikki circle of Japanese nationalist militarist officers and the 1931 Manchurian Invasion; and Shillony (1973: 3–55) on their coup attempt in Japan. Shimano Saburō denki kankōkai (1984: 439–45); for Yamaoka, see Esenbel (2000: 117); Tazawa (1998: 74–87) has brief references to Kurban Ali and Shimano in this well-written narrative on personaiities and incidents from pre-war Muslim Japan. Shimano Saburō denki kankōkai (1984: 450–61). Matsunaga (forthcoming: 4).

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14 Shimano Saburō denki kankōkai (1984: 460). 15 Komura (1988: 59–60). 16 For the few but crucial sources on the Kokuryūkai and its parent organization, the Genyōsha, see Norman (1944) and Storry (1957); Shimano Saburō denki kankōkai (1984: 460). 17 Honpō, Gaimushō 1937 report; Shimano Saburō denki kankōkai (1984: 460–7). 18 Komura (1988: 71); Shimano Saburō deuki kankōkai (1984: 466). 19 Honpō, telegram from the consul-general in Cairo to Foreign Minister Hirota Kōki (Shōwa 10 [1935] 2 month 5 day). 20 Liu (1941), preface by Ōkawa Shūmei. 21 Komura (1988: 78). 22 Shimano Saburō denki kankōkai (1984: 463); Honpō, Ōbeikyoku dai-ikka tokugai dai 6366 gō (Shōwa 7 [1932] 12 month 20 day: 20). 23 Shimano Saburō denki kankōkai (1984: 463). 24 Shimano Saburō denki kankōkai (1984: 463–4). 25 Charles H. Sherrill to Secretary of State, 27 Dec. 1932, including newspaper clippings of press conference. Relations Between Japan and Turkey 1930–1939, National Archives, Washington, DC. 26 Matthews (1993: 113). 27 Shillony (1973: 26). 28 Charles H. Sherrill to Secretary of State, Ankara, 19 Jan., 1933, Relations Between Japan and Turkey 1930–1939, National Archives, Washington, DC. 29 Whiting and Sheng (1958: 38). 30 Nyman (1977: 114); Forbes (1986: 242–8). 31 See OSS 890.1: 100–13, on Xinjiang; Nyman (1977: passim); Forbes (1986: esp. 45–54), Whiting and Sheng (1958: passim); Lattimore (1950 [1975]), Wu (1940 [1984]), on the same period from the perspective of the representative of the Guomindang nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. 32 Wu (1940 [1984]: 237) discounts the effectiveness of the Japanese. 33 Nyman (1977: 114) on Japanese arms; Whiting and Sheng (1958: 40); OSS 890.1, on Xinjiang. 34 Shimano Saburō denki kankōkai (1984: 468). 35 Whiting and Sheng (1958: 40). 36 Kokuryūkai jireki (1930: 17). 37 Türkoglu (1995). 38 Honpō, Zai honna kaikyōto toruko tatarujin funsō mondai chōsa (Shōwa 9 [1934): 51). 39 Komura (1988: 96); for identity, see Görmez (1994: 47). 40 Honpō, Kuwajima kyokuchō ni taisuru Tcwfikku no danwa yōshi (Shōwa 11 [1936] 4 month 16 day: 324); Honna, Tewfikku el Sherifu no ken (Shōwa 11 [1936] 5 month 21 day: 329). 41 Komura (1988: 96); Honna: 284, French paper Tribune Libre (17 April 1935) article on Muhammad Muhsin Çobanoglu who taught Turkish, first in Manchuria and then in the Tokyo Military School. 42 Komura (1988: 90). 43 As told to this author by the owner of the bookstore who sold the remainder, mostly pre-war journals and popular literature in Japanese and Chinese. 44 Whiting and Sheng (1958: 40); Lattimore (1950 [1975]: 209–14). 45 Lattimore (1950 [1975]: 209). 46 Honpō, Imaoka Jūichirō report: 479. 47 Honpō, Nihon kaikyōto no ‘Arabiya’ryokō keikaku ni kansuru ken (Shōwa 11 [1936] 6 month 25 day: 331) on the preparation of the 1936 pilgrimage from Cairo; Kaku, Manshū kokujin Cho nyūkoku kyōka no yumu narabi ni Suzuki ichi gyō no ‘Mckka’ junrei shuppatsu kijitsu toiawasc no ken, telegram no. 18, Shōwa 13 [1938] 1 month 26 day; Ki den dai 23 go ni kanshi: kaikyōto no honna torai ni kanshi joryoku hō-no ken: 155–64, on whether a Mr Zhang from Manchuria could enter Egypt with Suzuki, one of the pilgrims on the way to Mecca, followed by a series of telegrams between Cairo and Tokyo concerning whether Xinjiang people befriended the same party in Mecca can travel with them back to Japan.

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48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Zenrin kyōkai (1981: 268). Newspaper clipping on the prince, Joseph Grew Papers, Harvard University. Tokyō nichi nichi, May 22, 1933: 11; July 6 1933: 2. OSS 890.1, 15 May 1944: 114–9. OSS 890.1, 15 May 1944: 114–9. New York Times [1935], Aug. 4: 21, Aug. 7: 10, Aug. 11: 26. File on Prince Abdül Kerim, Municipal Archives, New York City. Conversation 50, Joseph Grew Papers, Harvard University. Honpō, Zai honna toruko tatarujin funsō mondai chōsa: 59–67.

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❚ First published in Rotem Kowner (ed.), Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904– 5, Vol. I, Centennial Perspectives, Folkestone, Global Oriental, 2007, pp. 263–80.

3

The Legacy of the War and the World of Islam in Japanese Pan-Asian Discourse: Wakabayashi Han’s KaikyoSekai to Nihon a

A

fter the Russo-Japanese War, Muslims had celebrated the Japanese victory as that of the oppressed against the Western imperialists. The victory inspired many Muslims to see Japan as a new form of modernity suitable to Islamic civilization.1 The Japanese response to this worldwide enthusiasm from the Muslim world was as a political and economic actor: to incorporate the nationalist and revolutionary dynamics of Islamic peoples into a joint revolt against the West as part of Japan’s imperial destiny.2 During the Meiji era (1868–1912), Japanese Pan-Asianists pioneered contacts with Muslim political activists primarily in a joint effort to work for Asian emancipation against Russia and Britain. For the Meiji “patriotic activists,” Japan and the world of Islam were to be cultivated in the form of an overseas policy of alliance and cultivation, kaikyō seisaku, a term that was invented to mean Islam policy, that would serve the Japanese empire. However, in so far as the official Meiji governing elite was concerned, Islam policy was not a dominant issue. Hence Islam policy remained as the subject of desire among a set of informal and unofficial contacts between Asianist-oriented Japanese and some Muslim figures that they had met during the Meiji era. However, after the Manchurian invasion of 1931, Japanese-Muslim relations became important for the Asianist orientation of the Japanese Army in Manchuria, and later for Baron Hiranuma’s Asianist foreign policy during the Showa era. The objectives were multifaceted but in general the Islam-oriented Japanese political and military circles saw Islam policy, kaikyō seisaku, the popular term, to mean developing pro-Japanese networks in the Western colonial empires, establishing anti-Communist fronts, or countering Chinese anti-Japanese nationalism; in other words to find friends among Japan’s enemies and help Japan’s global claim to see Asia as a world power. Militarily, the objective was to cultivate local collaborative contacts in such strategically significant areas as the Soviet border, North China, and South East Asia where there were predominant Muslim populations.

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Economically, Japanese business also developed a new commercial interest in the Islamic word in the Near East, with the decline in the political and economic domination of the British and French colonial empires in the region, that was flooded with the phenomenal increase of cheap Japanese exports to Muslim markets.3 Wakabayashi Han’s well-known work titled Kaikyō sekai to nihon (The World of Islam and Japan), that was published first in 1937 and quickly went through numerous reprints, was representative of this intellectual and political rapproachement between the global claim of Japanese Pan-Asianism to emancipate Asian peoples from Western oppression and the Muslim political agenda of nationalism and PanIslamic awakening. Ōkawa Shūmei, who was a major figure in Wakabayashi’s political and intellectual circle, the main intellectual figure of Pan-Asianism in Showa Japan, the “mastermind of Japanese fascism” in the Tokyo trials, justified Japan’s mission to liberate Asia from Western colonialism by war if necessary, saw Islam as the means.4 Given his immersion in German philosophy and Indian thought, Ōkawa’s theoretical scholarly discussions of the topic of Islam presented a perceptive critique of the prevailing Orientalist discourse in Western views of Islam. As one of the major figures, who became the intellectual mentor of the militarist Asianist actors of the day, Ōkawa’s views set the terms of the political agenda for the construction of modern Japan.5 Like Ōkawa, Wakabayashi’s work was also representative of this 1930s interaction between the two militant political currents. However, compared to Ōkawa’s work, it was more of an informed and well-written public-relations book bent on creating a favorable image of the Muslim world for the Japanese public. However, like the publications of Ōkawa, Wakabayashi’s book also advocated a strong political agenda of this 1930s Japanese Pan-Asianist argument why Japan should ally with Muslim agendas for Asian emancipation. Unlike the Meiji Pan-Asianists whose motive appears to have been more to ally with the anti-imperialist forces of Muslim activists against Western empires, in this 1930s argument, Wakabayashi’s vision is much more imperialist with an immediate agenda as he clearly states on numerous occasions in the introduction of Japan’s need “to use Islam as the instrument to govern Asia.”6 The author, Wakabayashi Han, whose name is sometimes read as Nakaba or Nakabe also remains as an enigmatic figure of prewar Islam-oriented activities of Japan. The little that we know about his career is that he was an Islam expert of the Showa era who worked during the 1930s in forming direct contacts between the Japanese and Muslims in the Near East and Asia. He appears to be one of the many experts and agents that the Japanese authorities used as an unofficial network for intelligence-and information-gathering activities. During the 1920s and 1930s, Wakabayashi was in charge of the organization of at least five out of the six Japanese Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of the Islamic faith in Saudi Arabia. Most of these Japanese Muslim pilgrimages of Japanese agents who claimed to have converted to Islam took place during the 1930s some of which are accounted for in detail by Wakabayashi. The pilgrimages reveal the acceleration of Islam policy activities within the military and foreign ministry prior to the outbreak of World War II to find allies among Muslims as well as form pro-Japanese contacts within the Muslim populations of Asian countries. (plate 15)

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JAPANESE MUSLIMS AND THE HADJ MUSLIM PILGRIMAGE AS INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Although written in the thirties, Wakabayashi`s work encapsulates the stories and personalities who are part of the beginning of Japanese-Muslim relations. During the late nineteenth century of the Meiji period many Japanese went overseas and worked as military men, merchants, students, businessmen, officials, political activists, or intelligence agents, which brought them into close contact with Muslim peoples all over Asia. Some of them became Muslims coincidentally, others did so upon orders from the authorities in Japan. There were not many Japanese converts to Islam during these years, but their importance was not so much in their numbers but in the role that they played for the purposes of Japanese empire building and concurrently aiding and abeting the political activities of political Islamic groups already active on many fronts as part of the transnational anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist activities against Britain, Holland, and Russia, later the Soviet Union. As Wakabayashi`s work shows, Japanese Muslims and Japanese experts on Islamic Affairs became the typical intermediaries and middlemen for these policies that transpired in Muslim locations. Some of the Japanese Muslims had become sincerely interested in Islam as a new spiritual message, perhaps in a vein of doubting the supremacy of Western civilization which had been the central motto of the Meiji Restoration era between 1868 and 1912 as part of the new Asianist, Ajiashugi perspective that aimed at the reawakening of Asia as a new alternative modern. Others were Japanese versions of the romantic scholar-agent type such as T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935), truly believing that they were helping the cause of liberating Muslims from their Western hegemony and at the same time gathering information and contacts for General Staff intelligence. Having developed expertise on aspects of Muslim culture in China, India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Turkey, etc. these Japanese experts on Islamic affairs hoped to fulfill the “need” for colonial advisors to implement Islam policy at some point in Japan`s Muslim territories in South East Asia. Some of the Japanese Muslim experts such as Ōkawa Shūmei were of high intellectual caliber similar to the “expert-colonial policy advisor” type in European colonial establishments, such as Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) the Dutch expert of Islam who served the Dutch colonial administration’s Islam Policy by using his knowledge of Indonesian Islam to help the Dutch conquest of Aceh except that in the Japanese version the role had shifted to help “liberate” the same peoples from Holland for the sake of the Japanese empire.7 An early figure from the Meiji period that comes close to the romantic idealist/agent type is Hatano Uhō-Yōsaku (1882-1936) who graduated from Tōa Dōbun Shōin of Shanghai and then became in charge of investigation and propaganda on Russian Muslim Central Asia and Chinese territories with Muslim populations such as East Turkestan that was part of the Japanese military intelligence covert operations against the Romanov authorities during the Russo-Japanese War. Having converted to Islam and taking the name of Hasan, Hatano took charge of publications of presenting Japan in a pro-Islamic light toward the network of Muslim nationalists and PanIslamists from Asia and the Middle East. When Abdürreşid Ibrahim (1853-1944) visited Japan in 1908 upon the invitation of the Kokuryūkai, Ibrahim, Hatano and a Hilmi Nakagawa translated the Japanese pamphlet that Hatano had written on “Asia

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in Danger” into Ottoman Turkish Asya Tehlikede that was widely distributed in the Muslim world. The pamphlet warns the Muslim public of the cruelty and oppression of European imperialism in Asia. El Mostafa Rezrazi who has published the seminal work on Hatano has traced his career as typical of this transition from espionage to Pan-Islamist activity that mapped the road of many other Japanese Muslim agents who combined sincere commitment to the cause with intelligence work.8 The next figure, Ahmad Ariga Bunhachirō (1866–1946) went to India in 1892 as a businessman and met Muslims in Bombay. Although he was a Christian, he converted to Islam and started teaching it in Japan. Ariga was more of a scholarmissionary for the cause. Upon retirement in 1913 he devoted himself to propagating Islam but by 1933 counted only seventy Muslim converts. Ariga later translated the Koran into Japanese in collaboration with Takahashi Gorō in 1938; the second translation, the first being the one by Sakamoto Kenichi in 1920. Both translations were still from the European language versions of the Koran. Later, Ōkawa Shumei, the Tokyo University scholar of German and Indian philosophy who can be credited with developing the intellectual discourse about the unity between Pan-Islam and Pan-Asianism as a global strategic vision challenging the West, also translated the Koran from the German and other European language translations during his postwar Sugamo imprisonment in 1950 although he also studied the Classical Arabic original. The first Japanese translation from the original Classical Arabic was by the eminent Keio University scholar of Islamic studies Izutsu Toshihiko in 1945. He was aided by Ōkawa. In the postwar era, Fujimoto Katsuji of Osaka Kansai University, Ban Yasunari and Ikeda Osamu translated the Koran from the Arabic in 1970, and the last translation again from the original was by Umar Ryoichi Mita in 1972.9 The career of Omar Yamaoka Kōtarō (1880–1959) the first Japanese pilgrim to Mecca represents the archetype Japanese Muslim from Asianist circles who served the Japanese authorities as a Japanese Muslim agent. Omar Yamaoka Kōtarō converted to Islam through the auspices of the maverick Pan-Islamist Abdürreşid Ibrahim, who pioneered close contacts with Japanese military and Pan-Asianist political circles in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War when he visited Japan briefly in 1908-1909. Graduating from the Department of the Russian Language, Tokyo School of Foreign Languages, currently Tokyo University of foreign Studies, popularly known as Tokyo Gaigō Dai, Yamaoka served as an interpreter for the Army in Manchuria and Korea. Following the steps of Hatano, Yamaoka was also a member of the Black Dragons, the Kokuryūkai, Amur River Society, the influential prewar Japanese nationalist organization that spearheaded the actualization of Islam Policy in the late Meiji period as part of an Asianist agenda. Due to the interest some Japanese Army officers and intelligence men took in fostering relations with Muslims, Yamaoka met with Ibrahim in 1909 in Bombay during the latter’s return journey to Istanbul after his six month stay in Japan, where he had formed close links with the Kokuryūkai circles of politicians, intellectuals, and military elements to participate in the foundation of the Ajia Gikai (Asian Reawakening Society) association that soon served as the pro-Muslim Japanese public relations organization in the Muslim world. In 1909 Yamaoka visited Mecca and Medina as the first Japanese Hadji, or, pilgrim. Having been swiftly converted to Islam by Ibrahim while in Bombay, he met with the Sharif of Mecca and other Arab notables.10 The student of Omar Yamaoka, Hadji Nur Muhammad Tanaka Ippei (18821934) performed two subsequent pilgrimages after Omar Yamaoka; one in 1924

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and the other in 1934 together with Nakao Hideo, a diplomat who served as the specialist of middle eastern affairs in the Japanese embassy of Ankara. After learning Chinese at Taiwan Kyōkai Gakkō (School of the Association of Taiwan, currently Takushoku University, where he was in Ōkawa Shūmei`s circle of Islamic studies, Tanaka went to China and worked as an interpreter and intelligence agent for the Japanese Army. He became interested in Islam and finally became a Muslim in 1924, converted by Chinese Muslims, before setting out on a pilgrimage to Mecca as a member of a party of Chinese Muslim pilgrims. Tanaka Ippei gained recognition as the first Japanese scholar of Chinese Islam due to his complete translation of the eighteenth century Chinese Muslim scholar Liu Chih`s biography of Mohammad, T`ien-fang chih-sheng shih-lu nien-p`u (An accurate biography of the Arabian Prophet), the most important work of Chinese Islam, into Japanese as Tempo shisei jitsuroku, that was published in 1930.11 Finally, coming closest to the expert/covert operations agent model of T.E. Lawrence, Hadji Saleh Suzuki Tsuyomi, perhaps the most controversial of them all, was typical of the second generation of Japanese Muslims who were to play a major role in the invasion of South East Asia in the Pacific theater during World War II, as ground agents in covert operations. Suzuki had gone to Celebes at the age of 24 whereupon he converted to Islam in the Pacific region. During the war, he was to be active as a political agent in the field during the invasion and organized Indonesian Muslims under the Japanese military occupation of the Dutch Indies. Suzuki soon became the leader of the pilgrimages during the thirties prior to the outbreak of the war. On the eve of Japan`s surrender to the Allied forces in Indonesia, Suzuki acted in typical fashion of the on-the-ground Muslim Japanese agents who self styled themselves as ideologically committed to the Asianist objectives of Japanese imperialism. Like many officers and special agents who hid in the field and later joined the resistance of the Indonesian nationalists, Suzuki organized the Hezbollah guerilla organization of Indonesian youth who fought effectively against the Dutch authorities as a jungle guerilla force.12 These Japanese Muslims began the enigmatic history of Japanese Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina from the late Meiji period into the Showa era of the thirties. The history of the Japanese Muslim pilgrimages during the twentieth century between 1909-1938 shows us that the Islamic pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the Hadj, though meant for religious purposes, in this case, served as an alternative form of international relations between Japan and the Muslim world to aid the Asianist policies of the Japanese government of the 1930s and serve the entry of Japanese business into the Middle East with both co-joined in the preparation of the journeys. In his article on the early Japanese pilgrimages, Nakamura explains that eight Japanese Muslim pilgrimages were organized during the years 1909–1938, but only six of them actually took place. Yamaoka Kōtarō honored as the first Japanese Hadji, pilgrim, journeyed to Mecca with Ibrahim for the Hadj in December of 1909. Hadji Nur Tanaka Ippei performed the second pilgrimage in July 1924 with Chinese Muslims, and the third one in March 1934 with young Japanese Muslim agent trainees. Wakabayashi discusses this journey and the others of the 1930s in detail claiming to have had a direct hand in the organization. A young Japanese Koizumi Kōta tried and failed to make a pilgrimage in 1929 through Central Asia after he had studied Islam, Arabic, Turkish, and Tatar languages for a year under Kurban

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Ali (1892-1972), a central figure who had settled in Japan after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and was the community leader and imam of the Diaspora Tatars. The Bashkurd refugee, Kurban Ali was to lead the foundation of the Tokyo Muslim Press (Tokyo Mohammedan Press, Tokyo Kaikyō Insatsusho), the Tokyo Muslim School (Tokyo Kaikyō Gakkō), and finally the volunteer work for the inception of the Tokyo Mosque, which was to be opened with a grand politically-charged ceremony in 1938, representing the Japanese governments full engagement with Islam Policy. It is clear that the Japanese authorities were using émigré political actors such as Ibrahim and Kurban Ali to train the Muslim Japanese according to the rituals and practices of the Hadj in order to organize the Japanese religious journeys to Arabia. Ibrahim had trained Omar Yamaoka, Kurban Ali had trained Koizumi who was helping him in the press to publish Arabic and Turkish language public relations materials on Japan.13 The fourth Pilgrimage that took place in March 1935 showed the primary importance of Islam Policy for Japan’s future interests during the thirties. Tanaka had died upon his return in 1934. The members were Hadji Saleh Suzuki Tsuyomi, Muhammad Abdul Muniam Hosokawa Susumu, Muhammad Abduralis Kōri Shōzō, and Yamamoto Tarō. From then on, pilgrimages were to be organized every year. In 1936, Kōri Shōzō, Yamamoto Tarō, and Uehara Aizan embarked upon the journey, but the pilgrimage did not reach Mecca in time because Uehara committed suicide on the way. The reasons for this are not clear but suggest that he panicked when the real purpose of the mission was deciphered by local officials. The fifth pilgrimage to Mecca was undertaken in February 1937 by Suzuki Tsuyomi, Hosokawa Susumu, Enomoto Momotarō while the sixth pilgrimage took place in February1938, again by Suzuki accompanied this time by a Manchurian Muslim Chang T`e chun who was later to become the imam of Mukden mosque supported by the Japanese authorities in Manchuria. This was the last Japanese pilgrimage before the War.14 The context for the writing of Wakabayashi`s book, Kaikyō sekai to nihon which was published in 1937 thus was the rise of Asianist discourse to the kaikyō seisaku policy-making of the civilian and military authorities that incorporates the story of the Japanese Muslims and the pilgrimages to Arabia since the Meiji period. The book is an example of how the memory of the Japanese-Muslim rapprochement during the Meiji period as a result of the Russo-Japanese War was appropriated to construct the new policy-oriented Asianist discourse of the civilian and military authorities toward Muslims as part of Japanese expansionism in Asia. The colonial and imperialist expansionism of the thirties that began to make use of kaiyō seisaku of the Meiji Asianist discourse now as a policy in Japan`s increasing imperial involvement in the Asian continent and burgeoning business interest in the Middle East. That incited the prolific increase in the Japanese publications related to Islam.

KAIKYō SEKAI TO NIHON OR THE WORLD OF ISLAM AND JAPAN The book, one of the first accounts of this little known history of modern Japan and the world of Islam until then, apparently had achieved an immediate wide reception. The author, Wakabayashi, gratefully thanks his readers in the numerous prefaces that he wrote for each new reprint as the book went through five reprints until this last one in 1938, indicating the popularity of the work.15 The book also

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appears at times to harbor the author’s personal desire to heighten his personal role in organizing the numerous pilgrimage journeys of Japanese Muslims who were to be the new young generation of Japanese Muslim agents working for the military and political policies of Japan toward the Islamic world in Asia. Wakabayashi’s 200-page book first provides a summary introduction to the Islamic faith with the standard explanation of the principles of the faith and the rules of worship. The book then gives a brief history of Muslim peoples from the days of the prophet Muhammad to current times to the Japanese readers. Special attention is given to the history of Islam in China that is the closest Muslim region to Japan with Chinese Muslims shown to be potential friends of Japan in a sea of anti-Japanese Chinese people. All through this section Wakabayashi presents the defensive argument that Islam was an important civilization in the past. The present decline of Muslim societies should not reflect on the glorious past of this civilization. He also exposes various arguments that aimed to counter the prevalent prejudiced view of Japanese people about Islam that it was a backward faith without cultural qualities or that it is a militant religion of the sword. Wakabayashi states that this negative view is a product of Western missionary propaganda and teaching which became influential in the Meiji period. In this context, Wakabayashi was projecting his counter argument to the current Japanese view of Islam that was quite critical and based upon prevailing Western-inspired notions. The pro/con arguments about Islam surfaced just about this time in the 1938 Diet debate as to whether the Japanese government should legally recognize Islam as a religion of Japan similar to Buddhism, Shinto, and Christianity.16 Like Ōkawa Shūmei who was the most intellectually engaged prewar Asianist Japanese figure concerned with Islamic studies, Wakabayashi placed special emphasis on the importance of the current conditions in the Islamic world as a new Asian revolution. If used well, Wakabayashi argues that Islamic revolutionary currents will help Japan’s quest to ally with Muslims against the Western imperialists of Asia.17 Emphasizing his personal contacts in the Near East, Wakabayashi also appears to have wanted to present his important role in the activation of this new Islam policy, Kaikyō seisaku, orientation since the late Meiji period. After having narrated the pre-modern and modern history of the Islamic world, Wakabayashi discusses the importance of having a governmental Islam policy of forming close political, economic ties with Muslim leaders and the populations in Asia for the interests of Japan to govern Asia. Briefly summarizing the Islam policy strategies of Britain, Germany, and Italy as the means for empire building, he strongly argues for the development of a Japanese policy to that end. The book ends with the first-hand account of the experiences of the Japanese Muslim agents who undertook the fifth Japanese pilgrimage of 1936 to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. The detailed account of the pilgrimage voyage, the junreiki was written by the young Japanese Muslim pilgrims. It is included at the end of the book and is an interesting source for the Japanese narration of their experiences and motives in these pilgrimages. In the junreiki, the narrators explain in detail the great difficulties of their journey on camelback. The text is a combination of the chronology of the Japanese participation in the religious ceremonies that takes place with the multitudes of pilgrims almost as a proof of how successful the Japanese pilgrims were in completing this vastly difficult physical task. Sprinkled with friendly conversations with dignitaries and adventures of

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chance encounters with local Muslim Arabs who help the Japanese party which gets lost in the desert at some point, the pilgrimage narrative combines the politicallymotivated religious journey with the excitement of travel in exotic lands. Finally, the pilgrimage results in important audiences with King Ibn Saud and other dignitaries of the Saudi kingdom that seals the special close friendship of Imperial Japan and Muslim leaders.18

THE KOKURYŪKAI AND WAKABAYASHI’S BOOK In this work, Wakabayashi constructed a new historical narrative appropriate for the 1930s that tells the story of the bonds between Meiji Pan-Asianist nationalism and Islam as the continuous legacy of the Meiji era contacts that were engendered by the famous Meiji Pan-Asianist organization, the Kokuryūkai, Amur River society, popularly known as the Black Dragons. The little that we know from the prewar sources about Wakabayashi’s career itself points to a pattern of the 1930s when late Meiji Pan-Asianists, especially members of the Kokuryūkai and Genyōsha (Dark Ocean Society) like Wakabayashi, now engaged in new tasks with the resurgence of Asianist oriented policies for the governing authorities in Japan during the thirties.19 The few bits of information that can be gleaned in mostly prewar Pan-Asianist publications tell us that he was the older brother of Wakabayashi Kyūman who had been born in 1891 and had graduated from the Military Staff College in Tokyo. Both were the sons of a Hanzaemon of Chiba ken. Kyūman graduated from Chiba prefecture’s public middle school in 1916 and after graduating from the Military College, went to China. During the late Meiji and Taisho periods, the two brothers were actively involved in field networking and intelligence activities on behalf of the Army among the Chinese Muslims of China. In 1919, both brothers were under instructions to conduct research on China when they are said to have realized that the great task of Asian Awakening (Kōa) could only be realized with the assistance of Chinese Muslims. There, Kyūman worked for Yamamoto Yukichi, who owned a general store in Changsha. Like many Japanese agents, Kyūman peddled goods in Hunan, Hupeh, Szechuwan, Yunnan to study the Muslims and forge bonds of friendship. In 1921, Kyūman ended up finally gaining some trust among Chinese Muslims in Ch’ang-te, a town west of Tung-t’ing Lake in Honan while working for the Yamamoto firm branch. The real politik motive, however, was to counter the severe anti-Japanese movement in Hunan province, that resulted in the killing of some Japanese, by forming pro-Japanese circles among the Chinese Muslims.20 Kyūman and Wakabayashi Han were close associates of the Kokuryūkai, the Black Dragons, the well-known Pan-Asianist organization of prewar Meiji Japan that was actively involved in various Asian revolutionary movements. Militant advocates of Japan’s “manifest destiny” as an Asian empire, Kokuryūkai members worked in information gathering and local operations on behalf of military intelligence during the Russo-Japanese War.21 The sources from the prewar and wartime Japan tell us that Wakabayashi was particularly close to the two leaders of Meiji era PanAsianism, Tōyama Mitsuru, the elder founder of the Genyōsha and the spiritual leader of the Kokuryūkai who was the éminence grise of Japanese right-wing politics and Uchida Ryōhei the charismatic activist of the Chinese and Korean revolutions who was the founder and first chairman of the Kokuryūkai. In his book, Wakabayashi always refers to Toyama and Uchida as his superiors.22 In Tōa senkaku shishi kiden,

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the prewar Kokuryūkai publication of 1936 on the biographies of “patriots” who worked for East Asian emancipation during the Meiji era, Wakabayashi is introduced as a tairiku ronin, the typical late Meiji era continental adventurers who were involved in revolutionary movements in China and Korea. However, while the same source provides the biography of Kyūman, there is very little information on Wakabayashi Han himself, which suggests that he was active in the field during the publication of that book in 1936.23 Tōa senkaku shishi kiden briefly mentions Wakabayashi Han as the only survivor of Kyūman’s family and gives his present address in Tokyo City.24 Throughout his 1938 book, on numerous occasions, Wakabayashi connects the Russo-Japanese War and its aftermath to his early realization of the primary importance of Islam policy as the soul of Asiatic governance and as an instrument for the ultimate victory of Japan as the leader of Asia.25 He recollects his own determination of the importance of Islam policy that began twenty-seven years ago in 1912 when he was journeying in the British colony of India with Mr. Ottman, the high priest of Burma, former head of the Congress of the Hindu religion who was an activist against British imperialism. He tells us that after coming back home: “I thought that Islam policy is of crucial importance for East Asia’s governance.” Wakabayashi explains that it was he who sent his younger brother Kyūman to China where he began to form friendship links and networks among Chinese Muslims. But Wakabayashi’s brother apparently died of dysentery in Changsha soon thereafter in 1923 having left the objective of Islam policy unfinished.26 Despite the late Meiji origins of Islam policy, Wakabayashi complains that the authorities did not pay serious attention for a long time and narrates the eventual adoption of Islam policy as a serious agenda by the Japanese authorities at this juncture of Japan’s new future as the leader of East Asia after the Manchurian invasion. He claims to have played a role of some importance in the final adoption of Islam policy by the Japanese authorities. Hence the account is that of an idealized chain of events representing a personal story of contacts, voluntary advice to important military figures, which may or may not necessarily have been even solicited over these years. Wakabayashi complains that even though he talked to the various authorities of the government and important thinkers about the importance of the Islam question, in the end many listened to his words but none showed enthusiasm, even though: “I ran from hither to thither galloping to the East and running to the West.”27 Wakabayashi also embellishes his account with constant references to the two senior figures of the Pan-Asianist right, Tōyama and Uchida, that bolsters the argument of connecting the roots of Islam policy efforts back to the Meiji Asianist leaders and fits his terminology to that of the Meiji Pan-Asianist activists who liked to see themselves as selfless heroic samurai figures of loyalty. During the thirties, Wakabayashi explains to us that he was dispatched by Tōyama and Uchida as a ronin daihyō or “masterless samurai”—an allusion to the late Tokugawa patriotic samurai who worked for the Meiji Restoration against the Tokugawa Shogunate - to attend the League of Nations Geneva General Meeting in 1932 as an informal observer. Next year in 1933, Japan’s delegate, Matsuoka Yōsuke, known for his Asianist foreign policy views walked out of the League over the adoption of the Lytton Report that was critical of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Matsuoka was to become the controversial foreign minister who forged the Axis Alliance during World War II.28

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Wakabayashi apparently stayed in Geneva throughout the controversy and after Japan walked out, he took a long trip on an inspection tour of Europe and the United States. Upon his return home, he claims to have been busy trying to convince military figures of the importance of Islam-oriented overseas policies. Wakabayashi informs the reader of his numerous contacts in political and military circles where he repeatedly advocated attention to cultivating the Muslim peoples of South East Asia to the Near East for Japan’s advantage. Among the names he cites are those of important military actors of the day such as: General Araki Sadao, briefly Minister of the Army, Lieutenant General Isogaya Rensuke (the Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army in 1938–39), Major General Itagaki Seishirō, who are responsible for the Manchurian invasion and the expansionist and the militarist politics of the day. As intellectual figures, the master-mind Asianist intellectual and political activist of the thirties Ōkawa Shūmei, the scholar-agent of Central Asian studies Professor Okubo Kōji of Komazawa University, and the judo expert advisor and Asianist activist in India Abdullah Takasagi Shinzō reveal for us the expansionist and Asianist orientation of the circle that made use of Wakabayashi at the time of the book’s publication.29

IBRAHIM’S ROLE Wakabayashi’s book uses the individuals who were involved in the Meiji period at the beginning of Japanese Pan-Asianist contact with the Islamic world on the occasion of the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War as the protagonists in the construction of the Meiji era memory of Japan’s connections to the Islamic world. It is clear that this is done in order to legitimize Wakabayashi’s responsibility in such activities as organizing the Japanese Muslim pilgrimage in 1936 which is narrated at the end of the book. Here, the major protagonist in the narrative is Abdürreşid Ibrahim (1853– 1944), the Russian Tatar Pan Islamist in the book from the outset. Historically, Ibrahim had formed a close collaboration with Colonel Akashi Motojirō, the head of European intelligence during the Russo-Japanese War. His subsequent contacts with the Kokuryūkai people in the immediate aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War were forged during his first visit to Japan, for five months during 1908–09, which had been a catalyst for the inception of a Kaikyō seikaku, or Islam policy circle of Kokuryūkai, and military, political, intellectual Japanese figures who were part of Meiji Asianist environment. Japanese such as Tōyama Mitsuru, the Pan-Asianist right-wing leader or Inukai Tsuyoshi, the liberal politician, continued to be patrons of émigré Muslim political activists from India to Arabia and Tatar Turkish émigrés after the Bolshevik revolution.30 In fact, in 1933 before the publication of Wakabayashi’s book, Ibrahim was invited back to Japan in order to aid the activation of Islam policy strategies during the thirties. He was to stay in Japan until his death in 1944 in Tokyo. He cooperated with the Japanese government as the non-Japanese head of the Dai Nippon Kaikyō Kyōkai which was founded in 1938 as Japan’s official Islamic organization for public relations and propaganda that was active until the end of World War II. Ibrahim’s own life is an example of how the political contacts of the Russo-Japanese War period were activated via intermediaries like Wakabayashi in order to aid the new Asianist policies that became important during the 1930s until the end of the war.

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Back in 1909, Ibrahim had converted the first Japanese Muslim pilgrim to Mecca Omar Yamaoka Kōtaro, a Kokuryūkai member in Bombay, during his return trip from Japan which represents the political character of these Japanese conversions to Islam. Omar Yamaoka or many later Japanese Muslims justified conversion as a means to serve Muslim Japanese friendship and alliance to serve the imperial way as a patriotic duty to the Emperor.31 In 1909, the two comrades had visited Mecca and Medina where Omar Yamaoka had become the first Japanese pilgrim to visit the Holy Lands and form contacts with Arab leaders on behalf of the Japanese Empire. In 1909, Omar Yamaoka had given lectures in Istanbul on the principles of Japan’s newly-formed organization for Islamic peoples, the Asia Gikai or Asian Reawakening Society, which was publicized in the Pan Islamist press of Istanbul that had distribution in the Turkish reading world beyond Ottoman borders including British Egypt and Romanov Russia.32 The message had been about how Japan was the new hope for Muslim emancipation and modernity. This background now gave precedence to Wakabayashi’s justification for new pilgrimages to expand on Islam policy activities. Most important, Wakabayashi’s book in 1938 published the photograph of the Meiji documentation of this spiritual alliance between Japan and Islam to work for the reawakening of Asia. Ibrahim’s own memoir of his 1908–9 travels in Japan and Asia gives us a detailed description of the founding of this society in the office of Tōa dōbunkai with the liberal Asianist politician Inukai Tsuyoshi ever present on these bonding ceremonies with Asian activists, Toyama, Uchida, and others of the Kokuryūkai, Ōhara Bukeiji, and many other members of the military establishment with strong connections to the Kwantung Army and the Russian section of the General Staff. The symbolic representation of this ceremony was in the form of an oath deed, identified later during World War II as the Muslim Oath by the OSS reports that saw it as the proof of Japan’s long years of infiltration efforts among world Muslims. The agreement was in the form of a scroll with Arabic and Japanese texts which declared a joint oath to persevere for the accomplishment of their great goal “to be of one heart and mind.” It was signed by members of this newly-formed Asianist Islam circle that included among the Japanese who were present, well-known Kokuryūkai members Tōyama Mitsuru, Nakano Tsunetarō, Nakayama Yasuzō, Kōnō Hironaka, Yamada Kinosuke, military figures Lieutenant Colonel Ohara Bukeiji, Captain Aoyanagi Katsutoshi, the politician Inukai Tsuyoshi as well as Chinese Muslims and finally the protagonist of Islam policies in Japan, Ibrahim himself. All these figures were active in the Russo-Japanese War and were to continue military and political careers with Asianist agendas in the Taisho and early Showa period into the 1930s.33 Wakabayashi explains the process of bringing Ibrahim back to Japan and his recruitment in his own words. He tells us that he had a discussion with some people, and had the venerable Abdürreşid Ibrahim who was a world famous elder leader of the Islamic world (close to his nineties when he came back to Japan in 1933) invited from Turkey where he was living as a Turkish citizen after his return from Japan in 1909. Wakabayashi writes that now Ibrahim is collaborating with him in an effort for the realization of Islam policy.34 Wakabayashi is aware of Ibrahim’s political problems in Turkey after the founding of the Republic of Turkey under the leadership of the first President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, when Ibrahim’s Pan

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Islamist intellectual activities were found to be incompatible with the accelerating secularist and Westernist policies of the new revolutionary regime. The rest of Ibrahim’s activities during the interval between his return from Japan in 1909 and his return in 1933 had included his participation in the Great War (World War I) as an Ottoman special agent for the Young Turk Special Agency (Teskilat ı Mahsusa) where he published the propaganda paper Islam Dünyasi (The World of Islam) for Enver Pasha the leader of the Young Turk government that had entered the war on the side of Germany. In keeping with his Asianist views, he organized the Asya Taburu (Asian Battalion) from the Romanov Army Tartar ex-prisoners of war in the Gallicia battlefront which fought quite successfully on behalf of the Ottoman Army that was victorious against the British forces of General Towsend which surrendered in the battle of Kut Al Amara of the Iraq front.35 During this period, Ibrahim was seen in Afghanistan together with Indian revolutionaries in an attempt to plot rebellion against the British and bring in the Afgan King on the side of the Ottomans. Next he was in Russia during the revolutionary upheaval helping to expedite the emigration of destitute Muslims to Anatolia, and went even as far away as Sinkiang as part of various operations on behalf of the Young Turks. Like many other Pan Islamist figures of the late Ottoman era, Ibrahim had fallen out of favor and was ultimately placed under house arrest in the village of Reşadiye, Konya, in central Anatolia where he was exiled from the center of new political developments. It is difficult to discern just how Wakabayashi’s recommendation that Ibrahim be brought to Japan was realized in 1933, but the possible evidence reveals how all of this Islam policy networking was taking place during the thirties. Later, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports inform us that Ibrahim had close connections especially to one of the two Japanese military attachés in Ankara. The famous coup plotter of the 1930s and founder of the Sakurakai group of the Imperial Way and an admirer of Ataturk, Hashimoto Kingorō was the military attaché in Turkey (1927– 30) to be followed by Colonel Iimura Jō (later Lieutenant General), who was the military attaché (1930–32) and the military figure who was closest to Ibrahim during his activities in Japan after his 1933 arrival. Japanese military attachés in Ankara were responsible for information gathering against the Soviet Union and for forming direct contacts with political intellectuals and activists especially among the Tatar and Turkestani émigrés of Turkey. Hence, it is most likely that Wakabayashi’s recommendation to invite Ibrahim was delivered via the Japanese military attachés in Ankara.36 The report of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Muslim activists in Japan refers to close relations between Ibrahim and Iimura Jō. Wakabayashi’s book uses this Ibrahim centered legacy of the Russo-Japanese War to show strong Meiji connections with the world of Islam in a way that reinforces a historic legacy for the instigated Islamic policy activities during the 1930s, particularly to justify the series of new pilgrimages of Japanese Muslim agents. Wakabayashi uses Ibrahim in person as a confirmation of this long-lasting relationship throughout the book. After introducing the important political career of Ibrahim in Russia as “a benefactor who worked very hard for Japan through religious activities and the first person to introduce Islam to Japan,” the venerable Ibrahim met with distinguished figures concluding with his declaration back then that “Japan in the future would rise to a position of leading the world.” As a survivor of the Meiji Oath, Wakabayashi states that many of his fellow companions

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of the day had passed away. Only Ibrahim and the elder Genyōsha leader Tōyama Mitsuru were survivors of the Oath.37 The book outlines the networking that forged bonds between individuals from Ibrahim’s days in Japan and lasted until now. In addition to Ibrahim, Wakabayashi introduces to the reader his friend and close collaborator in Islam policy, the late Hadji Nur Tanaka Ippei (1882–1934), whose sudden death after a recent pilgrimage to Mecca in 1934 greatly saddened Wakabayashi. Known to have been the second Japanese Muslim to undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1924, Tanaka Ippei followed the footsteps of Omar Yamaoka, Ibrahim’s comrade on their trip to Mecca and Istanbul back in 1909, and again the personality who provided the historic link between late Meiji Japan and new Islam oriented policies of the Asianism of the thirties. Wakabayashi explains that even before Kyūman’s death in 1923, he had counsel with the “senior venerable Tōyama and master Uchida.” Whereupon he proceeded to visit his good friend Tanaka Ippei, who was in south China and convinced him to work with Wakabayashi “hand in hand” to realize this important Islam policy for East Asian governance.38 Omar Yamaoka who also subsequently proceeded to work among Chinese Muslims in the Yangtze area is said to have helped train Hadji Nur Tanaka Ippei who became the second Japanese Muslim convert again serving the Japanese empire.39 But Tanaka himself claimed he was converted into the Muslim faith by Chinese Muslims while he was working among Chinese Muslims as a China hand during and immediately after the Russo-Japanese War.40 An interesting figure in this narrative of Japanese Muslim, Tanaka Ippei wrote extensively on Chinese Islam. Even though he continued to be a devout Shinto believer and at times speculated with the idea of harmony between all the great religions of the world, Tanaka, himself, explained that conversion to Islam was the only way to understand Muslim culture truly from the inside so that with the help of such committed Muslim Japanese who are aware of Muslim ways, Japan can form permanent bonds with Muslim peoples.41 In 1924, the year after the founding of the Republic of Turkey, Ibrahim again had gone on a religious pilgrimage to Mecca to form political contacts which is when he is thought to have met Hadji Nur Tanaka Ippei. The China Muslim expert Tanaka Ippei actually began his career as a Chinese language graduate of Taiwan Gakkō which is the Takushoku University of today. After serving in the Russo-Japanese War as an army interpreter in Manchuria, he became an assistant to Professor Hattori Unokichi the famous prewar Sinologist. Later, Tanaka worked among Chinese Muslims and befriended the Chinese religious community leaders, the ahon. By this time, he had already became the close comrade of Wakabayashi Han.42 A student of Takushoku University, Tanaka also appears to have kept up a close correspondence with Takushoku students trained as Asia specialists like Kamoto Toshio, who was an activist stirring up rebellion in Malay’s Halimao during World War II. Like Omar Yamaoka and many others who followed suit, Tanaka is quite typical of this pattern that becomes quite visible in the Showa period of Japanese field experts and agents who adopt a Muslim identity as part of their training, but also justify it intellectually as part of their Asianist self-identity. We understand that Tanaka Ippei now became very close to Wakabayashi and worked very closely with him in this Islam policy agenda resulting in the organization of the series of new Japanese pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia during the thirties. He credits Wakabayashi

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as the important Japanese expert on Islam who acted now as the mentor of the Japanese Muslim pilgrimages of the 1930s. Wakabayashi even claims that it was he who convinced Tanaka to study Chinese Islam and convert into the faith for the cause. He tells us that after solitary hard work, he was the one who managed to get Tanaka Ippei to embark upon an Islamic pilgrimage back in 1924.43 The photographs in the book reinforce this message linking the Pan-Asianist Islam policy of the Kokuryūkai, Ibrahim, Omar Yamaoka, and finally Tanaka Ippei that provides a Meiji root to the new Showa era pilgrimages which had just taken place, that Wakabayashi is proud to present as his own scheme. In the photographs of the book, the elders, Ibrahim and Tōyama, the two Meiji figures of the Asianist and Islamist alliance, are placed in the center of the photo with Japanese and Muslim figures in the surrounding group. In one photographic composition, Ibrahim is the central figure with Tōyama and Uchida on his two sides and most importantly the photograph of the famous 1909 Muslim Oath at the bottom of the picture (plate 2). What is fascinating is that a photograph of the same oath scroll was already published in the 1911 memoir of Ibrahim which had been published in Istanbul in Turkish and had already had a wide reception outside of Japan, almost a generation earlier. But now the same oath is part of a later Japanese Asianist propaganda effort during the thirties in order to justify Japan’s new empire building in Islam Asia. However, the signatures in the two versions are slightly different which suggests more than one copy of the oath was signed back in 1909. There are more names in Wakabayashi’s version of the scroll but the writing in Ibrahim’s hand and that of the Japanese calligraphy by the Kokuryūkai member Nakano Tsunetarō are the same.44 Even the design of Wakabayashi’s book made use of Ibrahim’s script. The front cover of the book has the title of the book, Kaikyō sekai to nihon, written by Ibrahim in the Arabic script, Alemi Islamiye’de Nippon, also signed below by the man himself as Abdürreşid ibrahim. The title of Wakabayashi’s book, “The World of Islam and Japan” is quite reminiscent of the title of Ibrahim’s original 1910–11 publication in Turkish of “The World of Islam and the Spreading of Islam in Japan.” One suspects that Wakabayashi may have written perhaps a major part of the sections on Islamic principles and history in consultation with Ibrahim. Wakabayashi’s work like so many similar Pan-Asianist publications of the thirties exhibits the strong motive to show that Pan-Asianist politics of the present are shown as an outcome of a rightful past of strong bonds formed in the late Meiji era. The work includes interesting photographs of the political figures in Japan and from the Muslim world which represent the image of a strong alliance between Muslims and Japanese ever since the Meiji period. The old Meiji traditional right-wing’s PanAsianism is represented in the person of the chairman of the Kokuryūkai Uchida Ryōhei and the éminence grise of Japanese nationalist politics Tōyama Mitsuru, the spiritual head of the Kokuryūkai and the founder of the Genyōsha in the Meiji period. They had been pioneers in the development of the Islam oriented policies. Now they appear as romantic role models that justify the current strategic character of the Islam policy as a ground for training agents. The reader is left with the impression that Japan’s relations with the Islamic world dated back to the victory of the Russo-Japanese War and its present incorporation works as a narrative to historically link the new policies and strategies that accelerate in the aftermath of the Manchurian invasion of 1931. The book therefore reflects the transformation

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of Meiji Pan-Asianist nationalism into the Asianism of the 1930s, or, better yet how the elements of Meiji Pan-Asianism were incorporated into new Asianist agendas of the day. Wakabayashi justifies the urgency of sponsoring regular Japanese Muslim pilgrimage visits to Saudi Arabia that had first begun with Ibrahim and Omar Yamaoka Kotarō’s 1909 visit, and had been followed by the second pilgrimage of Tanaka Ippei in 1924 which Wakabayashi claims was because of his own supervision. In 1933, Wakabayashi claims that he sent Tanaka Ippei again, this time accompanied by Yamamoto Tarō who was active in Kabul, Afganistan, and Nakao Hideo who worked in the Ankara embassy for more than twenty years as an expert authority on the Near East.45 The sudden death of Tanaka after his return in 1934 due to illness also became an occasion for using Ibrahim in his new role as the leader of Japan’s Muslims which reveals the strong interest of the Japanese authorities in this new Islam policy image. On the 10th month 20th day, 1934, the funeral of Tanaka Ippei took place in Aoyama ceremonial hall with the chanting of Koranic prayers by Ibrahim. The ceremony was given political significance with the attendance of a large number of government figures and the military. Public relations journals of the period use the photo of Tanaka’s Muslim funeral as part of the propaganda toward Muslim readers in Japanese publications. The personal collection of photographs in Ibrahim’s family in Turkey includes one in which the military high command and ministers of the cabinet were present at this formal funeral ceremony of Hadji Nur Tanaka Ippei with wreaths of flowers from the Kokuryūkai and other nationalist organizations placed on the podium where the Koran recitation took place46 (plate 7). The book also reveals the financial source for these new Showa era pilgrimages which take place between 1934 and 1937 to have been a coalition of political and economic interests of the day that saw interest in supporting Islam policy oriented activities (plate 15). Wakabayashi explains that Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, The Spinning Federation, The Kwantung Army, South Manchurian Railway Co. (Mantetsu) provided the financial support for the three pilgrimages of young Muslim Japanese who adopted Islamic names. Arrayed in Islamic attire, Muhammad Haji Saleh Suzuki Tsuyomi, Muhammad Abdul Muniam Hosokawa, Muhammad Abdul Valis Kōri Shōzō, and Muhammad Ahmad Yamamoto Tarō of Kabul again, the four young Japanese Muslim agents, now were trained in Islamic affairs through their visits to the heartland of the Islamic faith. These figures were later active especially on the South East Asian front during the Japanese invasion of the Dutch Indies with the outbreak of the Pacific War. Tanaka had led the third pilgrimage in 1934 with Wakabayashi who had held discussions with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and received a royal flag which he included in the photographs of the book that was later presented to the emperor. The fourth expedition took place in 1935 with only Kōri Shōzō and two other persons. The fifth pilgrimage that was undertaken by Suzuki Tsuyomi, Hosokawa, Enomoto Momotarō took place in 1936 which is narrated in detail in their travel journal that is published as an appendix to Wakabayashi’s book.47 Subsequently, a sixth pilgrimage of 1937 was undertaken by, again, Suzuki Tsuyomi and a Manchurian Chang Te-ch’un with the Muslim name of Niputon Raiki who headed the Institute for Islamic Culture in Dairen, and was the imam of Mukden mosque that had been built by the Japanese.48

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These pilgrimages also followed the pattern that had been set already with Ibrahim and Omar Yamaoka’s visit in 1909. In most of these pilgrimages, the Japanese Muslims made sure that they were accompanied by some non-Japanese Muslim collaborators and frequently as part of a larger Muslim pilgrimage group from China. Japanese Muslims also made sure that they formally underwent a ceremony of conversion into Islam by an important Muslim scholar or local leader such as Ibrahim or Chinese Muslim religious leaders. In 1909 and 1924, on both occasions, Ibrahim had accompanied the Japanese Yamaoka and Tanaka. In the 1930s, Tanaka’s trips were organized actually as part of Chinese Muslim pilgrimage parties leaving from China, or as in the case of Suzuki accompanied by a Manchurian Muslim. These pilgrimages served as an alternative form of international relations through an informal transnational network of Muslims across many different countries that began in the Russo-Japanese War period. Japanese Asianists now committed to a Muslim identity such as Omar Yamaoka had begun this form of networking in 1909 and 1910. Hadji Nur Ippei and the others had followed suit. By 1936, on the occasion of the publication of Wakabayashi’s book, a new crop of Muslim Japanese agents was now initiated into the strategy of Japan’s Asianist face toward Islam. Wakabayashi comments on the importance of allying with the newly-awakened Muslims of Asia after the decline of the British empire following World War I, as the only potent means to accomplish Japan’s rightful domination of Asia as the leader of the future. The political argument is reinforced with the economic one; most of the population in South East Asia was important for Japanese exports and the Near East promised to be a new economic market with the departure of Britain from the scene, an argument that must have appealed enough to the big firm interests such as Mitsui or Mitsubishi that had ended up sponsoring these pilgrimages as explained by Wakabayashi. The OSS does record significant rise in Japanese exports to the Near East markets for these years.49 Wakabayashi’s book on the World of Islam and Japan appears to have been meant for public relations in the Japanese audience to find friends for the Islam policy among financial and political circles. Perhaps a second motive was to develop a wider interest among the general public in Japan which disregarded Islamic affairs and culture in its Western oriented modernist vision of the world from the Meiji period. By making liberal references to the Pan-Asianist figures of the Meiji era and the central symbolic role of their good friend Ibrahim, the book surely was meant to gain more supporters from the ascending political and military circles of the day with an Asianist internationalist agenda after the Manchurian invasion. Japanese Pan-Asianist publications of the 1930s, such as the well-known biography of Kokuryūkai members and affiliates who “served the construction of the East Asian order and the fight against Russia,” the Tōa senkaku shishi kiden, that were published by the Meiji Pan-Asianist organization Kokuryūkai heightened its own role as pioneers for the cause. Such works represented the victory of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War as an Asianist victory against the West that served as the historic background to justify current Japanese expansionism in North Asia, particularly in Manchuria as an extension of the ambivalent Asianist revolutionary character of Meiji Pan-Asianism which had exhibited a genuine sense of solidarity to Asian emancipation agendas and anti-imperialism against the Western empires of Asia such as Romanov Russia.50

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Much of this 1930s Pan-Asianist narrative in the publications of the day presented the Meiji experience with Pan-Asianism as a series of success stories that aided Asian emancipation. The Pan-Asianists proudly verbalized their contribution to the Chinese Nationalist Revolution of Sun Yat Sen, support for the Korean revolutionaries, the Philippino independence movement, or Mongolian and Manchurian separatism. Japanese Pan-Asianist friendship with important Asian cultural figures, such as Tagore of India or Ibrahim of the Islamic world, illustrated this Asianist international network. According to this narrative, the Japanese shishi or loyalist patriots who were responsible for the Meiji Restoration had also worked for Asian Revolution. These works reflected the enigmatic character of Meiji Pan-Asianism that expressed a militant opposition to Western imperialist hegemony in Asia with strong irredentist imperialism which envisioned Japan as the savior of Asia. Pan-Asianist publications of the Kokuryūkai took credit for having directly contributed to the dramatic victory of Japan over tsarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese War as the great accomplishement of such Pan-Asianist aims.51 Noteworthy is the fact that Wakabayashi’s book was published by Dainichi sha that was a relatively new 1930s right-wing association devoted to the ideals of Tōyama Shigeki, reflecting this transition from the romantic nationalist Asianism of the Meiji era to the right-wing politics of the Showa period. The book thus represents the incorporation of Meiji Pan-Asianism and the memory of the RussoJapanese War as its honorable victory as historical elements that were used by new major actors who pursued the expansionist agendas of the Showa era which caused Japan’s collision with the Western world. Once, in their role as activists of Meiji Pan-Asianism, Uchida and Tōyama had helped Asian revolutionaries such as Sun Yat Sen and had supported anti-imperialist Muslim activists such as Ibrahim, but by the thirties the Kokuryūkai elders like Tōyama or fellow travelers like Ibrahim were more symbolic in importance than as decision makers, which was in the hands of the new military and civilian figures. Still, the Meiji Pan-Asianist figures had transmitted important networks, contacts, and patterns of overseas transnational networking and intelligence gathering as in the form of pilgrimages from the Meiji era to the service of the present operations of the thirties in the hands of new political and military actors who were intent on an Asianist vision of internationalism that aimed at a new Japanese Asian empire in conflict against the West.52 To be sure, Japanese Pan-Asianist arguments for Japan’s rightful place as the leader of Asian emancipation and the unification of all under the eight corners of the world were not new. But, during the thirties, these arguments became justifications for Japanese military operations in wars that broke out from the Manchurian Invasion through the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. The Russo-Japanese War had not broken out because of these Asianist ideals, but the political vestiges of its impact in the Islamic world were now seen as the instrument for Japan’s governance of Asia. Hatsuse Ryūhei argues that Uchida Ryōhei represents the Meiji current of the traditional right and his life span of 1874–1937 covers the transformation and links to the emergence of Asianism and Japanese political currents in what the author defines as the 1930s Japanese form of fascism as a modernist innovative rightist thought and activity.53 In national politics, after Taisho democracy in the 1920s, Tōyama, Uchida and their followers had became militants against democratic and

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leftist movements and strong advocates of anti-Communism. By 1931, Uchida formed Dai Nihon Seisantō (Greater Japan Production Party) as a populist organization which the author sees to be comparable to fascist organizations. However, he notes that these figures who saw themselves as Meiji type patriotic loyalist activists devoted to the Emperor, represented the peculiar type of rightist thought that carried the character of the Meiji romantic visionary views of Asia.54 It is in this Meiji legacy of Pan-Asianism that, together with his younger brother Kyūman, Wakabayashi claims to have played a considerable personal part in incorporating into the 1930s practice of Islam policy, or, Kaikyō seisaku for the Japanese governing authorities.55 Ibrahim’s activities in Meiji Japan and in his return voyage to Istanbul accompanying Omar Yamaoka in this first Japanese Muslim pilgrimage to Arabia were efforts at forming bonds between Japanese Pan-Asianism and Muslim agendas of nationalism and Pan Islamic awakening on a transnational common platform of anti-imperialism against Western hegemonic empires, namely Romanov Russia, the British empire, and the Dutch. By the 1930s, new agendas of anti-Communism, Japanese expansion in North Asia, and take over of the former colonies of the Western empires became the strategic platform of this JapaneseMuslim collaboration. In hindsight, Ibrahim and Omar’s interaction in 1909 became the guidelines and the seed for the training of Japanese agents to be sent to Muslim countries under Muslim identity, a tactic that now had military, bureaucratic, and business support in the form of the numerous pilgrimages that were financed by these interests. Wakabayashi’s book demonstrates how the legacy of the Russo-Japanese War, in the form of contacts and networks, was put to use for the development of this 1930s policy of training Japanese Muslim agents who served in active duty in the operations of World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aydin, Cemil, “Politics of Civilizational Identities: Asia, West, and Islam in the Pan Asianist Thought of Ōkawa Shumei, Ph.D. Diss, Harvard University, 2002. Esenbel, Selçuk, “Japan`s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power, 1900–1945.” The American Historical Review, October 2004, No. 109: 1140–1170. Fuess, Harald, ed., The Japanese Empire in East Asia and its Postwar Legacy (Munich: Iudicium, 1998). Hatsuse, Ryūhei, Dentōteki uyoku: Uchida Ryōhei no kenkyū. (Fukuoka: Kita Kyūshū Daigaku Shuppankai, 1980. Hurgronje, Snouck, Mohammedanism: Lectures on its origin, its religious and political growth, and its present state (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1916). Kokuryūkai, Tōa senkaku shishi kiden, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kokuryūkai Shuppansha, 1936). Lawrence, T. E., The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922). Matsunaga, Akira, “Ayaz Ishaki and the Turco Tatars in the Far East” in Selcuk Esenbel and Inaba Chiharu, The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on Japanese-Turkish Relations (Istanbul: Bogazici University Press, 2003), Nakamura, K., Early Japanese Pilgrims to Mecca” Orient , XXII (1986): 47–58, p. 48. Norman E. H., “The Genyōsha: A Study in the Origins of Japanese Imperialism” Pacific Affairs, 17, 1944: 261–284. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), R &A Reports, No. 890.3, October 1943, “Japanese Infiltration among Muslims in the Near East.” Office of Strategic Services (OSS), R & A Reports, No. 890.1, May 1944, “Japanese Infiltration among Muslims in China”.

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Ōkawa Shūmei, Kaikyō gairon (Tokyo: Keiō Shobō, 1943). Rezrazi, El Mostafa, “Pan-Asianism and the Japanese Islam: Hatano Uho: from espionage to Pan-Islamist Activity”, Annals of Japan Association for Middle East Studies (12), 1997, March: 89–112.) Sakamoto, Tsutomu, “The First Japanese Hadji Yamaoka Kōtarō and Abdürreşid Ibrahim” in Selçuk Esenbel and Inaba Chiharu, The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives of Japanese-Turkish Relations (Istanbul: Bogazici University Press, 2003), pp.105–21. Shimizu, H. “The Japanese Trade Contact with the Middle East: Lessons from the Pre-Oil Period.” In K. Sugihara and J. A. Allan, eds., Japan in the Contemporary Middle East (London: Routledge, 1993): 27–54. Sun Ge, “How Does Asia Mean?” Part 1, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2000, 1: 15–27. Takushoku Daigaku, Tanaka Ippei isuramu nihon no senkakusha (Tokyo: Takushoku Daigaku, 2002). Wakabayashi, Han (Nakaba), Kaikyō sekai to nihon (Tokyo: Dainichisha, 1937). Worringer, Renee, “Sick Man of European of the Near East?: Constructing Ottoman Modernity in the Hamidian and Young Turk Eras.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 36: 207–30.

NOTES 1 Worringer, 2004: 207–230; Nakamura, 1986: 47–57. 2 Esenbel, 2004: 1140–1170. 3 OSS No. 890.3: 2-6; Shimizu, 1993. 4 Esenbel, 2004: 1141. 5 Ōkawa, 1943: in passim. 6 Wakabayashi, 1937: 1–10. 7 Lawrence, 1922; Snouck Hurgronje, 1916, as an example of European Muslim experts serving imperial and colonial policy. 8 Rezrazi, 1997: 89–112. 9 Nakamura, 1996: 48; Bob Wakabayashi, 2007: 226; Shinohe Junya, (2004): 517–539. 10 Esenbel , 2004: 1140–1170 also included as Chapter 1 in this book that discusses the pilgrimages and Japanese Muslims as part of the larger historical context of Japan and Islam; See Sakamoto Tsutomu, “The First Japanese Hadji Yamaoka Kōtarō and Abdürreşid Ibrahim” in Esenbel and Inaba, 2003: 105–21. 11 Nakamura, 1996: 48–49; Gibb, 1979: 770. 12 Nakamura, 1996: 48–49. 13 Nakamura, 1996: Akira Matsunaga, “Ayaz Ishaki and the Turco Tatars in the Far East” in Esenbel and Inaba, 2003: 197–215. 14 Nakamura, 1996: 50. 15 Wakabayashi, 1937: 1–5. 16 Esenbel, 2004: 1156 note 48 See debate in Diet. 17 Ōkawa, 1943: 1–13 and introduction; Aydin, 2002: 180–198. 18 Wakabayashi, 1937: 1–10 for the recollection of the history of Islam policy or kaikyō seisaku in Japan; 2–38 for the introduction to the main principles of the Islamic faith and the history of Islam; 39–41 Islam in the Near East and China; 53–86 current trends in the Islamic world before and after World War I and the main nationalist leaders of Muslim countries; 89–120 special emphasis on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and King Ibn Saud; 121–197 anectodal discussions of Arab views, Japanese economic relations with the Muslim world and the daily account of the pilgrimage of Japanese Muslim pilgrims in 1936. 19 Kokuryūkai, 1936, II: 777; Office of Strategic Services Research and Analysis Branch R&A China No. 890.1, May 15, 1944: 91. 20 Kokuryūkai, 1936, II: 777; OSS 890.1: 91. 21 Kokuryūkai, 1936, II: 777. 22 OSS 890.1: 91. 23 OSS 890.1:appendix.

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Tōa senkaku: 777. OSS 890.3:1. Wakabayashi, 1937 : 1–2; OSS 890.1: 91. Wakabayashi, 1937: 2–3. Wakabayashi, 1937: 3. Wakabayashi, 1937: 4. Esenbel, 2004: 1148. Esenbel, 2004: 1149. Worringer, 2004: 225 note 25. Ibrahim, 1910–1911: 354–64, 359, 366–67, 392–94, 401, 413, 427; Esenbel, 2004: 1152. Wakabayashi, 1937: 9. Esenbel, 2004: 1160. Esenbel, 2002: 194–200; Gaikō shiryōkan, 1937: 49. Wakabayashi, 1937: 9. Wakabayashi, 1937: 2. Esenbel, 2004: 1159. Takushoku Daigaku, 2002: 355, 439. Takushoku Daigaku, 2002: 414. Wakabayashi, 1937: 6–7; Takushoku Daigaku, 2002: 354–59. Wakabayashi, 1937: 2–3. Esenbel, 2004: 1152–54. Wakabayashi, 1937: 1–10. See Müge Isker Özbalkan Photograph collection. Wakabayashi, 1937: 189–197. OSS 890.1:139. Wakabayashi, 1937: 114–119; Shimizu, 1993. Norman, 1944: 261–84; Sun Ge, 2000: 15–17. Sun Ge, 2000: 15–17, 20–21, 27. Fuess, 1998: in passim; Iriye, 1981: in passim; Najita and Harootunian, 1995: 771–775; Morley,1983: in passim; Shillony, 1981b: 1–16. Hatsuse, 1980: 2–3. Hatsuse, 1980: 2–3. Esenbel, 2004: 1145.

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❚ Paper presented at EAJS Conference, Lecce, September 2008.

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Maps in Our Mind: Chinese Coins, the Asian Muslim Network, the Japanese and the Transnational a

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lobal historical perspectives need to incorporate the local history within interregional connections to the greater world beyond. Lately I have been intrigued with the historical process of how events on the transnational level along traditional pilgrimage, commercial, and trade routes between the tri-continental space of Euro/ Asia/Africa have also interplayed with the political reality of national and imperial power in the modern twentieth century. What the late Joseph Fletcher of Harvard termed interconnected history is apt as a starting point to try and capture some of the connections and filtrations between regions in Asia that escape our attention when one studies the peregrinations of nationalism as a domestic phenomena, a troubled one at that, in the geo-social hemisphere of the nation state. I would like to practice what I like to call “interlacing” that hopefully will help us understand why Chinese Coins from global trade, the Turkestanis from the Asian Muslim transnational network, the Japanese, transnationality and nationalism are all seemingly disparate facts and ideas that interrelate with the history of nationalist, imperialist, and even Japanese Asianist agendas and policies during the long modern age from the second half of the nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War in the twentieth century. By doing so, one hopes to detect the “proto” conditions of transnational nationalism that also hint at patterns of world power behavior. This paper discusses a cluster of geographic and political maps derived from archeological and archival evidence that portray for us three major conceptual maps that will guide us through the linkages between the historic Asian Muslim network, the age of religious quest and nationalism, and the Japanese Asianist interest in Muslim agendas. The first map that we should bring to mind is that of the ancient Silk Road, “the sailor’s Silk Road” which was a southern parallel route of transcontinental travel to the better known Central Asian route over land caravans to the rich markets of the East. The “sailor’s Silk Road” which relied on the knowledge of navigating across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific according to the Monsoon winds 73

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connected the Mediterranean with the Inner Asian frontier of China through the Persian gulf as the historic trans-oceanic route of trade, migration, and pilgrimage. It was in the year 2000 that my colleague Asli Özyar of the History Dept. in Bogazici and myself when visiting our newly acquired site Gözlü Kule of Tarsus city in the south Mediterranean coast of Anatolia, the birth place of St. Paul, in Çukurova, Cilicia of Antiquity, that we “discovered” a small collection of 31 Chinese Coins in a pouch in the Gözlü Kule study material. We had just received the material from Adana Museum. The coins had been deposited by the American archeologists of Byrn Mawr College back in 1946 with the local Adana Museum when they closed up the unfinished excavation. The American team had begun excavating in 1937 but the Second World War had intervened, making it impossible to continue the investigation that searched for a Hittite Palace. Tarsus once served as the capital of the Hittite provincial governors of the Anatolian empire. The pouch simply had a label which said “Chinese Coins” in bold letters. The coins led us to the traveling route of Turkestani/Uigurs from Inner Asia to the Mediterranean area who were using Chinese coins as part of the local commercial exchange. By the way, subsequent queries revealed that apparently there is a whole series of caches of Chinese coins which have been discovered by the archeologists who have been digging in archaic and classical sites along the Southern and Western Anatolian coast that remain unstudied.1 Upon reading the inscriptions on the Chinese coins with the help of our Chinese language instructor Mr. Yin, I could determine that they were minted during 1875– 1908 during the reign of the Qing Emperor Guangxi whose name is inscribed on one side of the coins. The other side of the coin has the character Xin which means “new” in Chinese. It indicated to us that the coins were used in Xinjiang (meaning New Province in Chinese) where the population is mostly Muslim, a combination of Uigur, Uzbek inhabitants, who have gone with the various names of Turkestanis, or Sarts in history, a Turkic population of Inner Asia. Chinese Turkestan had been an autonomous vassal region of the Qing, but the recent conquest of Emperor Ch’ien Lung in the eighteenth century had incorporated the vast pastoral plains which were devoted to horse breeding and leather industry, as well as the mountains, fertile land, and dry desert steppes into the Empire. The conquest provided access to the profitable trade of the vast amount of precious Jade which was highly valued in China as in the rest of East Asia. Furthermore, since the middle ages, Chinese Turkestan like Western Turkestan in Central Asia produced high quality cotton that the Uigur Khagans cultivated with extensive irrigations systems as a cash crop for the Chinese textile market. During his journey to the court of Kubilai Khagan in the thirteenth century, Marco Polo had noticed the extensive fields dedicated to cotton cultivation in Kashgar, Yarkand, Khotan, and Pai in the region. The Turkestanis who were to travel to the Tarsus region were to bring their skills in horse breeding and cotton cultivation to the region.2 During the nineteenth century the region experienced political unrest with a series of rebellions that led to the Qing re-conquest in 1881 when Turkestan was for the first time turned into a province of the Empire, the named Xinjiang, the New Province, the Uigur Muslim elite lost their autonomy and the whole area was put under the authority of the central government, however, unrest continued on and off into the twentieth century. The era of Emperor Guangxu is significant because the era witnessed the tumultuous changes of the late nineteenth century in China ever since the Opium War of

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1838–1842 as the country experienced reform, revolt, and revolution in the midst of intensive wars with Western imperialism and domestic rebellion. The challenged the Qing dynasty and the Chinese public’s were shocked with Japan’s victory over China in 1894–5 that provided the sudden opportunity for the “100 Days Reform” interval of the young Chinese bureaucrats, Kang Yu wei and Liang Chi Chao who had convinced the young emperor to take radical measures in line with Japan’s rise as a great power through an intensive adoption of Western models. The reform movement failed due to a palace coup plotted by Dowager Empress Cuxi and the conservative members of the dynasty who took over the helms of government and executed the top six members of the reformists. The leader Kang Yu Wei and his pupil Liang Chi Chao, advocates of a constitutional monarchy, who were to continue their career as political émigrés, had to escape to Japan. The Empress, likened at times to the “Red Sultan” Abdulhamid as the source of staunch conservatism, the nemesis of liberals and progressives, remained firmly in power behind the throne. Known for her conservative reign, the Cuxi era witnessed the humiliation of China by young Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 and the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion of 1901. The demise of the reformists is an important event in Chinese history for it meant that the central government was incapable of continuing a comprehensive and unbroken reform policy of the imperial state. China’s “modernity” was politically to be the product of a “decentralized” process that came about more as the result of provincial reforms in the hands of regional governors and warlords than a continuous top down etatist trajectory of transformation that one observes in the case of Meiji Japan and perhaps even Ottoman and Republican Turkey.3 A tumultuous phase of late Qing History in Chinese history, the era saw the suppression of numerous regional revolts including the famous Yakub Beg rebellion of Chinese Turkestan, in 1864 that had just been suppressed by the able forces of the Qing government in 1877 after Yakup’s untimely death, perhaps the reason why people from the region came to Tarsus with all these coins. Supported by the Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz who liked to play the Great Game, maybe the last Sultan to be able to do so confidently, Yakub Beg had been provided with the military assistance in the form of a Captain Ali Kazim, five privates, 2000 odd rifles with ammo and six cannons, probably the last such substantial Ottoman style “overseas” aid to troubled Muslim rulers in the Asian “world of Islam” to help train Yakub’s army according to the European style Nizam I Cedid system. The revolt was one of those regional uprisings that had Great Power involvement. Even Britain and Russia had momentarily supported and recognized this steppe Khanate. Abdulaziz was not alone. The small military aid party traveled to Turkestan through the trans-regional route from the Mediterranean through the caravan road to Basra, and sailed to British India whereupon they trekked up the Karakorum route to Turkestan to meet with Yakub’s forces.4 While one side of the coin, thus, is in Chinese, the cursive script on the back side of the coins is in Manchu, the native language of the North Asian pastoral nomad Manchu tribes who spoke an Altaic type of language and had conquered China in 1644. Like many of the previous non-Chinese or Sino-nomad conquerors such as the the Sui and the T’ang in the sixth century (Sino-Turkish), and the Mongol world empire of Gengiz whose grandson Kubilai Khan founded a Chinese style Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century, the Manchus swiftly adopted the identity of the Confucian Chinese state. Having obtained the support of the Chinese

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bureaucratic elite, the warrior Manchu rulers declared the Qing dynasty which represented a universal concept of Empire that appealed to the vast majority of the realm who were Chinese. But, the Manchu rulers who immersed themselves in the high culture of Chinese civilization also liked to keep their steppe/tribal identity with discrete measures in such practices as bi-lingual coins and a bi-lingual bureaucratic archive. Some years ago Martin Wilbur, the grand historian of modern China, had contended that it was one of the reasons for the dismal defeat of the Manchu forces during the Opium War of 1838–1842 in the hands of the British East Asia Company fleet of gunboats with lethal fire power (at one point the British manned a fleet of 15 barrack ships, 4 steam boats, 25 smaller boats with 4000 marines with a total of 20,000 troops against the Manchu imperial Banners of 90,000 strong.) that had rushed to “punish” the Chinese for destroying the opium stocks of the British agents who had disregarded the Imperial decree that had banned the sale of opium. While the vicious assault was demolishing the coastal defenses of China, helpless against the guns of the European techno-industrial revolution, the desperate Qing imperial commanders had to prepare orders in two languages. (Transmitted by Martin Wilbur during class in 1972 at Columbia University.) The Tarsus coins reflected the required practice of the bi-lingual bureaucracy of the Qing which produced all of its official documentation in two languages. The script also tells us the story of another map of cultural and commercial communication, for the Imperial Manchu alphabet was derived from the original Mongolian script of the thirteenth century, which in turn had been derived from the Uigur Buddhist script of the eighth century. It was an extraordinary case of the transnation journey of literacy along the Silk Road. Uigur writing again in turn was an adaptation of the Aramaic script that had originated in the Fertile Crescent region of Mesopotamia which is related to the cursive scripts of the Arabic language and the Aramaic biblical script of the “Syriac-Assyrian” Christian Church, the Suryani community of East Anatolia today. Aramaic was the spoken language of Jesus Christ. The cursive script reflects an older route of travel along the Medieval network in Central Asia using the caravan Silk Road land route between Mesopotamia, Bagdat and China which was north of the southern trans-Oceanic route. Sogdian merchants of the silk trade, an Indo-European language speaking people akin to Persian, (perhaps the ancestors of the Tajik) adopted the Bagdadi script as they traveled to and fro between Persia and Inner Asia carrying Silk and other Chinese goods to the profitable Western markets during the middle ages. It was the Sogd merchants who taught this writing system to their Kumul, Hami, and Kashgar trading partners the Uigur during the sixth century, some of whom also learned of Manichaeism and Nestorian Christianity from their Sogd partners. We think that the Uigur decided to use this Western script for their language when they converted to Manichaeism from Persia. Later when the Uigur became Buddhist they continued to use the script only to give it up for the Arabic script with their conversion to Islam in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. In 1599, Nurhaci the conqueror of China had a Manchu script devised from the older Uigur-Mongol script in order to unify all the tribes under the mighty Manchu Banner organization which was the military backbone of the Qing dynasty. An Inner Asian nomad writing tradition, for the Manchu rulers of China it made sense that while they fully adopted the principles of Chinese civilization, still, they thought it more appropriate to adopt the writing system of nomad peoples like themselves with whom the Manchu emperors tried to keep an amicable relationship until the advent of

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nationalism and other divisive forces of Russian and British imperialism in the region during the nineteenth century. Yakub Beg had been the commander of the Khokhand Khanate, an important regional frontier power between Romanov and Qing empires. His castle had been destroyed in 1847 with the Russian conquest of Khokhand some years before he marched on to Kashgar to declare a new Muslim Emirate with the ferman and hilat of Abdulaziz.5 Publications about the history of the Turkestanis in the Ottoman empire point to Tarsus as a center for the oceanic Silk Road connections between China and the Mediterranean since the middle ages. One suspects that this silk road connection to the region began in the Roman period, when Tarsus was a major commercial town where silk imported from China was rewoven and dyed for the Roman elite market. The Silk Road map of the Middle Ages connected Europe, Asia and Africa. The travels of Marco Polo and later Ibn Batuta during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries made use of the Trans-Oceanic Silk Road. (Marco Polo during his return journey. Ibn Batuta on his journey to India and China.) Like today this sailor’s Silk Road began from the southern coast of China, sailing in sturdy Arab or Chinese sailboats through the islands of today’s Indonesia, passing along the Malacca straits between Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, and reached the bay of Bengal and finally Western India Gujurat. This was (and still is) also the Muslim Haj route of pilgrimage from Asia to Mecca and Medina, the Holy Cities of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. Travelers arrived in the Persian Gulf Hormuz, Basra, and proceeded to sail into the Red Sea from Aden, to disembark in Jeddah, or go up to Cairo or sail down to the coast of (Somali today) East Africa. Just like today, all of this was dependent upon the great Monsoon winds which permitted travel from East to West in early summer and back in the winter months. The route wellknown to ancient and medieval travelers, merchants, adventurers, and settlers from China, South Asia and the Southern Arabian Egyptian lands, also juxtaposed with the pilgrimage or Hadj route with the rise of Islam.6 This trans-Asian route between the Mediterranean and Chinese Turkestan also became the road to migrations. Subsequent research on Tarsus and the Turkestani connection revealed that the Tarsus region had always been a favorite site for visits and emigration for settlement from China since the late middle ages. Today, the Cukurova region which historically has been home to most of the ancient peoples of the region including the Arabs, Armenians, Turks, Turkoman tribes, Greeks, Romans, Africans also began to receive a migrant population of Uigur, Ozbek and other Turkic populations from Central and Inner Asia who have traditionally worked in horse breeding and the cotton cultivation economies of Cukurova the Cilician plane for which they brought their know-how from their original homelands. In Tarsus alone there are two Turkestani Vakf or Pious Foundations that are active to this date: Abdullah Mencek Zaviye, higra 781, western 1403, known popularly as the Turkistan Zaviye. According to its charter, the Zaviye has been providing free food and lodging to Turkestanis who can prove with a document from their local communal leaders back in Inner Asia that come from the designated villages and towns in Inner Asia that the foundation had been serving. The Foundation charter lists 84 Turkestan cities and villages from which travelers have the right to stay in the lodgings for about three days. The second Vakf is the Inci Pinar plains foundation in the Ulas district of Tarsus known as the Beyce Sheikh Vakfiye, founded in Higra 782, only 1 year after the first one, in 1404, by a Sheikh Esseyid (Seyid holy man

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descended from the Prophet) Abdulgafur from Turkestan who settled in the area. To the Turkestanis, the chain of local foundation lodges along the Silk Road/ Pilgrimage Route from far away frontier of China to the Mediterranean provided the “proto-national” network along the Euro-Asian transnational arena of communication.7 By the eighteenth and nineteenth century we can envision a second map of the global religious and political movements in the “World of Islam” which overlaps the very same geography of ancient and medieval commercial and religious travel. The second map emplots the stories of regional reform, resistance and political movements of nationalism and anti-colonialism among Muslim societies of varying sectarian, ethnic, and national populations to meet the challenge of modernist winds blowing from the Western hemisphere of imperialism and colonialism. The map of Ira Lapidus conveniently shows us how the new religious debates for transcendentalism, fundamentalism, modernism, political movements of nationalism, Pan Islamism and revolution fertilized the tri-continental vast space that was to be also began to be imagined as the new World of Islam beset with troubles and problems of decline but offering the hope for revival and rejuvenation.8 The Sufi, mystic order of Central Asia, the Nakshibendiya communities of Central Asia and North West China reached into Indonesia, India, Anatolia, and the Balkans represents one typical example of how religious transnational denominations became the foundation for economic, intellectual, educational currents in the early modern and modern period. Halide Edip Adivar, the brilliant political activist, literary figure, nationalist who participated in the War of Independence after the surrender of World War I, is aware of the significance of the Nakshibendiya Silsile (chain of transmission) in passing along not only Sufi religious knowledge between religious leaders and their student followers but also as an information channel for the current political nationalist networking between Ghandi’s Indian independence movement and the Khilafat movement that supported the Turkish struggle in Anatolia against the European occupying forces.9 To this day, the eastern and western borders of Asia has been the back-bone of this dynamic early modern Sufi sect which exhibits a Muslim version of “Catholic modernity” combining modernism with conservative strict Islamic practice and has played a major role in the surge of modernist revivalism. In contrast to the above, the very same geography experienced the rise of the Wahhabiya of the Arabian peninsula that represented a forceful iconoclastic force of fundamentalism which contended the Ottoman and Egyptian authorities for generations until they were instated into power by the British Empire. The early nineteenth century in this geographic expanse was witness to the Kadiriya of Central Asia and the Ottoman realm, the Sanussiya of North and Central Africa, and other religious/social currents of the early modern and modern eras.10 In the late nineteenth century, these same Afro-Euro-Asian hemispheres of travel also became the environment where the politics of modernity and reform in Islam, the debate between the kadim (old) and the cedid (new) intertwined with the question of how to adopt Western civilization. By the turn of the twentieth century, the same geography now becomes home to the radicalized political and intellectual currents of nationalism/ reform, and anti-colonial resistance that erupt one after another in this new political world of Islam that had become the territories of European imperial expansion and the colonial project. The specter of British, Russian, and Dutch colonial empires surfaced as a “Western imperialist” Great Power reality

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which occupied or made unofficial inroads into the territories of the existing old world regional polities in Asia. Confronted with Great Power interference, occupation, and the forces of nationalism, the Ottoman Empire including Khedival Egypt, the Kingdom of Qachar Iran, Mughal India, and the Khanates of the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as the Muslim Sultanates and princely states of the Indonesian Islands and the Malaya peninsula were all beset with insurmountable problems of survival. A selected foray into this geography would show the 1857 Indian Mutiny against British power; Sumatra Acheh Sultanate’s 1873–1910 resistance to Dutch colonial conquest; the Yakub Beg rebellion 1873–1877 against the Qing; the proBritish Sayyid Ahmad the Muslim reformist thinker, as well as the diametrically opposite radical Mawlawi Barakatullah the anarchist Pan Islamist revolutionary of British India; the anti-British Sokoto Caliphate in West Africa. These survived to be the “hot spots” in this great geography of trans-regional communication which now became the road for nationalists, Pan-Islam agitators, revolutionaries, radicals, British and Dutch explorers, agents, and modern bureaucrats traveling to their posts and using the telegram as the means of communication. The Suez Canal which opened in 1869 all the more accelerated every type of trans-regional interaction in this geographic map. One can chisel in nineteenth century Ottoman reformism, the Constitution of 1876, the Crimean and Kazan modernist debate in Romanov Russia of Ismail Gasprinsky, the Young Turks in 1908, the Iranian Constitutional revolution of 1906 on to this political map. And so on. Tarsus was also affected by these currents. Today a monument that stands in the middle of the town that was constructed in 1933 is called the Turkestani martyrs monument, Turkistan Sehitligi. It was built in the memory of some 40 Turkestanis who had come to Cukurova on their usual return voyage to China from a traditional pilgrimage to Mecca, and had been caught in the conflict of WWI that erupted in the meantime. The stranded pilgrims had joined the nationalist resistance movement against the brief French occupation of the region. Accordingly 16 had died in action including their leader Hadji Yoldas. The transnational geography of nationalism begins from now on. In 1927, The Turkestan Turkish Youth Union of Tarsus (Türkistan Türk Gençler Birliği) was involved in the activities of the Turkestan independence Movement that had just erupted in Kumul and Kashgar region of China. Xinjiang had had its share of troubled administration and local discontent after the 1912 Chinese Revolution era which had destroyed the Qing and plunged China into a long era of the political disunity between the Nationalist Republic of the Kuoming Tang Party under General Chiang Kai Shek, the Chinese Communist Party, and many local Warlord regimes. The Union recruited members from Adana, Tarsus, Ceyhan, and Mersin and sent them off as volunteers to fight for the East Turkestan Turk-Islam Republic (Sarki Turkistan Türk Islam Cumhuriyeti) under the leadership of Mehmed Emin Khan, Serif Han, Mahmud Khan, and Hoca Niyaz.11 Our third and last imagined Map of the trans-regional geography between the Mediterranean and Chinese Turkestan are from the Japanese archives showing the Japanese analysis of the same Muslim global space in the twentieth century as a possible strategic arena for Japan’s imperial interest in commercial and political agendas. This Japanese understanding of world Muslims come from reports that argued for the adoption of Modern Islamic world as the Japanese overseas territory of political and commercial activity. The 1937 Map of Imaoka Jūtarō, an expert on Muslims of

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Russian Asia, comes in his report on Muslim regional distribution in the world from the Diplomatic Record Office Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The 1943 map on the Ethno national Distribution of the World of Islam is a publication by Ōkubō Kōji a Turkic languages expert, who advocated the line that the Japanese government needs to ally with the political forces of central Asia. The most intriguing one is the swift hand drawn map of the Muslim rebellion in Xinjiang in 1936 that was part of a detailed report on the region prepared during the thirties arguing that Xinjiang could be made into a possible buffer zone against the Soviets with Japanese support to the rebellion which Tarsus volunteers had joined12 (plate 13). This Japanese geo-political Map of Muslim Xinjiang has a background. After the 1868 Meiji Restoration, the Japanese authorities, particularly the General Staff and Army intelligence as well as a new generation of Pan Asianist intellectuals developed a concerted interest in the Muslim regional geographies such as Xinjiang Chinese Turkestan as a possible terrain for pursuing Japan’s imperial interest. The Japanese were responding to a strong Muslim admiration of young Japan’s modernity as a trope for debating the questions of emancipation and reform against the imperial West. Beginning with the late nineteenth century and propelled by the sudden Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, Muslim opinion around the world in this geography had developed a deep interest in Japan as the alternative “Eastern” power which can offer a model of development and possibly political support for Muslims. Japan’s global claim to Asia as the leader of Asian modernity during the years 1900–1945 entailed propaganda and intelligence activities among the Muslim populations in Asia as part of a strategy against Russia and in time the Western empires of Britain and Holland in Asia to become a world power on its own.13 The Japanese Pan Asianist semi-governmental popular organizations of the Meiji era, 1868–1912, the Kokuryūkai, the Black Dragons, and the Genyōsha, the Great Ocean Society, had pioneered this strong Japanese Asianist interest in the Muslim Question. A politically controversial group of right-wing revolutionaries who served Japanese imperialism by supporting Asian nationalists and revolutionaries in their early history, supporting such figures as Sun Yat Sen or befriending anti-colonialist intellectuals such as Tagore, or protecting Indian revolutionaries in trouble such as Rash Behar Bose who tried to assassinate the British governor, now saw helping the Muslim cause as a means of Asian emancipation from the colonial West. They led the way in developing Kaikyo seisaku, Islam policy, which meant befriending political actors from Muslim countries and societies and extend the Japanese network among the Asian Muslim transnational. Abdürreşid Ibrahim of Kazan pioneered close relations among a whole generation of mid-level globe trotters, revolutionaries, exiles, diaspora leaders from Russia Muslims, India, Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Chinese Muslims, Saudi Arabia who came to Japan and were under the protection and agency of the Black Dragons and in some capacity. Having visited Japan in 1908 briefly upon the invitation of the Kokuryukai, Black Dragons, he had met with members of government, intellectuals and gave conferences. During his long journey through Asia visiting China, Indonesia, and India, frequently using his Nakshibendia connections and international reputation as a reformist Kadi, judge, in Russia, Ibrahim did a pro-Japan tour and passed on the message that Japan will be the Savior of Muslims under oppression. During his return journey in 1910 Ibrahim met Omar Yamaoka Kōtarō, in Bombay, a young Black Dragon memberagent for the Russia Division of the General Staff and aide to Harbin intelligence

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during the Russo-Japanese War. Ibrahim accompanied Omar to Arabia, Mecca and Medina on a Hadj where he had political discussions with the local notables such as the Sherif of Mecca and subsequently to Istanbul.14 During the Siberian Intervention and into the thirties, the Japanese Foreign Ministry and the Military establishment adopted this Islam Policy actively as an anti-Communist and anti-Soviet agenda. The measures ranged from bringing into Japanese occupied territories in Manchuria and late to the home islands a diaspora of Muslim Russian Tatars who escaped the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 to funding Muslim organizations among Chinese Muslims, and inadvertently supporting the famous Turkestani rebellion of the thirties by bringing in an exiled Ottoman Prince Abdül Kerim in 1933 as a prospective head of a pro-Japanese state in Xinjiang like Manchukuo. Matsuoka Yōsuke, the director of the Manchurian Railway was particularly in favor of collaborating with Tatar diaspora as part of the “White” forces against Communism. Later when he became the foreign minister of Japan and is known for leaving the League of Nations in 1932 and subsequently signing the Axis Alliance with Nazi Germany and Italy, he toyed with idea of a Xinjiang invasion and had Shimano Saburō, a Russia hand of Army intelligence, prepare a report for that purpose. Finally, the cabinets of Prince Konoe Fumimarō and Baron Hiranuma, the right-wing leader of the Asianist foreign policy of the late thirties and the outbreak of the 1937 Sino-Japanese War, presided over the activities of the Dai Nippon Kaikyō Kyōkai founded in 1938, The Greater Japan Islamic League, which was to act as the official arm of the government for propaganda among world Muslims as to the strong attention that Japan now claimed for befriending Muslims. General Hayashi Senjurō was the Japanese head and Ibrahim, the everlasting fiery preacher according to the OSS, was appointed to be the Muslim international leader and the imam of the Tokyo Mosque.15 There was also an intellectual agenda with Islam Policy. The leader of Japanese Pan Asianism during the thirties, Okawa Shumei, the mastermind of Asianist policies, saw Asian Islam as an transnational international that confronted Western empires which had to be incorporated into Japan’s Asianist claims to Asia because of its fermenting energy. He instigated the establishment of Islamic Studies Institutes that increased in numbers during the thirties establishing the Japanese field of Islamic, Central Asian, and Near Eastern expertise. Not all of the participants in this policy oriented research agenda were propagandist and agents however although knowledge served power in Japan too. The thirties produced excellent Islamic studies scholarship in Japan partaking of the knowledge from such diaspora scholars as Ibrahim and Musa Carullah, the reknowned Muslim theologians of the twentieth century in Russia who stayed briefly for a few years in Tokyo. Professor Izutsu Toshihiko, an expert on Islamic philosophy, of Keio University, who served as a language instructor in one of the wartime agent training schools, later became a well-respected name in the field in the postwar era and taught in McGill University for many years. These institutes were mostly supported by military funds allocated to propaganda and intelligence especially through the ZenRin Kyōkai, the Good Neighborhood Organization for intelligence in Mongolia, or the Manchurian Railway Organization Research Division, and the Foreign Ministry, to train the first generation of Japanese experts on Islamic Affairs. Ōkawa privately sponsored many and sent Kobayashi Hajime, who is in the photo with Ibrahim and Chinese Muslims, to Egypt to study Classical Arabic in Al Azhar University. For the Army,

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especially the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, the Muslims were a fertile ground in China against the Soviets and the anti-Japanese Chinese opinion, especially the boycotts that justified this strong interest in Islamic studies.16 Tokyo had became a “haven” momentarily for diaspora Muslims including large populations who spilled over from the end of the Romanov Empire and the Ottoman Empire, others escaping British and Dutch colonial intelligence, some ex Young Turks and Ottoman loyalists opposing the revolutionary secularist regime of Republican Turkey. The Tatar diaspora published Arabic and Turkish journals, the Koran as publicity material. The Japanese government aided the Muslim diaspora in constructing the Tokyo Mosque, a much publicized event of May 12, 1938, commemorating the millennia birthday of the Prophet, attended by a select number of international dignitaries, the Crown Prince of Yemen, the Italian Ambassador, the representative of Saudi Arabia, and Chinese and Turkic Muslims in Tokyo. The Turkish ambassador did not attend the ceremony. Ibrahim, our early pioneer in Muslim cooperation with Japan and close friend of the Black Dragons came back to Tokyo in 1933 to preside over the ascendancy of Islam Policy together with Kurban Ali, the local Bashkir leader as seen in this private group photo of the two with members of the Kokuryūkai, Foreign Ministry, and the Military General Staff. On a personal level, the Tatar diaspora did the best they could to survive under the precarious conditions of stateless exile. Kurban Ali founded the Mekteb I Islamiye for Tatar children, an excellent modern school well known in pre-war Japan to get their students into the best Japanese universities. (Global Claim, pp. 1157–59.) The Japanese entry into the Muslim transnational network along the silkroad/pilgrimage international geography, now, made this geography between the Mediterranean and the China Seas a coveted arena for infiltration, propaganda, and recruitment. These individuals like the Tatar Ibrahim had pursued their activities with Japanese support (his son Munir (Isker) was educated in Waseda with Kokuryukai scholarship) but during the thirties they became part of the larger picture of Japanese public relations and networking in Asianist internationalism along this geographic space. British intelligence, the Soviets and the OSS have called this development “Japanese infiltration or machinations among World Muslims”. Japanese agents and experts studied Arabic, or Persian and Turkish intensively, and frequently claiming to be converts to Islam with Muslim names and attire, self justified their mission as converts as service to the Emperor. Following in the footsteps of Snouck Hurgonje who had slipped into Mecca in 1885 to study the potential for Pan Islam activity against the Dutch Indies, during the thirties Japanese agents used the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina more intensely as an alternative route of international relations and networking among the Muslim international who gathered in each pilgrimage season. Frequently using the pilgrim communities from the Muslim world as “cover”, Japanese agent-Muslims tried to use the occasion to gain the trust of the leaders in Saudi Arabia but also to gain the credentials of being good Muslims among the communities that they worked with in the field in China and South East Asia especially.17 By joining a Chinese Muslim pilgrim group from Yunan, Hadji Nur Tanaka Ippei had ventured to the Holy Cities in 1924 in the footsteps of Yamaoka. Later he collaborated with his counterpart Kurban Ali or Kurban Galiyev of Baskurdistan Russia, the leader of the diaspora Tatar community of Tokyo who had escaped

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into Manchuria in 1917, in public relations activities in Manchuria among Chinese and the few Manchu Muslims. Subsequently this Tanaka also helped Wakabayashi Nakaba a mysterious figure, an Islam expert with Kokuryūkai credentials, get money from government and business circles Mitsubishi, Mitsui among them, to organize 4 more pilgrimages of the Japanese Muslim group of 4 newly trained agents, Hadji Saleh Suzuki, and others between the years 1934–1937 as Japan became the site for the rise of militarism and aggressive expansionism in mainland China.18 Japanese Military attachés overseas and the geography of Japanese pilgrimages served as the means to gather intelligence and recruit collaborators among especially Inner and Central Asian Turkic populations to help the Japanese military operation in that region. Between 1927 and 1930, Colonel Hashimoto Kingorō, later a plotter for military takeover in Japan, gathered information about the Soviets from Istanbul. His replacement military attaches Iimura Jo and Kanda in Ankara arranged for Ibrahim to return to Japan in 1933. One Foreign Ministry Document in 1935 tells us of the dilemma the Cairo Japanese Embassy faced when a Sultan Bey, an Ozbek of Afganistan who came from Istanbul, insisted upon a visa to go to Tokyo because he had been a close friend of the Japanese military attaché in Turkey. He was given a visa with the explanation that he was helpful for the activities of the Japanese military attaché in Afganistan. In 1936, again a telegram from the Cairo Embassy asked the home office in Tokyo whether Hadji Saleh Suzuki and the Japanese Muslim group who were led into Arabia by a Manchu Muslim guide, and had just returned from Mecca and Medina could take back to Tokyo a Turkestani pilgrim that they picked up there. The Japanese Muslim groups Shimano Saburo paid careful attention to pitch their tents during the religious ritual in the suburbs of Mecca next to Turkestani pilgrims in an effort to befriend some. In 1936, Tewfik Pasha of Saudi Arabia who had travelled from Cairo to India and had finally fought in the 1930 Turkestani rebellion, the site of our Tarsus volunteers, as a commander came to Tokyo where he lived for a while to recuperate from his wounds during battle. Tevfik Pasha, an Ottoman officer of Turko-Arab lineage, married a young Tatar Turk in Tokyo. Later he had his family settle in Syria. His son Adnan Şerifoğlu lives in Istanbul. The family history like many in this transnational history of nationalism linked to the trans-regional geography of the political journey between today’s Turkey and Asia.19

CONCLUSIONS Some conclusions. First, a series of very general ones. Although Japanese Pan Asianism, Black Dragons, Okawa Shumei, Asianist political and military leaders, and political Islam in this case Ibrahim, Kurban Ali, the rebels in Xinjiang, Tewfik Pasha, the Indian Muslim Barakatullah, the Acheh rebels, etc, all shared a critique of the West in the form of the British/Russian/Dutch empires that initiated the dialog between Japan and Muslims, in the end this whole cooperation was for the sake of the Japanese empire’s claim to world power status in Asia. For many Muslims however Japan also had become their last haven after a profound dissolutionment with the prospects of nineteenth century a modernist Islamic possibility, such as we see in the case of the modern school of the Tatars in late Romanov style that was founded in Tokyo, which went down the drain with WWI and the inception of hard secular Turkish republicanism after 1923 that abolished the Caliphate or

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the straightforward atheist stance of the USSR which suppressed religious practice made it impossible to keep alive that turn of the century collage of modernism and Muslim values which had become possible for many Muslim intellectuals in the Ottoman and Romanov worlds. In the end of the day Japan’s use of Islam represented the same process as that of contemporary Western powers linking intelligence strategies and cultural studies so that knowledge served the interests of Power. Second, a specific conclusion concerning the Chinese Coins, Silk Road, and Pilgrimage as a background to nationalism and world power. The trans-Oceanic “sailor’s Silk Road” had been the geographic space for numerous “trust networks” of Turkestanis, Indians, Nakshibendis, Arabs, Ottoman Turks, Chinese Muslims, and other populations amongst whom the ideas and activities of modern politics incorporating nationalism, Pan Islam, revolution, resistance to Western imperialism, or collaboration had taken hold into which the world power interests of Japan entered as a new agenda collaborative networking through Japanese Muslim actors.20 I suggest that the Japanese practice of Islam policy in this transnational geography of the Ancient Silk Road of Trade, Migration, and Pilgrimage helped implant world power intelligence networks within the transnational Muslim diaspora in Asia. In my opinion, the process helped empower political groups in some areas along this traditional “pilgrimage/cum silk road para-national network”. The transnational had become the arena for the national regionally and possibly engendering an Islamic international globally. The Sumatra Acheh rebels who are still staunch Muslim actors of the Indonesia archipelago who first surfaced in our religious and political map of Islam, helped the Japanese vanguard forces land in Sumatra and slip into Java with the onset of the Japanese South Seas invasion in 1942. After visiting Mecca and recruiting his Turkestani, during the Second World War, Hadji Saleh Suzuki who was part of the vanguard, trained the Indonesian youth as a jungle guerilla militia right after surrender in 1945 and baptized them with the name Hezbollah, the faction of God, that fought quite effectively against the Dutch who tried to make a feeble come-back between 1945 and 1949 as a colonial power. During the twentieth century, the silkroad of the Turkestani Chinese coins in Tarsus shows a window along the highway for Muslim political traffic and networks from the Mediterranian into the heartland of Asian politics from India into Inner Asia and South East Asia. Finally two remarks. Our peregrinations along this geography of transnational communities and networks opens a window to world power intelligence activities. Here the Japanese practice of Islam Policy was part of twentieth century world power behavior which canvassed the support of world Muslims, recruited some, for an overall Anti-Communist strategy of the twentieth century, Bōkyō. It heralded the postwar United States global strategy of the Green Belt in Asia, probably its contacts too. Some were surely hopeful in this clash between Communism and Anti-Communism. But it was also a dismal world of the vulnerable who became embroiled in the twilight zone of the clandestine politics of world power international relations. The fate of the few personalities from the interloper diaspora populations of the transnational in this essay shows how transnationals, frequently the remnants of a by-gone era, can be inherently vulnerable to global power interests worthy of reflecting upon this day and age. Ibrahim died in Tokyo during 1944 under bombing. Kurban Ali was sent to Manchuria whereupon he was arrested by the Soviets and spent the rest of his life in a Siberian Gulag Camp until 1972. Hadji Saleh Suzuki and all the rest pretty much perished with the war. The rest of the

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Tatar community quietly became Turkish citizens and were lost to Japanese postwar memory. The map in our mind dilutes the conceptual boundaries of East/West, Japan/United States, and narrates the story of a twentieth century world power linked with the Asian Muslim network that burgeoned along an ancient geography that “interlaced” the transnational and the national, the local and the global claims to power.

NOTES 1 Selcuk Esenbel, “Comment on the Chinese Coins from Tarsus-Gozlukule,” in Asli Özyar, Field Seasons 2001–2003 of the Tarsus-Gözlükule Interdisciplinary Resarch Project. Istanbul: Ege Yayinlari, 2005, pp. 173–176. 2 Elif Akcetin, “Corruption at the Frontier: The Gansu Fraud Scandal”, Ph.D. University of Washington, 2007 for Jade trade between Turkestan and Gansu province after the conquest; Maureen Fennell Mazzaoiu, The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages 11–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 1–9, 11 for cotton traveling to China in late Antiquity and cash crop in the Uigur Kingdom. 3 Huri Cihan Islamoglu and Peter Perdue, Shared Histories of Modernity, China, India, and the Ottoman Empire. London: Routledge India, 2009; Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China. New York: Norton, 1999. 4 Ahmet Riza Bekin “Yakub Bey Zamaninda Dogu Turkistan in Dis Iliskileri” Ankara Universitesi, Dil ve Tarih Cografya Fakultesi Dogu Dilleri, Vol. II, No. 1, 1971: pp. 35–36, 39–72; Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia 1864–1877. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2004. 5 Kuddus Issiyev, Uighur script, 2009 checked in http://the_uighurs.tripod.com/Scrpt.htm. Retrieved on May 7, 2009; Rene Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes A History of Central Asia, Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 1988, p. 124; Pamela Kyle Crossley for Manchu script in Willard J. Peterson, ed., Cambridge History of China Volume 9, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 319; Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road. A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. On the medieval Silk Road, pp. 140–182. 6 Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the age of Global Empire. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 7 Ahat A. Andican, Cedidizm’den Bağimsizliğa: Hariçte Türkistan Mücadelesi. Istanbul: Emre Yayhinlari, 2002, pp. 393–395 for the Vakfs. 8 Ira Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, Map. 29. Islamic reform and reistance movements: eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 9 Halide Edip (Adivar), Inside India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p.li introduction; Francis Robinson, The Ulama of Farangi Mahall and Islamic Culture in South Asia. London: C. Hurst, 2001. 10 Ira Lapidus Map 29. 11 Ahat A. Andican, Cedidizm’den Bağimsizliğa: Hariçte Türkistan Mücadelesi. Istanbul: Emre Yayhinlari, 2002, pp. 393–395 for the Vakfs and the nationalist movement. 12 For the East Turkestan rebellion see, Owen Lattimore, Pivot of Asia. New York, 1975; Andrew D. W. Forbes, Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: Political History of Republican Sinkiang 1911–1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Gaikoshiryokan (Diplomatic Record Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Japan), Honpō ni okeru shūkyō oyobi fukyō zakken, 1.2.1.0.1 documents on religious and missionary activieties Islam volumes. Here after Honpō. Honpō, Map of World Muslims 1937, Map of the Ethno-national Distribution of the World of Islam by Ōkubō Kōji 1943, Hand-drawn Map of Muslim Rebellion in Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan) 1938. 13 Selçuk Esenbel, “Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam, Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power, 1900–1945.”

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14 15 16 17

18 19

20

The American Historical Review, October 2004, Volume 109. Number 4: 1140–1170 for a detailed analysis that is summarized below. Hereafter Global Claim. See Chapter 1 in this book. Global Claim, p. 1149. Global Claim, p. 1164. See Chapter 1 in this book. Global Claim, pp. 1163–64. Selçuk Esenbel, “The Pilgrimage as International Relations: Japanese Pilgrims to Mecca Between 1909–1938 in Vera Costantini and Markus Koller, eds., Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community. Leden: Brill, 2008, pp. 267–275. See Chapter 4 in this book. Wakabayashi Nakaba, Kaikyo Sekai to Nihon, Tokyo: Dainichisha, 1937, pp. 1–10; Takushoku Daigaku, pp. 354–59. Honpō, Telegram from Cairo Consul to Hirota Koki on Turkestani pilgrims, pp. 163–164, Showa 13, 1938, 2 month, 16 day; Kuwajima kyokushō ni tai surōu Tewfikku no danwa yoshi, Showa 11, 4 month, 16 day, p. 324; Gaimushō, Tewfikku el Sherifu no ken Showa 11, 5 month, p. 329. Charles Tilly, Trust and Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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❚ First published in New Perspectives on Turkey, No. 35, 2006, 37–63.

5

A Transnational History of Revolution and Nationalism: Encounters between Japanese Asianists, the Turkish Revolution, and the World of Islam a

T

he leading intellectual and ideologue of the Japanese Asianist agenda of Japanese imperialism until the end of World War II, Ōkawa Shūmei (1886–1957), was tried in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial as a war criminal but found to be mentally disturbed. The postwar memory about Ōkawa is an alien image-Ōkawa spending his days translating the Qur’an while detained in a mental hospital in solitary confinement. The clinical description of Ōkawa’s hallucinations on 13 March 1947, while under psychiatric treatment, is a telling climax of the narrative on the fusion of Japanese Pan Asianism and Islam. The examination report describes in detail the psychological state of Ōkawa, who might have been suffering from syphilis-induced hallucinations: “Ōkawa believes Mohammed comes to him. In his vision, he states that he sees Mohammed dressed in a green mantle and white turban. Mohammed’s eyes glow brilliantly, and his presence fills him with courage, enthusiasm, and contentment [...] Patient believes that this is a religious experience. Mohammed enables him to understand the ‘Koran’ as he was never able to understand it before. There is no conflict with his Buddhist faith because he states there is only one God: and Mohammed, Christ, and Buddha are all prophets of the same God.” The report notes that the prisoner’s principal interest is now in “Mohammedanism and the translation and interpretation of the Koran.”1 To postwar Japan that has censored its Asianist past in denial, it is a scene that typifies the irrational and unfathomable side to the cultural vision of the nationalist and militarist prewar era. But it makes perfect sense if the career of Ōkawa is traced back in time to the encounter between political actors in the world of Islam and Japanese Asianism that gradually infused an Islam-oriented facet to the Asianist current of Japanese nationalism. This paper traces the prewar history of Japanese Asianism through the encounters between Japanese Asianists, the Turks, and the World of Islam; it unveils a transnational history of nationalism that is a little-studied aspect of twentieth-century nationalist movements.

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The encounter between Japanese Asianist nationalists, the Turkish revolution, and the World of Islam is a subject that offers a snapshot of this global history of ideas and action in a transnational history of nationalism. Duara notes that, like all “good nationalisms,” turn-of-the-century nationalisms had a transnational vision that linked the political purpose of nationalism to the universal ideals of human liberty and emancipation.2 The twentieth-century anti-imperialist nationalist rhetoric—concerned with the issues of “awakening,” “modernity,” or “liberty”—was shared by many in Asia, serving as a common platform of a transnational vision critical of Western hegemony. Pan Asianism has meant many things to many people. Rebecca Karl in her study of the radical potential of the Asian Solidarity Society (a socialist group of Japanese, Chinese, and Phillipine students) in 1907 notes that Asianism has been “far from always meaning the same thing or even including the same configurations of peoples and states it has been mobilized for very different purposes at different times.”3 Japanese Asianist encounters with political currents in the Islamic world between 1900 and 1945 and their relations with the Turkish cultural world illustrate an important but unknown side to the transnational dynamics of twentieth-century nationalism in Asia through the rhetoric of a shared Pan Asia. The enigmatic relationship between Japanese political actors and political activists, mainly from the Turkish cultural world of Russia, but also from the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, which began on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 is a thoughtprovoking historical example of the transnationalist vision of nationalism. The relationship initially transpired as intellectual discourse of Japanese Asianism with Pan Islamist and Pan Turkist components. The intellectual dialogue of Asianism, Islamism, and Turkism concurrently encouraged political actors from the Islamic world to approach Japan as a possible conduit for helping their activism, primarily against Russia and Britain. Pan Islamist Muslim intellectuals and political activists from Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, Russia, India, and South East Asia sought an alternative vision of modernity for solving the “Crisis of Islam” in the wake of the Western challenge. Consequently, they often found Japanese Asianism’s critical perspective of the West on questions of modernity, religion and nationality appealing. In addition to Pan Islamism, the Turkic peoples of Romanov Russia also developed the idea of a cultural irredentism in a vision of Pan Turkism to unite in the great homeland of Turan in Central Asia, an idea that became influential among some of the political and intellectual elites in the Ottoman world.4 Pan Islamism and Pan Turkism were thus components of the lively nationalist debate especially among Russia’s Muslims who were among the first to form close relations with Japan already on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 that made Japan the first successful challenger to the power of the West in Asia. What began as an intellectual and political interest on the part of Muslims and Turks in particular soon became the intellectual argument of Japanese Asianist thinkers forming the ideological basis for Japanese empire-building policies and intelligence strategies. Therefore, the subject is so complex because it combines the study of ideas and politics and the subject of intelligence as a linked history that illuminates shades of the Saidian critic of Orientalism, a critique that exposed the Western use of knowledge about the “other” as a mechanism of power over the Orient. However, in this case the emphasis is on the mutuality of the encounter between the Japanese and their “others”—namely people from the world of Islam,

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and particularly those who were involved in the Turkish revolutions between 1908 and 1923. Initially privileging the actors from the Turkish-speaking cultural world (including the Ottoman Turks and the Turkic people of Russia), the story of the encounter involves mainly the Japanese and the Muslims of China, Indonesia, and India as well as Muslims in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Afganistan. In this narrative, therefore, the intellectual discourses shared by Japanese Asianists, Pan Islamists and Pan Turkists, which were the prevalent political and intellectual currents among the Muslims of Russia, is the beginning part of this story around the turn of the twentieth century. Japanese Pan Asianist fascination with the Turkish revolution as a model makes up the second phase of the story during the 1930s. The collaboration of political actors from Japan and the world of Islam—with a special component of Turkish elements, especially from the Russian world—constitute an underlying facet of the same phenomena. The totality of the encounter also encompasses aspects of Japanese imperialist policies overseas and intelligence strategies in the Islamic regions of Asia before and during World War II. The combination tells us something about the linkages between intellectual discourse, political action, and intelligence strategies that went into the making of the twentieth century, while it also brings to light the relations between nationalist currents between 1900 and 1945. Studying these linkages also works as a corrective to our perspective of globalization; thus, social and economic transformations are paralleled by global interaction in terms of political agendas, programs, ideas about revolution, nation-building, and modernization, not only between the “West and the Rest,” but also outside the Western world.

TRANSNATIONALITY AS THE HISTORY OF NATIONALISM Studies of nationalism explain little about the special form of relations between nationalist movements in the twentieth century, relations that paralleled the dominant sphere of international relations dictated by the Western Powers. We customarily view the history of nationalism through studies that emphasize the history of nation-building within the boundaries of the modern-nation state, largely disregarding the internationalist background to nationalist dynamics. Possibly this is also because nationalism is an ideology that privileges a culturally homogeneous community over others. That this nation is antithetical to internationalism is seconded by most present-day intellectuals who harbor a profound distrust of nationalism as a divisive and anti-humanistic destructive ideology. In the introduction to Rescuing History From the Nation, Prasenjit Duara refers to our obsession with the nation-state: “historical consciousness in modern society has been overwhelmingly framed by the nation-state.”5 Even the critical study of nationalism has been primarily concerned with the question of nationalism within the boundaries of the specific nation’s environment. Focusing on the contemporary character of the phenomenon, Hobsbawm has demonstrated the historic claims of nationalism to be an invention of tradition of political power by modern empires and nation states.6 Anderson has conceptualized the nation as an “imagined community” of modern individuals, which is constructed through the globalizing process of the media, press, and communication, but does not deal with political actors from different countries as international actors.7 He deals with the power of the print in spreading ideas and the colonial framework of Asian nationalism, but he does not discuss the collective

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memory of the recent history of a series of Asian successes in defying Western colonial powers. These success stories appear to have charged many nationalists with a new sense of historical moment and induced them to take action. The only available international history of nationalism in Asia today primarily describes the problematic relations between Western countries as actors and their colonial counterparts as the followers or adapters of the nationalist mode that first originated in the West. Anderson stresses the active role that Western imperialism and colonialism played in the production of what he terms “colonial nationalism” in Asia a product of the anomalies created by European imperialism.8 The field of Subaltern studies has provided a critical perspective of the conceptual legacy of imperialism that survive within the historiography of India. However, the postcolonial critique primarily concerns itself with the dynamics between the West and the colonized other. The prevalent debate on nationalism, therefore, takes the global system of nation-states that really matured into formation after the end of World War II as its territory of discussion. By focusing on the structural character of the local scene of national identity and nationalism in Asia, this paper’s perspective offers a critical but still nation-oriented impression of the dynamics that went into the making of Asian nationalism, namely the international aspects of the process. One major reason for this limited perspective is that our standard impression of international relations of the modern era instinctively takes as its reference point the global actions of the Western Powers. The colonialist imperialism of the Great Powers is credited with the formation of the arteries that linked other countries in a forcibly shared process of globalization in political and economic terms. While this is undeniable, it is an incomplete picture.

THE SETTING: THE TWILIGHT WORLD OF 1900–1945 The global setting between 1900 and 1945, as dominated by the Western Powers, can also be described as a twilight world of international relations that would become fertile ground for the transnational activities of political actors engaging in revolutionary and nationalist activities in Asia. Therefore, a description of this twilight world is incumbent for the purpose of this paper. First, this so-called twilight world was the operational arena available for nationalists, emerging from the rise of new powers (such as Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union) which destabilized the hegemony of the Western imperialism. Second, the twilight world of international relations also incorporated a geographically large arena of international activities in the territories of the few states which can be termed politically compromised sovereignties. These included, for example, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, or Afganistan, countries that managed to remain non-colonized. From this perspective, long since the late nineteenth century nationalist activism in Europe and Asia actually involved a large dose of informal diplomacy, intelligence activities, and in many cases clandestine activities using this special global theater against autocratic regimes or Western colonial governments. Perhaps this was because, in Anderson’s terms, these still remained states with porous and indistinct borders, co-existing with modern nationstates and empires that tried to be “evenly operative over a legally demarcated territory.”9 Relatively weak polities, such as the Emirate of Buhara in Afganistan, or the Ottoman Empire sprawling over some of the Balkans and the Near East, provided

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for many political actors temporary homes and opportunities to hide and formulate schemes of rebellion. In this global setting, the rise of Japan to the status of Great Power is significant as a factor of destabilization that aided the transnational setting of nationalist movements in Asia. As John Dower notes, Japan became the crucial catalyst in destabilizing this global theater of world politics dominated by Western Asian empires, resulting in the demise of the Western Powers’ Asian colonialism. For some Asian nationalists who perceived the chafing under the yoke of foreign rule, collaboration with Japan was a risky venture that might help gain independence from the West.10 In the words of Najita and Harootunian, “the Japanese revolt also tended to link the resolution of Japan’s problems with the revival of Asia as a world area, to emphasize the commonality of Asian peoples in their struggle to eliminate Western colonialism.”11 Both the Asian political activists of the age and the Japanese shared the West as their opponent and as their “other.” The checkered road of Japan’s empire-building process brought many Asian intellectuals and romantics as well as agitators to Japan’s door. For the purposes of this paper, it is also preferable to describe the political history of nationalist movements beyond their own territorial boundaries as transnational relations in order to distinguish the phenomenon from the inter-state relations of sovereign powers (such as the nation-states and modern empires), which have been determined by the international law of the West. The term also brings to light the issue of global interaction entailing not only political and strategic collaboration and contacts to help the cause of liberation or independence, but also an environment for the exchange of ideas and individuals from different national and ethnic environments, debating shared problems of national awakening and modernity. The career of Sun Yat-Sen, the pioneer of Chinese nationalism whose ideas inspired the 1911 Chinese Nationalist Revolution, is a well-known case in point. Hoping to realize a Chinese nationalist revolution against the troubled Ch’ing dynasty beset by Western imperialism and domestic turmoil, Sun Yat-Sen spent a lifetime of constant agitation through his sojourns overseas; he organized oppositional groups among the overseas Chinese in Asia, Europe, and the United States, plotting numerous rebellions with the help of Japanese nationalists.12 The major part of the history of nationalist movements is at the same time the transnational history of political actors like Sun Yat-Sen and many others who were constantly on the move and crossing many different political borders, who were involved in a great number of international encounters and networking. Like Lenin and Trotsky, political actors such as the Ottoman Young Turks who opposed the autocratic regime of the conservative modernist Sultan Abdülhamid II organized their opposition in Europe. In exile, Russian Muslims active against the Pan Slavism and despotism of the Romanov Tsars and the Indian nationalists active against the British Raj were frequently pursuing overt and covert agitation against their home countries’ authoritarian regimes or Western colonial authorities. Not yet leaders of nation-states, many future nationalists were members of a global generation of revolutionary activists and oppositionaries around the turn of the century. To be sure, this was a world in which Western imperialists formally controlled the conduct of international relations between outside countries and their colonial dependencies. Furthermore, unequal treaties allowed the West to exercise

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hegemonic influence in the internal affairs of the non-colonized world—such as the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Ch’ing China— until the early decades of the twentieth century. However, significant in this description of the international relations in the global system dominated by Western capitalism and imperialism is that by the early twentieth century political activists from the anti-imperialist and nationalist movements in Asia, and even Europe, turned their gaze to Japan and other new powers as a possible ally against their foes. Muslims seeking Japan’s help against Western colonial powers were in good company with Jewish Zionists, Polish patriots and the Finnish underground which also sought Japan’s help against Russia. European Jews who were outraged at the recent Russian pogroms and the Zionists who dreamt of a Jewish utopia equally admired Japan’s victory against Russia in 1905—“to smite Ivan,” in the words of Naphtali Herz Imber who published in New York a book of Hebrew poems entitled “The Blood Avenger” and dedicated to “His Majesty Mikado Mutsuhito the Ruler of Japan.”13 The rise of Japan enabled nationalists to seek a possible new dynamic among the Great Powers which had a conflict of interest between the colonial polities of the British empire, the French and the Dutch Indies.14 The Indian anarchist socialist Pan Islamist Moulvi Barakatullah (1859–1927) who was constantly hounded by the British authorities for his anti-British activities, pursued a life-long career against British imperialism through contacts in Berlin, Tokyo, Cairo, Kabul, and Moscow. Contacts in these cities represented this international arena frequently visited by many contemporary Asian nationalists and political activists. For Muslim activists, Mecca and Medina were not only the Holy Cities of Islam and center of pilgrimage, but also a gathering ground for political contacts with collaborators, a location that Western interests had great difficulty to penetrate. Barakatullah left British India at the end of the nineteenth century and wandered from country to country in search of external support for India’s independence. While Barakatullah lived briefly in Japan until 1912, together with another Egyptian Pan Islamist nationalist Ahmad Fadzli Beg, he published an Englishlanguage newspaper named Islamic Fraternity which propagated anti-British views and advocated Japanese support for Asian liberation. However, he lost his teaching position at Tokyo University and his newspaper was closed down because of British pressure on the Japanese Foreign Ministy, the Gaimusho. Later, Barakatullah traveled to Berlin and Istanbul to organize the anti-imperialist Indian opposition in exile. Finally, he arrived in Kabul in 1915 and along with Raja Mahendra Pratap set up the first provisional government of India with himself as the Prime Minister. He represented Amir Amanullah Khan, the King of Afghanistan, in Moscow to seek assistance for the Afghan struggle against the British. During World War I, Barakatullah aided Ottoman agents in fermenting rebellion in Afghanistan, which would help the Ottoman cause against the Western allies. Seeking Bolshevik help like many other nationalist revolutionaries against Western imperialism, he wrote a book entitled Bolshevism and Islamic Body Politic which, despite British measures to ban the book and stop it from reaching India, became well-known in several Asian countries. Barakatullah also had contacts in the United States where he joined forces with the nationalist Har Dayal in San Francisco. Both were to found the Indian Committee in Berlin. Ultimately, Moulvi Barakatullah died in the United States in 1927. Barakatullah’s political career in the form of a world tour was quite typical of

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the movements of the revolutionaries and nationalist political actors of his generation who constituted a diaspora roaming outside the walls of enemy regimes.15 Here, we should note that the nationalists of the age also constructed a new distinct transnational narrative of Asian nationalism, inspired by the recent events of nationalist victories against the West contemporary to their own life times, bringing relevance to the ideas of national identity and emancipation. According to Anderson, Asian nationalists presumably learned the idea of the nation and nationalism from the history of the French Revolution and the Americas in the Western school of colonialism. But the events that prompted many political actors were recent events outside of the West, in areas of perceived close proximity, which were narrated as a new Asian awakening. For example, Mohammad Hatta, the well-known Indonesian nationalist who became the first vice-president of post-war Indonesia under President Sukarno, already a young nationalist in 1923, wrote in an essay while a student in the Netherlands that three events profoundly influenced him and instigated his sense of Indonesian nationalism: (1) the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 which was seen as a victory for all Asians suffering under Western imperialism; (2) the emergence of the movement of the Indian National Congress Party seeking to gain Indian independence; (3) Turkish modernization and the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, as a victory against the Western Powers.16 Asian nationalist rhetoric of the twentieth century was inspired by a sequence of contemporary events (such as the ones enumerated above) which were perceived as a new vista of liberation for Asian peoples.

JAPANESE PAN ASIANISM’S ENCOUNTER WITH PAN ISLAMISM AND PAN TURKISM Japanese Asianists constructed their own narrative of modern Asian history from the same events that were evaluated as acts of defiance against the West which in turn ought to fuel Japan’s leadership of Asia. In the imagination of daiajiashugi (Greater Asianism) the Japanese nationalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century during the Meiji era of modernizing reforms (1868–1912) pursued cooperation with the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and the Chinese nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen, as well as with other reformists and revolutionaries of Asia who shared in a similar Pan Asianist vision of the liberation of Asia from Western hegemony. Marius Jansen’s seminal study on the cooperation between Sun YatSen and Japanese Asianist nationalists of the Kokuryukai society, the Amur River society popularly known as the Black Dragons, has exposed the interesting links of the Chinese nationalist revolution of 1911 with that major political organization of nationalism in Japan, which had close ties to military and governmental authorities. Both movements shared a vision of Greater Asia, but had to follow separate paths as a result of Japanese imperialism in China.17 The encounter between Japanese Asianism and the currents of Pan Islamism and Pan Turkism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century constituted a special form of Asianism that focused on mobilizing Muslims all over the world as friends of Japan. After Japan’s victory over Russia in 1908, Japanese Asianists as well as military authorities apparently found increasing appeal in collaborating with potential oppositional groups among Muslim populations, especially in Russia as well as

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in the Ottoman Empire, in India, South East Asia, and China. They would help to fulfill Japan’s destiny in Asia to challenge Western powers. But this encounter was not just an instrument on the part of Japanese imperalism; rather, it can be argued that the interaction ensued a Japanese response to an invitation from Pan Islamist and Pan Turkist circles. Both the Japanese Asianists and their new friends among Russia’s Turkic Muslims developed intellectual focus and political strategies which would rationalize the relevance of Pan Asianism to Pan Islamism and Pan Turkism. The life story of Abdürreşid ibrahim (1857–1944)—a Russian Tatar journalist and oppositional political activist and an Ottoman Pan Islamist who collaborated with Japan throughout his life and died in Tokyo during World War II—succinctly expresses the connections between Japanese Pan Asianism and the currents of Pan Islamism and Pan Turkism as part of this transnational narrative. A religious cleric (imam) and judge (kadi), İbrahim had become a major figure in the political and intellectual activities of the Kazan region near Moscow, the center for the nationalist and reformist currents among the Muslim Turkic subjects of the late Romanov Empire. Like other Pan Islamists of his generation, İbrahim was the typical nationalist and universalist combined. Pursuing nationalist aims at home, he also advocated the formation of a global network of Islamic peoples to oppose the yoke of Western empires. A maverick political figure and, in the words of later OSS reports from World War II, a “fiery religious preacher,” İbrahim is said to have become a close friend of the Japanese military attaché Colonel Akashi Motojiro, the mastermind of Japanese intelligence in Europe during the RussoJapanese War. He organized the All Russia Muslim congress in 1905, possibly supported by the Japanese behind the scenes. The summary of his career is just like that of Barakatullah, his contemporary and friend in Pan Islamist activities, typically moving from one city to another in search of collaboration and support for his agenda of the day. İbrahim’s “fated marriage” with Japan began on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War and carried him to Tokyo, possibly first in 1906 and later again in 1908, when he contacted political figures in the bureaucracy, army, and especially the ultra-nationalist society of the Kokuryukai which hosted him. In 1909, İbrahim traveled back to Istanbul with Kokuryukai support, taking a very long route that took him about a year and visiting Muslim communities in China as well as British and Dutch colonial territories in order to spread the message to Muslims that Japan would be the future savior of Islam. During his return voyage, İbrahim also introduced Yamaoka Kotarō (1880–1959), a member of the Kokuryukai who became the first Japanese convert to Islam, to nationalist and Pan Islamist circles in Istanbul as a speaker of Japan’s pro-Islam message. On their way to Istanbul, the two comrades also visited Mecca and Medina, whereupon Omar Yamaoka, as he was to be known from now on, became the first Japanese pilgrim to visit the Holy Lands and formed contacts with the Arab notables and leaders on behalf of the Japanese Empire. Later, Yamaoka was to publish an account of his experience in Arabia, entitled Arabia Jūdanki, the first Japanese account of the Arabian world of Islam. During World War I, İbrahim fought on behalf of the Ottoman government conducting propaganda and intelligence operations on the numerous war fronts and as far as Afghanistan where he tried to instigate rebellion against the British authorities with Barakatullah and others.

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Ultimately, İbrahim came back to Japan in 1933 and became the Muslim head of the official organization of the Japanese government for Islam, named Dai Nippon kaikyō kōkai, which was founded in 1938 with General Hayashi Senjuro as its president in order to facilitate cooperation between Japan and the world of Islam. Supported by the military and civilian circles of Asianism and continental expansionism in Japan, he also became the imam of the Tokyo mosque which was established with Japanese and local Muslim support in 1938. The mosque became the symbol of Japan’s new image as the supporter of the Muslim cause around the world against imperialism and colonialism. İbrahim participated in Japanese propaganda activities in the Islamic world during the Pacific conflict; he made use of his reputation as a scholar and Pan Islamist activist of many years. He also took part in the development of Islamic studies in Japan during the long years of political turmoil and war. Away from his family who were dispersed between Russia and Turkey, İbrahim died in Tokyo in 1944, at the age of 94. He was buried with an official ceremony attended by Japanese dignitaries and Muslims resident in Japan.18 İbrahim first visited Japan officially in 1908 and stayed for about five months during which time he formed close alliances with Japanese Asianists of the Kokuryukai, nationalist activists closely linked with Sun Yat-Sen’s revolution, military and civilian authorities, and intellectuals who represented a newly formed Japanese Asianist lobby for a strong pro-Islam policy to help Japanese interests around the world. According to İbrahim’s later publications, the Tokyo of the turn of the century was already a hotbed of Muslim activists among many nationalists seeking collaboration with Japan. Aside from Ibrahim, the Egyptian nationalist Ahmad Fadzli Beg who had been exiled by the British authorities, the Pan Islamist anti-imperialist Mouvli Barakatullah who had been forced to leave India, and a number of other Indian emigres formed a close circle of friends in this transnational community of political activists. The extensive treatment of İbrahim’s argument advocating an alliance between Japan and the Muslims of Russia can be gathered from the interview he gave to the Foreign Affairs Editorial Committee of the Gaiko jiho (foreign affairs news) study group of the Foreign Ministry. On March 21, 1909, İbrahim argued for the need to liberate the Tatar Muslims from Russian oppression. Japan, as the Rising Star of the East, was framed as a model of modernity from which to learn. Stressing that close to 100 million Muslims living in Russia, China, India, and Turkey would offer a potent social base for Japan, İbrahim constructed the demographic argument for Japan’s pro-Islam policy that would be expanded in the future by the Japanese Asianists themselves. A second point in İbrahim’s interview was Japan’s successful importation of Western civilization without losing her spirit. Here, the standard slogan of Japanese nationalism, wakonyosai (Western technology, Japanese spirit), was adapted by İbrahim as an inspiration for the Pan Islamist ideal of preserving the ethics and spirituality of Islam within modernity, while eliminating the distortions of Western modern civilization, an argument that appeals to many Islamists to this day. From a political perspective, Japan represented the ideal of liberalism with a proper constitutional regime, unlike the autocracy of the Tsars. For political activists like İbrahim, Japan was an inspiration not simply as the antithesis to the West, but rather as a desirable progressive regime of constitutionalism in an Asian setting of modernity, blurring the lines between the East and West. Finally, the notion of Asians for Asia, which would afford resistance against European oppression,

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required Japanese and Muslim collaboration in view of the world’s large Asian Muslim population.19 In his publications about Japan, published in Istanbul after he returned in 1909, İbrahim further discussed the real political and cultural reasons for the collaboration of Japanese Asianism and Pan Islamism. His major work, entitled Alem-i Islam ve Japonya’da Intisari Islamiyet (published in 1910 and 1911) is a two-volume account of his sojourn in Japan and his extensive travels through the Muslim communities in Asia on his way back to Istanbul, spreading the message of Japan as the new savior of Islam. The book is generally famous for introducing the image of Japan as the Rising Star of the East against the imperialist West to the reading public of the Turkish-speaking world in the Ottoman and Romanov worlds. The political and economic argument reasons that a rapprochement between the Japanese and the Islamic world would bring solid economic gains for Japan. The author states that the only way that Japan can successfully penetrate the Chinese market is for her to establish close connections with the Chinese Muslims. If the Japanese converted to Islam, they would conquer a third of Asia.20 Significant for the future is that the exchange of ideas between the Japanese Asianists and İbrahim would result in a blue-print for the collaboration of Japan’s Asianist vision and Pan Islam as a new foreign policy for Japan, termed Islam Policy, kaikyōron or kaikyō seisaku in future documents. While the religious issue was not of concern for the Japanese, the persons surrounding Ibrahim formed an “Islam circle,” a lobby in favor of encouraging close relations between Japan and the Muslim peoples— such as Uchida Ryōhei and Tōyama Mitsuru of the nationalist organization Kokuryukai which also had close links with army intelligence. Other members of this Islam circle are the Tōa Dōbunkai, the famous research association of Chinese and East Asian Studies founded by Prince Konoe Atsumarō, and Ōkuma Shigenobu and Inukai Tsuyoshi, the liberal parliamentarians who held an Asianist perspective on foreign relations. İbrahim’s encounter with this circle of Japanese Asianists led to a joint meeting with military officers, when a 41-article program of collaboration with Muslims around the world was prepared. The same circle organized the Ajia Gikai, the Asian Re-awakening Society, that would become the propaganda arm of Japan in the Islamic world, spreading the message that Japan will be the savior of Islam.21 Another theme that bonded İbrahim with his Japanese Asianist circle was the special historic connections between the Altaic peoples of Central Asia and the Japanese of North Asia, “Our Altaic Brothers.” Japanese historiography of the turn of the century debated the special historic bonds between the Japanese and the Altaic peoples of the Mongols and the Turks. As discussed in Stephan Tanaka’s study of the subject, Shiratori Kurakichi, the founder of the field of Tōyō-shi (Oriental history), advocated the historical perspective that Japanese history was distinct and separate from Western history (seiyo shi) and Oriental history (toyo shi), the latter of which encompassed the history of the Sino-centric world. Shiratori also argued that Japan’s historical roots were North Asian and therefore distinct from the southern cultural zone of China, and that it had a special link with the North Asian nomadic cultures of the Altaic peoples of Inner and Central Asia.22 While the Shiratori debate became the foundation for the construction of a Japanese perspective of history as a science, the Altaic argument also found place in the Asianist debate of the age, with obvious political repercussions.

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Tokutomi Sōhō, the liberal Asianist journalist and editor of Kokumin Shinbun, introduced İbrahim to Japanese readers as “our Tatar elder brother [referring to his age of 52] from Russia.”23 Count Okuma Shigenobu, in his interview with İbrahim, symphatizes with his views about Islam and stresses the objective of Waseda University to educate the Chinese and the Japanese races together, so that they can be the leaders of the unification between the Chinese and Japanese nations. In his romantic vision of Pan Asianism, Ōkuma also explained that Japan needs to extend her influence over Manchuria, Mongolia, and even India to solve her land problem and thus expand to defend herself against the inevitable European aggression, bringing the Altaic component of Mongolia into the scheme.24 When İbrahim visited the House of Representatives, he was introduced by the politician Hayashita who had just recently returned from Mongolia and brought a young Mongol noble, Turgub vak oglu balta tore, to be educated in Japan. According to İbrahim, the extraordinary nationalistic tone with which Hayashita introduces this Tatar visitor to the assembly is indicative of the Altaic argument’s prevalence within the political community and its connection to the Japanese critique of the West. İbrahim is dramatically introduced: “Here is our Tatar brother of Gengiz Khan descent [...] I have traveled in Europe. I know their languages. I have studied there. However there is no hope in the West.” The enthusiastic response of the audience ends with: “Long live the Tartars.” İbrahim’s own commentary brought the Altaic argument closer to his Turkish-reading audience, as he narrated how the Tatars were similar to the Japanese who also sit on the floor and eat around a hearth fire. The Japanese festivals were described as similar to the Tatar Sabantoy celebration.25 While arguing for the necessity of an alliance with the Pan Islamic currents, İbrahim is at the same time formulating an argument appealing to the special advantages of the relationship that ought to be formed between the Turkic Muslims and the Japanese in order to facilitate the latter’s entry into the world of Islam. The Altaic argument constitutes an important layer of the ideological dialogue between Japanese Asianists, Russia’s Muslims, and the Turks, a layer that in the future would connect the premises of Pan Islamism and Pan Turkism under the same rubric of a viable vision for Japanese Asianist policies.

MODERNITY AS ISLAM AND THE AWAKENING OF ASIA The Asianism debate in Japan during the 1930s represents the maturation of the politically engaged character of the Japanese intellectual interaction with Pan Islamist and Turkist views, which had begun with İbrahim’s generation. During that time, the first crop of Japanese Islam experts and Japanese Asianists incorporated elements of the Islamist and Turkist agendas into their own perspectives. Irrevocably linked to the militarism of the time, Islamic studies flourished in Japan under the auspices of the military and civilian authorities who now incorporated it as part of the global vision of Japanese leadership in Asia. In 1932, the Isuramu bunka kenkyūjō was founded by the first group of Japanese Islam experts, followed by the Isuramu gakkai in 1935, and the Isuramu bunka kyōkai in 1937. Finally, in 1938, under the presidency of Tokugawa Iemasa, newly trained Japanese experts on Islamic studies founded the Kaikyōken kenkyujō under the auspices of the Gaimushō, the Foreign Ministry. The first crop of Japan’s experts on Islam, Central Asia, and the Middle East—such as Naitō Chishu, the foremost authority on Ottoman Turkish history in

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prewar Japan; Ōkubō Kōji, a Turkish language expert specializing in Central Asian studies; Kobayashi Hajime, the first specialist in Arabic; and Izutsu Toshihiko, the foremost Japanese expert on Islamic philosophy—began their careers in this great feverish atmosphere of discussions of Islam, or Turkism, and Asianism as a new world for Japan. As in the West, these experts to a greater or lesser degree used their knowledge to serve strategic purposes during the war years. While sharing the same imperialist desires, the Japanese approach looked at Islam as an Asianist phenomenon. Kawamura narrates how Islamic Studies in Japan started in the thirties and rapidly developed, along with Japan’s military expansion into Asia.26 The writings of Ōkawa Shumei (1886–1957), the rightist intellectual and ideologue of the prewar Asianist military current, represent an unsurpassed example of deep intellectual involvement with the political question of Islam in the context of the Asian awakening, expanding on ideas that are already expressed in İbrahim’s advocacy at the turn of the century. In his bifurcated vision of Japanese nationalism, Ōkawa advocated a policy of Pure Japaneseness at home, eradicating the corruptive elements of extreme Westernization and Pan Asianism as a foreign policy that will bond Japan with Asia against the West. Similar to İbrahim and others of the Muslim world who looked at Japan as possessing a kindred spirit, Ōkawa posited Islam as a critical factor in his analysis of contemporary world politics, by attributing to Islamic currents the crucial political and social energy for the realization of Pan Asianism. According to Ōkawa, particularly Pan Islamism—which began as a political challenge of Muslims against Western imperialist domination over the Muslim world—was a significant turning point in history. According to Seike Motoyoshi, Islam appealed to Ōkawa because it was a universal religion that became the basis for a universal movement independent from the nation-state in order to challenge the West. In other words, the modern currents of Pan Islamism and the like constituted a supra-national, transnational dynamic, an Islamic “international” that shook the hegemony of the West.27 In his book on the builders of Modern Asia, Ōkawa included Muslim nationalist struggles as a global current of modern times, while constructing a transnational narrative of Asian nationalist revolutions, a narrative that gave a major role to the revolutions in the Islamic world. As in the case of Hatta’s memory of striking events (such as the Russo-Japanese War, the founding of the Indian National Congress and the like) which led him to a national consciousness, Ōkawa too was writing the history of Asian liberation and nationalism based on the contemporary struggles of Asian peoples—that is, a transnational narrative of Asian nationalism. These turning points in the construction of a new Asia were the 1906 Iranian revolution that brought about a constitutional monarchy, the Young Turk revolution of 1908, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secularist Republican revolution of 1923, and the present regime of King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. By toppling ancient regimes and defying Western imperialism, these new Asian leaders were introducing revolutionary reforms to aid the modernization of traditional Muslim societies. Together with Ghandi and Nehru who represented the rise of Indian nationalism, they constituted the “builders of Asia” (ajia no kensetsusha) in the words of Ōkawa, the architects of Asia’s entry into the modern age.28 Ōkawa’s studies stand out as the analyses of the contemporary political situation in Muslim societies, for he saw the dynamics of modernity in contemporary currents of the Islamic world, a view that was antithetical to the Orientalist

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perspective of Europe which had emphasized the character of the Islamic world as a classical pre-modern civilization alternative to that of the modern West. Quite conscious of the dynamics of modern Islam, in his book entitled Kaikyō Gairon (a collection of Ōkawa’s lectures during the late thirties in various political organizations and universities), he argued that Islam was a glorious civilization which had been part of the West. In his original idea that challenges the civilizational conflict perspective of present-day experts (to name Samuel Huntington of recent fame), Ōkawa saw Islam as being in a state of stagnation and decline under the West. However, he stressed that there was a new awakening in the Islamic world which expressed itself in Pan Islamism and nationalism against the hegemony of the West. Reminiscent of similar discussions within Muslim intellectual circles, for Ōkawa it was Pan Islamism and Muslim nationalisms that could ally with the Japanese Asianism bound to make Japan into the victorious leader of Asia challenging the West. Simply put, Japan needs to ride the wave of modern political currents in the Islamic world. In Ōkawa’s case, the connection between intellectual discourse and application is significantly illustrated by these two books. Since his book was published in 1942, the year of Japan’s invasion of South East Asia with the outbreak of World War II, Ōkawa’s Kaikyo gairon lectures were meant as immediate policy vision for the Japanese public. Ōkawa wrote in the introduction: “Now that the Great Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere includes a great number of Muslims it is necessary for our nation to obtain knowledge on Islam.” In 1938, Ōkawa established a special training school for young Japanese Asia experts with the support of the foreign ministry intelligence division. We also learn that Ōkawa gave these lectures every day during the morning classes of the special training school, named Zuikōryō, which later became known as “Ōkawa’s spy school” during the war. The school trained about twenty selected young men who were sent out to various locations in Asia to inculcate friendship with Japan. Its curriculum was primarily from Ōkawa’s publications on the builders of Asia, colonial history, and the question of Islam, in addition to intensive language training in European languages and Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, indicative of the Islamic emphasis in the training program.29 Much later, in 1946, in Sugamo prison under interrogation by the General Headquarters Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers International Prosecution Section, Ōkawa explains his vision of Asia, a vision different from the idea of a timeless Orient, by stressing that before the World War I, the issue at hand had been “how Asia should be cooked and divided among the European powers.” However, after the war the problem had become entirely different in its essence: It meant the Asians’ efforts to revive Asia against the European domination.30 For Japanese nationalists like Ōkawa, there was also practical political lesson to be had from this discussion of Asian awakening to justify action at home. Okawa also admitted to the interrogators that the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and that of Mustafa Kemal in 1923 constituted a single historical revolution of soldiers acting as the principal bodies of political revolutions in the Orient. This analogy was to justify the leadership of the Japanese military to lead a revolution in Japan and to achieve Pan Asianism. Ōkawa criticizes the Young Turks, the Kemalists, and the Indian nationalist revolutionaries for their mistake of too much Europeanization, a mistake that Japan should avoid, again taking its cue from these recent historical events. Accordingly, Ōkawa states: “Attempt at Europeanization [sic] or modernization

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has been the common blunder committed by Asiatic nations. The young party in Turkey and the revolutionary party in India came under this category. They achieved success up to a point but were fated to failure.”31 The translation of this theory of Asian revolutions gleaned from the militarized history of Asia can be seen in the career of a close associate of Okawa, the infamous revolutionary Colonel Hashimoto Kingorō (1890–1957), who was the leader of many clandestine activities, including the March and October incidents of 1931, against civilian rule. The issues of Islam, Turkism, and nationalism connect to the actions of Colonel Hashimoto Kingorō, known as a member of the “Imperial Way,” the kodoha faction of the military. He founded the nationalist organization of radical officers known as Sakura kai, the Cherry Blossom Society, which was involved in many of the bloody conspiracies of the day. As a member of the Russia division of the Japanese military general staff which was also directly involved in the 1931 Manchurian invasion, Hashimoto was the military attaché in Turkey between 1927 and 1930, and he is said to have become an admirer of the revolution under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk, also a military man. As in the case of Ōkawa, the event convinced Hashimoto of the potential for military revolution in Japan. In his articles in Kaizo, first in 1932 and later in the Osaka Mainichi English edition in 1940, Hashimoto explained his sympathy with Mustafa Kemal’s aspirations and that the resurgence of Turkish national patriotism inspired him to found a similar movement in Japan. After World War II, during his interrogation by the US officers for the Tokyo Trials, Hashimoto, like Ōkawa, surprised his interrogators by insisting on his strong admiration for Atatürk and how the Turkish republican revolution led by military leadership was his inspiration for constructing a new Showa Restoration for Japan that would eliminate the ills of Japanese society through the political action of young officers.32

THE “FERTILE LAND OF ISLAM” AND “OUR ALTAIC BROTHERS” FOR JAPAN The intellectual discussion of Islam as a code word of Asianism, as seen in Okawa’s thought emerges in the formulations of the intelligence and military perspectives of the 1920s and 1930s. The memoirs of Japanese intelligence officers who conducted propaganda networking and intelligence operations during that time conveniently expose the fusion between the ideas of Japanese Asianist policy, Pan Turkism and Pan Islamism for its strategic purposes. After World War I, the troops involved in the Japanese imperial project in Manchuria, the Japanese Kwantung Army and the Mantetsu (South Manchurian Railway Research Organization) provided a haven to a large number of migrants from the former Romanov and Ottoman Empires, which had been destroyed as a result of the Great War. Rejected by the Soviet Union and the Republic of Turkey, Russia’s Muslim Tatars, former Young Turk officers and intelligence men, even Ottoman loyalists no longer welcome in their own countries formed a diaspora émigré population under the protection of Japan. Some of these Pan Turkists and Pan Islamists had been party to the Basmaci uprising of the Turkic populations in Central Asia in 1922, led by the exiled leader of the Young Turks, Enver Pasha, who died in the steppes of today’s Tajikistan in a suicidal last stand against the Bolshevik forces. The bulk of the émigrés were from the Kazan and the

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Bashkir regions where Russia’s Muslim Tatars had lived. Together with 100,000 White Russian emigrés, about 10,000 Tatars settled in the Far East, and close to a thousand relocated to Japan. By the 1930s, the Tatar émigrés, together with British Indian Muslims and Indonesians from the Dutch Indies, formed the bulk of the population of the Muslim community of Japan, Kaikyō to, founded by the Japanese authorities as a pro-Japanese foreign community.33 For the Japanese military circles in Manchuria this émigré population was now to become the initial fertile ground to launch Japanese Army strategies with respect to Islam Policy or kaikyō seisaku in North West China and Inner Asia during the 1930s, actualizing some of the discussions of the Meiji visit of İbrahim. A former officer of Harbin intelligence during the 1930s, Nishihara Masao explained the military view of the matter in his 1980 account of intelligence operations against the Soviet Union and China: “from 1931, 1932 on, the Army developed a deep interest in the Islam Question, and thought that if we could ride the religious communal solidarity of these people, it would promise a very beneficial agitation and operational strength. Thinking this way, since there was a very large population of Russian Muslim emigrés in Manchuria they could be used in anti Soviet intelligence. The Army held this view that it could cultivate a new fertile ‘heavenly’ land through Islam (shin tenchi).” 34 As Louise Young notes, the term tenchi was frequently used for Manchuria as the fertile heavenly land, a kind of new heaven on earth for Japanese colonizers. In this case, the term is used for the Muslim regions adjacent to Manchuria as a fertile territory for pro-Japanese policies.35 Both the Japanese authorities and the Turkic émigrés converged around the idea that Tatars and Turks were particularly useful for this Islam Policy that infused Pan Turkist elements into the logic of Pan Islamism. This was the expansion of the argument about “Our Altaic Brothers,” which was already implicit in İbrahim’s agenda, as an instrumental policy for justifying the new contacts and strategies of the period. A letter dated September 1922 from a M. G. Kurban Galiev (in Turkish, Muhammed Abdulhay Kurban Ali, 1892–1972), a Bashkirt leader and imam of Tatar émigrés in Manchuria, written in Russian from Mukden to unidentified Japanese authorities, relies on this argument about “our Altaic brothers” to justify the cooperation between Japan and the Turks of Central Asia. The transnational ideology of Kurban Ali’s claim surfaces in the introductory sentence with the importance of Japanese-Turkish friendship in cultural and economic matters. This friendship will contribute to the founding of a world of equality, based on the principle of just world humanism (seigi sekaijindōshugi). If befriended by Japan, the vast Turkish populations in the Eurasian and North African continents will aid the achievement of a just future under the leadership of Japan for the peoples of Asia. The letter explains that the Turkoman people of Russia, the people of Turkestan, the Bashkirts, Tatars, Azerbeyjanis, and Crimeans are all trying to determine the destiny of their peoples with independent republics. Referring to the national liberation war that was still being waged in Anatolia against the surrender terms of World War I, Turkey had proven itself with a successful national movement and its armed struggle under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. All of this concludes in a general Pan Turkist vision tied to the decline of the West. For Kurban Ali, the economic and spiritual impoverishment of Europe is an asset for the rise of the Turkish people with whom Japan should ally.36

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Having outlined the mega-project of Japanese alliance with the Turkic world, Kurban Ali’s letter is a summary of the rhetoric concerning the special role that Turkish elements should play in Japan’s rapprochement with the world of Islam. He argues that Turkish language study will enable Japanese specialists to gain entry into the Turkic world. Since the script is in Arabic, it will provide for Japanese scholars a point of entry into the written languages of the Islamic world, such as Arabic and Persian. The diasporic character of the national appeal of Kurban Asli surfaces in the Japanese translation of the original Russian text: Kurban Ali is identified as the representative of the Bashkirt people. The word Turkoman in the original is crossed out throughout the text to be replaced by torukojin, meaning the Turkish people as a national identity. Finally, the letter is written on a sheet of paper with a letterhead imprinted by a seal with a star, a crescent, and the titles “Irak Şarkiye Müslüman Milletleri ve Mümessilleri Şurası,” and, in misspelled English, “Connciel of Moslem Representatives in the Far East.” The letter hints at the fluidity of the question of national identity at the time of the making of the diaspora which contributes to our transnational setting. Kurban Ali was part of a Bashkirt militia that fought first with the Czech troops near Yekaterinburg where the Tsar’s family was murdered. Later he led his community in crossing the Central Asian highlands, using the Trans-Siberian Railway. Finally, he briefly collaborated with the White Russian forces of General Ataman Semenov and Colonel Porochikov in the Far East. In the letter, Kurban Ali is representing a collage of Bashkir, Muslim, Turkoman, and Turkish identities, interchangeable and complementary at the same time. The accounts of former intelligence officers, like that of Nishihara, are again illuminating in this respect. A former agent in Inner Mongolia and an ostensible convert like Omar Yamaoka, Komura Fujiō, whose account of the history of Japan and the world of Islam remains the only book on the subject, comments that Kurban was quite successful in linking his ideas of Pan Turkism and Pan Islam to the Asianist perspective of the kodo-ha, the Imperial Way faction of officers, such as Hashimoto Kingorō, who were behind the political turmoil of the early 1930s and had a leading role in the Manchurian Invasion of 1931.37 Shimano Saburo, a Russia expert and agent of Mantetsu discusses the circumstances of Kurban Ali’s introduction to Kita Ikki, the nationalist intellectual who was central to the radical views of the Kwantung Army’s Imperial Way circle in the period. Kita Ikki was enthusiastic about the prospects for an independent state in North Asia that would liberate the Muslims of the Soviet Union. Upon the request of the Manchurian authorities, Shimano was put in charge of Kurban Ali during his visits to Tokyo and put him in contact with Baron Hiranuma, Hirota Kōki, Inukai Tsuyoshi, Toyama Mitsuru, Sugiyama Shigemaru, all well-known figures of Asianist and right-wing politics of the day. Kurban Ali’s associates included particularly Matsuoka Yosuke, president of Mantetsu and famous foreign minister of the Axis Alliance. Shimano claims that Matsuoka envisioned the collaboration with Muslim peoples as a citadel of anti-Communism against the Soviet Union. Kurban Ali was also close to General Shioden Nobutaka of the Harbi Intelligence, a sympathizer of Germany. Vice-Admiral Ogasawara Naganari represented the Asianist right wing Navy circle that was to come to power ultimately at the onset of World War II.38

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Kurban Ali’s activities represent the implementation of the Islamist and Altaic Brothers arguments in his letter on behalf of the Imperial Way faction of the Japanese military and the Manchurian authorities. As Kurban Ali’s interaction with the Asianist circles of the Japanese military and civilian authorities matured, the transition of the identities expressed in the original letter of 1922 would also become a universal Muslim identity, reflecting Japan’s Islam Policy for Asia. In 1927, Kurban founded the Tokyo kaikyō gakkō, the Tokyo Mohammedan School in Sendagaya Yoyogi Uehara, next to the Tokyo Mosque, to serve Tatar émigré children. The new school represented the continuation of the reformist currents of Islam under the Romanovs, with a modern curriculum of science, math, history and religion. In 1928, he became the president of Nihon kaikyō-to renmei (Federation of Muslims of Japan). Finally, in 1929 Kurban Ali set up the Tokyo kaikyo insatsusho (Tokyo Mohammedan Press, in English). The most interesting publication in Turkish was the journal Yani Yapon Muhbiri Journal (News on New Japan), founded in 1933 and published in Kazan Turkish. It provided news on Japanese society and culture for the Tatar émigré community in the Far East. The press published in Turkish and Arabic. It is especially significant that the Qur’an published in Japan was disseminated to the Arabic reading public as proof of Japan’s support of Islam. A telegram sent by the Japanese Foreign Ministry, the Gaimusho, in 1933 conveyed the positive reception of the Qur’an by the members of the Egyptian royalty, particularly Prince Omar Tosun who was known for his anti-British views.39 The decision to use the Arabic script in the Turkish-language publications of Tokyo, as Kurban Ali advocated it in 1922, reveals the desire to convey the Pan Islamist message to the Turkish and Tatar diaspora in step with the Japanese agenda toward uniting an Islamic lobby for Japan. Publishing in Arabic, the language of the educated classes and the religious clerics among Indonesians and Chinese Muslims, conveys the desire of the Japanese authorities and Kurban Ali’s operation to appeal to Asian Muslims as well as to the Muslims of the Near East and Russia.40 The rest of Kurban Ali’s career continued along the lines of helping Japan to network among the Muslim minorities in Manchuria and China. During the Manchurian invasion of 1931, Kurban Ali was active in propping up Chinese Muslim support in Manchuria and North West China, together with Japanese agents such as Shimano Saburo who had introduced him in Japan, Tanaka Ippei who had been trained as an Islam expert-agent by Omar Yamaoka, and Chang Te-ch’un who was the imam of the Mukden mosque, constructed with Japanese support. In 1932, Kurban Ali apparently organized the declaration of about fifteen Manchurian Muslims representing the Muslim communities in favor of the establishment of an independent Manchurian state and exerted efforts on behalf of Japan against the League of Nations.41 He was the leading figure in the construction of the Tokyo Mosque, which was finally completed in 1938 after procuring the support of the Japanese authorities and businesses as well as the local émigrés. That year, however, Kurban Ali lost his privileged position within the Japanese military, due to the fallout between the Imperial Way faction of Kita Ikki and the Japanese military establishment. Replaced by the new Islam experts of the military establishment that took over government in Japan in 1938, Kurban Ali was

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to be exiled to Manchuria where he worked on behalf of Mantetsu again until the end of the war. In the end, like many of the tragic figures embroiled in Japanese militarism, Kurban Ali was arrested by the Soviet authorities and imprisoned in a Siberian camp where he died in 1972.

CONCLUSION A significant theme of the history of encounters in this narrative has been its transnationality in terms of the cross-fertilization of nationalist narratives of awakening, modernity, liberation, and the agenda of each actor in the story. Still, while their fundamental political objectives diverged, Japanese Asianists such as the intellectual activist Ōkawa and the militarist colonel Hashimoto saw the Turkish revolutions as one single political process, conflating 1908 with 1923, as a militarized nationalist revolution that represented a suitable model of modernity for Japan. Asian nationalists (such as the revolutionary patriot Hatta), or the doyen Pan Islamist activist of the late Romanov and Ottoman political worlds (such as İbrahim and the diaspora imam Kurban Ali who developed a national identity in exile) grounded their intellectual and political agendas on a common historical narrative of modern national history. This narrative was made up of an Asian liberation constructed out of the chain of events that started with the rise of Japan as an alternative modernity with its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, the Indian nationalist movement, and the Turkish revolution. The aggression of Japanese imperialism and the failure of Asianist internationalism with the defeat of Japan in World War II has blurred our ability to discern the extent of crossfertilization that took place between Japanese agendas and those of the Muslim and Turkish political actors of the day, a cross-fertilization that went into the making of a Japanese revolutionary nationalist vision for modern Asia together with the common agenda of defiance against the imperialist West. Ōkawa’s delirium about the image of Muhammad in 1947 had its origins in the rationale of the political and intellectual agendas of the revolutions in Ottoman/Republican Turkey, India, and the Islamic world at large; he saw these as modern Asian history, a notion that has survived in the post-war era as the language of nationalism and revolution in those regions.

REFERENCES Ahmad, Feroz. “1914–1915 Yillarinda İstanbul’da Hint Milliyetçi Devrimcileri.” Yapit, no. 6 (1984): 5–15. Akashi Motojiro. “Ryakka ryusui: Coloner Akashi’s Report on His Secret Cooperation with the Russian Revolutionary Parties During the Russo-Japanese War.” In Studia Historica 31 Societal Historica Finlandiae, edited by Olave K. Falt and Antti Kujula, 177–97. Helsinki, 1988. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Refections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1993. Awaya Kentaro, and Yoshida Yutaka, eds. Kokusai kensatsu kyoku jimmon shirabe sho, (International Prosecution Section Interrogation Records). Vol. 23. Tokyo: Nihon tosho senta, 1993. D’Encausse, Helene Carrere. Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolution in Central Asia. London: I. B. Tauris, 1988. Dower, John W. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

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Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Engineer, Ashgar Ali. Islam and Revolution: Ajanta Publications, 1984. Esenbel, Selçuk. “Japanese Interest in the Ottoman Empire.” In The Japanese and Europe Images and Perceptions, edited by Bert Erdstrom, 95-124. Richmond Surrey: Japan Library Curzon Press, 2000. Gaimusho gaiko shiryokan (The Diplomatic Record Office of the Japanese Foreign Ministry). Honna ni okeru shukyo oyobi fukyo kankei zakken kaikyo kankei, (Misscelaneous documents on the religious and missionary activities in the home country: Related to Islam): I. 2.1.0. Volume 1. Showa 10 (1935) 2m. 5d. telegram from Consul General in Cairo to Foreign Minister Hirota Koki, 1935. Goto, Koza. Gendai ajia (Contemporary Asia: Nationalism and the Nation-state). Vol. 1, 1994. Hobsbawm, Eric. “Mass-producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 263–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Ibrahim, Abdurreşid. Alem-i Islam, Japonya’da lntisar-i Islamiyet. Vol. 2. Istanbul: Kader Matbaasi, 1911. ——, Alem-i Islam, Japonya’da lntisar-i Islamiyet. Vol. 1. istanbul: Ahmet Saki Bey Matbaasi, 1910. ——, Komatsu Kaori and Komatsu Hisao. Caponya. Tokyo: Daisanshokan, 1991. İbrahim, Abdürreşid. Yirminci Asnn Başlannda islam Dünyasi ve Japonya’da İslamiyet. Edited by Mehmet Paksu. İstanbul: Yeni Asya Yayinlari, 1987. Jansen, Marius B. Japanese and Sun Yat-sen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954. Kamozawa Iwao. “Zai nichi tataru jin ni tsuite (On Tatars in Japan).” Bulletin of Faculty of Letters, Hosei University, no. 28 (1982): 27–56. ——, “Zai nichi tataru jin ni tsuite (On Tatars in Japan).” Bulletin of Faculty of Letters, Hosei University, no. 29 (1986). Karl, Rebecca E. “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (1998): 1096–118. Kawamura Mitsue. “Sen zen nihon no isuramu chuto kenkyu shoshi: Showa ssan ju nendai o chushin ni (The Short History of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in Japan: A Case of the 1930s).” AJMES, no. 2 (1987): 409–39. Komura Fujio, Nihon to isuramu shi semen senchu rekishi no nagare no naka ni katsuyoshita nihonjin musurimutachi no gunzo (The Biographies of Japanese Muslims Active in the History of Japan and Islam Before and During the War). Tokyo: Nihon isuramu yuji remmei, 1988. Najita, Tetsuo, and Harry Harootunian. “Japanese Revolt against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century.” In The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 6: The Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Duus, 711–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Nishihara Masao. Zenkiroku Harubin tokumikan: Kanto gun jochobu no kiseki (The Complete Record of Harbin Special Agency: The Footsteps of Kwantung Army Intelligence Division). Tokyo: Mainichi shimbunsha, 1980.” Ōkawa Shumei. Ajia no kensetsusha. Tokyo: Daiichi shobo, 1941. ——, Okawa shumei nikki (The diary of Okawa Shumei). Tokyo: Iwazaki gakujitsu shuppansha, 1986. Rutkowska, Ewa Palasz. “Major Fukushima Yasumasa and His Influence on the Japanese Perception of Poland at the Turn of the Century.” In Japanese and Europe Images and Perceptions, edited by Bert Erdstrom, 125–34. Richmond Surrey: Japan Library Curzon Press, 2000. Seike Motoyoshi. Senzen showa nashonarizumu no shomondai. Tokyo: Shinseisha, 1995. Shimano Saburo. Mantetsu soren josho katsudo ka no shogai (The Lives of Soviet Intelligence Experts of Mantetsu). Tokyo: Hara shobo, 1984. Shillony, Ben Ami. The Jews and the Japanese: The Successful Outsiders. Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1991. Tahir, Mahmud. “Abdurrasid Ibrahim 1857–1944.” Central Asian Survey 7, no. 14 (1988): 135–40.

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Tanaka, Stephan. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. “Tatarujin dokuritsu no kibō.” Gaikojiho, no. 137 (1909): 26–33. Young, Louise. Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Zenkovsky, Sergei A. Pan Turkism and Islam in Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19

Awaya Kentarō and Yoshida Yutaka, eds., Kokusai kensotsu kyoku jimmon shirabe shō, (International Prosecution Section Interrogation Records), vol. 23 (Tokyo: Nihon tosho senta, 1993), 373–74. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 13. Rebecca E. Karl, “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (1998): 1118. Helene Carrere D’Encausse, Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolution in Central Asia (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), 54–79. For Pan Turkism and Islamism see, Sergei A. Zenkovsky, Pan Turkism and Islam in Russia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 3. Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1993). Ibid., 1.14. Ibid., 19. John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 178. Tetsuo Najita and Harry Harootunian, “Japanese Revolt against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 6: The Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Duus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 714. Marius B. Jansen, Japanese and Sun Yat-sen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1954). Ben Ami Shillony, The Jews and the Japanese: The Successful Outsiders (Rutland: Charles E. Turtle Company, 1991), 143–50. For the Finnish underground see, Akashi Motojiro, “Ryakka ryusui: Coloner Akashi’s Report on His Secret Cooperation with the Russian Revolutionary Parties During the Russo-Japanese War,” in Studia Historica 31 Societal Historica Finlandiae, ed. Olave K. Falt and Antti Kujula (Helsinki: 1988), 177–97, Ewa Palasz Rutkowska, “Major Fukushima Yasumasa and His Influence on the Japanese Perception of Poland at the Turn of the Century,” in Japanese and Europe Images and Perceptions, ed. Bert Erdstrom (Richmond Surrey: Japan Library Curzon Press, 2000), 125–34. Feroz Ahmad, “1914–1915 Yillarinda İstanbul’da Hint Milliyetçi Devrimcileri,” Yapit, no. 6 (1984), Ashgar Ali Engineer, Islam and Revolution (Ajanta Publications, 1984), 221–23. Koza Goto, Gendai ajia (Contemporary Asia: Nationalism and the Nation-state), vol. 1 (1994), 29–33. Jansen, Japanese and Sun Yat-sen. For major sources and recent studies, see, Selçuk Esenbel, “Japanese Interest in the Ottoman Empire,” in The Japanese and Europe Images and Perceptions, ed. Bert Erdstrom (Richmond Surrey: Japan Library Curzon Press, 2000). For his biography see, Mahmud Tahir, “Abdurrasid Ibrahim 1857–1944,” Central Asian Survey 7, no. 14 (1988). “Tatarujin dokuritsu no kibō,” Gaikqjihō, no. 137 (1909).

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20 Abdürreşid ibrahim, Alem-i Islam, Japonya’da Intisar-i Islamiyet, vol. 2 (İstanbul: Kader Matbaasi, 1911 Abdürreşid ibrahim, Alem-i Islam, Japonya’da Intisar-i-Islamist, vol. 1 (İstanbul: Ahmet Saki Bey Matbaasi, 1910), 319–21. For a Japanese translation see, Abdürreşid ibrahim, Komatsu Kaori and Komatsu Hisao (Tokyo: Daisanshokan, 1991). For a modern Turkish version, see Abdürreşid İbrahim, Yirminci Asnn Başlariinda İslamDünyası ve Japonya’da İslamiyet, ed mehmet paksu (İstanbul: yeni Asya Yayinlari, 1987) 21 For sections on meetings and discussions about Islam policy and Ajia Gikai, see, İbrahim, Yirminci Asrin Başlarinda, 354 –64, 59, 66–67, 92–94, 401, 13, 27. 22 Stephan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 88. 23 “Kokumin shinbun Meiji,” February 17 1909, 1. 24 İbrahim, Yirminci Asrın Başlarinda, 200. 25 Ibid., 216, 317. 26 Kawamura Mitsuo, “Sen zen nihon no isuramu chuto kenkyu shoshi: Showa ssan ju nendai o chushin ni (The Short History of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in Japan: A Case of the 1930s),” AJMES, no. 2 (1987). 27 Seike Motoyoshi, Senzen showa nashonarizumu no shomondai (Tokyo: Shinseisha, 1995). 28 Ōkawa Shūmei, Ajia no kensetsusha (Tokyo: Daiichi shobo, 1941). 29 Ōkawa Shūmei, Ōkawa shūmei nikki (The diary of Okawa Shumei) (Tokyo: Iwazaki gakujitsu shuppansha, 1986), 521–22. 30 Kentarō and Yutaka, eds., Kokusai kensatsu kyoku, 304, 18, 409, 29. 31 Ibid., 429. 32 Ibid., 134. 33 Kamozawa Iwao, “Zai nichi tataru jin ni tsuite (On Tatars in Japan),” Bulletin of Faculty of Letters, Hosei University, no. 28 (1982), Kamozawa Iwao, “Zai nichi tataru jin ni tsuite (On Tatars in Japan),” Bulletin of Faculty of Letters, Hosei University, no. 29 (1986): 223–302, 228–29. 34 Nishihara Masao, Zenkiroku Harubin tokumikan: Kanto gun jochobu no kiseki (The Complete Record of Harbin Special Agency: The Footsteps of Kwantung Army Intelligence Division) (Tokyo: Mainichi shimbunsha, 1980), 230. 35 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 5, for shin tenchi. 36 M.T. i.2.1.1 numbers 03676–03694. September 1922. Miscellaneus documents relating to the foreign policy of various countries: Persia, China, Afganistan, Turkey. Reel 35. Library of Congress Microfilms on Japanese Government Documents. 37 Komura Fujiō, Nihon to isuramu shi senzen senchū rekishi no nagare no naka ni katsudōshita nihonjin musurimutachi no gunzō (The Biographies of Japanese Muslims Active in the Historf of Japan and Islam Before and During the War) (Tokyo: Nihon isuramu yuji remmei, 1988), 71. 38 Shimano Saburō, Mantetsu soren jōhō katsudō ka no shōgai (The Lives of Soviet Intelligence Experts of Mantetsu) (Tokyo: Hara shobo, 1984), 439–45, 60–67. 39 Gaimushō gaikō shiryōkan (The Diplomatic Record Office of the Japanese Foreign Ministry), Honpō ni okeru shūkyō oyobi fukyō kankei zakken kaikyō kankei, (Miscellaneous documents on the religious and missionary activities in the home country: Related to Islam) (I. 2.1.0. Volume 1. Showa 10 (1935) 2m. 5d. telegram from Consul General in Cairo to Foreign Minister Hirota Koki, 1935). The second category of Gaimushō gaikō shiryōkan files used in this paper is the Kakku koku ni okeru shūkyō oyobi fukyō kankei zakken (Misscelanious documents on religious and missionary activities in each country. 40 Shimano, Mantetsu soren josho, 460–67. 41 Gaimushō gaikō shiryōkan, S9210–3, Ōbei kyoku dai ikka tokugai-dai 6366, Showa 7 (1932) 12m. 20d. 20, Shimano, Mantetsu sōren jōhō, 463.

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❚ First published in Bert Edström (ed.), The Japanese and Europe, Richmond, Surrey, Japan Library (Curzon Press Ltd), 2000, pp. 95–124.

6

Japanese Interest in the Ottoman Empire a

T

he history of the Japanese interest in the Ottoman empire during the nineteenth century reflects the motives, ideas and strategies entailed in Japan’s entrance into the world of Great Power politics. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the new Japanese government sought to establish relations with the Ottoman Porte and started sending various missions to the Ottoman region that had territories which spread over the Balkans and the Near East. This paper is based upon the travel accounts and reports of the Japanese visitors to the region. It focuses on the character of the Japanese interest in the Ottoman empire, a declining old world empire which was once a formidable power in the sixteenth century, but now increasingly threatened by the involvement of the Great Powers in its affairs which was known as the Eastern Question.1 In terms of political history, one can detect two distinct phases in the development of the Japanese interest in the Ottoman empire. The first phase is during the years between 1868 and the 1890s that covers Japan’s quest for gaining her full rights of sovereignty through treaty revision with the West. This is the period when the Japanese authorities are interested in learning from the Ottoman example in order to help their treaty revision policy because it was a non-Western polity which like Japan faced the problems of the ‘unequal treaty’ privileges that were conceded to the major Western powers. The main agenda of the Japanese and the Ottomans is to negotiate a treaty of trade and diplomacy that was mutually acceptable. The Japanese and Ottoman relations of this period clearly represent the inflexible boundaries of such treaty privileges as extraterritoriality and the most favoured nation clause etc. that functioned as the ‘international law of Western imperialism’. Imposed by the Western powers upon the Japanese and other non-Westerners as the international terms of trade and diplomacy, these treaty arrangements made it almost impossible for third parties outside of the Great Power circle to have formal diplomatic relations. The second phase can be recognized to be the period that starts with the last decades of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War. This is when Japan as an ally of Britain due to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 and the Ottoman government as an ally of Germany fall into conflicting camps. The second period contrasts with the earlier one as it entails the process of Japan’s adoption of the posturing and strategies of being an imperialist Great Power vis-à-vis the

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Ottomans and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance appears to be an important turning-point. The Japanese contacts in the Ottoman world especially during this latter phase provides a window that reveals the numerous circles in Japan who competed with each other for access to influence in the domestic and international arena of Japanese imperialism and the rising agenda of Asianism. At this stage, such strategies as collaboration against Russia, an Asian solidarity against the Western empires, Japanese leadership in the world of Islam are different objectives that motivate the Japanese authorities in forming contacts with this ‘European’ power which had Asian roots.

JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS OF THE OTTOMAN WORLD AS PART OF THE WORLD OF ISLAM The Meiji Japanese view of the Ottoman world and the world of Islam stems from the same process as that of the contemporary Western Powers, linking intelligence and information-gathering activities with cultural studies where knowledge serves the interests of power. Consequently, the late nineteenth-century rapprochement between the Japanese and the Ottomans is reflected in the frequency of the Japanese visits to the empire for information and intelligence gathering purposes that is also commensurate with the heightened awareness of the Japanese authorities of an immanent conflict with Russia and the requirements of empire–building. One can detect that the Japanese concern over the Russian expansion in East Asia was coupled with an avid interest in the conditions of the Ottoman empire and Persia that might help the interests of Japan. This perspective was also in agreement with the main British imperialist strategy of the late nineteenth century of containing Russian expansion to the south particularly in the Ottoman empire and Persia. The Yoshida mission of 1880 is the best known among the Japanese efforts to collect first-hand extensive information about the conditions of the Near East. The Japanese Foreign Ministry, Gaimushō, organized a mission in 1880 led by Yoshida Masaharu of the ministry accompanied by the manager of the Imperial Hotel, Yokoyama Nagaichirō, Captain Furukawa Nobuyoshi of the army, two assistants, Tsuchida Seijirō and Asada Iwatarō, and some merchants. Known later as the Yoshida mission, the group arrived in the Persian Gulf that year with the battleship Hiei that is said to have been sent as a show of force. The Japanese team embarked upon a difficult land trek to ‘Bushire’ Bushehr, Iran’s port city on the Persian Gulf and—according to their later accounts— arrived in Teheran after a horrifying journey. After staying on in Teheran for twelve days, the mission went on to the Caucasus region and in 1881 entered the Ottoman capital. The Ottoman Porte welcomed the Yoshida mission. Sultan Abdulhamid II encouraged the beginning of negotiations to sign a treaty between the two countries. Thereupon, the Yoshida mission went on to Romania, Budapest and finally reached Vienna where the mission split. Yoshida went on to St Petersburg while Yokoyama and the merchants went on to London, and Furukawa went back home via Italy.2 A noteworthy visit is that of the famous intelligence officer Colonel Fukushima Yasumasa for the Japanese General Staff, who accomplished a 488-day arduous land journey between the years 1892–3 on horseback through Central Asia. A visit to the Ottoman empire in such intelligence-gathering journeys was part of the Japanese aim to investigate the Russian designs to expand her influence towards the south. Fukushima left Tokyo in 1895 again and went on a difficult journey through Africa, Turkey, Ceylon, and India. The following year, in 1896, he entered Iran and went into

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Central Asia, turned south to Arabia, arrived in India, passed on to Thailand, Vietnam, and finally returned to Japan in 1897 whereupon he submitted a detailed report.3 Another similar intelligence-gathering visit of the time is that of Ienaga Toyokichi who travelled in Iran, Turkey, and India during 1899 in order to investigate the conditions of opium production so as to prepare a report for the colonial administration in Taiwan. Ienaga arrived in Peshawar in the Persian Gulf, took the same route as that of Yoshida to arrive in Teheran, and after travelling through Iran, emerged in Baku and Batum near the Black Sea coast, whereupon he sailed to Istanbul. From Istanbul, Ienaga embarked upon a land journey, the first Japanese to travel by land into the hinterland of Anatolia, in order to investigate opium production. Finally, he passed on to Syria, and after crossing into Egypt, went on to India. In 1900, Ienaga returned to Taiwan whereupon he submitted his report to the colonial authorities.4 The Japanese missions resulted in the preparation of reports about the region that reflect the Meiji Japanese perspectives about the peoples of the Eurasian continent including the world of Islam. As a result, there are at least eight well-known Japanese studies of the Ottoman empire and its region for this period. The number is quite prolific in view of the minimal degree of relations between the two countries despite numerous attempts to pursue treaty negotiations on the part of the Japanese that will be discussed below. The relatively large number of studies in addition to the Gaimushō communications and research on the area reflects the Japanese government’s concern over the treaty question in the empire and the questionable future of the Ottomans as the famous Eastern Question of European diplomacy; the question was of particular interest to Russia and Great Britain that would share the territories of the empire in the Balkans and the Near East as spoils. Some of these studies are the memoirs and personal accounts of visits of a diplomatic nature. The Kan’yū nikki [The diary of travels around the globe] of Kuroda Kiyotaka, of fame for the Hokkaido Colonization Board scandal who was probably a cabinet adviser at the time, later to be the president of the Privy Council in 1887, includes an extensive account of his visit from Russia to Istanbul on his way to Italy. An early work is written by a Nakai Hiroshi, who appears to have been on duty in the London embassy, and travelled back to Japan via Ottoman Turkey. Nakai wrote the Man’yū kitei, [The account of travels] which was published in 1877. The diary of Rear Admiral Ōyama Takanosuke who was a young crew member of the Meiji naval visit of the battleships Hiei and the Kongo to Istanbul stands out. In January 1891, the Hiei and the Kongo brought back to Istanbul the 69 survivors of the 609 member crew of the Ottoman frigate Ertuğrul that had sunk on September 16, 1890, in Japan during a terrible shipwreck. The ship was caught in a ferocious taifun storm crashing on to the rocks along the Kushimoto promontory of Oshima island off the coast of Wakayama, losing most of the crew and officers. The tragic end of the Ertuğrul frigate on her returm voyage had occurred after the Ottoman mission had paid a good will visit to Emperor Meiji during the summer months. The disaster continued to play a central symbolic role in the foundation of Japanese-Turkish relations. The diary titled Toruko kōkaiki [The account of a sea voyage to Turkey] published in 1891, constituted an account of the visit to the imperial palace for an audience with Sultan Abdulhamid II (Kuroda, 1887 [1987]; Nakai, 1877; Ōyama, 1890 [1988]). Others are major works of the intelligence-gathering visits as that of Colonel Fukushima that contains a section on the Ottomans as part of the larger journey through Asia and Europe. Some of the well-known ones are those of Furukawa

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Nobuyoshi, Perushia kikō [The account of travels in Persia] written for the General Staff Head Quarters, the Sambō honbu in 1891, and Ienaga Toyokichi’s work on Anatolia and the opium question which was submitted to the Taiwan colonial administration, later published as the Nishiajia ryōkōki [The account of travels in West Asia] (Furukawa, 1891 [1988]; Ienaga, 1900 [1988]). An important classified report is that of the Foreign Ministry, the Gaimushō, on conditions in Turkey, titled Toruko jijō, prepared in 1911 by the Okada embassy. The Gaimushō report gives a detailed study of the ethnic configuration of the empire, probably translated from English sources, and deals with the problems of nationalism and decline, reflecting the Eastern Question approach. One of the interesting sections is when the report deals with the question of Albanian loyalty to the empire, considered for a long time as a supporting ethnic element in Abdulhamid’s ethnic policies against Balkan nationalist currents. In another section, the prospects for Japanese business interests in developing cotton production in Iraq are evaluated in the event of direct British take-over of the territory from Ottoman rule.5 The Meiji Japanese perspective about the Near East and the world of Islam was generally critical and negative, a by-product of the Euro-American-based modernist agenda of the Meiji generations with a Westernist vision. Many of especially the early reports on the region carry the early impressions of the Japanese of Near Eastern polities and the world of Islam. Such Meiji statesmen as Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi and Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru, who were bent on making Japan a Western-style Great Power, saw Islam and its peoples via the filters of the missionary and imperialist vision of contemporary Westerners. For example, Inoue Kowashi, the minister of education known for his contribution to modern education and drafting the constitution, is also purported to have upheld a critical evaluation of Islam in his so-called Mohamettoron [Mohammedanism], which was one of the earliest offical policy statements about Prophet Muhammad and Islam. In contrast to his vision of contemporary Western life, Inoue Kowashi apparently argued that Islam was an uncivilized religion in some respects and had little to offer to the modernist aspirations of the Japanese.6 The well-known arguments of the Meiji liberal intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi for datsua—that young Japan had to ‘leave Asia and enter the West’—generally dictated a rejection of Asia as a source of contemporary civilization and forms the foundation of this Westernist Meiji perspective on the world of Islam and partially influences the Meiji attitude toward the Ottomans. In Bummeiron no gairyaku [An outline of a theory of civilization] (1875), Fukuzawa provides an evaluation of the Ottoman state that is a standard liberal Westernist one of the age: the Ottomans, once a mighty power that was the foe of Europe, belonged to the semi-enlightened category of Asian nations together with China in a three-tiered view of the world. Japan needs to avoid the prospect of remaining in the Ottoman and Chinese category and should join the ranks of the enlightened world as represented by the West.7 Not surprisingly, the Japanese diplomatic and commercial contacts with the Islamic world entailed the prejudices and assumptions of the Meiji Westernist perspective. Furthermore, the initial historic encounter of the Japanese with the Islamic world is important for it created some themes and images that have survived as the ‘code’ words of the mainstream Japanese attitude of general disdain for Islamic culture and peoples as not sufficiently modern. Using a naturalistic argument, a main theme associated with the Japanese impression of the world of Islam was one of an arid and dry climate and the desert-like geography of the area which is not suit-

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able to the sensibilities of the Japanese people. Other code words entail the notion of Muslim politics as corrupt governments and Muslim officials and peoples as unfriendly. An important argument that has survived to this day is that the Muslims are not secular because they are very strict about living according to the rules of their religion: this also reflects their unmodern character. In a 1981 study, postwar Japanese scholars of Islamic studies criticize these early accounts, especially the famous Yoshida Mission to Persia in 1880, for their tone of exasperation and despair at the inscrutable behaviour of Muslim Orientals. The authors note in hindsight that the early visitors to Persia appear to have experienced a traumatic ‘cultural shock’ at the alien environment that apparently worsened with what they thought was the unfriendly reception of the local officials who were not particularly overjoyed at the sudden barrage of Japanese visitors to their country. Here, the Yoshida mission report was typical of the early Meiji alienation from the world of Islam as it described the conditions of the journey from Persia as having an arid and desert-like land with an unfriendly population. The same study also argues that the Japanese perceptions of the Muslim Near East demonstrated a much more ignorant mind-set than even that of the Europeans. Orientalist training may have induced a superior attitude among Europeans towards Muslims, but they also generally carried a deep admiration for the monuments and the cultural heritage of Islam and Ancient Near Eastern civilizations. On the other hand, the Meiji Japanese who at this point lacked the language training and the rigorous study of the local culture in the Orientalist manner, were cruder and more negative. Here what is fascinating to read is that the Japanese were considering themselves as completely alien to the conditions of the region as they perceived their own environment as a self-styled modern identity with a Western character.8

TREATY NEGOTIATION PROBLEM In hindsight, the history of the Japanese interest in the Ottoman empire is part of the game of Great-Power politics from the political angle while it also provided for Japan a window to the world of Islam. Ironically, it shows how ‘unfree’ were the terms of the international law that was imposed by the West upon the countries of Asia with different traditions. The Japanese interest in the Ottoman empire begins with the problem of treaty revision in order to eliminate the ‘unequal treaty’ character of the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce. It had brought home the legal foundation of Western imperialism to Japan due to the recognition of privileges especially of extraterritoriality, mandatory tariffs, and the most favoured nation clause to the Western powers. Like Japan, the Ottomans had remained distinct in the nineteenth-century history of imperialism and colonialism for while they were party to the system of treaty privileges given to the Western powers they were not colonized and had managed to remain a sovereign power. Furthermore, the Ottomans had entered into a nineteenth-century ‘unequal treaty system’ that defined Asian and Western relations relatively earlier than China and Japan in East Asia. Ottoman capitulation to foreign countries that derived from an early mercantilist form of trade during the sixteenth century, had evolved into a web of treaty privileges enjoyed by the Great Powers that had begun to expose the Ottoman realm to the economic and commercial forces of ‘free trade’. Particularly the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman Treaty of Trade is seen to have opened the gates of the Ottoman economy to the transformative influences of Western imperialism, a few years before the 1842 Treaty of Nanking in China and

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the 1858 treaties of Japan which represented the entrance of Western imperialism in East Asia.9 The contacts between Japan and the Ottomans began in 1871 with the Iwakura Mission to the capitals of the West which hoped to revise the 1858 treaties. During the mission’s visit to Europe, one of its secretaries, Fukuchi Gen’ichirō, was instructed by Prince Iwakura to visit Istanbul and study the Ottoman conditions of the capitulationist treaties that were similar to Japan’s predicament under the ‘unequal treaties’. There are reports about the practice of the treaties in the Ottoman empire, particularly the jurisdiction of the consular courts in terms of extraterritoriality that was a special concern of the Japanese authorities.10 The accounts of Japanese-Ottoman relations conclude that the Fukuchi report of 1873 was considered unsatisfactory in terms of providing information about the conditions of the empire. Furthermore, the Japanese appear to have been interested in developing closer relations with the empire in line with their international interests. Presumably, this was the reason why in 1875 Foreign Minister Terajima Munenori instructed Ueno Kagenori, the Japanese minister for Great Britain, to initiate contacts with the resident Turkish ambassador for investigating the conditions in that country and for negotiating the possibility of signing a Trade and Amity agreement between Japan and Ottoman Turkey (Naito, 1931: 15). It was already apparent that a formal diplomatic and commercial treaty would not be easy to formulate due to problems that the international law imposed upon both countries by the West entailed for either side. Ironically, the regulations of the treaties that Japan and Ottoman Turkey signed vis-à-vis the Great Powers in terms of extraterritoriality, mandatory tariffs and most favoured nation clause were supposed to enhance the globalization of trade and commerce in the name of ‘free trade’ between Asian countries and the Western powers albeit under ‘unequal conditions’ with the West. Now, the same regulations made it very difficult for the two interested parties to establish relations of mutual reciprocity. Terajima’s letter to Ueno indicates an awareness of the problem that will plague Japanese-Turkish relations into the twentieth century. Rather than a formal treaty, on the 7th month of 1875, Terajima wrote to Minister Ueno in London and formulated an alternative in colourful diplomatic language as: Turkey resembles our country in many respects (of its affairs). If we dispatch an envoy or an observer to this country we may derive many advantages . . . With this in mind and although we do not yet have commercial relations with Turkey I would like you to approach the Turkish ambasador in London to inquire candidly about sending an envoy in order to enact an agreement of amity and friendship between our two countries (Naito, 1931: 15).

In addition to trade and commercial concerns, political motives also emerge as a factor in sustaining Japanese interest in the Ottoman empire. This was to be the strengthening of a regional line of containment against the threat of Russia, a policy encouraged by Great Britain in her concern about protecting the British empire, especially India. Despite the lingering treaty problem, Great Britain, Japan, and Ottoman Turkey appear to have shared the common concern for containing Russia that formed an incentive for forming closer relations. This was a strategy that was encouraged by Great Britain for whom the Ottomans, though weak, had remained to be important as a regional power against Russia since the 1854 Crimean War.

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Britain, which was soon to see Japan as a rising new Asian power which would act as a bulwark against Russia with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, appears to have encouraged contacts between Japan and Ottoman Turkey at all levels. The Ottoman government, for its part, expressed continued interest in developing relations with Japan particularly during the reign of the conservative modernist Sultan Abdulhamid II while sharing the general agenda of collaborating against Russia with a new concern for forming contacts with this successful modernizing power of the East. When the real politik interest against Russia prevailed, already in 1876, certain British politicians approached the Turkish Grand Vizier Mithat Pasha, suggesting that the Ottomans establish close relations with Japan. In 1878 the Japanese battleship Seiki with naval cadets on board paid a twelve-day visit to Istanbul and was received with the due ceremonies (Takahashi, 1982: 128; Naito, 1931: 15; Naito, et al., 1942: 328–9; Matsutani, 1986: 19; Katsufuji, et al., 1981: 169–70). However, the official contacts between Japan and Ottoman Turkey continued to be plagued along the question of signing a treaty of trade and commerce with the Japanese side intent on learning about the existing treaty privileges in the Ottoman empire that they would also want to have. On the other hand, the Ottoman stance was to avoid at all costs any agreement that would reinforce the undesired practices of the existing capitulationist regime in trade which the Porte wanted to gradually abolish in the future. The negotiations continued in St Petersburg between the Ottoman ambassador, Şakir Pasha, and the Japanese ambassador, Yanagihara Sakimitsu. Yanagihara submitted a detailed questionnaire to Şakir Pasha on the judiciary, the legislative, administrative, and commercial systems of the empire, in particular to the application of the most favoured nation clause. A concern of the Japanese questionnaire was to find out about the practice of court litigation against foreigners and whether there were mixed courts of law. Both were issues which were hotly debated in Japan and in the treaty–revision negotiations of Japan with the Great Powers.11 Şakir Pasha’s answers explained the official legal situation in the empire with the new legal reforms and the end to the most favoured nation clause due to the Treaty of Paris in 1856 after the Crimean War. Making use of their brief popularity with the West as the ‘Grand ol’ Turk’ in the struggle of Britain against Russia, the Ottomans had managed to gain a foothold in the Ottoman aim for treaty revision, as the empire, for centuries a Turkish Muslim empire with a multi-ethnic population that had been the traditional foe of Europe, now was recognized as a ‘European power with independence and integrity’. Most crucial, the Ottoman government was exempt from abiding by the most favoured nation clause in future treaty agreements with new countries, but it had to keep the existing treaty privileges with the major powers. However, the memoires of Sait Pasha, the grand vizier of the time, reveals the existing state of affairs concerning the Japanese desire for a most favoured nation clause. In 1881, Sait Pasha notes in a frank manner the problems that the Ottomans faced with respect to the existing treaty practices. In his words, even though the Ottoman legal reforms of the nineteenth century had established a new framework with the adoption of European codes for commercial and administrative purposes which ensured mutual reciprocity and equality on principle, the real politik of great-power influence had continued to foster ‘. . . the unfortunate traditions in Turkey of the bad habit of resorting to Consular Courts for the litigations involving foreigners which was the accepted institutional rule’. Hence Sait Pasha concluded

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that although it was unacceptable, still it was understandable that Japan would want the same privileges as those accorded to the Great Powers in practice. Ultimately, he firmly declined the prospects for signing a treaty with Japan based upon the same argument as the above that conceding treaty-power privileges to Japan would injure the Ottoman government’s partial liberation which had been gained with the 1856 Treaty of Paris from the treaty privileges (Sait, 1910: 37; Arik, 1989: 25; Naito, 1931: 31–5).

JAPAN AS AN ALLY OF GREAT BRITAIN By the end of the nineteenth century, the anti-Russian agenda which had initially warmed relations between Britain, the Ottomans and the Japanese, began to exhibit a conflictual character due to the growing antagonism between Britain and the Ottoman Porte, over the emergence of British imperialist behaviour in the Balkans and the Near East that was considered to undermine Ottoman interests as the old ruler of the area. The antagonism also entailed a stronger ideological turn in a short period of time. On the Ottoman side, Sultan Abdulhamid II, gradually developed a pan-Islamist foreign policy in order to counter the standard argument of the Great Powers that justified their interference in the ‘domestic’ ethnic and religious problems of the empire by claiming the protection of its Christian subjects. Initially a measure with which to counterbalance the Russian hold over large populations of Turk Muslims, the Porte had begun to use the pan-Islamist twist to Ottoman foreign policy also against Britain with whom relations cooled off toward the end of the century. The real shock which troubled Ottoman-British relations had come in 1881 when Britain occupied Egypt, nominally a troublesome Ottoman territory that had already become effectively independent with the Muhammad Ali revolt in the early nineteenth century which had forced the Ottomans to seek British help in the first place. In the meantime, the institution of the British Raj in India with a large Muslim population, the systematic extension of British influence in the Arab world became serious problems as far as the Porte was concerned. By the twentieth century, British imperialist expansion in the Arab world was to erupt into a conflict between the two powers during the First World War of 1914 that was to lead to the British role behind the Arab revolt and the British Mandates over the former Arab territories with the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire at the end of the war (Zürcher, 1993: 85–6). Officially, Japan was firmly in the camp of Great Britain in so far as world politics was concerned. Especially, after Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War, Britain and Japan became closer in terms of collaboration in the protection of their mutual interests. It is crucial to note that British leadership in the acceptance of treaty revision with Japan enabled her to abolish the ‘unequal treaty privileges’ by the end of the nineteenth century, before any other non-Western power. The pro-British stance of the Meiji officialdom continued to prevail in the nineteenth century. It had been formalized with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902. The crux of the matter was that while Japan had become Britain’s staunch ally in protecting mutual imperial interests in Asia, the Ottomans were dropping out of the British strategy to protect India from Russia. On their part the Ottomans were also not keen on reinforcing the existing practices of the treaty privileges for the sake of Japanese friendship. Feeling threatened by the British imperialist strategy in the

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Near East, the Ottoman diplomatic line was already collared with a more neutral stance vis-à-vis Britain that would not find strong support among the Meiji leadership of the day. The above account of the main events that concern the political history of Japanese-Ottoman relations is a good example with which to see the nature of the Meiji perspective on the world of Islam that was modified in the Ottoman case. Some of the above early impressions of the Japanese towards the Islamic world most likely infiltrated into the formulation of the ‘cool’ side to the Meiji foreign ministry towards the Ottomans insisting upon the concession of Great-Power privileges despite the official ‘warm’ diplomatic language of frienship. Naito Chishū, the best pre-war Turkish historian of Japan, attributes the insistence of the Gaimushō for treaty privileges, which resulted in the failure to establish relations between the two countries, to the datsua perspective of the Meiji élite. Inoue Kaoru who was the foreign minister at the time was not too keen on according an equal status to an ‘Asian power’ at the Ottoman empire that would undermine the treaty revision negotiations of Japan. Whether the Bummeiron no gairyoku or the Mohamettoron perspective cited above is responsible for the insistence of the Japanese authorities on getting Great-Power privileges from the Ottoman empire or not is hard to prove, but the critical rhetoric about ‘superficial Westernism’ will be important from now on in the evolution of the Japanese interest in the Ottoman and Islamic world.

THE ERTUĞRUL NAVAL DISASTER: THE FIRST OTTOMAN VISIT TO JAPAN While the treaty problem remained unsolved, the documents of the Japanese and Ottoman relations of the nineteenth century begin to exhibit a dual language of the early Meiji Westernist attitude that co-exists in time with a diplomatic language which exhibits the evolution of an Asianist Japanese identity. By the late decades of the nineteenth century, one can detect in the Japanese accounts of the Ottoman empire and the Turks in particular a formal language of warm friendship and solidarity among these two Asian powers that is used by both sides as the rhetoric for forming relations. This official rhetoric contrasts with the private language of cool real politik that is particularly apparent in the in-house reports of both the Japanese Gaimushō as well as in the Ottoman Porte’s evaluation of Japanese interest in the Ottoman empire. The increase in meaningful contacts and relations between the Ottomans and the Japanese was to occur again in a decade after the treaty impasse in the 1880s, when the Asianist tendencies of Japanese foreign policy and the pan-Islamist overturns of Sultan Abdulhamid’s foreign policy helped rekindle the interest of the two powers in each other and in a process giving birth to the development of the friendly official rhetoric of common Asian roots and martial camaraderie among the Turks and the Japanese befitting the political trends of the times. The event which has had most influence in the construction of the amicable rhetoric of goodwill in Japanese-Turkish relations is the well-known calamity of the Ottoman imperial frigate, the Ertuğrul, which sank along Japanese shores in 1890 after an arduous journey to pay a ‘goodwill visit of friendship’ (not an official diplomatic one obviously) to the emperor of Japan. After the treaty problem, the next important contact between the two countries was the visit of Prince Komatsu, the brother of Emperor Meiji and Princess Komatsu in 1886 during their trip

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to Europe. The royal couple arrived in Istanbul in the fall of 1887 and the occasion appears to have revived the desire to pursue closer relations (Naito, 1931: 36; Arık, 1989: 26). Using the visit of the prince as an occasion to rekindle relations with Japan, Abdulhamid II launched a second attempt to form close relations with Meiji Japan, by now seen as the rising new star of the East in Ottoman public opinion. The government decided to send the imperial frigate Ertuğrul with Commander Osman Pasha and his crew of 609 men to Japan. Osman Pasha was empowered to represent the sultan and delegated with extraordinary powers. The ship and her crew sailed out in March 1889 with the objective of paying a goodwill visit to the emperor of Japan in return for the visit in 1887 of Prince Komatsu. The voyage turned out to be a hazardous journey with recurring technical problems and mishaps. This was in part due to the fragility of the ship which was an old-fashioned wooden vessel and considered unfit for the journey by the British engineer who was a technical aid to the Ottoman navy. In hindsight the Turkish public opinion has also interpreted the disastrous journey as a typical reflection of the pathos of the last-ditch efforts of the Ottomans for a show of force. After sailing in Asian waters for more than a year which was full of various mishaps and difficulties, the Ertuğrul arrived in Japan in June 1890. Osman Pasha and his crew managed to complete a successful visit with the authorities and the imperial family. On the return voyage, however, the Ottoman frigate, which had set out in September, sank on the eighteenth day due to a severe typhoon. She foundered on the dangerous sharp rocks off the coast of Wakayama in southwest Japan. Except for a mere 69 survivors, the waves of the Pacific Ocean claimed the pasha and his men. According to the official narratives of the tragedy, deeply saddened by the tragic event, the Japanese government sent the few survivors back to Istanbul with the Japanese frigates, the Hiei and the Kongo, together with the condolences of the Meiji emperor and the Japanese government. The Japanese visit which set out in October was to arrive in Istanbul on 2 January 1891. The disaster was to also bring Yamada Torajirō in 1892, who was going to be the first resident merchant, unofficial emissary of Japan in Istanbul for the next twenty years (Komatsu, 1992: 1–16; Mütercimler, 1993; Naito, 1931: 110–81). The disastrous Ottoman voyage had had sober political ambitions, however, which reflected the ideological turn to pan-Islam in recent years. Lately, Abdulhamid II had begun to use his title as the caliph of orthodox Islam (the Sunni sect) to advance a foreign policy of being strongly concerned with the welfare of the Muslim subjects of the Asian empires of the Western powers. Using his role as the caliph now as a foreign policy measure against the Great Powers, Abdulhamid had sent the Ertugrul mission to Japan in part to advance the pan-Islamist foreign policy of being strongly ‘concerned’ with the welfare of the Muslim subjects of the Asian empires of the West. The commander of the Ertuğrul frigate, Osman Pasha, took the opportunity to meet with Muslim notables in each port of the British and French colonies in Bombay, Singapore, Saigon, and Hong Kong. Local Muslim papers gave major coverage that the ship of the caliph arrived in town and the crew of the Ottoman navy attended prayers with the local Muslim communities. On the other hand, the occasion proved to be a fruitful opportunity for the sultan for tailoring domestic opinion back home in his favour. During the voyage, the Ottoman papers of Istanbul reported at length about the path-breaking journey that spread the caliph’s message

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to the Muslims of the world although it must be admitted that the London press had ignored this aspect in favour of the technical mishaps to the annoyance of the sultan.12 In conclusion, while Japanese and Ottoman relations were encouraged in the context of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance by Great Britain, the Ottomans were sending a ‘green light’ to Japan as an ally in the world of Islam. So far as the Meiji authorities were concerned at the moment, however, the Japanese empire’s interests were defined firmly in the terms of Great-Power politics with Britain, against Russia.

THE JAPANESE ASIANIST ROMANTICISM ABOUT THE TURKS The account of the Ertuğrul calamity written in Japanese by those who were involved in the aftermath such as Yamada Torajirō, the pioneer of Japanese-Turkish relations who settled in Istanbul, defines Japanese interest in the Ottoman empire and the Turks in terms of a new sense of Asian camaraderie, sharing a noble martial heritage. The most important visitor to the Ottoman realm in terms of establishing long-term personal contacts of more depth than previous brief contacts is Yamada Torajirō (1866–1957) the pioneer of Turkish-Japanese relations, and probably the first Japanese expert in Ottoman Turkish and culture. A young man of 23, Yamada arrived in Istanbul in 1892, one year after the Japanese frigates brought the Ertuğrul survivors back home. He was sent on an official mission that was encouraged by the new foreign minister of Japan, Aoki Shūzō, who wanted to revive Japanese contacts with the Ottomans. Yamada was quickly accepted by the Ottoman Porte as the unofficial conduit for conducting relations between Ottoman Turkey and Japan. During the following decades he was to become the sole agent for trade with the Ottoman empire and acted as an unofficial consulate-general for Japanese visitors taking advantage of his congenial relations with the palace and the Ottoman élite circles who seem to have developed a liking for this young Japanese (for the details on Yamada and Turkish experience, see Esenbel, 1996). While the Ertuğrul affair was the subject of deep emotional bonding in official relations, during the years after 1891 the Japanese side still reattempted to negotiate a treaty of trade and commerce, and Yamada was to become the subject of some controversy as the Japanese authorities tried to use him as an example to push for the recognition of extraterritoriality and other privileges to Japan on par with the Great Powers. But the attempt floundered as the Ottomans were again to curtly refuse the issue. In a language that is a perfect example of ‘oriental’ inscrutibility at its best, the Ottomans explained that they were extending the benevolent ‘protection’ of the palace to Monsieur Yamada who was a good friend of the Turks and therefore did not need treaty privileges.13 It is clear that as the controversy over the treaty issue between Japan and the Ottoman Turkey died down, Yamada continued his career in Istanbul with the approval of the local authorities. He became an important conduit between the two governments during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 and was free to fulfil a mission for the Japanese ambassador Makino in Vienna by reporting on the passage of the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the Bosphorus to join the battle in the Far East. He was to remain in the capital for almost twenty years and be witness to the history of the Hamidian era of conservative modernism and the subsequent dramatic transition to the constitutionalism of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution

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(Esenbel, 1996: 242). Yamada’s account of his impressions of Istanbul and the inhabitants of this old world empire constitute a rich example of the new, friendly and admiring Japanese attitude towards the Ottomans that represents a romantic Japanese form of the ‘friendly’ version of an Orientalist perception of the Turks and their empire. Yamada’s friend, a Mr Sakitani who wrote the introduction, discusses the realpolitik character of the empire in a mode that exhibits the new Asianist emotions of Meiji Japan at the turn of the century. In contrast with the strategic reports of the Gaimushō, this account is imbued with the need to pay attention to the Turks because they represent an Asian power—more supportive in tone to the earlier Westernist arguments about the Ottomans because they had Asian roots. The Turks are a martial people who share a warrior tradition with the Japanese and they are important for their realm in Europe represents the extension of Asian power to the West. The new nationalist athmosphere of the Young Turk Constitutional Revolution of 1908 is a new element that is seen as reflective of the Turkish inspiration being drawn from the Meiji élan vital—an Asianist argument that advocated the Meiji Restoration as a revolutionary model for Asia (Esenbel, 1996: 247). The best acknowledgement of this tug-of-war in hypothetical terms between the formal language of warm friendship that is constructed with the Ertugrul disaster between the Japanese and the Ottoman Turks and the language of Great-Power politics is illustrated in the text of the Gaimushō report prepared much later, in 1923, on a summary of the past history of Japanese-Ottoman relations that has been narrated so far.14 The report was prepared at a time when no formal relations existed between Japan and Turkey (these were to take place in 1924) following the Lausanne Treaty which abolished the capitulation and established treaty relations of mutual reciprocity and equality between the West and the young Republic of Turkey undergoing the Kemalist revolution. The analysis explains very well the previous problems of treaty revision between the Japanese and the Ottomans. The tone is curt with no recourse to the language of warm frienship and camaraderie due to common Asian roots that would be expressed in formal communiqués or in such private accounts as that of Yamada. It is a typical diplomatic in-house discussion that interprets the problems of the relations from the perspective of Japanese interest. There is a comment which reveals the extent to which this interest was defined in Japanese terms in the section on the history of the Ottoman-Japanese relations during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. One would assume that since Yamada’s activities of local intelligence were allowed by the authorities in Istanbul, presumably this would have been interpreted as an act of a warm and friendly nature. Yet, the report concludes with a cool appraisal about Ottoman diplomatic policy towards Japan during the RussoJapanese War as a policy of neutrality tinging on the unfriendly. The problem from the Japanese point of view was that the Ottoman authorities ‘had not’ allowed the Japanese to have a free hand in pursuing their activities of intelligence and propaganda within the territories of the empire. According to the report, this restrictive policy on part of the Ottomans was due to the diplomacy of neutrality during the conflict between Russia and Japan, carefully practised by the Sultan Abdulhamid (although he had sent the Ertuğrul to Japan, during the war he practised a balance of power policy between Britain and Russia that entailed a shift to a line of neutrality which would not antagonize Russia). The report comments that this policy of

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neutrality was tinged with a pro-Russian slant due to the influence of the ‘Russian clique’, the shinroha, in the government.15 As far as the Gaimushō view of the late Ottoman history of Japanese-Turkish relations was concerned, the whole experience was one of failure because the Ottomans refused to concede treaty privileges to Japan, restricted Japanese intelligence activities, acted in a pro-Russian fashion during the Russo-Japanese War. The rhetoric of mutual admiration, the Turkish public’s celebration of the rise of Japan as the star of the East, Asian camaraderie, the Ertuğrul tragedy, are all absent from the analysis.

JAPAN AS THE SAVIOUR OF ISLAM The history of the failure of Japanese and Ottoman formal relations remains as an instructive example of the Meiji government’s Gaimushō perspective on the Ottomans. However, on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War and right after the dramatic Japanese victory that is acclaimed with enthusiasm in the anti-imperialist public opinion of Europe and Asia, one notices the formation of regular contacts between the Japanese and the Ottomans, outside of the top official circles, that is of an ideological nature aimed at a common anti-Western/imperialist agenda. The agents of these contacts are the Asianist expansionists in Japan, particularly linked to the Kokuryūkai, the Amur River Society, mostly known as the Black Dragons, and militant nationalists, activists among the Muslims in Russia, the Ottoman empire, and other countries particularly in Asia. The agenda of these contacts is the potential of activist Muslims to form ‘the pro-Japanese network in the world of Islam’. Ian Nish has noted that the charged athmosphere of Asianism and the demand for Japan’s natural destiny as a new Asian empire fuelled the creation of new right-wing groupings whose adherents constituted a rival strata to the Meiji élite in power, with anti-Western views that justified the formation of an Asian empire which went handin-hand with the rising militant line against Russia (Nish, 1985: 95–6, 118, 153–4). In the context of the Asianism and Japanese imperialism at the turn of the century, the Japanese start to treat the Ottoman connection as part of a larger game plan to recruit like-minded friends and collaborators from Muslims to help the cause of the Japanese empire. No longer simply seen as a good environment of collaboration for reasons of obvious enmity shared against Russia as a traditional rival, the Ottoman world is now hoped to be ‘used’ by the Japanese authorities as sort of spring-board for making Japanese contacts with the politically engaged Muslims of Russia, Egypt, and Arabia who can be conveniently contacted through Istanbul, one of the main centres for intellectual and political activity of Muslims, to aid the interests of the Japanese empire. From the numerous accounts of the Japanese activity among the Muslims which begins on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, one gains the impression that the Japanese authorities were interested in forming pro-Japanese lobbies primarily from the activist political circles among the Muslims in Russia who were already in an ideological and nationalist opposition against the autocratic and pan-Slav tsarist regime. Sometimes, as in the case of Chinese Muslims, the Japanese strategic argument was that Muslims who were treated as marginal in a primarily non-Muslim environment had the potential to be sympathetic to the Japanese as a type of

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‘fifth column’. Soon there was also the view that Muslims in the Dutch Indies and British India who suffered under Western Christian rule would naturally be good candidates for collaborating with Japanese interests.16 The activities of colonel Akashi Motojirō, the military attaché of Japan in St Petersburg, who was the famous mastermind of Japanese intelligence and espionage in Europe, and his predecessor Tanaka Giichi of army intelligence, already trained as an expert on Russia and China, are a turning point in forming the Japanese network among Muslims just before the Russo-Japanese War. Akashi and Tanaka supported the anti-tsarist activities of Russian Muslims as part of their major strategy to fuel the revolutionary ardour in Russia. The Japanese strategy was to aid the opposition activities of such dissaffected groups as the anti-Russian Polish and Finnish nationalists, the Russian revolutionaries and the Cadet Party. The Russian Muslims, primarily of Turkish stock, were also on the stage as one of the opposition groups chafing under the strong-handed authoritarianism of the tsarist regime, especially its recent panSlav policies. While Akashi comments in his memoirs, Ryakka ryūsui, that he still has not studied their situation in detail and that the Russian Tartars and the Muslims were at this point not good candidates for helping the aims of Japanese as they lacked a strong organization; still, circumstantial evidence indicates that he did support the political leaders of the Muslims in their propaganda activity and the organization of the All Russia Muslim Congress of 1905 which is considered to be a milestone in the emergence of nationalism among the Russian Muslims.17 The importance of the Japanese intelligence networking among militant Muslims at this time is that it will form the foundation for the activities of the Japanese authorities which will become more Asianist in its imperialism and militant in its expansionism after the First World War down the road to the Second World War. Accounts of Japanese intelligence activities in the Islamic world point to the early connection between Russia Muslims of Turkish origin during the terms of Akashi and Tanaka, who constitute a small core-group of pro-Japanese activists that, in later years, aid Japanese contacts and propaganda networks in the Muslim world. In this context, from the Asianist imperialist point of view of intelligence activities around the turn of the century, now the Ottoman empire serves as as stage for the recruitmment of activist Muslims from Russia and the Near East for the Japanese cause. The life of Abdürreşid Ibrahim (1854–1944) a Russian Tartar, a religious cleric (imam) and judge (kadi) well-known for his pan-Islamist and reformist ideas as a journalist and political activist, is a very meaningful example of these early contacts via Istanbul and St Petersburg during the Russo-Japanese War. Such contacts will mature into a wide network of Japanese intelligence activity geared towards the Muslim populations in later years. A maverick political figure and militant intellectual of the pan-Islamism current at the time, Ibrahim is said to have become a close friend of Japan as the organizer of the All Russia Muslim Congress in 1905, whereupon he visited Japan through the help of Akashi and Tanaka. While his career spans a good half of the twentieth century, Ibrahim’s ‘fated marriage’ with Japan which began on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, carried him to Tokyo first in 1906, then again in 1908 when he made contacts with figures in the bureaucracy, army, especially the ultra-nationalist Kokuryūkai, who were agitating the mood of Asianism in Japan. Typical of many anti-imperialist, nationalist figures of Asia who were in admiration of the rise of Japan to power, Ibrahim continued to serve the Japanese authorities

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as one of their conduits in the world of Islam. He had prestige among the educated Muslim public in many countries due to his political and intellectual activism for the cause of Muslim emancipation around the world. Already in 1909, Ibrahim travelled back to Istanbul, with Kokuryūkai support, by taking a very long route back home that took him about a year as he stopped over in important Muslim communities in China and in the territories of the British and the Dutch empires to create a pro-Japanese public opinion.18 Ibrahim wrote a fascinating memoir of his travels in Japan and Asia during 1908 and 1909 on behalf of the Kokuryūkai and the Ajia gikai (an organization linked with the Tōa dōbunkai, which was formed in Tokyo by the Asianist Japanese and Muslims of many countries with Ibrahim as the main Muslim figure). The book is titled Alem-i Islam Japonya’da Intisar-ı Islamiyet [The world of Islam: The spreading of Islam in Japan] became a popular work favouring Japan’s modernity, creating the image of Japan as the rising star of the East in the Turkish-speaking population of the Ottoman and the Romanov empires. Just like the Yamada work on the Turks, Ibrahim’s memoir can be said to have become the first Turkish text with a vocabulary that has developed the full image of Japan as a friendly and familiar entity as an alternative Eastern model for modernity. The continued contacts between Ibrahim and his Asianist Japanese friends is a story that takes him back to Japan for good in 1938 as the official head of the Japanese government organization for Islam, Dai Nippon kaikyō kyōkai, where he died in 1944. In the meantime, his career shows that the Japanese interest in the Ottoman empire during the rise of Asianism in Japan carries a new ideological character: it is perceived as a convenient centre for spreading propaganda about Japan as the saviour of the Islam. While Abdulhamid II had striven to preserve the Ottoman empire with conservative modernism, the impact of nineteenth-century currents of Westernization, nationalism, and reform, the Ottoman cities had already become an important meeting ground for nationalist intellectuals and political figures from Russia such as the pan-Islamist Ibrahim, the new generation of Young Turk nationalists, whose travels back and forth in the region carried people and ideas through the press, the media, public lectures and the like that kindled nationalist and reformists movements. Thus, connections in Istanbul had the potential to lead to others in Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Mecca and Medina, for which the Asianist Japanese in Tokyo developed a strong interest. This new phenomenon also engendered its typical Japanese experts, specialists on Islam and its way of life who became the agents of realizing the Asianist vision in the world of Islam. Here, the Japanese figures of this new network that was forming among Muslims start frequenting the Ottoman realm in the early years of the twentieth century and also constitute a new breed of Asianist activists frequently connected with the Kokuryūkai and army intelligence in some fashion. Many of them began to study languages such as Arabic and Turkish, the tenets and rituals of the Islamic faith, under Ibrahim and other pro-Japanese Muslim collaborators to become well-versed in Islamic ways in the manner of the Orientalist trained agents of the Great Powers such as Lawrence of ‘Arabia’. It is clear that right after the Russo-Japanese War that is followed by the tumultuous impact of the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 in the Ottoman world, the Asianist network for Japan in the world of Islam was in the making. The Russian Tartar Muslim Ibrahim again pioneered in this new policy of introducing Japanese

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Muslim agents into the Near East via the Ottoman realm. According to his memoirs, on his way back to Istanbul in 1909, Ibrahim meets with Yamaoka Kōtarō (1880–1959), a member of the Black Dragons whom he had known in Tokyo, in Bombay and accompanies him to Mecca and then to Istanbul. By now, Yamaoka who has already become ‘Omar (Omar)’ Yamaoka, the first Japanese Muslim convert, is introduced by Ibrahim to nationalist and pan-Islamist circles in Istanbul as a speaker. Yamaoka gave a number of conferences to the Istanbul audiences on the new Japanese policy towards helping the Muslim world and the importance of the Ajia gikai organization, which is now introduced as the Japanese Society of Islam. The Istanbul pan-Islamist press such as the Sirat-i Müstakim and the Tearüf-ı Müslimin, owned and edited by Ibrahim after his return from Japan, published Omar Yamaoka’s letters together with Ibrahim’s pro-Japanese editorials. Significantly in Istanbul, Yamaoka addresses the Istanbul public, where pan-Turkist and panIslamist ideas are prevalent against the oppression of the Western empires, through conferences arranged by the Russian Tartar students organization—a connection to the world of Islam which the Japanese will continue to consider as important. In the meantime, Ibrahim’s son disseminated Ibrahim and Yamaoka’s conferences in the Russian Muslim world through the Beyanül Hak, of the Kazan region that appealed to the Tartar population of the Volga region. It is also clear that Ibrahim aids Omar Yamaoka to make contact with Arab leaders in Mecca and Medina whereupon this Japanese Muslim also becomes the first Japanese pilgrim to visit the Holy Lands, which he duly uses to initiate contacts with the notables of the two cities and make publicity about the special attention of the Japanese empire regarding the plight of Muslims.19 Travelling from Mecca in Arabia through Damascus, Beirut and Istanbul, Yamaoka was to return to Japan and later continued a career of agitation and activism among the Chinese Muslims. In 1912, only a year after Ibrahim’s book on Japan, he was also to publish an account of his experience in Arabia titled Arabia jūdanki [The record of the pilgrimage to Arabia] which probably was the first Japanese account of the Arabian world of Islam (Yamaoka, 1912: 1–2; Katsufuji, et al., 1981: 173; Komura, 1988: 52–3, 360–7, 468–74). Yamaoka’s activities and impressions of the world of Islam signify the beginnings of a strong focus on the part of Asianists in forming a kaikyō seisaku, or Islam policy for Japan that becomes a major strategic line in the future for Japanese expansionism. In Yamaoka’s account the Ottoman world is no longer the declining old empire of Meiji strategists, nor the romantic Orient of Yamada, it is the gate to the Arab Muslim world. As the first Japanese Muslim pilgrim to Mecca who went through the complete ritual of the pilgrimage in addition to formal contacts with local Arab leaders, Yamaoka advocates a strong Asianist line towards the world of Islam, and the focus appears to be no longer the Russia Muslims or the Ottoman Turks, but the Arab world and via the Arabs the Asian Muslims. Yamaoka’s justification for conversion is also reflective of the combination of patriotism, Asianism, and imperialism that was the familiar mixture of that generation of Asianists. It will constitute the basis of the argument for training Japanese agents who will be active in the world of Islam through the Second World War. Yamaoka is very straightforward in the text that is appealing to the Japanese readers about his conversion. His argument is that it is justified as a patriotic duty for the emperor of Japan. Yamaoka argues that a global policy for Japan cannot be realized without incorporating a strategic policy towards the Muslim peoples suffering under the Great Powers.

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In his introduction he discusses the importance for young Japanese to go out in the world and exert the pioneer spirit of the Japanese warrior ethos to help the pitiful people of the Orient and the Occident and to turn their gaze towards the region of western Asia. Significantly, the Westernist rhetoric which has been discussed above serves now as a scapegoat to justify the new Asianist perspective. In his introduction Yamaoka laments the superficial Westernism of the Meiji era as encouraging frivolity and demoralization. His daring journey to Arabia is presented as part of the duty to perfect the mission of the empire of the rising sun (Yamaoka, 1912: 1–2). It would seem as if Omar Yamaoka are taking the same road as Lawrence whose admiration for the Arabs served the British empire during the First World War. The political and military consequences of the activities of the Japanese enthusiasts and experts of Islam such as Omar Yamaoka are to become apparent later as Japan will embark upon her empire-building. The image of Japan as the saviour of Islam and kaikyō seisaku, an Islam policy will be used in the politics and propaganda of the Japanese expansionists and militarists who will come to power in the Second World War.

CONCLUSION Neither Meiji Japan nor Ottoman Turkey could formalize their relations as long as either side was dependent upon the terms of extraterritoriality etc. which gave special privileges to foreign countries. The Japanese as well as the Ottomans were part of an agenda of imperialist interest in the terms set by the West, with Japan now adopting the posturings of a Great Power. The political narrative about the Japanese interest in the Ottoman empire shows the evolution of the Japanese idea of itself as a modern nation from a strictly Westernist definition of the early Meiji era to one imbued with a sense of Asian roots by the turn of the century. Stefan Tanaka has masterfully argued that the Japanese conceptualization of tōyō, the Orient, restored China and Asia in Japanese thought which ‘provided the basis for a history [of the Orient termed] (tōyōshi) by which Japanese, as Asians, could compare themselves against the West, and at the same time, as Japanese, could measure their progress’ (Tanaka, 1993: 18). For the first generation Meiji élite in power with a Westernist vision of the world, the Ottomans were simply the representation of the European-Western imperialist agenda of the Eastern Question of a crumbling ‘semi-civilized’ non-Western empire. For the young Meiji generation with a new sense of Japaneseness such as Yamada Torajirō, however, the Ottoman world was the object of romantic interest in the ‘accessable Orient’ of the Europeans which is off shore borders of Asia in Europe for Japan. It is a Japanese version of the contemporary Orientalist Western romantic image about the area. Unlike the Western Orientalist romantics, however, the Japanese romantic such as Yamada sought a personal identification within this Orientalizing image. For Yamada and his friends in Japan, the Ottoman Turks and the Japanese had much in common because of a martial warrior heritage and an Asian sensibility, and last but not least Meiji Restoration had been inspirational for the 1908 Young Turk Revolution as a modernist agenda. The Russo-Japanese War was a breakwater in this story. The Muslims and other anti-imperialist peoples in the East as well as the West particularly against Russia, had suddenly created a world public opinion that enthusiastically admired Japan as

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the rising star of the East. Thus for the Japanese nationalists and expansionists as well as officials with a newly gained sense of confidence about Japan as a Great Power, the Ottoman empire as a polity is no longer simply the important bulwark against Russia; it was already the realm that could be ‘exploited’ in economic terms as in the case of the the 1911 report which pointed to the fertile lands of Mesopotamia. The Ottoman empire now became an arena where Muslim agents such as Omar Yamaoka would roam to spark off a militant Asianist line among Turks as well as Arabs and even Muslims of the world. Given the imperialist motive of the Islam agenda for Japan, it was however, obvious that there was a generational collaboration across national boundaries as well. Asianists of Japan who chafed under the so-called Westernism and prudency of the Meiji élite had found a common cause with the pan-Islamists such as Ibrahim, or for that matter the Young Turks who were also chafing under autocratic imperial regimes such as that of Tsar Nicholas and Sultan Abdulhamid; both sharing with their Japanese counterparts a militant combination of liberalism and nationalism that was deeply critical of the West. From now one, Muslims such as Ibrahim who appeared to be creating a militant defiance against the rule of Western imperialism will be convincing as potential collaborators in the quest for a Japanese Asian empire. The late Meiji period interest in the Ottoman realm also created the words that will constitute the language that will be used within this political relationship among the Japanese and their Muslim friends. Towards the Ottoman Turks, the dual language of Japanese ‘cool’ diplomacy as a Great Power contrasted with the warm language of a shared cultural heritage illustrated the problematic very well. Furthermore, by the time Ibrahim brings Yamaoka to the Near East, Japan is not just the friend of the Turks with a shared martial heritage, but the saviour of Islam, a monolithic world of many nations for which the Ottomans provide only an entry and there is the need for Islam policy. During the Cold War era, the political tone of this vocabulary especially towards the Turks was toned down as by gone became the political agenda of the past such as the treaty problem, Asianist politics, and great power politics. But some of the basic concepts have managed to survive to this day as the formal diplomatic language of Japanese-Turkish relations that stresses a shared cultural heritage with Asian roots. Since the end of the Cold War era it is intriguing to note the revival of some of the old vocabulary and perspectives of the prewar era in the new heightened Japanese interest towards the Turkish-speaking world and its consequences remain to be seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Akashi, Motojirō. 1988. Rakka ryūsui: Colonel Akashi’s Report on His Secret Cooperation with the Russian Revolutionary Parties During the Russo-Japanese War. Edited by Olavi K. Fäıt and Antti Kujula. Translated by Inaba Chiharu. Studia Historica, 31. Helsinki: Societas Historica Finlandiae. Arık, Ümit, 1989. A Century of Turkish Japanese Relations: Towards a Special Partnership. Istanbul: Turkish Japanese Business Council. Beasley, W. G. 1964. The Modern History of Japan. New York: Praeger. Deringil, Selim. 1991. ‘Osmanlı Imparatorlugu’nda Gelenegin Icadı, Muhayyel Cemaat, ve Panislamizm’ [The invention of tradition, imagined community, and pan-Islamism in the Ottoman empire]. Toplum ve Bilim, 54: Yaz-Guz, 47–65.

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Esenbel, Selçuk. 1995. ‘Islam Dünyasinda Japon Imgesi: Abdürreşid ibrahim ve Geç Meiji Dönemi Japonları’ [The image of Japan in the world of Islam: Abdürreşid ibrahim and the Late Meiji Japanese]. Toplumsal Tarih, 19(4): 13–8. ——, 1996. ‘A Fin de Siecle Japanese Romantic in Istanbul: The Life of Yamada Torajiro and His Toruko Gakan’. Bulletin of SOAS, 59/2: 237–52. Fukuzawa Yukichi. 1875 (1970). Bummeiron no gairyaku [An outline of a theory of civilization]. In Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshū. [Collected works of Fukuzawa Yukichi], 4. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Furukawa Nobuyoshi. 1891 (1988). Perushia kikō [Persia travelogue]. Tokyo: Sambō hombu. In Meiji siruku rōdo tanken kikōbun shūsei. [A collection of Meiji period Silk–road expedition travelogues], 2. Tokyo: Yumani shobō. Gaimushō [Ministry of Foreign Affairs]. 1911. Toruko jijō [Conditions in Turkey]. Tokyo: Gaimushō seimukyoku dainika. ——, 1923. ‘Tai-to jōyaku teiketsu keika’ (Ōshū taisen mae). In Gaimushō, Documents on Japanese-Turkish Relations, Taishō 12 file. Library of Congress, Microfilm, MT11212. Harries, Meirion, Harries, Susie. 1991. Soldiers of the Sun. New York: Random House. Ibrahim, Abdürreşid. 1910/1911 (Islamic 1328 and 1329). Alem-i Islam ve Japonya’da Intisar’ı Islamiyet 2 volumes. Volume 1 Ahmet Saki Bey Matbaası (Ahmet Saki Bey Printing) 1910; Volume 2 Kader Matbaası (Kader Printing) 1911. Ienaga, Toyokichi. 1900 (1988). Nishiajia ryōkōki [The record of the travels to west Asia]. Tokyo: Minyūshi. In Meiji shiruku rōdo tanken kikōbun shusei. [A collection of Meiji period Silk–road expedition travelogues], 16. Tokyo: Yumani shobō. Jansen, Marius. B. 1975. Japan and China: From War to Peace 1894–1972. Chicago: Rand-McNally. Komatsu Kaori. 1992. Ertugrul faciasi: Bir dostlugun dogusu [The Ertugrul calamity: The birth of a friendship]. Ankara: Turhan kitabevi yayinlari. Katsufuji Takeshi, Naiki Ryōichi and Okazaki Shōkō. 1981. Isuramu sekai: Sono rekishi to bunka [The world of Islam: Its history and culture]. Tokyo: Sekai shisōsha. Kokuryūkai. 1930. Kokuryūkai jireki [The Kokuryūkai records]. Tokyo: Kokuryūkai. Komatsu Kaoru and Komatsu Hisao, 1991. Caponya [Japan]. Tokyo: Daishokan. Komura Fujiō. 1988. Nihon isuramu shi (The History of Islam in Japan). Tokyo: Nihon isuramu yūji remmei. Kuroda Kiyotaka. 1887 (1987). Kan’yū nikki [Journey around the world]. In Meiji ōbei kemmonroku shūsei. [The collection of the accounts of the Meiji study missions to the United States and Europe], 6. Tokyo: Yumani shobō. Matsutani Hironao. 1986. Nihon to Toruko: Nihon Toruko kankeishi [Japan and Turkey: the history of Japanese–Turkish relations]. Tokyo: Chūtō chōsakai. Muramatsu Masumi and. Matsutani Hironao. 1989. Toruko to Nihon [Turkey and Japan]. Tokyo: Saimuru shuppankai. Mütercimler, Erol. 1993. Ertugrul faciasi ve 21 yüzyila dogru Türk-Japon ıliskisi [The Ertugrul calamity and Turkish–Japanese relations towards the twenty-first century]. Istanbul: Anahtar kitaplar. Naitō Chishū. 1930. ‘Toruko shisetsu Osman pasha raichō no shimei’ [The mission of the Turkish envoy Osman Pasha to our monarchy]. Shigaku, 9(4): 575–86. ——, 1931. Nitto kōshō shi [The history of Japanese-Turkish relations]. Tokyo: Izumi shoinban. Naito Chishū, Kotsuji Setsumi and Kobayashi Hajime. 1942. Seinan Ajia no shūsei [Trends of southwest Asian history]. Tokyo: Meguro shoten. Nakai Hiroshi. 1877. Toruko Girisha oyobi lndo man’yū kitei [Account of travels in Turkey, Greece and India]. Tokyo. Nish, Ian H. 1976. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance: A Study of Two Island Empires. Westport: Greenwood Press. ——, 1985. The Origins of the Russo-Japanese War. London: Longman. Office of Strategic Services. Research and Analysis Branch. 1942. ‘Japanese Infiltration Among the Muslims Throughout the World’. R&A. No. 890. Washington DC: National Archives.

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——, 1944. ‘Japanese Infiltration among Muslims in Russia and Her Borderlands’. R&A. No. 890.2 National Archieves. Washington DC: National Archives. Ōyama Takanosuke. 1890 (1988). Toruko kōkai kiji [The record of the sea voyage to Turkey]. In Meiji shiruku rōdo tanken kikōbun shūsei. [A collection of Meiji period silk–road expedition travelogues], 10. Tokyo: Yumani shobō. Sait Pasha. Sait Pasa’nin Hatirati, 2 volumes, Sabah Matbaası, Istanbul, 1328 (1912), pp. 37–38; Arık, Naito Chishu, Nitto kosho shi, pp. 31–35. ——, 1912 (Islamic/solar calendar 1328) Sait Pasa’nın Hatıratı (The memoirs of Sait Pasha), 2 volumes. Istanbul: Sabah Matbaası (Sabah Printing). Shaw, Stanford J. and Shaw, Ezel Kural. 1977. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Takahashi Tadahisa. 1982. ‘Türk Japon Münasebetlerine Kısa bir Bakıs’ [A brief look at Turkish– Japanese relations]. Türk Dünyasi Arastirmalari Vakfi Dergisi. 18 June, 124–8. Tanaka, Stefan. 1993. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Toyama ō shashinden kankōkai. 1935. Tōyama ō shashinden [A photographic biography of the venerable Toyama]. Tokyo: Tōyama ō shashinden kankōkai. ‘Toruko oyobi Ejiputo ni aru ryōjikan saiban no ken’ [The collection of the drafts of translations for the Meiji government, concerning the consular courts in Turkey and Egypt]. 1986. Tsūyaku shūsei daiichi hen of Meiji seifu tsūyaku sōkō ruisan, 5. Tokyo: Yumani shobō. Uçar, Ahmet. 1995a. ‘Japonların Islam Dünyasindaki Yayılmaci Siyaseti ve Abdürreşid ibrahim’ [The expansionist policy of the Japanese in the world of Islam and Abdürreşid ibrahim]. M.A. dissertation, Selçuk University. ——, 1995b. ‘Japonların Islam Dünyasındaki Yayılmaci Siyaseti ve Abdürreşid ibrahim’ [The expansionist policy of the Japanese in the world of Islam and Abdürreşid ibrahim]. Toplumsal Tarih, 20 August, 15–17. Yamaoka Kōtarō. 1912. Sekai no shimpikyō Arabia jūdanki [Mystery of the world; the record of the pilgrimage to Arabia]. Tokyo. Hakubunkan. Zürcher, Erik J. 1993. Turkey, A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris and Co.

NOTES 1 For a general history of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey in English, see Shaw and Shaw 1977, and Zürcher, 1993. There are many terms which are historically used for the country known as Turkey today. The paper will use some of them as it fits customary use. The Ottoman empire (1299–1923) is the standard term which is used for the polity that was formally abolished in 1923 after the First World War and the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. In European languages it was customary to refer to the Ottoman empire as Turkey, or Ottoman Turkey, and the Ottoman government as the Sublime Porte or simply the Porte from the term Bab-ı Ali. The works of Naito Chishū—the pioneer of Turkish studies in Japan—give the best prewar account of Turko-Japanese relations. See Naito, 1931: 15, for the above; Naitō, et al., 1942: 327–34; Naito, 1930; Takahashi, 1982: 128 for the above and for an overview in Turkish; Arık, 1989: 19, to be used with caution for citations (see the Japanese translation of Arık’s work which has correct citation of Japanese sources). For a recent appraisal of TurkishJapanese relations, see, Matsutani, 1986. 2 On the Yoshida and Furukawa missions, see Katsufuji, et al., 1986: 169–71; Naitō, 1931: 15; Naitō, et al., 1942: 328–9. 3 See Katsufuji, et al., 1986: 170–2. Komura, 1988: 46–8, gives accounts of the above Japanese visits to gather intelligence information explained from a ‘pro-Islamic’ perspective. The author, originally an intelligence officer in Inner Mongolia during the Second World War is one of the active figures among the few Japanese converts to Islam. 4 Same sources as the above.

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5 6

7

8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15

16

17 18

See Gaimushō, 1911: 105–18, for Albanians; 100–4, 246–48, for Japanese interest in acquiring economic and commercial interest in the Basra area such as land for cotton cultivation. See Komura, 1988: passim, for a general account of early Meiji publications on Islam that convey the standard Western missionary critical perspective. See also ibid.: 45, for Inoue Kowashi, Mohammettoron, his policy which claimed Islam was not very suitable for a civilized religion. See Fukuzawa, 1875 (1970): 16, for a three-tiered view of the world: the unenlightened world of primitive peoples such as in Africa, next is Asia which belongs to the semi-enlightened category (that has the potential for full enlightenment). The second category should be rejected by Japan which has to join the ranks of the enlightened world represented by the West. See Katsufuji, et al., 1986: 169–73, for an account of the early Japanese visits to the Near East and their negative impressions. Beasley, 1964: 57–76, on treaties and politics; Jansen, 1975: 84, 197, 206, 214; for the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, see Nish, 1976, 1977. For Ottoman treaties with the West, see Zürcher, 1993: 49–50, 58–69, 78–88 for an overview of the Küçük Kaynarca Treaty of 1774 after the defeat of the Ottomans to Russia that forced the Porte to recognize diplomatic equality with the Europeans, impact of the French Revolution and nationalist rebellion in Greece and Egypt, 1838 Anglo-Ottoman Treaty of Trade that brought the nineteenth-century ‘unequal treaties’ home by opening the empire to ‘free trade’, and the history of Westernization and reform as a corresponding process. ‘Toruko oyobi Ejiputo ni aru ryōjikan saiban no ken’ [The collection of the drafts of translations for the Meiji government, cincerning the consular courts in Turkey and Egypt], in Tsūyakū shūsei daiichi hen o f Meiji seifu tsūyaku sōkō ruisan, 5. Tokyo: Yumani shobō, 1986. See Naito, 1931: 23–5, for the questionnaire, ibid.: 28, 31–5, for problems with the treaty; Arık, 1989: 20–2, for the English translation of the questionnaire. See Naito, 1931: 182–252, for an extensive treatment of the pan-Islamism of Abdulhamid II; Mütercimler, 1993: 151–2; Deringil, 1991: 47–65. I am grateful to Selim Deringil for documentary information on the negotiations concerning the diplomatic and trade treaty between Japan and the Ottoman Porte. See, Basbakanlık Arsivi, Yıldız Mütenevvi Maruzat, 198/122 Daire-i Hariciye no. 436, for comment about special protection from the palace. It was after this article was published that I discovered the intelligence activities of the retired navy officer Nakamura Kenjirō through the contribution of Inaba Chiharu. Nakamura owned the Nakamura Shoten of Istanbul where Yamada worked. For details see Selçuk Esenbel and Inaba Chiharu, The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on the History of Japanese Turkish Relations (Istanbul: Bogazici University, 2003). See ‘Tai-to jōyaku teiketsu keika’ (Ōshū taisen mae), in Taishō 12 file, Gaimushō, documents on Japanese-Turkish Relations, Library of Congress, Microfilm, MT11212. In ‘Tai-to jōyaku teiketsu keika’ one reads: ‘torukokoku nai ni wa shinroha no seiryoku . . . ’. The comment is interesting because it is quite unfeasible from the Turkish point of view to imagine a pro-Russian clique in the Turkish politics at the time in view of their historic rivalry. See Takahashi, 1988: 241–4, for a detailed account of Abdulhamid’s balance of power strategy between Russia, France, and Great Britain which was behind the official policy of neutrality during the Russo-Japanese War. For detailed account of these activities see, ‘Japanese Attempts at Infiltration Among Muslims in Russia and Her Borderlands’ August 1944, R&A, No. 890.2, Office of Strategic Services, Research and Analysis Branch. I am grateful to Tamamoto Masaru for bringing these invaluable sources to my attention. The material on the nationalist Japanese and their strategy in the world of Islam is part of this author’s research in progress for a book on the subject. See, ‘Japanese Infiltration Among Muslims in Russia and Her Borderlands’, for extensive coverage of Akashi and Russian Muslims who helped the Japanese cause; Akashi, 1988: 28, mentions briefly help to Tartars and Russian Muslims; Harries and Harries, 1991: 80, 92. Part of work in progress to be published as Japan and the World of Islam. There are many sources on Ibrahim’s activities in Japanese, Turkish, English and Russian. A basic bibliography has been published as part of a special file on Ibrahim which is made up of a collection of

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articles in Turkish in the journal Toplumsal Tarih, 19, July 1995; 20, August, 1995; Esenbel, 1995. Major sources are ‘Japanese Infliltration Among the Muslims Throughout the World’, OSS, R&A, No. 890, 1942, in addition to the OSS. No. 890.2 report cited above. See also Kokuryūkai, 1930: 17, 21, for references to Ibrahim and his son Münir; Tōyama ō shashinden kankōkai, 1935: 55, for a photograph of Ibrahim with Tōyama Mitsuru, the spiritual head of the Kokuryūkai. For Ibrahim’s memoir, see Ibrahim, 1910, 2 vols. The first volume is on Japan and has been translated in Japanese, see Komatsu and Komatsu, 1991. 19 For the letters and conferences by Omar Yamaoka and Ibrahim about the Ajia gikai society, see newspapers published in Istanbul, Tearüf-i Müslimin, 17, 13 October 1910: 278; 22, 17 November 1910: 358; 23, 24 November 1910: 363; 32, 1 February 1911: 125; Sırat-ı Müstakim, 4(83), March 1909: 53–6; March 1910: 66–74; 5(133), March 1910: 42–45. For the dissemination of articles in the Russian Muslim press, see Uçar, 1995a, 1995b: 15.

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❚ First published in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. LIX, Part 2, 1996, 237–52.

7

A Fin de Siècle Japanese Romantic in Istanbul: The Life of Yamada Torajiroand his Toruko Gakan a

he modern Japanese tourist visiting the Topkapı Saraı may well be struck by a display of sixteenth-century samurai armour and helmets held there. It was presented, along with a sword, to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1892 by Yamada Torajirō (1866–1957), an important pioneer in the history of Turkish-Japanese relations and the subject of this paper. Yamada, who was to remain in the imperial capital for almost twenty years, was witness to the history of the Hamidian era of conservative modernism under the despotic regime of the so-called ‘Red Sultan’, and the subsequent dramatic transition to constitutionalism that came with the Young Turk revolution of 1908. He was one of only two Japanese resident in the city (possibly in the whole empire) in this period. The other was Nakamura Kenjirō, owner of the first Japanese shop in Istanbul, and Yamada’s friend and partner.1 (plate 16) Yamada Torajirō’s impressions of the Ottoman world constitute the first account from a perspective which was at the same time both Japanese and ‘Western’. His written works on the Ottomans provide one of the first eyewitness reports by a contemporary Japanese of the world of Islam observed through the Turks and their multi-religious, multi-ethnic empire. The visit in 1892 arose out of contacts between the two empires which began several decades earlier. The gifts were Yamada family heirlooms. They testified to the family’s samurai warrior origins in the feudal order of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1600–1868). The sword represented the lineage’s claim to a certain renown and status—they had played a part in the civil war which brought the Tokugawa to power in the seventeenth century. It was very likely presented to Yamada’s ancestors by the defender of Osaka castle, Toyotomi Hideyori, whose forces had held out to the last in that great battle. Despite the traditional symbolism of his gifts to the Porte, however, Yamada represented the new reformist Japan which began with the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and which, 24 years later, was interested in the political and commercial conditions of the Ottoman empire.2

T

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FROM ISOLATION TO FIRST ENCOUNTER Before the late nineteenth century, Japan and Ottoman Turkey had had no known contact. Even their awareness of each other was minimal, limited to brief descriptions of the exotic and strange peoples of the world in classical geographies and popular works. Katip Çelebi’s Cihannuma, the well-known seventeenth-century Ottoman travel account and history of the world, has a few pages on Japan or ‘Caponya’, noting, for example, that ‘the Japanese love to take cold baths and have high morals’. The numerous Japanese popular works of the eighteenth century, including the Kōmōzatsuwa (‘Miscellaneous stories about the red-haired peoples’) or the Bankoku shinwa (‘Tales of ten thousand lands’) did not go beyond exoticsounding and superficial descriptions of ‘Toruko’ (Turkey), described as a ‘ferocious military power in three continents’. Most of this information was not even first-hand but relied on sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century hearsay transmitted via the Portuguese and the Dutch.3 Yamada’s visit reflected both the end of isolation between the two Asian powers and the growing globalization of world-power interests in the modern era. The Ottoman and Meiji governments, effectively the only politically independent nonWestern world powers apart from China, were then both under going a process of integration with Western civilization, albeit with difficulties. The Ottomans, with their much older and continuous contact with the West, had been part of European history since the late middle ages. They had, however, adopted a policy of Westernization primarily for the purposes of military reform. While this policy expanded into other fields in the nineteenth century, the new institutions it gave rise to coexisted with the traditional institutions of the empire. By comparison, the Japanese adaptation to Western civilization came later and more dramatically with the opening up of the country to international relations by the US fleet in 1853.4 Despite their efforts at reform, however, both powers were still signatories to the capitulations of the unequal treaty system dominated by the Great Powers, the terms of which made it impossible for them to establish diplomatic relations with each other. Yamada thus became the only intermediary between the two governments, frequently carrying messages back and forth and handling trade between the Ottoman Empire and Meiji Japan as well as playing a role in the futile negotiations towards a diplomatic and commercial treaty between the two powers.5 Yamada’s gifts to the Ottoman Sultan also reflected the late nineteenth-century Japanese social and political world. Although Yamada represented the interests of Meiji Japan, his gifts emphasized rather a common heritage of chivalry and military honour. Samurai status had in fact been abolished, together with the other accoutrements of feudalism, in the early years of the Meiji Restoration, but among the rising middle class of urban Tokyo to which Yamada belonged a samurai past still carried social weight.6 More significantly, the gifts indicated the new ‘Asianist’ mood prevalent among Meiji Japan’s second generation, many of whom were disenchanted with the enthusiastic Westernization of the reform years. This return to ‘Asian roots’, coupled with a growing sense of confrontation with Romanov Russia, was partly responsible for Japanese interest in the Ottoman polity.7 Great Britain, herself moving towards closer relations with Japan, with whom she was to sign the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, encouraged Ottoman-Japanese

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contact as part of a global strategy against Russia. Britain valued the Ottoman empire because even as late as the 1890s, the Ottomans were still ruling over most of the Near East and continued to maintain a small foothold in the Balkans. The Ottomans may have been weakened but they survived as a continuing presence in the politics and military balance of power in Eastern Europe and the Near East.8

YAMADA TORAJIRŌ AND OTTOMAN-JAPANESE RELATIONS Yamada was born in 1866, two years before the tumultuous changes of the Meiji Restoration. He was typical of the first generation of Meiji élite whose education included a considerable Western element along with immersion in the Chinese and Japanese classics. Yamada was the second son of a karō, the highest hereditary official of the daimyō of the Numata, a small feudal domain in the Tokugawa period. He was also the ‘adopted son’ of a family distantly related to his mother and became the master of the famous Yamada classical tea ceremony school from which he received his surname. Like all the sons of the élite in nineteenth-century Japan, Yamada studied in the best schools of Tokyo and Yokohama, learning Classical Chinese, French, English and German. Moving in the international circles of the port city of Yokohama, Yamada developed his artistic and literary talents, partly following the cultural heritage of his family and partly his own romantic nature and taste. As a young man, Yamada became familiar with the prominent intellectual figures responsible for creating the Westernized Japanese culture of Meiji Japan.9 Yamada Torajirō’s Ottoman career was launched by the famous Ertuğrul naval disaster of 1890. Abdülhamid II had sent the imperial frigate Ertuğrul to Japan with a crew of 609 men under the command of Osman Pasha to initiate close relations with the ‘ rising star of the East’. Osman Pasha represented the Sultan as a delegate with extraordinary powers and the ship and her crew sailed in 1889. The mission was a goodwill visit to the emperor of Japan, returning the visit of the brother of the Meiji emperor, Prince Komatsu, to the Ottoman capital in 1887. On the home voyage, however, the frigate was hit by a typhoon and foundered on rocks off the coast of Wakayama in south west Japan. Except for a mere 69 survivors, the Pacific ocean claimed the Pasha and his men. Deeply affected by the disaster, the Japanese government sent the survivors back to Istanbul in Japanese frigates, the Hiei and the Kongo, bearing messages of condolence from the Meiji Emperor and government.10 The Ertuğrul mission had been controversial from the start. The seaworthiness of the old-fashioned wooden vessel in an age when iron gunboats were the norm had caused much debate both in Istanbul and in the international press. Indeed, the British chief engineer of the Ertuğrul, Colonel Harty, had advised against the voyage. Once on its way, the mission was beset by problems. After sailing from Istanbul, the ship lost a month in Egypt when it foundered on a sand bank in the Red Sea. She was also to lose her mast in the Indian Ocean, which put Osman Pasha and his crew in the embarrassing position of having to wait in Singapore for the meagre sum despatched from Istanbul for repairs. The money finally arrived, but the Porte, short of funds as always, ordered Osman Pasha to cover the final stretch to Japan under sail because the sum simply could not buy enough coal to take the vessel from Hong Kong to Yokohama.

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Plate 1. Fevziye hanim in kimono while visiting her father Ibrahim in Japan during the 1930s. Courtesy of Müge Isker Özbalkan collection.

Plate 2. Ibrahim and the “Muslim Oath” of 1909 of the occasion of the founding of Ajia Gikai. Signed by Ibrahim, Tōyama Mitsuru, Nakano Tsunetarō, Nakayama Yasuzō Tsuyoshi, Ohara Bukeji, Aoyanagi Katsutoshi, Yamada Kinosuke, Kōno Hironaka. Courtesy of Wkabayashi Nakaba, Kaikyō sekai to nihon (Tokyo, 1938), unpaginated. A similar photograph is also already printed in Ibrahim’s earlier memoir of his stay in Japan, Abdürreşid Ibrahim, Alem-I Islam ve Japonya’da Intisar I Islamiyet (The World of Islam and the Spreading of Islam in Japan) 2 vols (Istanbul: Ahmed Saki Bey Matbaasi, 1910-1911).

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Plate 3. Ibrahim and Kurban Ali with members of the Japanese Army, Foreign Ministry, Kokuryūkai in Tokyo, probably in 1933. Courtesy of Müge Isker Özbalkan collection.

Plate 4. The Opening of the Tokyo Mosque, May 12, 1938. Present are Abdürreşid Ibrahim, in the center seated next to him is Admiral Ogasaware Chōsei, a familiar figure in Japanese Islam and Asianist events. Courtesy of Müge Isker Özbalkan collection.

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Plate 5. Propaganda photograph of Abdürreşid Ibrahim in Prayer.

Plate 6. Propaganda publication on the visit of Husain the Crown Prince of Yemen for the Opening of the Tokyo Mosque in 1938. The children are émigré TurkoTatars.

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Plate 7. Ibrahim conducting prayers during the Islamic Funeral Service held for Hadji Nur Tanaka Ippei in 1936 in Tokyo that was attended by important members of the Japanese government and the military. Trained as an expert on Chinese Islam, Tanaka worked among Chinese Muslims and arranged numerous Japanese Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina during the 1930s as part of the pro-Islam policy in Japan.

Plate 8. Ibrahim, Kurban Ali, and Tōyama Mitsuru visiting the grave of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi in 1933. In the political upheaval of the 1930s, the prime minister had been assassinated May 15, 1932, by the radical nationalist group in the Imperial Japanese Navy and remnants of the League of Blood Ketsumeidan clique. Courtesy of Müge Isker Özbalkan collection.

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Plate 9. Tokyo Mekteb-I Islamiye, 1930s. Known as Tokyo Mohammedan School, or Tokyo Kaikyo Gakko, the school for émigré Tatar children was founded in 1927 and was recognized as an excellent school which taught a modern curriculum in Turkish in addition to Japanese, English, and Russian language instruction. Kurban Ali and Ibrahim who are seated in the center taught Islamic ethics and religion. During the post-war period, like many Tatar organizations, the school also changed its name to become the Tokyo Turkish School. Courtesy of Müge Isker Özbalkan collection. Plate 10. Kurban Ali. Printing at the Tokyo Matbaa-I Islamiye, known also as Tokyo kaikyō insatsusho, or Tokyo Mohammedan Press. Courtesy of Sakamoto Tsutomu.

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Plate 11. Map of World Muslims. Gaikōshiryōkan, Honpō, 1937.

Plate 12. Wounded in battle,Tevfik Pasha recuperating in East Turkestan, Xinjiang province of China. Next to him stands the Swiss doctor who saved his life. Behind in the shadows is an East Turkestani soldier in the typical uniform of Central Asian fighters of the 1922 Basmaci Rebellion led by Enver Pasha against the Bolsheviks. Tevfik Pasha was flown to Tokyo for further treatment and married a local Tatar-Turkish girl. The photo suggests connections between the 1922 Basmaci upheaval, East Turkestan rebellion of the 1930s, and Japan. Courtesy of late Adnan Serifoglu, the son of Tevfik Pasha, whose family lives in Istanbul.

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Plate 13. Hand Drawn Map of Muslim Rebellion in Xinjiang. Gaikōshiryōkan, Honpō, 1938.

Plate 14. Ibrahim in rickshaw visiting TurcoTatar family in Japan during the 1930s. Courtesy of Müge Isker Özbalkan collection.

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Plate 15. Japanese Muslim agents who joined the 1934 and 1936 pilgrimages. The figure on the upper left corner is Wakabayashi Kyūman, the brother of the author Wakabayashi Han (Nakaba), who died in Changsha in 1934 where he was operating as an undercover merchant. The figure on the upper right is Hadji Muhammad Saleh Suzuki Tsuyomi, who served in Indonesia and organized the Hezbollah. Lower left is Muhammad Abdul Munian Hosokawa Susumu. Lower right is Muhammad Abduralis Kōri Shōzo, Wakabayashi Nakaba, Kaikyō sekai to nihon, 1938, unpaginated.

Plate 16. Yamada Torajirō, Japanese merchant in Istanbul, partner of Nakamura Kenjirō. Courtesy of Edhem Eldem from the journal Sehbal.

Plate 17. Yamada Torajirō in Turkish costume on the occasion of receiving the imperial medal Mecidiye from Sultan Abdulhamid II in 1904. Courtesy of the Yamada Family Collection printed in the journal Shochu, 2003.

A FIN DE SIÈCLE JAPANESE ROMANTIC IN ISTANBUL

The Ertuğrul and her weary and weatherbeaten crew finally arrived in Japan eleven months after her departure from Istanbul. Even in Japan the problems continued. The mission was treated with great hospitality and honour, but 15 of the crew members died in an epidemic raging in Yokohama. Disturbed by the deaths and already anxious about the ordeal that lay ahead, Osman Pasha left in early September, determined to obey orders from the Sultan to return home without further delay, even though the Japanese had warned him of the coming typhoon season, and the mission ended in catastrophe.11 This ill-fated voyage had had serious political ambitions beneath the outward purpose of a goodwill visit. Abdülhamid II, as the Caliph of Sunni Muslims around the world, wished to advance a Pan-Islamic foreign policy of concern for the welfare of the Muslim subjects of the Asian empires of the Western powers. Pan-Islamism had taken on importance for the Ottoman Sultans, technically holders of the title of Caliph since the conquest of Egypt in the sixteenth century, as a counter to Russian, British and other Western claims to be the protectors of Christian subjects under Ottoman rule. Osman Pasha met Muslim notables in each of the British and French port colonies of Bombay, Singapore, Saigon and Hong Kong. Local Muslim papers gave major coverage to the arrival of the ‘ship of the Caliph’ and the crew attended prayers with the local Muslim communities. But while the Ottoman media reported news of ‘Muslim joy and celebration’ at each Asian port visited, the London papers, while providing regular reports on the voyage, limited themselves to the mission’s many technical and financial difficulties, a fact which the Porte occasionally found irritating.12 Yamada arrived in Istanbul in 1892, two years after the Ertuğrul disaster, bearing letters of introduction from the upper levels of Tokyo society and has been claimed to bring the considerable sum of 5,000 Yen (a hundred million Yen in today’s currency), collected for the families of the bereaved in a widely publicized campaign in the major cities of Japan. Young Yamada himself had used his many connections in Meiji Tokyo to organize a successful campaign among the aristocracy. Pleased with his energetic efforts, the Foreign Minister, Aoki Shūzō, requested that Yamada should take the sum to Istanbul personally and also help to establish formal relations with the Ottomans. Yamada left on a British ship chartered by the Japanese navy to carry 300 naval staff to Ceylon to take over the French-built Matsushima on her maiden voyage around the world. Three months later, the mission arrived in Port Said where Yamada and the Japanese crew parted company; Yamada stayed on in Egypt to await permission from the Porte to enter Istanbul.13 Yamada was not idle in Egypt. Through an introduction from a Mr Anton Sururu (Sururi?) of the Ottoman Bank in Egypt, Yamada attended a dinner on March 17 at the home of the Prime Minister, Abdul Kadir Pasha, with important figures of the British-ruled Egyptian administration such as Mahmut, Hasan, and Necim (Necip?) Pashas, and the Muslim notables Shaikhs Huseyin and Markanin. Pleasantries were exchanged over dinner, the Egyptians expressing their admiration for Japanese reforms, while Yamada explained Japan’s historical claims in Korea.14 Abdul Kadir Pasha, who knew of the Japanese partiality for seafood, impressed Yamada with his hospitality by procuring fresh fish from the bay of Alexandria, sent express to Cairo in Nile barges. Yamada finally arrived safely in Istanbul on April 4. He went immediately to the Ottoman Foreign Ministry and presented his papers to Şerif Pasha, the son

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of the Foreign Minister, Sait Pasha. That afternoon Yamada presented the gift of 5,000 Yen together with the letters of introduction from the commanders of the Kongo and Hiei. Yamada reports with enthusiasm the kind reception of the Pasha whom he describes as a vigorous man in his sixties. While Yamada exaggerated Ottoman hospitality, the Ottomans do seem to have accorded him special treatment. The same night he was immediately invited to the Foreign Minister’s home for a family dinner. Yamada later describes his formal audience with the Emperor, Sultan Abdülhamid II, at which he presented the armour and sword.15

LIFE IN ISTANBUL Yamada began at once to foster trade between Japan and Turkey, an endeavour he was to continue for the rest of his life as the founder of many associations aimed at enhancing Turkish-Japanese relations. Japan began exporting porcelain handicrafts, artefacts, lacquer ware, silk textiles and tea to the Ottoman Empire, and in turn imported tobacco, rock salt, wool and sheepskin. Yamada and Nakamura Eijirō also opened two stores in the commercial centre of Pera and near the main railway station in the old city. There they sold ‘bon pour Occident’ Japanese items of garishly decorated porcelain, usually designed especially for turn-of-the-century European taste: handcrafted artefacts such as lacquer boxes, screens, and silk goods, popular in the houses of the Ottoman élite and the palaces then being decorated in the European fashion.16 By all accounts, Yamada, 23 when he settled in Istanbul, was a charming person. His affable, romantic personality and noble bearing reflected his samurai origins, which seem to have worked in his favour among the Ottoman élite with whom he felt a bond. On occasion, Yamada is said to have even performed the classical tea ceremony in the style of his family for members of the Ottoman upper classes.17 Yamada also developed a rather romantic image of the Turks. A photograph taken in his early years in Istanbul shows him clad in exotic dress, a flowing robe and cap, based on an imaginary idea of Near Eastern ‘orientalia’ rather than the attire of the Europeanized Ottoman official, and recalling similar photographs of Pierre Loti and contemporary Westerners. Yamada also showed his empathy by adopting the pen name Shingetsu ‘crescent moon’.18 (plate 17) During his twenty years in Istanbul Yamada witnessed the momentous social and political changes that accompanied the Young Turk revolution of 1908. Together with Noda Shōtarō, a journalist from the Tokyo paper Jiji, Yamada was appointed to teach Japanese to a select group of military and naval cadets in the Ottoman military academy.19 Later, on the instructions of the Japanese ambassador in Vienna, Makino, he gathered information on the movements of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Yamada explains that he rented a house on the hilly side of the entrance to the Bosphorus from the Sea of Marmara and every day scanned the northern horizon through binoculars to see whether the Russian Black Sea Fleet would sail down towards the Mediterranean to join the Baltic Fleet on its way to do battle with the Japanese in Port Arthur. He also posted 20 men as lookouts on the old Genoese tower at Galata. Yamada’s report of the passage of the Russian Black Sea fleet was of some importance to Japanese military strategy during the conflict.20

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Yamada also provided information to the Yıldiz Saraı on the progress of the war at Port Arthur. Yamada mentions that he was ‘honoured’ with at least three audiences with the Sultan. While publicly Abdülhamid II observed a position of impartiality towards the warring powers so as not to alienate the Russians, Yamada reports outpourings of sympathy for Japan from the Istanbul public, confirmed by the enthusiastic support that the Ottoman press gave to Japanese successes. Turkish praise and admiration for the Japanese was no less fervent than that of the antiRussian ‘brigade’ in Finland, or the Russophobes in England, for whom this war was ‘Japan’s Fight for Freedom’.21 Ottoman enthusiasm for Japanese victory had another side. The peoples of the empire shared with the rest of Asia and Africa an ‘anti-colonialist’ stance vis-à-vis the imperialist aggression of the Western powers. Japan’s success symbolized to them the victory of Asian power against the West. Poets in Teheran even composed a eulogy entitled Mikadonāme in honour of the victory, an ode to the Japanese ruler in the Persian court tradition of the Shahnāme, and many Turkish intellectuals named their newborn sons Tōgō in honour of the hero of Port Arthur.22 Yamada became a sort of ‘honorary consul’ to Japanese visitors, helping them to arrange appointments with important figures, resolving the problems of international marriages, even aiding financially the few Japanese stranded in the country. Most visitors to the Ottoman realm were from the Japanese aristocracy, doing a ‘Grand Tour’ of Istanbul, the classical sites along the Aegean, and the Holy Lands. Yamada returned to Tokyo several times during his residency in Istanbul. On one occasion he brought back precious gifts from those members of the Meiji aristocracy and the Imperial family whom the Sultan had entertained on visits to Istanbul. Among gifts sent in ‘kind appreciation’ were a rare white pheasant reared personally by Prince Fushimi, a robin from the Marquis Tokugawa Yorimichi, a Japanese nightingale from the Marquis Hosokawa Morinari, a bird wood-carving from Baron Den Kenjirō, an ornamented sword from the Foreign Minister, Aoki Shūzō, the album of the Sino-Japanese War of 1898 from General Count Terauchi Masatake, and photographs of the commemorative gravestone constructed on the site of the Ertuğrul cemetery in Japan by the governor of Wakayama. Some of these gifts, especially selected to please Abdülhamid’s passionate interest in rare fauna and flora, were quite a challenge to bring from Tokyo alive. Yamada also appears to have presented rare plants and trees such as the Japanese persimmon to the palace arboretum.23 When World War I broke out, Yamada returned to Japan but although Japan was to support the Allies, he continued to be active, especially in trade between the two countries. He organized the Turkish-Japanese Friendship Association, the JapanTurkey Trade Association and other such bodies, especially in the business circles of Osaka. In 1931, after a 17-year absence, Yamada paid a final visit to Turkey with a Japanese mission and met President Atatürk as well as many of his old friends and acquaintances. During World War II Yamada contributed to cultural activities relating to Islam; for example, he gave more than a hundred Ottoman articles to the World of Islam Exhibition of 1939 in Tokyo.24 In the post-war period, Yamada’s principal activity was that of master of the family tea ceremony school. He died on 3 February 1957 at the age of 91 and is buried in the Yamada family cemetery in Tokyo.25

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THE ‘GREAT GAME’ Yamada’s story has another more shadowy side, connected with Turko-Japanese relations during the Ottoman era. He was the bearer of politically sensitive messages relating to attempts at establishing official relations between the Ottoman and Meiji empires. His clandestine career was a frustrating one, however, for the conflict of interest between the Japanese and Ottoman powers marred the negotiations, which continued sporadically, frequently via London or Berlin, during the Hamidian and Young Turk eras.26 Japan was still constrained by the unequal treaty system herself, but was seeking to expedite revision of the treaties by gaining the support of Great Britain through an Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Vis-à-vis the Ottomans, the Japanese side constantly insisted on advantageous ‘unequal treaty-capitulationist’ privileges in Ottoman lands such as were enjoyed by the Western Powers. Despite their official praise of the Ottomans as a ‘brave ally in the great Asian camaraderie’, by implication against the imperialist West, the Japanese already seemed to be replacing them as the eastern ally most favoured by Great Britain to protect India against the Russians. This shifting policy turned upon the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation in 1894 and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, by which the Japanese succeeded in revising their ‘unequal treaties’ and obtaining mutual reciprocity and tariff autonomy.27 The Ottomans were in no position to accept a new international capitulationist treaty even as they struggled to throw off the old. They had managed to persuade the Europeans to agree to a compromise, using their brief popularity in the struggle against Russia during the Crimean War. In 1856, with the Treaty of Paris, the European powers exempted the Ottomans from the Most Favoured Nation clause in future treaty agreements with new countries, though they insisted on the existing treaty terms with the major European powers. The Ottomans thus had the freedom to sign a mutual reciprocity treaty with a new country without providing for capitulationist privileges—an option they sought to use as a precedent for the total revision of the treaty system.28 At some point in this bargaining process in the 1890s, the Japanese at first accepted the Ottoman position, but then carried on proposing a ‘rechauffé’ version of their former demands. The Japanese foreign ministers of the time were pressing hard to revise the unequal treaties which bound them to the West. They were therefore wary of signing a treaty of mutual reciprocity with a power still subject to the capitulations. The Ottoman response was a considered but categorical rejection of the capitulationist terms. They reminded the Japanese more than once in friendly but firm terms, ‘that some years before they had accepted the Ottoman argument with “profuse enthusiasm” ’. Great Britain and Germany, both trying to manipulate the two oriental powers for their own purposes, meanwhile worked on the sidelines. At one point Yamada himself was embroiled in the conflict as the Japanese Foreign Ministry attempted to push through the capitulationist argument using him as an example. He was after all a Japanese national, a merchant resident in Istanbul, and should be accorded the privileges of his British and French counterparts.29 In the end, the Ottomans simply terminated the negotiations. There were to be no diplomatic relations between the two powers until after the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 which abrogated the unequal treaties with the Western powers some thirty years after Japan had done so.

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The irony for Yamada was that in the midst of this ‘Great Game’ he was sincerely enthusiastic about the Ottoman people and country which he considered almost a second homeland. If he was occasionally used by his government, there does not appear to have been any serious concern about his activities on the part of the Ottomans who were no doubt irritated but not particularly threatened by the impasse with Japan. In fact, the Sublime Porte probably found it convenient to have at hand someone who was willing to pass on information about the Far East. With no official rank, Yamada lived on in Istanbul merely as a resident merchant, ‘protected’ by the kind offices of the Porte. Despite the lack of diplomatic recognition between the two powers, Yamada was allowed to carry on business in Istanbul.

YAMADA’S IMAGE OF OTTOMAN ISTANBUL: TORUKO GAKAN, OR A PICTORIAL LOOK AT TURKEY Yamada developed an excellent understanding of Ottoman Turkish and became the first Japanese expert in Turkish culture. Because of his knowledge, he came to be well liked in Istanbul’s higher circles despite Turko-Japanese diplomatic difficulties. Yamada is thus particularly important as an observer of the Ottoman

FIG. 1 The star and crescent.

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FIG. 2 The Princess Islands and a European lady.

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fin de siècle milieu. Among his prolific publications on Turkey, the best known works are articles like those on ‘Toruko zūshin’ (‘News from Turkey’), and ‘Toruko no engeki (‘Turkish theatre’) published in Meiji 28 (1985) in the popular journal Taiyō. He also wrote many books on the Turks and on the Islamic world, including Kaikō gojūnen no toruko (A retrospective look at Turkey after fifty years) and Kaikyōen (The world of Islam), published in 1939 on the wave of growing Japanese interest in the Islamic world during the Second World War.30 Probably Yamada’s most interesting work is also his first, the beautifully illustrated Toruko gakan or A pictorial look at Turkey, published in Meiji 40 (1910). A narrative and pictorial introduction to the sites and people of Istanbul, its 179 pages are liberally sprinkled with Yamada’s own etchings and drawings of the people and sites of the city during the Hamidian era. The originality of the book lies in these sketches. They are scattered through the text in a charmingly idiosyncratic manner (Byzantine coins, for example, illustrate his discussions of Muslim wedding customs). Yamada says of this free approach in his introduction that he chose to illustrate according to personal taste rather than attempt to integrate the sketches into the text logically. His illustrations are usually based on photographs taken with his Kodak camera, although some are sketches of people and faces met in the streets of Istanbul.31 The narrative is also eclectic. The front and back covers are decorated by several pieces of calligraphy—sayings and poems composed by Japanese friends and acquaintances who visited him in Istanbul. The writings of these ‘most honourable aristocrats and gentlemen’ to quote Yamada, concern such ‘à la Turc’ themes as ‘the star and the moon’, ‘the rising crescent’, ‘the four seas are one garden’. They were written in praise of Yamada and the publication of the book, following the style of modish Chinese and Japanese publications of the period. The introductory and concluding chapters by contrast are more concerned with real politik, and discuss the strategic importance of Turkey, given Ottoman control of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. The author of the introduction, a Mr Sakatani, is astonished that the Turks still manage to guard their political independence (‘an extraordinary achievement’) despite Ottoman decline and the corruption of its administration. Both commentaries convey ‘the Rising East’ theme of Japan’s turn of the century nationalist generation, especially after the island kingdom’s victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War.32 Many of the poems that conclude the book have a distinct fin de siècle melancholy about them. One visitor writes in 1905, ‘Drawn by the fragrance of the Magnolia, I languish in the sadness of an old great power, wishing that its strength might awake. The Magnolia wilts under the shadow of the Crescent, oh how it awaits the morning dew!’ Another refers to Yamada in bold terms as the ‘light of the rising sun shining behind the Golden Horn’.33 In contrast to the ‘declining old power’ theme of the poems and much of the text, Yamada treats the 1908 Young Turk Revolution with great enthusiasm, perceiving it in terms of a Turkish national awakening comparable to the 1868 Meiji Restoration. He claims that the young Turks were inspired by the Japanese èlan vital. Sakatani concludes his introduction with a dramatic emotional appeal, reminding future Japanese visitors to the empire to etch into their minds that the awakening of the Japanese nation had contributed to the awakening of the Turks, and to behave accordingly.34

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The main text of the book is a light and entertaining introduction to Istanbul’s sites and life-style. After discussing such major historical and archaeological sites as St Sophia and Topkapi Saray, Yamada embellishes his description with stories of the Sultans in their splendour.35 For example, Abdülhamid II supposedly taught a lesson to the visiting Persian monarch who ‘sauntered about’ Yıldız Saray in his bejewelled regalia with pretensions to being the great ruler of the East. Hamid is said to have had a mound of the imperial jewels spread over the carpets where the two monarchs were taking their coffee. The story sounds a little too ostentatious for the austere Sultan of Yıldız, better known for his rather modest behaviour, but it accords well with the tales of the East that Western orientalists of the time were so enamoured with.36 Yamada was particularly impressed with the newly established Imperial Archaeology Museum founded by Osman Hamdi Bey, the pioneer archaeologist, Western-style painter, and founder of the Imperial Academy of the Arts. He presents a careful drawing of the recently installed sarcophagus of Alexander as an example of the museum’s impressive collection.37 The book’s profuse illustrations reflect Yamada’s cosmopolitan approach to Ottoman culture. He makes no distinction between the ancient Egyptian, classical Arab, Roman, Greek, and Byzantine or Hittite worlds. Yamada saw much in common between Turkish weddings and the pictorial illustrations of weddings on ancient Greek vases.38 From the perspective of classical Chinese civilization he perhaps saw Ottoman culture as constituting a harmonious whole, with the Eurasian Steppes, Persia and Europe all forming part of the ‘West’. That he does not introduce a conflict between Islam and Christianity into his concept of Ottoman culture may also be a reflection of his Japanese ‘impartiality’. At other times, however, Yamada comes closer to a European sense of the Ottoman world. Thus, he usually refers to Istanbul as Constantinople and he calls the Ottoman empire Turkey, a term which the Ottomans themselves were not to use officially until the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Yamada tries to make Ottoman life accessible to the Japanese reader by comparing the two societies, and draws many references from the culture of the Far East. He explains that Turkish lokum (Turkish delight) is just like ‘Korean jelly’ and that the Bayram (religious holiday) custom of visiting friends and relatives is similar to the Japanese tradition of New Year visits. He even sees parallels in court customs and titles of the Ottoman palace, translating Ottoman terms by Meiji Japanese or sometimes Chinese court terminology.39 Despite the book’s strongly romantic tone, many of Yamada’s observations are perceptive, particularly those owed to his privileged relations with members of the Istanbul Ottoman élite and occasional audiences with Abdülhamid. Yamada notes that while polygamy was permitted, it had declined in incidence and was widely criticized in élite circles,40 an observation which accords with the scholarly conclusions of the recent study by Duben and Behar. Yamada’s lively depictions of street life in the city are evocative and his phonetic transcriptions provide interesting information on the contemporary Turkish language. For instance, he names various types of street vendor; yazıcı (letter writer), boyacı (shoe shine) and trascı (barber), gezdirici (ısportacı in today’s Turkish for street vendor), yangıncı (itfaiye or tulumbacı) for fireman, and so informs us of such perfectly good Turkish words as gezdirici and yangıncı which have fallen into disuse.41

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Yamada found particularly stimulating the international atmosphere of the Galata Bridge, that great link between two continents where the peoples and costumes of Asia, Europe and Africa mingled in all their variety. He describes it as the bridge of ‘ten thousand nations’, and states that the average daily toll collected was 150 lira (1,300–1,400 Yen of the time), which was given to the Navy.42

CEREMONIES Yamada excels above all in his descriptions of the state ceremonies which took place on religious occasions, such as the Friday Prayer visit of the Sultan and his visit to the old palace of Topkapi on 15 Ramadan.43 Yamada dwells on the ceremonies in great detail, reflecting perhaps his Confucian sensibilities for which ritual was not merely pomp and show but the expression of a political and moral order. Some of his descriptions reveal the strikingly eclectic nature of some state ceremonies, whose combinations of Western and Ottoman Islamic elements were symbolic of the nineteenth-century Ottoman reformist psychology. Many of the ceremonies described exemplify Hobsbawm’s and Ranger’s concept of the ‘invention of tradition’ that was part of the attempt to remould the empire in accordance with European monarchic practice.44 Yamada’s text hints at such an understanding in statements like ‘the old and the new marched together’, or when he says that the elegant and stately Friday Prayer procession offered for a moment a symbolic ‘glimpse’ into the past grandeur of the Ottoman Empire in all its glory, though at present it had ‘stumbled’.45 Yamada’s first account of such ceremonial occasions is of the Friday Prayer of the Sultan, a major weekly public appearance for Ottoman rulers. Abdülhamid II attended the mosque near the palace of Yıldız, one of the many newly-constructed Western-style palaces overlooking the Bosphorus. Built especially for Hamid, Yıldız was located on a secluded forested hill near the shore, possibly because of the Sultan’s well-known fear of assassination. The Friday ceremony started at 11.30 a.m. when infantry and naval detachments, cavalry mounted on white horses, and artillerymen marched towards the Palace, bearing flags and banners, and formed up in the palatial grounds immediately outside the main gates. Then ten cartloads of clean white sea sand were sprinkled over the route the Sultan was to take to the mosque— a custom which appears to have been a feature of Ottoman ceremonies for some time. Next the officers of the Imperial Army and Navy fell into line on both sides of the route, turned, and marched into the courtyard of the mosque where they reformed. Meanwhile the carriages bringing the wives of the Sultan and members of his family entered the courtyard. Yamada, who was familiar with the tradition of an imperial harem from the Chinese and classical Japanese tradition, carefully refers to the first wife of the Sultan as the ‘Empress’, distinguishing her from his other wives and concubines whom he refers to as various imperial consorts and concubines, using suitable Chinese terms for their status. Well aware of the high rank of the Mother of the Sultan, the Valide Sultan, in the Ottoman harem, Yamada translates the term as the ‘Dowager Empress’, again in Chinese fashion.46 Yamada’s account of the participation of royal women in the Friday ceremony is significant because it reflects Ottoman modification of Islamic practice in the context of contemporary reforms. Traditionally, Islam dictated the strict segregation of men and women at prayer. Furthermore, women were not supposed to

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attend the Friday Prayer at all. Yamada, however, noted that while they remained in their carriages in the courtyard, the royal women greeted the Sultan as he arrived. His description thus reveals that the women of the imperial dynasty played a visible public role in the ceremonies, an interesting fact given the general dearth of the role of women in Ottoman Court ceremonies. When all had assembled the muezzin chanted the prayer for the occasion from the minaret in a ‘clear voice facing the sky’. On the third call to prayer, the Sultan, accompanied by the imperial chamberlain, proceeded slowly out of the main palace gates in the imperial carriage. At the same time the soldiers raised the shout ‘Long live the Sultan!’ (‘Padişahım çok yaşa!’), the standard greeting for Ottoman sultans in the nineteenth century. Yamada translates this cry as ‘kōtei heika banzai!’ which is very close to ‘tenno heika banzai!’, the greeting for the Meiji emperor which, as Carol Gluck notes, Japan took over from the practice of European monarchies (‘Long live the King!’). Both greetings thus reflect the currents of Europeanization that flowed through the reform movements of nineteenth-century Istanbul and Tokyo. This incorporation of the European form of salutation of the monarch with its political symbolism into the ritual of the Friday Prayer is, Deringil says, a clear example of nineteenth-century Ottoman style ‘invention of tradition’ with its combination of old and new.47 To the cries of ‘Padişahım çok yaşa!’, the carriage progressed as far as the steps leading up to the mosque where the Sultan alighted. Here, he was greeted by the imam who led the Sultan into the mosque where he joined the male members of the procession in prayers which lasted for half an hour. Meanwhile the troops outside made preparations for the return and coffee and tea were served to the foreign dignitaries who attended the ceremony, standing outside the mosque. On emerging from the mosque the Sultan stepped into an ordinary carriage and took the reins himself. The return procession was thus in sharp contrast to the arrival. The Sultan, driving his own carriage, led the male members of the dynasty and the cabinet and officers of the army and navy who fell into line behind him as the procession moved up the hill and into the palace. Yamada was deeply impressed by the somber majesty of the occasion, Ottoman officialdom in their gold-embroidered uniforms ‘shining brightly in the sun’ were indeed an impressive sight.48 The change of carriages symbolized the dual role of the Sultan in nineteenthcentury tradition. His arrival in the imperial carriage driven by royal attendants would appear to follow European ceremonial practice of the time. His taking the reins of an ordinary carriage on the return to the palace referred back to the Ottoman Sultans of old who led their men into battle in holy wars. The second ceremony reported by Yamada was the traditional visit to the old palace, the Topkapı Sarayı. Yamada loved this palatial compound with its Eastern aura that must ‘suit the particular taste of every Far Easterner’, whose mouth, in Yamada’s words, will ‘water’ at the prospect it presents.49 Situated in the old quarter of the city, the Topkapı Sarayı had been built on the site of a former Byzantine palace after the conquest of the city in 1453. The official visit always took place in the middle of the period of fasting during the month of Ramadan. On the 15th day all the city houses and buildings were decorated with the crimson star-and-crescent flag of Turkey (as distinct from the green banner of Islam). Again, clean sea sand was liberally sprinkled along the length of the route from Yıldız down the hill and across the town from the Golden Horn and finally up

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to the gates of Topkapı. And again, cavalry lined both sides of the roads. Sometime before 10 a.m., announced by a military trumpet call, the ‘Dowager Empress’ (Valide Sultan) left the main palace gate in her carriage, to be followed by the 300 or so carriages of all of the palace women who, though barely visible, were dressed in their best finery for the occasion.50 Shortly after their departure, another trumpet call heralded a throng of state officials, both civilian and military, leaving the palace gate in their carriages. Some of the cavalry accompanying this entourage had ‘old-fashioned’ or Ottoman-style harnesses, dating from before the reforms, while others had European-style ‘new fashioned trimmings’ for their horses. At ten o’clock the imperial carriage left the palace gate behind the cavalry. The procession moved at a slow pace, crossing the Golden Horn in about an hour, and finally arriving at the gates of Topkapı. The Şeyhülislam (head of the empire’s religious hierarchy), greeted the Sultan at the gates and escorted him inside. The Sultan and his retinue first rested, then the men prayed together for about an hour and a half.51 The high point of the ritual was the Sultan’s visit to the Chamber of Holy Relics to pay homage to Muhammad and Islam. Here were, and are still, housed the clothing, sword, and religious manuscripts of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions, which serve as the religious symbols of the transfer of the title and prerogatives of Caliph and have been in Ottoman possession since the conquest of Egypt in the sixteenth century.52 The women of the palace meanwhile held their own prayers elsewhere. After the men left the Chamber, they, too, paid homage before returning to Yıldız. The Sultan then made a final visit to the Chamber alone, after which all the men remaining in the palace waited for sundown to break their fast. On hearing the gunshot that daily informed the city of sunset during the month of Ramadan, the Sultan offered a feast (iftar) to the male guests, an occasion which brought together all the high officials of the civilian and military establishment of the empire. The Sultan and his attendants then returned to Yıldız where he and the Şeyhülislam prayed for a last time in the palace mosque. Yamada concludes his description with the observation that it was customary to have a young woman enter the imperial harem on the night of the 15th as it was thought to bring prosperity and luck to the reign.53 Yamada’s accounts provide details of these imperial ceremonies not often found in other sources. It is surprising, for instance, that the palace women participated in both ceremonies, despite Islamic injunctions against mixed company. Yamada’s description brings imperial women into the political imagery of the late Ottoman era. Yamada writes in the style of such late nineteenth-century romantic authors on ‘Istanbul and the Turks’ as Pierre Loti. He describes the Ottoman world of Istanbul in which Byzantine and Ottoman imperial majesty was the background to his fascination with the street-life of a diverse and bustling city peopled by many different cultures. Yet as a Japanese observer of the city, his impressions differ in some respects from familiar European accounts. Yamada persistently tries to define and describe the similarities between traditional Japanese and Ottoman culture, in order to make the latter ‘accessible’ to the Japanese reader. Although Yamada describes the customs and ceremonies of the Ottomans in great detail, his basic theme is that the Turks are not really ‘different’ from the Japanese. What impresses him most about this ancient capital of an old world is Ottoman imperial pomp, the natural

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beauty of the Bosphorus, and the international character of the inhabitants of the city. His description of the Bosphorus on a clear summer day is memorable: as streaks of sunlight shimmer along the water and reflect from the clear glass windows of the palaces and villas adorning the coastline, the Bosphorus seems to him to be spangled with the ‘crystal palaces’ of ancient times.54 Yamada’s political role as an intermediary between Japan and Turkey was neither distinguished nor crowned by diplomatic success. The failure of Ottoman-Japanese negotiations towards a diplomatic and commercial treaty is a fascinating story; as an aspect of the unsavoury politics of nineteenth-century ‘unequal treaties’, it remains unstudied. With great-power aspirations of her own, Japan tried to obtain capitulationist privileges in the Ottoman Empire just as the European powers had done. This was an objective which she was to realize in China and Korea through cruder methods. But there was diplomatic resistance from the Ottomans, who, though a weakened power, were signatories to the Treaty of Paris, and astute enough to dismiss Japanese ambitions and scupper the negotiations. With hindsight, Yamada was another example of the many foreign, for the most part Western, lovers of the peoples and cultures of the Balkans and the Near East of the nineteenth century, among them Byron, Lawrence and Loti. Yamada was not as politically engaged as Byron or Lawrence, nor was he as politically influential as Loti. Nevertheless, he did contribute to the development of a feeling of empathy between some members of the fin-de-siècle Japanese and the Ottoman élites. Yamada’s story shows that the so-called division between East and West in the nineteenth century was not so simple. Though he came from the ‘East’, the Ottoman world still was the ‘Orient’ for Yamada. One might even argue that his approach to the Turks and Istanbul was only possible because the process of Westernization at work then in both Japanese and Ottoman society brought them closer together. Japanese culture did, however, influence his interpretation on occasion; such influence can be seen in the Confucian sensitivity he brought to his descriptions of ceremonies, or in the empathy he felt towards festive customs. Yamada’s Japanese background may also account for his reformist but accepting attitude to such customs as polygamy. The Ottoman appetite for Japan which Yamada fed so enthusiastically also derived from Westernization and was very European. They may have been garish ‘bon pour Occident’ paraphernalia, culturally irrelevant to the living Japanese culture, but most of the decorative artefacts that Yamada helped to import into Istanbul and that became an essential part of the decor of the European-style mansions and public buildings of the Ottoman élite were what the European market demanded. Even the shared heritage of ‘military valour’, the essence of Yamada’s public approach to the Ottomans, had its problems as a purely romantic notion. The manner in which the Ottomans and the Japanese conceived their respective martial heritages differed sharply. For the Ottomans, it meant the defensive politics of Great Power rivalry; for the Japanese it meant the offensive politics of empirebuilding along an Asianist road. The role of individuals like Yamada in this complex mixture of Great Power politics and nineteenth-century romantic idealism was ambivalent. But he was part of a generation that restlessly wandered the world in search of adventure, romance, profit and politics, for many of whom, for better or worse, as friend or foe, the Ottoman world was the focus of their romanticism and their actions.

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NOTES 1 I am grateful to Selim Deringil, Daniel Goffman, Caroline Finkel, and Edhem Eldem for their contributions during the preparation of this article. As a historian of modern Japanese history, I found their comments as Ottoman historians invaluable. Sources drawn on for the section on Japanese-Turkish relations in this paper include: Komura Fujiō, Nihon isuramu shi (Tokyo: Nihon isuramu yūkō renmei, 1988) 138, 150 on gifts; Matsutani Hironao, Nihon to toruko: nihon toruko kankei shi (Tokyo: Chūō chōsakai, 1986) for the Yamada biography, 43–6; Hironao Matsutani, Japonya’nin Dış Politikası ve Türkiye (Istanbul: Bağlam, 1995) for a recent Turkish version by the same author. The work has a convenient summary of Turkish-Japanese relations from the Meiji period to the present from a Japanese diplomat’s perspective; Ümit Arık, A century of Turkish-Japanese relations: towards a special partnership (Istanbul: Turkish-Japanese Business Council, 1989) 28–9 (to be used with caution); see the Japanese translation of Arık’s work which has correct citations of Japanese sources, transl. by Muramatsu Masumi and Matsutani Hironao, Toruko to nihon (Tokyo: Simul Press, Inc. [Seimuru shuppankai], 1989) 14–25; Takahashi Tadahisa, ‘Türk Japon münasebetlerine kısa bir bakiş’, Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Vakfı Dergisi, 18 Cilt (June) 1982; The most valuable source on Turko-Japanese relations is the prewar study of Naitō Chishū, Nitto kōshō shi (Tokyo: Izumi shōin ban, 1931). The author who was an important Japanese diplomat in Turkey during the early Republican years during the 1920s, was a pioneer of Turkish studies in Japan. See also his article, ‘Toruko shisetsu Osman pashya raichō no shimei’, Shigaku, 9/4, 1930, 575–86; Yamada Torajirō, Toruko gakan: suioku roku (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1911). The latter is the main work by Yamada discussed in this paper. The title Toruko gakan means a pictorial look at Turkey. The book has an appendix entitled ‘suioku roku’ (‘record of thoughts’) which includes an account of the beginnings of TurkoJapanese relations. The main text and the appendix will be cited separately as the pages are also numbered independently. 2 Komura. Nihon isuramu shi, 138, 150; Matsutani, Nihon to toruko, 45–6. 3 Orhan Saik Gökyay, Katip Celebi, Hayatı, Kişıliği ve Eserlerinden Seçmeler (Ankara: Türkiye Iş Bankasi Kültür Yayınları, n.d., 182–3: Morishima Chūryō. ‘Bankoku shinwa’, in Ono Tadashige, Komozatsuwa (Tokyo: Sōrinsha, 1943) 205–208. 4 The present paper’s main concern is not an analysis of the Westernization experiences of Japan and Turkey. However, it should be noted that Westernization policies were a continuous influence on the cultural outlook of both societies during the nineteenth century. There were, of course, similarities and differences in their assimilation of the Western cultural forms, but the overall process of incorporating Western cultural perspectives seems also to have contributed to their perception of each other during the modern era. The role of Western culture as a conduit in the formation of mutual impressions or images within the non-Western world is not usually stressed in multicultural studies. For more detail on Westernization in Japan and Turkey see, Robert E. Ward, and Dankwart A. Rustow, Political modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1964), 461; Erik Zürcher, Turkey: a modern history (London: I. B. Tauris and Co. Ltd., 1993); 58–69; Carol Gluck, Japan’s modern myths: ideology in the late Meiji period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 20–1, 42–4, 70, 113, 119; Donald H. Shively (cd). Tradition and modernization in Japanese culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). 5 Naitō Chishū, Nitto kōshō shi, 15–16. The first Japanese visitor to the Ottoman empire was Fukuchi Genichirō who was instructed by the mission of Prince Iwakura Tomomi to the West to study the Ottoman conditions of the capitulationist treaties with the Great Powers. The Iwakura mission hoped to achieve revision of the ‘unequal treaties’ signed between the Western powers and the last Tokugawa Shoguns in 1858. 6 Kenneth B. Pyle, The new generation in Meiji Japan: problems of cultural identity, 1885–1895 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969); see pp. 6–23 for the new generation. 7 For the Asianist mood of Japanism see Gluck, Japan’s modern myths, 20–1, 38–9, 114; Pyle, The new generation, 163–87, 198.

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8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

Naito, Nitto kōshō shi, 15 on British encouragement of Turko-Japanese relations; Zürcher, Turkey, 78–80 for the Ottoman defeat in the war with Russian in 1878; 85–8 for the international problems due to nationalism and ethnic conflict in the empire. Komura, Nihon isuramu shi, 131–4 for Yamada. For early contacts and the Ertuğrul disaster see, Kaori Komatsu, Ertuğrul faciası: bir dostluğun doğuşu (Ankara: Turhan Kitabevi Yaımları, 1992): Erol Mütercimler, Ertuğrul faciası ve 21 yüzyıla Doğru Türk-Japon ilişkisi (Istanbul: Anahtar Kitaplar, 1993); Türk-Nippon dostluğunun sonrasız[sic] hatırası Ertuğrul/Nitto shinkō eikyū no kinen: toruko koku gunkan erutogururu go (Tokyo: Tokyo Büyük Elçiliği, 1937). A very detailed official account is given in the special 1937 volume published in commemoration of the ceremonies which were held on the site of the newly-constructed memorial. It includes Türkish and Japanese accounts of the event and a great number of photographs. Komatsu, Ertuğrul faciası, 1–16 for a summary of the event. Selim Deringil, ‘Osmanli Imparatorgulu’nda Gelenegin Icadi, “Muhayyel Cemaat”, ve Panislamizm’, Toplum ve Bilim, 54 Yaz-Güz, 1991, 47–65 for Panislamism; Mütercimler, Ertuğrul faciası, 151–2. Matsutani, Nihon to toruko, 44; Yamada, Suioku roku, 1–5 for the account of the disaster. Yamada, Suioku roku, 6–7. Yamada, Suioku roku, 4–5, 7. Recent research of Misawa Nobuo has revealed that Noda Shōtarō, the journalist of the Tokyo Jiji Shinpō paper who stayed in Istanbul for two years after arriving with the Ertuğrul survivors on the Hiei and Kongō in 1891 brought a major portion of the donation. However, Noda’s role was forgotten or ignored partly because he died young and most likely because the fame he enjoyed vanished when he was convicted twice for criminal offences. For details see, Nobuo Misawa, “The origin of the commercial relationship between Japan and the Ottoman Empire: The tactics of young Torajirō Yamada as a student merchant”, The Bulletin of Faculty of Sociology, Toyo University Vol. 45, No.1 (2007/12): 51–88. Komura, Nihon isuramu shi, 143; Annuaire Oriental, Commerce, Industrie, administration, magistrature de l’Orient (Istanbul: Annuaire Oriental Ltd., 1914) 606 (my thanks to Edhem Eldem for this source). Matsutani, Nihon to toruko, 46–7; Yamada, Suioku roku, 7. Komura, Nihon isuramu shi, 131; Lesley Blanche, Pierre Loti: the legendary romantic (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) for the romantic career of Loti and his photographs in oriental garb. Komura, Nihon isuramu shi, 131–4; Yamada, Suioku roku, 12; Matsutani, Nihon to toruko, 48. Yamada, Suioku roku, 16; Komura, Nihon isuramu shi, 146. Yamada, Suioku roku, 12; Komura, Nihon isuramu shi, 146; H. W. Wilson, Japan’s fight for freedom (London: Amalgamated Press, Ltd., 1905) 3 vols. Ank, A century of Turkish-Japanese relations, 46–55. Yamada, Suioku roku, 11. Komura, Nihon isuramu shi, 146–7, 152; Arik, A century, 80; Matsutani, Nihon to toruko, 49–50 for Yamada’s later years. Komura, Nihon isuramu shi, 152. I am grateful to Selim Deringil for documentary information on the negotiations concerning the diplomatic and trade treaty between Japan and the Ottoman Porte, See, Başbakanlık Arşivi, Yıldız Mütenevvi Maruzat, 198/122, Daire-i Hariciye no. 436, On the protection of Yamada. For a general treatment of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, see, Marius B. Jansen, Japan and China: from war to peace, 1894–1972 (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing Company, 1975) 84, 197, 206, 214. BBA, Yildiz. Mtv, 198/122. ibid. Komura, Nihon isuramu shi, 138, 150. Yamada, Toruko gakan, 1; the author’s explanation of the text of the book. Yamada, Toruko gakan; Sakatani’s unpaginated introduction at the front.

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33 Yamada, Toruko gakan; poems at the end of the book, unpaginated. 34 Yamada, Toruko gakan; Sakatani introduction. 35 Philip Mansel, Sultans in splendor: the last years of the Ottoman world (London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., 1988). 36 Yamada, Toruko gakan, 16. 37 ibid., 32–7. 38 ibid., 60. 39 ibid., 22. 40 ibid., 59. 41 ibid., 9–10. 42 ibid. 43 Yamada, Toruko gakan, 14–15, 21 for both ceremonies. 44 Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger (ed.), The invention of tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 1–14, 102–62, 253–307 for state ceremonies as the invention of neotraditions by the great powers in the nineteenth century to foster a loyal citizenry; see also, Selim Deringil, ‘The invention of tradition as public image in the late Ottoman empire, 1808– 1908’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35/1, 1993, 3–29 for a case study of the Ottoman experience. 45 Yamada, Toruko gakan, 15. 46 ibid., 14–15. 47 Gluck, Japan’s modern myths, 45, 326 for tennō heika banzai (‘Long live the Emperor!’); Deringil,’ Invention of tradition’, 9–10, 18, 28 for European style ceremonies and Padişahım çok yaşa (‘Long live the Sultan!’). 48 Yamada, Toruko gakan, 15. 49 ibid., 21. 50 ibid. 51 ibid. 52 ibid. 53 ibid. 54 ibid., 19.

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❚ First published in Shingetsu Electronic Journal of Japanese-Islamic Relations, Vol. 4, September 2008, 16–24.

8

The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War on Ottoman Turkey a

INTRODUCTION

T

he declaration of war between Japan and Russia on February 10, 1904, generated waves of enthusiasm in Turkey as a traditional archrival of Russia, but the eventual impact of the war on the empire proved disastrous. Naturally, news about Russian defeats in Manchuria were a cause for celebration, but the Ottoman government followed a carefully gauged policy of neutrality in this conflagration in order not to antagonize the Tsarist government of the Romanov Empire, a contemporary autocratic regime like that of Abdulhamid II, the Turkish Sultan. An old world empire which had once been the hegemonic power across the Balkans and extending to the Arabian Peninsula, the Ottomans had lost control of the Black Sea region to the Russians in the eighteenth century. In previous decades the Ottoman government had succumbed to disastrous defeat in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878 that had ended Ottoman rule in the Caucasus and furthered the erosion of Ottoman power in the Balkans. In the following years the empire continued to disintegrate. In 1881 the British occupied Egypt, in 1885 Eastern Rumelia was united with Bulgaria, and in 1898 Crete was placed under international control after fighting arose between the Ottoman authorities and Greek rebels.

POPULAR ENTHUSIASM, OFFICIAL NEUTRALITY During the Russo-Japanese War, to be sure, Turkish enthusiasm for Japan was genuine. A contemporary journalist, Ibrahim Halil, wrote in his memoirs, “We started to buy the Daily Asir, published in Selanik (Salonica), which was backing the Japanese as I did. They had asked the Japanese why there were no prayers in their temples for victory in the war; it was reported that they answered that the prayers of the Turks would be enough for them.”1 When Muslim newspapers celebrated Japan’s defeat of Russia as the victory of the downtrodden Eastern peoples over the invincible West, a Turkish nationalist feminist, Halide Edip, like many other women, named her son Togo after the commander of the

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Japanese fleet, Admiral Heihachirō Togo. The Ottoman embassies followed news on the war in great detail. As a neutral power, the Istanbul government dispatched Colonel Pertev Bey as an Ottoman military observer to join the international military observers’ group upon the recommendation of General Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, who spent twelve years assisting in reorganizing the Ottoman army in the late nineteenth century. Pertev Bey accompanied General Maresuke Nogi’s Third Army in Manchuria, witnessing the capture of Port Arthur. After the war, he wrote memoirs and books briefly introducing Japanese history with an analysis of the war that aimed to serve as a guide for Turkish youth, emphasizing the strong role of spiritual preparation in addition to material preparedness that lay behind the Japanese victory.2 In view of the existing public sympathy for the Japanese, the Ottoman government of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1842–1918) followed a studied neutral policy toward Japan and Russia in order to avoid any act that might be interpreted as hostile to the Russians. After the defeat by Russia in 1878, the Sultan chose to practice a cooperative policy despite initial efforts in 1890 to enter direct relations with Meiji Japan as a potential partner against the traditional enemy to the north. Earlier the Sultan had been intent on forming close relations with the rising star of the East. He had sent the imperial frigate Ertuğrul on a goodwill mission to the Meiji Emperor in 1890 to publicize the pan-Islamist message of the Sultan in the Asian colonies of the Western empires. The ill-fated mission had ended in tragedy when the Ertuğrul sank off the coast of Wakayama Prefecture. Most of its officers and crew drowned.3 Nonetheless, dogged Japanese insistence on obtaining privileges on a par with those demanded in the treaties of the Great Powers had soured the enthusiasm of Ottoman bureaucrats for the signing of a diplomatic and commercial treaty with Japan. The Turkish press was controlled by the Sultan’s censorship, which banned publication of overtly pro-Japanese editorials and obliged the press to report only on what was taking place on the battlefields.4 Torajirō Yamada, who conducted business in Istanbul with his partner Kenjirō Nakamura after the 1890 Ertuğrul tragedy, wrote in a well-known account of his impressions of the Turkish world, especially life in Istanbul, that he was told the founders of the Ottoman Empire were also from an Asiatic race, and the Turks were proud of the Japanese victory.5 However, the Ottoman archives inform us that the Ottoman government prevented Yamada and Nakamura from collecting the considerable amount of donations given by sympathetic Muslims to aid “victims of natural disasters in Japan.”6

THE STRATEGIC CONTEXT During the war the Ottoman government was caught between the Russians and the British, the latter supporting Japan in line with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902. Turkey faced strong Russian pressure to allow free movement to the Black Sea Fleet on the one hand, and British pressure to ensure that Russian ships stayed north of the Dardanelles on the other. Since the Treaty of Paris of 1856, after the Crimean War, the Black Sea Fleet had been denied exit to the Mediterranean. Although Russia recommenced the fleet in 1870, it was denied passage through the Bosporus by an agreement between Turkey and Russia signed in 1891 which prohibited the passage of warships carrying armaments or munitions. During the war, Japanese

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representatives in Istanbul kept close watch over Russian naval movements near the Bosporus, particularly movements on the Black Sea. In the capacity of honorary consuls and intermediaries, Yamada and Nakamura kept twenty men stationed on the medieval Genovese Tower in Galata closely observing the Bosporus straits. Yamada’s memoirs reveal that he and Nakamura reported to Japanese Ambassador Nobuaki Makino in Vienna the passage of Russian ships. As early as July 4, 1904, the Russian merchant ships Petersburg and Smolensk, belonging to the Volunteer Fleet, passed the Bosporus bearing guns and ammunition and headed for the Suez Canal. The Japanese authorities were on constant lookout for news of whether the Russian forces in the Black Sea would join the main Baltic fleet off the East African coast near Madagascar that would ultimately sail to the site of battle in the Far East. Hironao Matsutani notes that the Japanese Imperial Navy was said to have highly valued Yamada’s reports on the Volunteer Fleet’s passage from Istanbul.7 In the end, the Ottomans allowed several other ships of the Volunteer Fleet, seven vessels in all, which had left Odessa, to pass through the Bosporus in November 1904, one each day for seven days, starting with the Laroslavl and finishing with the Merkurii. The Volunteer Fleet passed the straits unarmed. They joined the Ferikerzam Division of the Baltic Fleet in Suda Bay, Crete, where they were armed with the help of Greece.8

IMPACT OF THE RUSSIAN DEFEAT The defeat of Russia in the battlefields of Manchuria had far-reaching impact on the Ottoman world, both immediate and long term. Ruling since 1876, Sultan Abdulhamid II was astutely wary of the immediate consequences of a Romanov imperial power radically weakened by military defeat and the nearly-successful 1905 Revolution. Like Nicholas II, he saw himself as an autocrat. Abdulhamid had suspended the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 and ever since had ruled autocratically, forcing the Ottoman opposition into exile in Europe where they formed the clandestine Young Turk opposition movement. When the Sultan’s officers congratulated him on the defeat of his old enemy Russia in the war, he replied that he did not by any means consider the outcome of the war a matter for congratulation, because he and the Tsar were the only autocratic monarchs left in Europe; the defeat of the Tsar was a blow to the principle of autocracy. Selim Deringil notes that the Sultan was proven right as the December revolutions in Russia and the convocation of the Duma soon followed.9 When Nicholas II granted a constitution, Abdulhamid feared that it would inevitably accelerate demands to re-activate the Ottoman Constitution.10 Viewed by many in Europe and Asia as a victory of the downtrodden, the deep influence of the Japanese triumph upon nationalist and anti-imperialist currents has been widely noted.11 However, the impact of the Japanese victory over Russia on the acceleration of demands for constitutionalism in Muslim and Asian opposition circles may have been more significant in immediate political terms. The ardent Egyptian nationalist pan-Islamist and admirer of the Meiji Constitution, Mustafa Kamil, proclaimed, “We are amazed by Japan because it is the first Eastern government to utilize Western civilization to resist the shield of European imperialism in Asia.” Muslim writers praised Japan’s victory over Russia as “the triumph of constitutionalism over Tsarist despotism.”12

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The Young Turks styled themselves as the “Japan of the Near East” in their push to modernize the declining empire and even contemplated inviting Japanese experts. They were also encouraged by Russia’s defeat and the opening of the Russian Duma to step up their demands for the Constitution.13 In 1908 the Young Turks sparked an armed rising forcing the Sultan to restore the Constitution. While ideas of the French Revolution had given birth to the emergence of the Young Ottomans and Young Turks, the Meiji Restoration and the Japanese victory in 1905 gave them another jolt that radicalized the opposition movement. This has been noted by Japanese historians as well.14 In terms of international politics, the long-term impact of the Japanese military victory and its aftermath was the destruction of the Ottoman Empire. The defeat of the Russian Navy in 1905 did not have immediate relevance to Ottoman Turkey since the Russian Black Sea Fleet remained intact. But the subsequent collaboration of Russia and Britain after the conclusion of the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907 proved in the long run lethal to the Ottoman Empire. One may elaborate that Russia’s meddling in the Balkans, the Italian invasion of the Dodecanese in 1912, and the two Balkan Wars, were all indirect consequences of the Russian defeat in the RussoJapanese War, which turned Romanov attention back to the Western front. In turn, Russo-British collaboration over the Balkans convinced the Young Turks that there was a new plan for the partition of Turkey.15 Ultimately, the shift in power politics encouraged, or forced, the Young Turk leaders to move into the German camp, which led ultimately to war pitting the Ottoman-German alliance against that of Britain, France, and Russia. The result was the First World War. Russia’s expansionist thrust in the Balkans after their defeat on the Far Eastern front had increased the threat for Ottoman dismemberment. With the defeat of the Ottoman-German alliance and the signature of the Treaty of Sevres, the Ottoman Empire was indeed dismembered. The Russo-Japanese War of 1905 subsequently had the effect accelerating Japanese relations with Ottoman Turkey and through them the Turkic world of Central Asia. The network formed during the Russo-Japanese War became the foundation for Japan’s connections to the Turkish world and the world of Islam. Ultimately, on the Ottoman front, the Turkish War of Independence against the terms of the Treaty of Sevres gave birth to the Republic of Turkey and the Kemalist revolution. The Sultan’s premonition about Japanese victory over the Romanov autocracy as an ominous harbinger of the future for the Ottoman Empire had been proven correct.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adivar, Halide Edib, Mor Salkimli Ev, Yeni Matbaa, Istanbul, 1963. Ahmad, Feroz, The Making of Modern Turkey, Routledge, London, 1993. Aydin, Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought, New Columbia University Press, New York, 2007 Demirhan, Pertev, Hayatimin Hatiralari Rus-Japon Harbi 1904–1905, Istanbul, 1943. Demirhan, Pertev, Japonlarin Asil Kuvveti Japonlar Nicin ve Nasil Yukseldi?, Cumhuriyet Matbaasi, Istanbul, 1937. Deringil, Selim, “Ottoman-Japanese Relations in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Selcuk Esenbel and Chiharu Inaba, eds., The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on the History of Japanese-Turkish Relations, Bogazici University Press, Istanbul, 2003. Esenbel, Selcuk, “A Fin de Siecle Japanese Romantic in Istanbul: The Life of Yamada Torajiro and His Tokuko Gakan,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 59, No. 2, June 1996.

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Esenbel, Selcuk, “Japanese Interest in the Ottoman Empire.” in Bert Edstrom, ed., The Japanese and Europe: Images and Perceptions, Japan Library. Richmond, Surrey, 2000. Esenbel, Selcuk, “Nichiro Sensō to Nitto Kankei: 20-seiki ni okeru Nichiro Sensō no Kioku,” in Bōeichō Bōei Kenkyūjō, eds., Sensō-shi Kenkyū Kokusai Fōramu Hōkokusho: Nichiro Sensō to Sekai 100-nen no Shiten kara, Tokyo, 2005. Hirama, Yoichi, Nichiro Sensō ga Kaeta Sekai-shi, Fuyō Shobō Shuppan, Tokyo, 2005. Inaba, Chiharu, “The Question of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles during the Russo-Japanese War.” in Selcuk Esenbel and Chiharu Inaba, eds., The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on the History of Japanese Turkish Relations, Bogazici University Press, Istanbul, 2003. Kowner, Rotem, Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War: 1904–1905, Global Oriental University of Hawaii Press, Folkestone, Kent, 2007. Kowner, Rotem, The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War, Routledge, London and New York, 2007. Matsumura, Masayoshi, Nichiro Sensō 100-nen: Atarashii Hakken o Motomete, Seibunsha, Tokyo, 2003. Matsutani, Hironao, Isutanburu o Aishita Hitobito, Chūō Kōrōn, Tokyo, 1998. Menning, Bruce W.; Steinberg, John W.; and Yokote, Shinji, eds., The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, Brill, Leiden, 2005. Ōe, Shinobu, Sekai-shi toshite no Nichiro Sensō, Rippu Shobō, Tokyo, 2001. Şahin, F. Sayan Ulusan, Türk-Japon lliskileri 1876–1908, T. C. Kültür Bakanliği, Istanbul, 2001. Takahashi, Shoichi, Toruko-Roshia Gaikō-shi, Shiruku Rōdō, Tokyo, 1988. Takahashi, Tadahisa, “Türk-Japon Münasebetlerine Kisa Bir Bakis, 1871–1945,” Türk Dünyasi Araştirmalari, Vol. 18, June 1982. Yamada, Torajirō, Toruko Gakan, Hakubunkan, Tokyo, 1911. Worringer, Renee, “Comparing Perceptions: Japan as Archetype for Ottoman Modernity, 1876–1918,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2001. Worringer, Renee, “ ‘Sick Man of Europe’ or ‘Japan of the Near East’?: Constructing Ottoman Modernity in the Hamidian and Young Turk Eras,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, May 2004.

NOTES 1

Tadahisa Takahashi, “Türk-Japon Münasebetlerine Kisa Bir Bakiş, 1871–1945,” Türk Dünyasi Arastirmalari, Vol. 18, June 1982, p, 135. For recent publications on the Russo-Japanese War: Rotem Kowner, The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War, Routledge, London and New York, 2007; Rotem Kowner, Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War: 1904–1905, Global Oriental, Folkestone, Kent, 2007; Bruce W. Menning, John W. Steinberg, and Shinji Yokote, eds., The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, Brill, Leiden, 2005; Shinobu Ōe, Sekai-shi toshite no Nichiro Sensō, Rippu Shobō, Tokyo, 2001; Yoichi Hirama, Nichiro Sensō ga Kaeta Sekai-shi, Fuyō Shobō Shuppan, Tokyo, 2005; and Selcuk Esenbel, “Nichirō Sensō to Nitto Kankei: 20-seiki ni okeru Nichiro Sensō no Kioku,” in Bōeichō Bōei Kenkyūjō, eds., Sensō-shi Kenkyū Kokusai Fōramu Hōkokusho: Nichiro Sensō to Sekai 100-nen no Shiten kara, Tokyo, 2005, pp. 169–187. 2 Pertev Demirhan, Japonlarin Asil Kuvveti Japonlar Niçin ve Nasil Yükseldi?, Cumhuriyet Matbaasi, Istanbul, 1937, pp. 36–37. 3 Selçuk Esenbel, “A Fin de Siecle Japanese Romantic in Istanbul: The Life of Yamada Torajiro and His Tokuko Gakan,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 59, No. 2, June 1996, pp. 237–252. 4 F. Sayan Ulusan Şahin, Türk-Japon llişkileri l876–1908, T. C. Kültür Bakanliği, Istanbul, 2001, pp. 123-129, 138-139. 5 Torajirō Yamada, Toruko Gakan, Hakubunkan, Tokyo, 1911, pp. 11-12. 6 Selim Deringil, “Ottoman Japanese Relations in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Selcuk Esenbel and Chiharu Inaba, eds., The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on the History of Japanese-Turkish Relations, Bogazici Press, Istanbul, 2003, p. 46. 7 Hironao Matsutani, Isutanburu o Aishifa Hitobito, Chūō Kōron, Tokyo, 1998, pp. 82–85.

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8 Chiharu Inaba, “The Question of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles during the Russo-Japanese War,” in Selcuk Esenbel and Chiharu Inaba, eds., The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on the History of Japanese-Turkish Relations, Bogazici Press, Istanbul, 2003. 9 Deringil, “Ottoman-Japanese Relations in the Late Nineteenth Century,” p. 46. 10 Shoichi Takahashi, Toruko-Roshia Gaikō-shi, Shiruku Rōdo, Tokyo, 1988, p. 245. 11 Masayoshi Matsumura, Nichiro Sensō 100-nen: Atarashii Hakken o Motomete, Seibunsha, Tokyo, 2003, p. 248. 12 Cited in Renee Worringer, “Comparing Perceptions: Japan as Archetype for Ottoman Modernity, 1876–1918,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2001, pp. 36–37. See also Renee Worringer, “’Sick Man of Europe’ or ‘Japan of the Near East’?: Constructing Ottoman Modernity in the Hamidian and Young Turk Eras,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, May 2004; and Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought, New Columbia University Press, New York, 2007, pp. 71–88 for the intellectual debate in the Islamic world. 13 Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modem Turkey, Routledge, London, 1993, p. 6. 14 Tadahisa Takahashi, “Türk-Japon Münasebetlerine Kisa Bir Bakiş, 1871–1945,” Turk Dunyasi Arastirmalari, Vol. 18, June 1982, p. 112. 15 Şahin, Türk-Japon llişkileri, pp. 129–132.

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❚ First published in Ian Neary (ed.), Leaders and Leadership in Japan, Richmond, Surrey, Japan Library (Curzon press Ltd), 1996, pp. 103–15.

9

The Meiji Élite and Western Culture a

S

tudies of modern Japan have tended to emphasize the ‘Japanization’ of Western culture and its minimal impact at a personal level as modernization overtook the structural and institutional construction of modern society on the basis of nascent institutions and values. It has been suggested that the continuation of a Japanese way of life in the private realm helped ‘placate’ the psychological stresses suffered during ‘modernization’ by being able to be ‘Japanese’ at home. (Hanley 1986: 447–462). The modernizationist view curiously agrees with the pre-war idea of Japanese national education and popular literature of being Western at the work-place and Japanese at home as an ideal of national identity. Both views assume, from different angles, that the ‘restriction’ of Westernization to the public sphere ensured the preservation of the nascent qualities in the private realm of the Japanese person. This was through Japanese pragmatism towards Western culture that combined Wa, or Japanese, and Yō or Western cultural elements in a flexible formula of eclecticism to serve as the basis for modern Japanese national identity in a bi-cultural civilization. The nationalist version was the wakonyōsai: Japanese spirit balanced with Western know-how. While there was a wide range in the interpretation of the idea of Western civilization balanced with Eastern ethics as a desirable national identity, the formula has been assumed to have assured a pragmatic adaptation of the individual to sufficient Westernization in scientific and material culture without unhealthy deepset Western influences. (Gluck 1985: 3–6, 284) Hence, the Japanese were able to modernize without the social instability or the psychological stresses of modernization and even avoid revolution. The narrative of this paper takes issue with the modernizationist interpretations of Japanese pragmatism towards Western culture, especially the notion that Japanese eclecticism was based upon the flexibility of splitting their public and private realism into a ‘separate but equal’ Western and Japanese cultural identities, or that this formula avoided the stresses of modernity at least for those who had an intimate proximity to Western culture in their everyday lives. The study of the Meiji Japanese ‘élite’ of the nineteenth century is important at this point for they had a ‘head start’ position in the internalization of Western cultural forms. (Lebra 1993:82–84,188,190) After the collapse of the Tokugawa feudal order and the inception of a new regime with the Meiji Restoration the adoption of

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Western civilization went through a first phase of enthusiastic adoption followed by a second phase around the turn of the century of nationalist criticism that strove to restrict the normative Westernization of individuals. Throughout this process, the Meiji élite continued to be pioneers in the adoption and rejection of Western cultural styles for personal as well as public purposes of civilization and enlightenment and economic prosperity and military strengthening, the main slogans of the Meiji government. This paper ventures to understand the meaning of Western culture for the selfperception of particularly the Meiji élite individual by focusing on an analysis of attire, household environment, and manners and ethics. Nineteenth-century thought in Europe and Asia abounds in discussions of Ethics, Propriety, and Civilization. Compared to today, this was a time when dress and ceremony carried more importance in the everyday life of an individual in the position of élite leadership. They reflected immediately at a personal level one’s individual perceptions of suitable culture, social status, political purposes, and in the case of Japan the self-perception of modernity for the individual. In this way, one can hope to decipher the complex layers of meanings that Western culture carried which have not been explained to a full extent by the modernizationist or the nationalist Wa/Yō formula.

THE CIVILIZING PROCESS AND THE MODERN INDIVIDUAL OF NORBERT ELIAS AND THE MEIJI ÉLITE When seen at a personal level, Western culture in Japan which has had a history of more than a hundred years since the Meiji Restoration seems to have infiltrated into deep waters as it has been meaningful to many in Japan as the cultural symbol of the psychological self-perception of the modern individual in contemporary times. Norbert Elias’ treatment of the history of the individual in the West is a comparable starting point for the discussion of the Meiji experience. Elias saw the emergence of the perception of the modern individual in Western Europe in a historic context of societal conditions that helps the comparative analysis of a cultural environment such as that of Meiji Japan where the modern individual, for reasons of tradition and ideology, continued to be seen in the light of his or her societal-Confucian context of human relations. (Elias 1978; 1982; 1991) For Elias, the environmental story of the modern individual since the middle ages is through the civilizing process of this personality through the history of medieval manners of court culture to the public manners of civilité for modern society that ensured the control of aggressive instincts, the development of a sense of sexual modesty and shame. (Elias 1978: 51–53) Politically the transition entailed the increase in the social and political control of the state in the direct discharge of impulses and individual violence. This was reinforced with the emphasis that sport, festivals and dance gained in modern society. Economically, the perception of such a self-restrained individual was integral to the requirement of a sophisticated market economy and the increasing importance of social and economic integration. (Elias 1982: 229–295) This is the historical background to the emergence of the selfperception of the modern individual that Elias terms ‘the civilizing process’. The socio-psychological aspect of the argument is perhaps the most interesting as Elias traced through memoirs and personal accounts the gradual emergence in

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Western Europe of the image of the modern individual as a rational being which interacts with an inseparable emotive side during this transition. While this is defined as a mental self-perception of the separation of the rational and emotive in the modern mind of the individual, for Elias these perceptions have a societal context in that the consciousness of an autonomous self was necessary to function in the complexity of class relations in capitalism and state formation. (Elias 1991: 8–9, 27–34; 1978: 261) Yet, in Elias’s typology, the Western European individual is not in reality free of family and society as claimed by the ideology of individualism. The ‘modern person’ is an individual who has developed a perception of independence but he/she is still dependent upon a social network. This individual has had to face in reality the stress and tension felt due to the inseparability of the rational and emotive sides mentally and an interdependency with others socially, and has had to find a modicum of balance within this ambivalent state of affairs. It is this acknowledgement of ‘the interdependency of the individual to a social network and the stress and tension due to the inseparability of the rational and the emotive’ part of the argument that is particularly appealing for a comparison with the Meiji experience. From the Meiji period to this day, Japanese modern individuals have been sensitized to the tensions and social dependencies that were engendered by modernity for reasons of bi-culturality. Given similar although not identical conditions in the history of the modern Western European individual, Elias’s studies inspire the question: Do the same cultural components create a similar self-perception of the modern individual vis à vis collectivity even in an initially alien cultural environment such as that of Meiji Japan?

DRESS AND GROOMING The Japanese use of native and Western costume has carried an important symbolic message to reinforce the pragmatism argument of modern/Western at work in the public realm versus being more Japanese at home in the private real. A 1930s book on modern Japan aptly defines these images as European at work with Western attire/ Asiatic at home with a kimono. (Lajtha 1936: 46) The history of Western dress in the Meiji period shows that the Meiji élite’s experimentation with Western attire resulted in the eclectic use of Japanese and Western forms for similar functions, or for different ones that had a rich hierarchy of political, social, personal meanings that would defy the dualstic simplicity of the modernist argument for the public. The primary meaning of Western attire for the Meiji élite was political. With the 1872 Dajōkan order for the adoption of Western dress and hair-styles by the Meiji bureaucratic élite, Western attire became crucial as an image in order to represent the policy of civilization and enlightenment and to impress the Westerners that Japan was civilized enough to warrant treaty revision in order to gain the status of equality with the Western nations. This was an exercise to revise the 1858 series of international treaties with the West that had compromised Japanese sovereignty. Prime Minister ltō Hirobumi and the Foreign Minister Inoue Kowashi were at the forefront of the Westernization policy for the upper class élite who were to have direct interaction with Westerners. (Chamberlain 1985: 43, 63, 122–126; Seidensticker 1983: 33, 96, 97; Tsuda 1991: 76, 268, 289, 291)

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In many ways, the experiment with Westernization was also theatrical, and the members of the élite women who were dressed in their Western finery were the ‘actors and actresses’. For the Meiji élite, the style of dress represented the political meaning at an individual level of the patriotic cause. The Rokumeikan, the Deer Cry Pavilion, which was established as a ballroom entertainment club for Tokyo society in 1884 was to be the stage. When Westerners criticized what they thought was the ungainly sight of having dainty Japanese women wearing Western dresses in contrast to the much more becoming styles of the traditional kimono, Prime Minister Itō is said to have laughed and commented that all of this is for politics: in kimono Japanese women look like puppet dolls whereas he felt in Western dress they looked modern and educated, like their Western sisters. (Tomita 1984: 150). A second aspect of the symbolic meaning of Western culture in dress was the interaction with Westerners on this and other matters of Westernization. Beneath the garb of traditional virtue, the woman’s kimono, the Tokugawa kimono was modified during the Meiji era due to Japanese and Western concerns of modern propriety that it be shortened and wrapped around more tighly to eliminate the erotic quality to the upper class kimono of Tokugawa women. In this ‘suppressed’ form, the kimono could now serve as a suitable modern traditionalist attire for the new middle-class image of the Meiji public. (Chamberlain 1985: 122–126). Class and gender roles also dictated different expectations of attire for individuals. While the general female population of Meiji Japan continued to wear the kimono that also befitted their role as the bastion of tradition and family virtue expected by the authorities, the Meiji élite women had to uphold a Western-style public image which represented modern education, Westernization of social life, and advancement of women’s position in society. Tsuda Ume, the pioneer of women’s education who had been brought up in the United States, is a particularly astute observer of the association between policy and dress during this period. (Tsuda 1991). She complains that with the demise of the Westernizers such as Mori Arinori briefly in the 1890s, a new court dress inspired by the Heian costumes of the ancient Japanese court of the tenth century became mandatory. But in a few years, Western gowns again became the norm for the aristocratic women. (Tsuda 1991: 268, 289, 291). For the élite, Japanese and Western attire had very specific meanings in the public images of ideology and were not flexible choices of Japaneseness in private at home versus Westerners in public at work. While the general public seemed vastly freer in their eclectic combinations of Wa and Yō culture in dress, the more one moved up the social ladder the more cultural categories of dress were dictated by rigorous ideological concerns. Lebra notes that the families of the Meiji aristocracy had to provide in their dowry a junihitoe which was a Japanese court dress, a European-style robe decolleté, and a tiara, each used for Japanese or Western-style ceremonies. (Lebra 1993: 230) Tsuda Ume refers often to her stressful experience of having to change and shift her dress from one style to another, Western to Japanese because of the nature of the public occasion or when entertaining at home. (Tsuda 1991: 63, 289) For the politically engaged, the public image of ideological stance strictly dictated the choice of dress. Members of the Meiji opposition confronted the completely

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Western outfit, the so-called hakama, male kimono, which in this case did not represent a relaxed Japanese sense at home. The political stance of the opposition had a wide spectrum. Fukuzawa Yukichi, the famous liberal and pro-Western educator, intellectual of Meiji Japan, usually preferred the hakama. On him, it was the symbol of his liberal stance, refusal of joining the oligarchy in morning coat grooming, and a symbol of him as an independent thinker. (Fukuzawa Yukichi 1960) On the other hand, for Tokutomi Sohō, liberal journalist, nationalist, Asianist intellectual and ideologue of Meiji and Taisho Japan, who was typical of the politically ambitious nationalists of the second Meiji generation with strong Asianist/ Japaneseness tendencies, the same hakama symbolized a Japanese nationalist reaction, and the criticism of the haikara weak-kneed oligarchic leadership in foreign affairs. (Pierson 1980: 228–230)

WESTERN CULTURE IN THE HOME INTERIOR The standard modernizationist argument notes that most Japanese experienced the transition from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan in small, traditional Japanese-style households due to practicality and poverty that reinforced the Japaneseness of home life. While this description suffices for the general public, again the situation was very different for élite families who lived in beautiful Western-style mansions in Tokyo such as the Iwasaki mansion, built by one of the pioneer entrepreneurs of the Meiji industrial establishment and the founder of the Mitsubishi concern. (Seidensticker 1983: 245) The élite homes had a great number of rooms which represented multi-cultural functions and meaning in addition to the usual multi-functional quality of the traditional Japanese rooms. Tsuda Ume’s memoirs reflect the home life of many Tokyo élite families including that of Count ltō, and reveal that the family members relaxed in the inner sanctum of private life in the inner rooms of the house, the okunoma area which was constructed in Japanese style and decorated in an informal hodge-podge manner combining Western and Japanese components in a liberal fashion. (Tsuda 1991: 22, 116, 311; Lebra 1993: 22, 116, 311) In addition, there were the formal Western-style rooms and the formal Japanese-style rooms for public entertainment. (Lebra 1993; Seidensticker 1983; Tsuda 1991) The accounts of the three types of rooms, the private inner rooms of ‘pure’ Western and Japanese styles represent an almost perfect image of the Meiji civilizing mission: Pure Westernist policies of reform counterbalanced with Pure Japanese public images of national ideology, and finally the ‘real world’ where there was a mixture of the Japanese and Western with no cultural consistency. In this eclectic way of life of the élite, the outer public Western façade was not reinforced by a pure nascent Japanese inner being, both were formal images for the public. Seen from the perspective of Elias’ description of the self-perception of the modern individual, the Meiji accounts of élite lives suggests it was in the okunoma of mixed cultural elements that individuals allowed for themselves the expression of their emotive sides in a free and relaxed manner. It was in the culturally ‘impure’ and undefined realm that the modern self-image was at liberty. On the other hand, the Meiji ‘public’ image of civilization split into ‘pure’ Western and Japanese compartments, both constituting a dual cultural definition of rationality in the public realm.

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MEIJI ETIQUETTE AND ETHICS Nothing brings out the personal problem of the rational and the emotive in a cultural context more clearly than the Meiji dictates on public propriety, manners, and etiquette. The Meiji authorities dictated new forms of public propriety to make Japan acceptable as a civilized nation to the nineteenth century self-centred Westerner. As a result, the Japanese individual had to enter into new constraints of public modesty, proper dress, censorship of the traditional expressions of sexuality and eroticism which had been previously accepted by Tokugawa society. The razing of phallic statues in the countryside, the requirement that male workers wear shirts within the city boundaries of Tokyo were but some of the many new constraints on public behaviour that were geared towards the adoption of nineteenth-century Western norms for Meiji public culture, in this case of squeamishness about nakedness and sexual expressiveness. (Chamberlain 1985: 258–62, 423; Seidensticker 1983: 42–45, 92) Furthermore, in line with the early Meiji vision of civilization and enlightenment, the incorporation of Western manners and rules of propriety into the modern etiquette of Meiji became an important means with which to achieve the idea of civilité or civilized behaviour for the middle class aspirations and values of the nineteenthcentury Japanese. In the Japanese case, the formation of the ‘modern’ rational selfperception was accompanied by the adjustment of the culture of controlling sexual expression, nakedness, and public behaviour in the public culture. Thus, Meiji Japan acquired a Western cultural component additional to the traditional Japanese cultural framework for rational public bahaviour. Historically, etiquette, or reigi, had carried a central importance in the socialization of the Japanese person into society. The rules of etiquette, derived from the Confucian tradition of China were adapted by the court aristocracy and the samurai warrior class rulers during the Tokugawa feudal order. Specific rules of conduct such as the three levels of seated bows reinforced physical behaviour and gestures that expressed the virtues of filial piety, loyalty, obedience, harmony, reciprocity and the like in the ideal social hierarchy between superiors and inferiors adhered to by the feudal culture of Japan. (Kōdansha Encyclopedia of Japan 1983: Vol. 2, 232–234, Vol. 6, 68). The Meiji texts are frequently titled Meiji Reigi or Sahō, represent striking examples of the Wa and Yō duality ideal of Meiji cultural eclecticism. The new Meiji etiquette was idealized as a fairly uniform standard of public behaviour for the nation which would replace the distinct class-based manners of the feudal heritage. Similar to the development of civilité in Europe for the modern public, Meiji etiquette texts are the adaptation of the Tokugawa manners to establish the public manners of the Japanese nation. The Ogasawara school, known for its subdued style and elegance, published numerous books on the subject that included an etiquette book for standing and bowing, the familiar three-tiered Japanese bow of today, which were necessary for the first time in Meiji Japan with the Western-style architecture and standing culture. (Ogasawara 1882: 8–12) A ladies’ etiquette book for the Meiji bride contains the picture of a kimono-clad Meiji woman who shows how to bow while standing next to a European chair—the solution to a Meiji problem. (Matoba 1899: 66)

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The Meiji etiquette works divided the text between the Wa and the Yō components of manners. But, in books meant for the general public, the emphasis was on Japanese manners. Unlike European etiquette books which tend to emphasize proper public behaviour, Meiji books differ for they focus on the special forms of modified traditional manners for the individual among family, relatives, friends, and superiors. These were gestures that were reflective of an ideal Confucian order of loyalty and filial piety in family and society as encouraged by Meiji modernity. (Norihashi and Shinoda 1881) In general, Western manners received lesser coverage and were kept to a discussion of the handshake, proper eating manners (drinking soup quietly as the Japanese custom of slurping was considered offensive by Westerners), the use of knives and forks, the introduction of the meishi, the proverbial name card, instruction of appropriate attire for various occasions. The individual is encouraged to adjust his/her behaviour according to the norms of the Westerners during the brief encounters they were sure to have in this contemporary age. As in the case of dress and home life, class and gender rôles differed in the world of Meiji etiquette. The élite men and women who were cut out to play a visible rôle in representing Westernized Japan were expected to be masters of European high protocol. A Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun writer who was critical of excessive Western styles at the Rokumeikan balls still complemented contemporary élite women as so much better at salon interaction than men thereby serving the patriotic purpose of helping international relations. (Tomita 1984: 168) While the etiquette books for the upper classes have a cosmopolitan air that stresses conviviality and good breeding, the books of the general public discuss Western manners as a political instrument of power. After the Russo-Japanese War when the surprising Japanese victory appears to have incited nationalist feelings, one book warns, Japan may win a lot of battles, but she will be doomed to lose all by her lack of knowledge of etiquette for the West uses it as a tool in war and competition. (Miyamoto 1906) Even more, Western manners like dress were seen dispensible by some. One book mentions that there are recent opinions that claim it is no longer necessary to imitate the manners of those round-eyed and red-haired foreigners. (Meiji reishiki 1899: 2) The dilemma that remains unanswered in this fascinating body of literature on etiquette and manners is where the issue of morality and ethics fits with respect to Western manners for the authors and the Meiji readers. The books do not express a choice in this respect. The Wa and Yō duality in manners determined that ethical values be operative primarily in the Wa world of etiquette in a Japanese moral and social setting. The Yō etiquette, while necessary for the public image of the civilizing process and part of the rational self-perception of the individual, remained outside the Confucian realm of civic and individual morality. The Meiji attitude towards the use of Western-culture in etiquette reveals the quagmire in the pattern of Wa Yō eclecticism that shows the limits of the pragmatic solution. The problem was always not so simple and humorous as Chamberlain noted as having to give way to your wife only when she was in Western dress, but invites the profound issue of how to envision a stage of universal individual and civic morality in the Western form, for only the Japanese etiquette forms demanded moral dictates from the Meiji individual. (Chamberlain 1985: 500)

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THE MEIJI CIVILIZING PROCESS AND THE MODERN INDIVIDUAL The Meiji élites’ use of Western culture close to their person in dress and home and manners represents one solution to the problem of multi-cultural existence in an eclectic pattern of the Wa and Yō elements as the definition of modernity. Given the above complex account, one suspects that the individual in a Meiji élite environment could not enjoy the benefits of a simplistic formula of being Western at work and Japanese at home despite the ideological stance that was advocated for the masses in order to avoid the stresses and tensions of modernization. The élites’ intimacy with Western culture at work and at home was also marked with thorns. Even after the Meiji era, members of the Japanese aristocracy continued to feel the psychological pangs of mental and emotional Westernization due to their proximity to a Western style of cosmopolitan life-style. They were expected to be symbols of the Imperial institution, yet also be completely Westernized mentally, a difficult task indeed. (Lebra 1993: 82–83, 190) Certainly, to be Japanese at home was not the source of security and emotional comfort. After all, for the élite, to be pure Japanese in the Meiji sense entailed a formal public image of rationality which was just as stress-filled as trying to be Western. The Meiji dictum appears to be that those lower in the social scale in terms of political power were expected to have less intimacy with Western culture unlike the élite who were expected to master it because of their head start position of leadership. This different level of intimacy could be politically explosive in later generations as social change and political participation brought the general public who lacked the Meiji élite’s cosmopolitan solutions to bi-culturality to hold more power after replacing the firm hold of the Meiji élite. Whatever its problems, however, the above narrative also indicates that the emergence of the self-perception of the modern individual in Meiji Japan required Western culture as the means with which to create a public culture even if it sometimes meant adjustment to peculiar Western fears and prejudices. The selfperception of the rational public world acquired a Western identity in addition to the Japanese one, if one were to be modern. And the inner rooms where the emotive realm of the private self could express itself were no longer pure Japanese but hybrid mixtures of the Western and Japanese elements. The personal Westernization of this bi-cultural context of the civilizing process must have burdened those Japanese individuals with the challenge to handle the complex psychological ‘double’ tensions of the process. Nor is it surprising to see the dark side of this double tension dilemma of modernity. Many Japanese intellectuals who have had an intimate knowledge of Western culture and experienced its psychological consequences have written modern Japanese novels on this theme. It is not without coincidence that such intellectuals as Yukio Mishima have rationalized the anguish of their suicides as the anguish of civilization from the encounter of Japanese cultural identity with Western civilization. In sum, Western culture has had a deep-set influence in the formation of the perception of the modern individual within Japanese society. The above narrative defies the dualistic category of Wa and Yō at least as defined in the general modernizationist approach of the past. The history of Western culture in dress, homelife, public behaviour, and manners, in an initially alien environment as Japanese society appears to have been a crucial component in the civilizing process that brought

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about the perception of the modern Japanese individual, albeit with special traumas and cultural compositions that has made this individual different from the one defined by Elias for Western Europe. It is not so much the pragmatic Japanization of Western culture that seems to have ensured the ability of the modern individual to handle the so-called stresses of modernization. At least this is so for the members of the Meiji élite who were intensely involved with Western culture compared to the rest of the population. The pragmatic Japanization approach was not possible in view of the highly rigid and inflexible political and social symbolism associated with Western culture. Under such circumstances, it was rather the ability of the modern Japanese individual to face the inherent tensions between a bi-cultural world of rationality and emotive sensibilities that brings this historical experience closer to that of Western Europe. In this sense, the history of Western culture outside of the historic cultural geography of the West is an authentic component in the history of Japanese society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Chamberlain, Basil Hall (reprint 1985 orig. 1904) Things Japanese Tokyo: Charles E Turtle and Co. Elias, Norbert (1982) State Formation and Civilization: The Civilizing Process (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell), Vol. 2. Elias, Norbert (1978) The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process New York: Urizen Books, Vol. 1. Elias, Norbert (1991) The Society of Individuals Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. The Meiji Élite and Western Culture Gluck, Carol (1985) Japan’s Modem Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hanley, Susan (1986) ‘Material Culture: Stability in Transition’ in Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, eds, Japan in Transition From Tokugawa to Meiji Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan (1983) Tokyo: Kodansha Vol. 2. Lajtha, Edgar (1936) La Vie Au Japan Paris: Payot. Lebra, Takie Sugiyama (1993) Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modem Japanese Nobility Berkeley: University of California. Matoba, Seinosuka (1899) Meiji Reishiki Osaka: Shobundo. Miyamoto, Keisen (1906) Seiyo danjo kosaiho Tokyo: Hakubunkan. Norihashi, Gyokusan and Shinoda, Shōsaku (1881), Ogasawara shōrei taizen Osaka: Heijokaku. Ogasawara, Seimu, Mizuno, Tadao (1882) Ogasawara shinsen tatsu reishiki Tokyo: Genshado. Seidensticker, Edward (1983) Low City, High City New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Tomita, Hitoshi (1984) Rokumeikan: Nise seiyōka no seikai Tokyo: Hakusuisha. Tsuda, Ume, Yoshiko Furuki, ed., (1991) The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda’s Correspondence to Her American Mother New York: Weatherhill.

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❚ First published in Japan Review, 5, 1994, 145–85.

10

The Anguish of Civilized Behavior: The Use of Western Cultural Forms in the Everyday Lives of the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks During the Nineteenth Century a

T

he psychological history of western culture beyond its “borders” is yet to be written. During the nineteenth century the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks used western culture as part of their reform efforts that linked their historical experiences to the history of the West. Thus, these “non-westerners” as they are sometimes called created patterns of eclecticism which formed the milieu in which the twentieth century was to take place. The nineteenth century eclectic reality of the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks did not remain as it was throughout the historical process of change, but aspects of it have remained to be irrevocable for the self-image of individuals in both societies. Since then, each generation in Japan and Turkey has continued to recreate and debate its individual and societal self-identity within an indigenous eclectic pattern of what is perceived as native or western as part of its “modernity”. The terms westernization and/or modernization all too frequently have been used in the past to brush up a complex process with very cursory strokes. Both terms emphasize the role of western culture in the general transformational dynamic of societal change inherent in such processes as the development of an industrial economy, the emergence of capitalism, or the establishment of a centralized polity such as the nation-state, a national educational system, and the assimilation of western forms of secular law and legal reforms and so on. However, neither term has been able to describe the mental and emotional context of the meaning of western culture vis-à-vis the local / indigenous / previous cultural components for the individual at a point of given time during this process of general transformation–be it termed reform, revolution, westernization, or modernization. Nor can these terms deal at length with the meaning of the eclectic mixture of the

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“nascent” and the “western” for the individual during this period of swift change to our contemporary age, other than the fact that “non-westerners” were trying to keep some things traditional such as the kimono or the veil, or even the Japanese emperor. This is so even in the case of the use of western culture together with the nascent one in the “outer” or “public” environment of individuals and their connection to society. More important, westernization and or modernization as analytical concepts say little about “inner” or “personal and private” meaning of the resultant multi-cultural environments. The concepts of westernization and modernization invariably restrict their analysis to what remains similar and different of the result in an “outside” environment beyond the borders of the Western world from the earlier experience of the parent world– namely the West as an abstract notion–usually an ideal in the mind of the writer. And invariably, eclectic mixtures always appear as either inconsistent or uniquely exotic in comparison, therefore eluding perceptive explanations of their meaning. The resultant eclectic patterns of the Japanese or the Turkish historical venture with western culture are hardly identical, but each in its own uniqueness also reveals similarities to each other as well as the encounters of those in other societies “outside” of the West who have also had to attribute meaning to the incorporation of western culture into their personal lives. One can even argue that this process was perhaps akin to the experience of the general population of the European continent since the Renaissance. Lest one forget, the majority of today’s westerners also had to learn to incorporate what was deemed to be more up-to-date western culture emanating from the urban capitals of Europe such as Rome, Paris, and London into their personal environment to consider themselves to be a part of contemporary times.1 This paper, therefore, ventures to focus on the eclectic patterns in the respective experience of nineteenth century Meiji Japanese and Ottoman Turks in order to search for a context of meaning in the use of western culture for the individual during the reform era. An underlying purpose is to provide an alternative and hopefully uncovered framework of analysis for this “non-western” history of western culture that differs from the standard stance of scholars of Japan and Turkey which is invariably based on the presumption of similarities and differences from a perception of the West as a static ideal. Members of Japanese and Turkish society have shared a common agenda of having to attribute a meaning to the incorporation of western culture into their personal lives. This has been especially so for the elite as shown by recent research that deals with westernization in the study of nineteenth century urban elites. In her recent book on the modern Japanese aristocracy, Lebra discusses the internalization of westernization since the Meiji period by the Japanese aristocracy and some of the problems resultant from the process.2 Compared to the practice of the scholars of Japanese studies who use the term modernization (kindaika) more often than the concurrent term of westernization or Europeanization (seiyōka, or ōshūka) to explain Japanese history since 1868, westernization as a concept is a central subject in the Turkish literature on modernity as it ultimately became the official policy of the Kemalist Republican Revolution after 1923. For Turkey, recent works on the nineteenth century urban families, who were more often than not members of the elite, have also started to deal with cultural aspects of westernization that bring a new emphasis on the concept of modernity primarily seen in political or economic terms until today.3

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The purpose of the paper is, therefore, to focus on the use of western culture particularly in the everyday lives of the nineteenth century Meiji Japanese and Ottoman Turkish elite rather than evaluating the use of western culture by the general public. One reason for trying to understand the mentality of the elite is that they were in a “head-start” position of incorporating western culture in their personal lives and were trying to use western culture in reforms. Their decisions thoroughout the nineteenth century, therefore, had a lot to do with creating the eclectic world which shaped the general public in the elitist character of decision-making for the top down reform experiences of Japan and Turkey that have been already noted extensively, whereas, at least for the duration of the nineteenth century, one can argue that the general public of Japan and Ottoman Turkey were not that directly involved in the process of decision-making. Finally, out of the many possibilities that could be selected for a study of western culture in Japan and Turkey, this paper is based on a selection of attire, household environment, and manners, that remain somewhat arbitrary choices. However, those components are worthy of analysis for a topic concerned with the meaning of western culture particularly because the nineteenth century was a time when dress and ceremony carried much more importance in the everyday life of an individual compared to today. These three components reflected one’s individual perceptions of suitable culture, social status, and in the case of countries like Meiji Japan and Ottoman Turkey political purposes. Hence, they serve quite conveniently as evidence that reveals how the members of the Japanese and Turkish elite saw themselves as part of this reforming—“modernizing” world of eclecticism.

WESTERNIZATION, EUROPEANIZATION, AND/OR MODERNIZATION In general, westernization or Europeanization as it has sometimes been called during the nineteenth century, has meant the use of western cultural forms as direct imports from the West such as the legal system, arts, philosophy, architecture, technology that were related to general and “public” concerns of reform. It has also referred to the adoption of western culture at a more personal or “private” domain such as dress, grooming, cuisine, lifestyles and so on. The term westernization, frequently used together with the term Europeanization, was particularly in vogue during the nineteenth century. Basil Chamberlain, the astute British observer of Meiji Japan, is fond of using the term Europeanization.4 In comparison to westernization, the term modernization, a newer concept that has been used since the Second World War, has dealt with the same phenomena from a more structural perspective that can be argued to have deemphasized the normative quality of westernization which suggested that at some point in the future all conditions including the normative elements of “westernizing” societies will end up, or should end up, being identical to the West. In comparison to westernization, a simple summary of the concept of modernization would be that it has been used to explain the same historical process of using western culture, as part of a structural process that begins with the emergence of the modern West since the seventeenth century. Here the emphasis has been on trying to unravel the more internal or covert structural processes of the emergence of modernity in any given society regardless of the differences of political ideology or culture. The assumption is that modernizing 165

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societies and the West will share a universal historical agenda but will not necessarily share the same cultural outlook. Furthermore, the process of modernization is a phenomenon which is not based on a one to one relation of cause and effect of western culture as in the concept of westernization. Rather, it is brought about by the greater transformations toward industrialization, urbanization, political participation, and social change: the key words in the concept. In this context the term modernization was thought to have hopefully deemphasized the cultural and normative quality of the concept of westernization. For example, one can argue that the term modernization has emphasized the economic and social change toward industrialization as opposed to the adoption of a western lifestyle. One can also argue that modernization has paid central focus on the importance of the structural aspects of political processes such as centralization, integration, and participation that lead to the formation of the nation-state for the countries of the western world as well as the non-western world. The above processes have received special emphasis in the concept of modernization instead of the ideological differences in political systems of democracy, totalitarianism, and traditionalisms toward the rights and liberties of the individual. The critics of the modernizationist approach have already pointed out all too well, the inherent weak points in the modernizationist approach. The use of the term modernization frequently ended up again seeing as modern only that which was explainable in terms of structural similarities to the idea of industrial society and the nation-state. The structuralist approach of the term usually ended up placing secondary importance to issues of ideology such as individual rights and democracy as part of modernity. In the Saidian critic of Orientalism, the assumptions of modernity are shown to have also become a tool for conceptualizing non-western cultures and peoples as less “modern”, therefore, subordinate in some form to the West.5 Suffice it to say that any term such as westernization or theory including the modernizationist one has its merits and demerits as forms of explanation. Therefore, this paper will not deal with a lengthy critic of either term as it has already been done quite extensively. The pendulum has already swung the other way as the prolification of “anti-modernizationism”, can become simply a way to present alternate forms of nationalism. Therefore, this paper will prefer to focus on realms that have been left largely uncovered in our understanding of the historical use of western culture by either concept. After all, the individuals who first started adopting western culture into their personal lives did not do so simply because it was fashionable, although fashion was certainly part of the process. More often than not these decisions by “non-westerners” already carried varying reform agendas of “modernity” which they had decided were compelling in order to ward off the threatening aggression of the West. Whether they liked it or not, the agenda of incorporating western culture into their personal lives also meant that they had to undergo complex mental adjustments which had to be creative and healthy enough in the long run. Whether they “succeeded” in doing so is not a primary concern of this paper. Rather, a primary concern is to understand how they went about doing it.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND ELITES Needless to say the historical circumstances for Meiji Japan (1868–1912) and Ottoman Turkey (1280–1923) in terms of western culture were quite different.

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The political modernization of Japan and Turkey has been already studied as a part of the modernizationist studies of the Sixties, however, a brief summary of the historical circumstances in both societies in terms of western culture is useful.6 In Japan, western culture makes a dramatic entrance with the political drama that ensued after the “forced” opening of the country that had been under the isolationist peace of the Tokugawa Shoguns (1600–1868) by Commodore Perry in 1853 which led to the signature of the “unequal treaties of trade” reflecting extraterritoriality and mandatory tariffs in 1858. While western culture has a long history in Japan since the 15th century, the 1868 Meiji Restoration after the brief civil war between the opposition samurai who had militantly reacted to the signature of the humiliating treaties signed by the Shogunate, began the intensive encounter of Japanese society with western culture.7 Studies of Japan’s modernization have stressed the swift speed with which the Japanese leaders, who were the major power holders from the domains that had formed the anti-Tokugawa league, accomplished the reforms necessary for the transformation of Japanese society from a feudal polity of various domains and the national government of the Shoguns to a nation-state and empire by the early years of the twentieth century. Throughout this “gestation” period, the early Meiji reforms incorporated western science technology into a modern educational system and founded the legal and institutional forms of government based on the western model, where the Constitution of 1889 and the Meiji Civil Code of 1895 stand out. Furthermore government and private enterprise leadership succeded in accomplishing swift economic growth and industrialization. These changes supported the emergence of Japan as a military power and the successful revision of the “unequal treaties’” by the end of the nineteenth century after a series of important military victories such as the Sino-Japanese War of 1885, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 as well as the signature of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Studies of Japan’s modernization have also pointed out the important role that the heritage of the Tokugawa era played in this quest. The relatively high literacy rates of the population, coupled with the gradual development of a commercial market economy during the long centuries of Tokugawa peace plus the homogeneous quality of the population have been seen as factors that contributed to the transformation process after 1868.8 While the story of Japan’s encounter with western culture in this modernizationist outlook appears quite positive until the end of the nineteenth century, the political and social problems of the twentieth century and the Second World War serve as the Japanese apocalypse in terms of its Meiji experience. After a destructive war and defeat which led to surrender in 1945, the encounter of Japanese society with western culture could be said to have had to begin anew with the Post-war reforms during and after the Occupation period. In contrast to Japan, the history of the Ottoman Empire’s encounter with western culture has a much longer history of political, religious, and most significant, military confrontation and interaction with Europe since the end of the middle ages. The Ottoman interest in western culture as a medium of reform was quite late, however, and began with the first serious steps taken toward reforming the major military institutions of the Empire in the eighteenth century. By the early years of the nineteenth century, the reformist Sultan Mahmut II had begun the process of expanding the content of reform beyond military objectives to involve reforms in the larger context of administrative, educational, economic, legal, and cultural spheres.

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The Anglo-Ottoman Treaty of 1838 brought “home” the capitulationist character of the nineteenth century “unequal treaties” for the Ottoman Empire. The commercial treaties of the early nineteenth century went hand in hand with the transformation of the economy, uneven as it was, to a more open commercial and integrated one with Europe and the gradual beginnings of some efforts at industrialization. Important land marks in the nineteenth century series of reforms were the beginnings of the reform period with the imperial edicts of 1826 and 1839. Similar to the use of “Meiji reforms” as popular term for the history of nineteenth century reforms in Japanese society, the 1839 edict known as the Tanzimat, or, the “New Order” edict has given its name to the nineteenth century history of Ottoman reforms. The edicts began a process of reform that had a wide span, covering the military, bureaucratic, social, and economic spheres of Ottoman society. Of the numerous reforms, however, the establishment of modern educational institutions, the gradual and partial revision of the customary religious based legal system with western inspired ones, and finally the promulgation of the first Ottoman Constitution in 1876 stand out as the areas where the infusion of western culture was most controversial.9 Compared to the Meiji success story, the Ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century have a tragic quality to them. Ironically, the Ottoman Turks had to lose an empire in order to start building a nation-state based on the western model. In the words of Ortayli, it was their longest century.10 First, the Ottoman efforts at reforms had to face the handicap of having to pursue reforms while fighting numerous wars and battles that were tearing the Empire apart. Second, the Ottoman elite saw the incorporation of western culture in their series of reforms as an important means to strengthen the empire within its own framework and not to replace it with a nation-state. However, the impact of nationalism made it no longer possible to mold the multi-ethic and multi-religious communities of the Empire into a unified Ottoman citizenry in the long run. Finally, the politics of reform had a jagged history. The last Sultan of the nineteenth century, Abdulhamid II, known rather infamously as the “Red Sultan” for his despotic rule, accomplished his long reign of 33 years as a conservative modernist without activating the parliament despite the existence of the Constitution. The accumulation of opposition to this state of affairs was a “Young Turk” revolt. Organized by a younger generation who were themselves the products of nineteenth century reforms, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 dethroned Abdulhamid and brought back the Constitution. The Young Turks introduced a fresh new agenda of Turkish nationalism and a vigorous economic and social program in an effort to save the empire as a constitutional monarchy. But it remained to be a last ditch effort that ended up in disaster as the empire plunged into the First World War with Bismarck’s Germany. Unlike Meiji Japan, by the early decades of the twentieth century, the Ottoman empire finally crumbled under the conflagation of the Great War of 1914, which was the Turkish apocalypse. The Turkish Republic born out of its ashes in 1923 with the nationalist revolution led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), engendered the second phase in the Turkish encounter with western culture in a more intensive manner.11 The Turks who survived as the dominant ethno-cultural entity of the former multi-ethnic and multi-religious Ottoman population, in a republic of much smaller size, had to rehash the agenda of reform versus tradition and the perennial question of incorporating western culture. The scions of the former Ottoman elite, the

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new nationalist leadership, rejected the Ottoman experiment with western culture, which was accused of being too eclectic, together with the Islamic tradition of the ancien régime. Familiar to students of Turkish “modernization”, the new encounter with western culture was delineated by a new ideology of nationalism, more similar in intensity and framework to the earlier Meiji experience. While Islamic law was completely abolished in 1926, westernization in law and in other aspects of society become one of the important pillars of the new Republican revolution.12 In addition to history, even the concept of elites for both societies entail significant differences. For the Meiji period the Japanese “high” elite can be argued to consist of the members of the Imperial household or royalty and the newly formed hereditary aristocracy recruited from the members of the Pre-Meiji domain lords and the ancient court aristocracy of Kyoto and most important, the power holders from the political elite of the Restoration leaders. The relatively small numbers of the above, which included roughly anywhere around five to six hundred families, one could extend somewhat if one included the members of the elite who were not necessarily titled but had close interaction with the new aristocracy. However, nineteenth century elite culture in Japanese society was also based upon a larger demographic base of a “middle class” elite of political and intellectual figures. This wider middle class elite comprised a rather large population of journalists, politicians and opposition leaders, academics, literary figures, artists and so on. If the nineteenth century suffrage regulations that had property qualifications can be seen as a form of delineating the boundaries of the percentage of the elite population, it meant that anywhere from 15–20 percent of the population which represented about 5 million people belonged to this upper middle and middle class of urban educated people that had contact with western culture in some form. They were usually members of the former samurai, Meiji gentry, shizoku, class but more and more commoners, or heimin, joined the group due to the swift social, and economic change as well as the relatively high educational level of the country. One also needs to take into account the general social environment in which the elites operated for the duration of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, Japanese society was a highly literate one and could increase its total literacy from about 20 percent in 1868 to close to 80 percent for all of the population. The possibility of relatively easy communication also helped the dissemination of information around the country. Japanese society was relatively densely populated with about 45 million people living within the compact geographical environment of the Japanese isles. By abolishing the hereditary character of feudal law and institutions, the Meiji reforms did create a firm legal and institutional basis that encouraged the development of meritocracy as the basis for advancement in society. All in all, the new reforms gave rise to social dynamics with horizontal and egalitarian qualities. However, in the long run, modern Japanese society did also retain a strong hierarchal quality in terms of its social and familial organizations where status and heredity continued to play important roles. The pre-nineteenth century background to the social character of the elites in the Ottoman empire needs some explanation13 as it was quite different from conditions in Japan, particularly the feudal hereditary class heritage of Tokugawa Japan. In the Ottoman case, the role of political decision-making was firmly based upon the institution of a long standing elitist bureaucracy and a scholar class of religious law that supported the rule of the Ottoman dynasty. While the Ottoman family was

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the only one with hereditary rights to the office of the Sultan, as well as the title of Caliph, the Commander of the Faithful, ever since the conquest of Egypt in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman elite was not formally hereditary in principle and Sultanic authority was absolute and personal. Somewhat reminiscent of the Chinese bureaucratic tradition. The elite tradition of pre-nineteenth century Ottoman society was a form of meritocracy based on the recruitment of military and bureaucratic personnel as servants, or kul, from the Christian as well as the Muslim population of the empire, who were educated in the Ottoman Turkish urban culture of Istanbul and through various palace schools served the Sultan. The elite military corp of the empire who were called the Janissary corp, or the “new soldiers” were the best representation of this “anti-feudal” entity in imperial polity. Originally converts recruited from Christian boys who were paid as “tax” to the Sultan, the Janissaries who were the vanguard of the conquest campaigns to Europe were loyal to the Sultan alone, and were supposed to act as a balance to the local Anatolian Turkish noble families whom the Sultan considered as potential rivals. In addition to the bureaucratic and military elite, the religious scholars, the ulema. constituted a class of literati who specialized in the study of Islamic scholarship as well as other subjects. While the military-bureaucrat servant class as well as the scholars constituted a “military”, or askeri, class with special privileges, the rest of the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish population of the empire including the Turkish one belonged to the reaya class of subjects. Recent studies suggest the literacy rate of the general muslim population was probably only 2–3 percent in the early 1800s, which however increased to a sizeable 15 percent by the end of the nineteenth century due to new schools and educational reforms.14 This meant that fewer numbers of people were involved in the general middle class formation of Ottoman Turkish society from the masses and much lower literacy rates prevailed among the general population compared to the Meiji experience. On the other hand, nineteenth century Ottoman educational reforms did place special emphasis on widening the base of elite education while introducing a new network of basic education to the masses. Thus, the numbers of people with high education who also had a relative access to western knowledge and culture increased greatly and constituted the newly rising class of bureaucratic and military elite. Known as the Young Ottomans and Young Turks of the latter half of the nineteenth century, this larger social entity is comparable to the Meiji-educated second generation “upper middle class” or “middle class” elite, below the titled Meiji aristocracy. The Young Ottomans played a similar role of expanding and confronting the ranks of the older Ottoman elite. Despite the basic differences obvious in the above summary, the Meiji and Ottoman elites, therefore, share some common grounds that make them comparable in terms of the infusion of western culture. In contrast to the position of the elites in nineteenth century Japan and Ottoman Turkey, the general public of Meiji Japan and the Ottoman Empire were so vastly different as to make comparison difficult in this context. Suffice it to say, the homogeneous linguistic reality of the Japanese isles and the widely shared perception of common ethnicity by the Japanese public contrasted greatly with the multicultural / multi-linguistic / multi-religious heterogeneous character of Ottoman society with an imperial ideology which customarily emphasized religious affiliation and explicitly deemphasized ethnicity until the impact of nationalism in the nineteenth century.15

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Other differences should also be kept in mind as well. The use of western culture in the Ottoman case, for example, should entail concurrent studies of numerous communities other than the Turkish speaking elite. The Ottoman Christian and Jewish communities which consisted of a rich variety of ethno-communal cultures such as Greek, Armenian, Balkan, Spanish, Levantine cultures as well as the Arab Muslim and Christian elites of Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt were all part of the greater process of incorporating western culture in the empire. One has to remember that their elites were also part of the upper class Ottoman elite formation in the nineteenth century as well. In many ways it could be even argued that these non-muslim subjects helped bring western culture “home” for the Turkish population. But this is a topic beyond the scope of this paper. Furthermore, twentieth century political history has dictated the demographic reality that the muslim Turkish population of the empire together with its elite remained to be the dominant cultural carriers in contemporary Turkey, who debated the Ottoman empire’s vestiges, including its peculiar eclectic combinations of western culture and indigenous components. In the case of Japan, the “elitist” argument has to keep in mind the premise that the geographical isolation of Japan as an island nation largely kept the general public out of direct contact with Europe and the United States even after the Meiji period. Except for immigration which did not bring large infusions of culture back into the old country, or the exceptional career of young men as students abroad, the Japanese masses remained pretty much isolated from direct contact with the Western World as during the Tokugawa period. They were able to interact with western culture only as components of it arrived into the country through the filter of urban intellectuals, or, the political decisions of government leaders, and the economic and educational systems, and so on, all of which were products of relatively elitist choices.

THE NASCENT AND WESTERN VERSUS “MODERNITY” AND “TRADITION” One complexity in this history of western culture beyond its “borders” between Meiji Japan even post-war Japan or Ottoman and Republican Turkey is that both the Japanese and the Turkish encounters with western culture since the nineteenth century have also entailed the “covert” use of western principles and models in the innovation, reconstruction, and the remaking of nascent cultural forms. These revised native components of culture were supposed to be part of the native tradition within a generation. What constituted to be modern or western in a “covert” sense for the nineteenth century has also sometimes come to be envisioned as tradition, frequently of a negative character, by the next or has been accepted as an old historical vestige. A good case in point for the “covert” application of the western model would be the formulation of state Shinto ideology of the Meiji era that served the modern nation-state as the tradition for a modern nationalist ideology then and was created out of the ancient nativist faith of Japan. By now for us, it is clear that State Shinto was an “invented tradition” formulated to be the instrument of a modern monarchy that reflected western principles and forms of ideology couched in a more Japanese context.16 A more “covert” example similar to the same process of invention would be the example of the 1876 Mecelle Islamic civil code of the Ottoman reforms that entailed the systematization of the orthodox Sunni Hanefi sect legal practices in commercial

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law and inheritance, inspired by the organizational form and principles of the Napoleonic Code. The Mecelle left the issue of marriage and divorce to the domain of religious law, which was the Shariat (the judicial code of Islam) for Muslim subjects, the Church and Rabbinical Codes for the Christian and the Jewish subjects. Still it was a remarkable up-to-date interpretation of traditional Islamic jurisprudence that provided solutions to commercial transactions, contracts, and property rights between Muslims that was suitable for the market orientation of the Ottoman economy during the nineteenth century. While in Islamic garb, the new Mecelle was furthermore part of a series of legal reforms that were more overtly western, such as in the case of the criminal code and the commercial code to deal with international trade. The Mecelle was also part of a “package” of imperial edicts which throughout the nineteenth century were, if not directly brought in from the West, were certainly inspired of contemporary conditions in the West. Since, imperial authority could frequently circumvent religious dictates and custom, the imperial ordinances and rescripts, usually the brain-child of reformist bureaucrats in disguise, provided the new legal basis for reforms. While couched again in Islamic terminology, imperial ordinances provided inheritance rights to women and children in agricultural land, abolished the customary status and laws pertaining to religious and social differences between muslims and nonmuslims, and outlawed bondage and slavery, and even ventured to interfere into Islamic family law by putting some restrictions on the Islamic practice of polygamy.17 Ironically, the Mecelle and the Imperial edicts were to be abolished by the Kemalist reforms in 1926 as the bastion of Islamic tradition even though when seen as part of a package of legal acts, they had in some measure brought the western principles of individual rights and liberty closer to home for the individuals of the empire. An even better example in the fluid nature of our concepts of what constitutes western and/or modern is from the historical experience of the Meiji legal reforms which were considered as successful completions of legal westernization ergo modernization at the time. For example, during the Meiji period, Basil Chamberlain, considered the Japanese legal system as completely Europeanized with the adoption of the new Civil Code of 1898 and the Meiji Constitution of 1889. And for the modernizationist studies of the post-war period, Japan’s “modernity” in terms of a westernized legal transformation was considered as complete in contrast to the uneven experience of the Ottomans.18 Yet, since the disastrous encounter with Japanese militarism during the Second World War and the subsequent Japanese defeat, both Japanese codes have been critically evaluated as bastions of incomplete westernization and or modernization that have carried over elements of feudal political culture and the ie family tradition into modern Japanese society.19 These are but a few of the many examples that reveal the generational shifts in the meaning of what constitutes to be the West or Modern by historical circumstances. It also reflects the complex meanings associated with what was considered as western and therefore modern during the nineteenth century for the members of the elites in Meiji Japan and Ottoman Turkey who had a hand in envisioning and drafting these reforms among others. Here, the discussion will turn, therefore, from the relatively impersonal realm of public reforms to the more personal realm of how western culture used by the members of the elite reflected their conceptualization of the role of western culture in the new civilizing venture at hand.

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THE CIVILIZING PROCESS: ATTIRE, HOME, AND MANNERS While both Tokugawa Japan and Ottoman Turkey had contacts with western culture before the nineteenth century it is really the period starting with the 1800s that represents the overture that begins the quest for a cultural identity of reform. The Japanese and the Ottoman Turkish elites of the nineteenth century ascribed the meaning a “civilizing process” reminiscent of Norbert Elias to western culture particularly its material components that directly affected one’s life such as attire, household environment, manners which were increasingly considered to be necessary to adapt to the new age. For the Meiji elite things western and their adoption at the personal level, whether for public or private concerns, was particularly important between 1870s and the turn of the century. For the Ottoman elite, the adoption of the accruements of western culture in everyday life started earlier obviously due to the geographical proximity and intimacy of the country to Europe. But western culture began to be officially adopted after the 1820s with the political decision making related to nineteenth century reforms of Mahmut II.20 For the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks, some of their adoption of western culture in everyday life had to do with fashion, or needs of practicality, but western cultural forms also carried symbolic meanings for the reform program of the age. The adoption of western dress as an attire for official use is a case in point. While there was a practical side to the adoption of western trousers and shoes since one needed western clothes for western style military training, frequently the use of western clothes was also quite laden with the symbolic meaning of the effort at integrating with western society as part of the reform efforts. Western cultural forms in attire, in home life, and the shift in manners or etiquette particularly stand out as worthy of analysis. They were considered as a necessary part of the new civilizing process associated with the reform age for the members of the elite in Meiji Japan and Ottoman Turkey during the nineteenth century—to dress, and live within a western context. Hence western culture gained new meanings—social and political in character—in the “outer” or “public” and “inner” or “private” spheres of their lives beyond the ordinary needs of practicality and personal taste. But one suspects there was more depth to what happened than mere practicality and fashion, or even political reform symbolism. If the words of Norbert Elias may be applied to their historical experience, by the adoption of the cultural forms of other civilization, the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turkish elite were reorganizing the cultural content of the rational and the emotive aspects of the individual’s connection to society in immediate terms.21 Furthermore, the process was implanted upon an existing practice of what already constituted the civilized process in the nascent culture of each society with its own rational and emotive qualities. The result was eclectic combinations which were necessary for the survival of the individual. Elias analyses in depth the emergence of civilized processes in Western Europe since the Middle Ages in the gradual emergence of the image of the human individual as rational which interacts with his/her inseparable emotive side. He traces the development of courtly culture, the control of a direct discharge of impulses, the gradual emphasis on sport and dance, and the development of a sense of civilized behavior in the form of rules of etiquette—as part of the history of the emergence of Western Europe. For Elias, these social and psychological changes molded the

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individual in the context of society that contests the ideal image of the modern individual in Western thought as a “free being” liberated from family and society. The emergence of the individual in social context with his or her inner consciousness was all part of the history of what for him was part of a civilizing process through social, economic, and political change which brought with it the “psychological” modifications necessary for the modern individual. This new image of “modern man” is an individual whose ties with society are permanently impaired and yet is also part of it as well. In the Elias typology, the Western European individual also has to live within the tension between the interconnected rational and the emotive sides to his/her mental nature and hopefully finds a modicum of balance within this perennial and rather ambivalent state of affairs. Elias is quite monolithic in his Euro-centered focus, for example he disregards the survival of definite differences in the more “emotive” Mediterranean personality of southern Europe and the more tension-ridden personality of the north which he assumes represents the West per se, and he is very superficial in his attempts to understand the individual in nonwestern cultures.22 However, it is clear that in such environments as those of Meiji Japan and Ottoman Turkey, individuals who were frequently the members of the elite felt for various reasons of politics and social life the need to familiarize themselves with components of western culture which in the end had to somehow shift the rational and emotive in their lives to fit the new complicated layers of differing lifestyles.

MEIJI JAPAN Dress and Hairstyle The Meiji history of western attire officially started with the 1872 Dajokan order for the adoption of western dress by government officials and soldiers and the members of the court. While the decree caused some consternation, western dress for the Meiji elite was symbolic for most of the Meiji era as representative of the policy of westernization. The first public portraits of the Emperor and the Empress in western dress appeared in 1872 as part of the official events to encourage the adoption of personal grooming and attire. The same year, the Empress appeared in public with natural eyebrows and gleaming white teeth “à la Européenne” in older to discourage the custom of shaving eyebrows and staining teeth that were the mark of a married beauty in upper class Tokugawa society. Meirokuzasshi, the main forum for the reformist intellectuals and statesmen of the era, are filled with essays by leading figures such as Mori Arinori, Kido Kōin in favor of the adoption of western forms in personal grooming.23 The western image of the military and the bureaucracy represented no compromises to indigenous symbols. As far as the Japanese were concerned usage of the male dress in this context of reform was to be “exactly” like the West—in line with the official reform program based on the slogans of strengthening the military, enriching the economy, and civilization and enlightenment. All of these motives were tied to the persistent goal of revising the unequal treaties of 1858 and gaining the status of equality as a nation. Interesting and practical adjustment was made to social reality, however. Japanese peasant boys hated to wear stiff military boots in service, hence were allowed to wear the comfortable straw sandals of Japanese

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peasants when on active duty. Boots were only required for ceremonies and actual fighting.24 While some of the measures taken by the new leaders did not create an immediate outcry, for example white teeth had almost automatic acceptance, for the Japanese of the early Meiji era a sensitive point of social and political symbolism was the hair styles of men and women. Early Meiji popular essays and pamphlets abound in comical depictions of the chommage––the proud chignon of the samurai versus the jangiri––a version of the Prussian crew cut or random cropping in popular parlance of the modern up to date Meiji young man. With the abolishing of samurai status together with the former feudal class distinctions in 1869, men’s hair-cuts had soon become mandatory. Seidensticker relates a popular ditty of the time “If you thump a jangiri head it sounds back Civilization and Enlightenment.”25 Women’s hairstyles were just as controvertial and focused on the debate whether women should give up the oily lacquered look of the Tokugawa court. Again the Meirokuzasshi journal abounds in articles by intellectual-reformer figures, mainly men, who hotly debated the issue of women’s hair. Women were complaining that the old style was unbearable. But the Japanese public strongly reacted to the mode when women poured out into the street with their tresses loose and freely flying about—the tresses interpreted to literally reveal the “looseness” of women. Government leaders were forced to ban the new styles. In the Meirokuzasshi debate one author who felt sorry for the plight of women sympathetically suggested perhaps the “poor creatures” should be allowed to wear a wig in public and leave their hair free and healthy at home. But short hair-cuts—a risqué fashion even by the standards of Europe in the nineteenth century—were definitely not to be allowed. Ultimately, the history of women’s hairstyles involved the foundation of an official guideline and a school for European styles adopted for Japanese women.26 By the late Meiji years Japanese women wore western hairstyles considered suitable for the kimono as many popular journals of the time recommended. By the Japanese victory of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, Edwardian fluffy chignons were fashionable in Japan, known as the 203 atama, the symbol of Hill 203 that was finally taken by Japanese troops after a long and arduous fight. Ironically, the chignon hairstyles of Japanese women today when they choose to wear a kimono as a traditional hairstyle appears to be a direct descendant of the western style reformist fashions of the Meiji era.27 For the Meiji Japanese elite, western dress and grooming were crucial as part of the social and political changes to impress upon the westerners that Japan was civilized enough to warrant treaty revision in order to gain the status of equality. The process of civilization in personal context was therefore laden with a heightened political motive. The 1858 series of treaties with Western Powers had included the standard nineteenth century “unequal treaty”, clauses of extraterritoriality and mandatory tariffs that gave special privileges to westerners, and were seen to have compromised Japanese sovereignity. Itō Hirobumi in particular together with Kido Kōin and lnoue Kowashi were at the forefront of the westernization policy for the upper class elite who were now to have direct interaction with westerners.28 The 1884 Rokumeikan, The Deer Cry Pavillion which was established as a ballroom entertainment club for Tokyo society, can be seen as the stage where the experiment for the policy of westernization was to be acted out. Reading Tsuda

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Ume’s letters to her American mother, one is struck with the whirlwind social flutter of the age. The “actors” were to be mainly the members of the newly formed aristocracy, especially women such as the Tsuda sisters who were brought up in America and were well versed in western lifestyles. They were to be particulary important in forming an amicable social environment with westerners resident in Tokyo. They were active in an unprecedented glittery social life of ballroom dancing, teas, charity balls together with the western residents of Tokyo. The aristocratic women were even obliged not to refuse a dance offer from a foreign guest. The experiment in the 1880s was brief as sharp public criticism and the failure of the first attempt to revise the treaties, ended the ball dancing. Inoue Kowashi’s ultimate goal in this policy of cultural westernization, however artificial as it may have seemed, was to create a common public sphere with the foreign residents of Tokyo as the social factors necessary for the political purpose of treaty revision.29 Sensitivity to western opinion and or approval was quite strong in this political motivation of the civilizing process. This can be seen especially in the controversy that arose concerning popular and or public images of women’s attire. As far as the modern Japanese educational system was concerned, the Mombushō deemed that Japanese girls were to wear a version of the male hakama for school that created the image of the typically Meiji girl in chignon hairstyles with a part of the hair let loose, who went to school in a practical hakama with shoes. It might at first appear as if the Japanese women were in general not required to fit a singular mode of dress as much as men as they were not to be that directly involved in representing the modern image of Meiji Japan. Quite content with the reformed but still traditional role dictated for women as good housewives and wise mothers, women were to wear a version of the traditional kimono garb. But even the kimono sometimes reflected the interaction between Japanese sensibilities and western opinion on the matter. The Meiji kimono was a reformed version, because the colorful and brocaded Tokugawa women’s kimono which was meant for sailing about in palaces or homes, was not suitable for the public activity of the more middle class image of Meiji society. While remaining to be a symbol of Japanese femininity and beauty, even the kimono could not escape political and social concerns. So it was shortened somewhat with government injunctions of austerity and decorum that advised modest styles and somber colors.30 The Tokugawa kimono which was the attire of the samurai/merchant classes and its risqué variety worn by the famous beauties of the courtesan quarters had an elegant erotic air about it provided by the décollté of a shapely long neck and a slight frontal opening of the long skirt which revealed the charming footsteps of a lady in motion. According to Chamberlain, western critics resident in Tokyo at the time disapproved of especially the slight frontal opening that revealed shapely feet or ankles. Meiji opinion that was against the Tokugawa kimono also had the agreement of local western opinion on the subject. Therefore, it became customary to wear the kimono wrapped firmly on the left hand side that allowed for comfort in walking and did not risk the erotic gait of the Tokugawa styles.31 However, there was a western style public image almost mandatory for elite women only. For Count Ito, the first prime minister of the country and the founder of the constitution of 1890, and his circle of reformist bureaucrats, women’s western dress was associated with western education and advancement of women’s position in society. Tsuda Ume’s letters are filled with careful considerations about what

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type of dress to wear on each occasion. For her, western dress in particular was at least during her Meiji years commensurable with her official role as a teacher in the newly established School for Peeresses and as a young woman educated in the United States working for the improvement of the educational level of her countrywomen. The government shifted policies back and forth about the dress of the court women. Ume complains that with the demise of the “westernizers” such as Mori Arinori briefly in the 1890s, a new court dress inspired of the Heian costumes was made mandatory. But in a few years western dress again became the norm for the women of the newly formed aristocracy.32 Here again, western opinion is very interesting in terms of the intimate involvement westerners had with the way the Japanese conducted their reforms particularly in the cultural sphere, which will contrast with the psychological distance between westerners and the Ottoman reformist agenda, at least in issues such as dress. In the words of Chamberlain again, westerners urged their Japanese friends to give up this experiment of western style fashions for women as the kimono was so much more becoming. As is well known, Pierre Loti, the French romantic naval officer cum man of letters-adventurer, who was an observer of both the Japanese, and Ottomans to whom he became deeply attached, was more cruel in his comments. In contrast to Tsuda Ume’s comments, he was overwhelmed with the image of the Empress and her ladies in waiting who appeared in an official gathering with the crisp spartan image of Heian court attires and lacquered hair left flowing in their backs like the “wings of a bird”. Even Mrs. Clearidge the first lady of the President of the United States wrote a letter imploring that the Japanese women not ruin their health by the horrible custom of European corsets. The outcry of the western residents of Japan now socializing with the Japanese elite seems to have had something to do with the demise of the policy as well as the better known conservative reaction on part of the Japanese public to women wearing revealing gowns in such affairs as the Rokumeikan balls.33 In sum the Meiji elite’s experimentation with western attire as a cultural form resulted in the eclectic combination of using Japanese and Western forms side by side for the same function, or separately to serve different functions in state and society. The dress adventure of the Meiji Japanese reflects numerous aspects of this eclectic pattern that formed what was seen as the civilizing process of the nineteenth century. The dual character of Wa and Yō or Japanese and Western in the eclecticism within the civilizing process stands out as the familiar pattern to student’s of Japanese history. While this dual pattern of eclecticism is frequently interpreted as having brought a degree of flexibility and stability to the Japanese encounter with western culture, in reality the public sphere of attire was dictated by a significant degree of inflexibility. Writers have usually noted how as time progressed a pattern prevalent until the early decades even after the Second World War emerged: western dress at work—Japanese dress at home that may have helped the cultural sensibilities of the Japanese public’s confrontation with an alien culture that helped “placate” the psychological stresses suffered during “modernization” by being able to be “Japanese” at home. The 1930s publications on Japan imbued with the schematization of Japanese ideology of that time liked to present an image of Japanese men as European at the work place—Asiatic at home with the kimono. Late Meiji

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photographs of statesmen such as Ito posing with his family as a genial patriarch in Japanese costume signify this separation of the Japanese to the “inner” sanctum of private-family-personal life, and the delegation of complete western attire to the “outer” public sphere.34 In reality it would appear from the continuation of intensive controversy about the matter in the politically engage elite world, each category in itself was quite inflexibly ordained as they were loaded with political symbolism. Lebra notes the families of the aristocratic women of Meiji Japan had to provide for a juni-hitoe, a Japanese court dress designed from l0th century Heian originals, and a robe décolleté, formal western gown with a tiara as part of their dowry. The general public was certainly freer in its eclectic combinations of this duality with a motley array of attires ranging from the combination of a bowler hat with a kimono, but as one moved up the social scale the Wa and Yō categories of dress as with many other elements became quite rigid and public.35 For the politically engaged, public image strictly dictated the choice of dress. The very conservative for example doggedly insisted on pure Japanese attire and confronted with the complete western outfit, the haikara, or “high collar” morning coat of the reformers who were bent on westernization. Sometimes, however, it was not the sharp difference in political vision but rather preferences of political style that dictated choice of the male hakama over the Meiji haikara, or the morning coat, which was the typical attire of the government official. Fukuzawa Yukichi who was the most famous liberal and pro-western culture educator, intellectual of Japan usually wore a hakama which was hardly a symbol of conservatism for him, but may be the sign that he refused to become a government official. In his case as with many other intellectuals who were more in the opposition and chose to remain as private and independent critics of government policies, the hakama would seem to be Fukuzawa’s implicit rejection of the formal government officials image in morning coat grooming. Just how loaded with political meaning was the usage of Japanese or Western dress for the elite is clear from the preference for Japanese male dress by the politically ambitious nationalists of the new rising middle class, or the “second Meiji generation”, around the turn of the century. Ironically, many of them were brought up in the western style schools of the new age. Major intellectual figures of the day such as Tokutomi Sohō severely criticized the Meiji bureaucracy as insipid and wavering over the Treaty Revision issue and the Japanese irredentist claims in Asia. Some of them also distained the official Western garb of the Meiji elite. The declaration of the parliamentarian Professor Tomizu, to Abdürreşid ibrahim, a Tatar-Turk from Russia who was visiting Japan in 1908, is very clear about the meaning of dress in the Asianist politic of the day. Based on the declaration of the nationalist parlimentarian Professor Tomizu that conflict with the West was inevitable, Ibrahim a Tatar-Turk from Russia who was visiting Japan in 1908, is very clear about the pejorative meaning of the pro-Western Meiji elite as haikara, those who are dressed in Western “high collar” attire, for lacking sufficient nationalist aim to defend the rights of Japan on the Asian continent against Russia. Tomizu criticizes those who are in favor of collaborating with the Western powers as “haikara” because they mistakenly were satisfied with the terms of the Portsmouth Treaty as progress whereas it was “a dismal failure at the conference table.”36

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Home The same pattern of dual eclecticism applied to the Japanese home. Observers of Meiji social history frequently note that partially due to the scarcity of space, partially to governmental policy that preferred national priorities over a direct improvement of living standards which arose very gradually, most Japanese experienced the transition from the Tokugawa to Meiji Japan in small Japanese style households which used a few instrumental western components such as a desk for school age children, perhaps a radio. The inside of the house, which was somewhat flimsily built especially in the new urban areas, meant a lifestyle of taking off shoes and living in multifunctional rooms covered with tatami, or, rice mat flooring, and the toilet facilities may have been constructed outside. Many houses did not have private bathroom facilities and public bathhouses provided these services for the general population. The Japanese house also reflected the Japanese family lifestyle of separate branch households that lived as small families who did not require large homes. Legally and socially the branch households were united under the administration of the main branch continued by the eldest son of the larger family unit or the extended family system known with the term ie. With the new Civil Code 1898, the Meiji family system accommodated individual rights to private property and firmly established monogamy as the form of legal marriage, but it also subjected members to the legal supervision of the main branch head of the ie, household, who was responsible for the conduct of religious rites to the ancestors as well as most tasks that pertained to the marriage, legal issues, social behavior, inheritance questions of subordinate branch households with female members and younger sons.37 While branch household members were dependent on the legal rights of the main branch, however, they usually did not live together and frequently there was a separation of economic assets and property between the different branches before the death of the patriarch of the main branch. This meant that houses which tended to be relatively small were expected to serve the needs of separate households though members of the older generation would tend to live with the eldest and his bride. The elite who built beautiful Western style mansions in Tokyo such as the Iwasaki mansion or the residence of Count Itō and others had the space and means to build large residences with many rooms that reflected best the concerns of the elite in terms of cultural lifestyles. Hence in their case therefore the practicality and poverty argument does not apply to their choices which were clearly cultural although elite families, which may have tended to have a larger number of people too tended to live as independent households. In elite homes, there were the inner rooms of the house decorated and arranged in informal Japanese style where the family lived and relaxed that frequently added a sprinkling of western components such as an armchair for the father of the family, a desk, or a radio later on, and the beautiful drawers for the lady of the house. In the case of an intellectual as many pictures of the age show, this “inner” sanctum had frequently meant the chaotic stacks of books, mementos, a brazier for warmth, pillows, a working table, western style lamps in a tatami floor. Tsuda Ume, the pioneer in women’s education who had been brought up in America as one of the select female students sent with the Iwakura mission in 1872 describes the inner sanctum area in her home in Tokyo sprinkled

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with a mixture of Japanese and western furnishings. She also describes a similar informal Japanese quarters in the upstairs of Count Itō’s family residence where she lived for a while as an instructress to his wife and daughter. She complains that it was hard to keep order in the back rooms of her father’s home and hoped that guests would not see the mess. In many households of the elite there was a tendency toward sexual segregation as well that carried over from Tokugawa practice. Lebra discusses the division of the houses of the aristocracy in Tokyo between omote, “public-exterior” rooms primarily the domain of men and the oku, “private-interior” that was the domain of women. An exception to this rule of segregation was however the privileged position of the male head of the household. Here, among the male family members, only the head of the household had the liberty to use the most outer spheres of the “public” rooms, the soto, or the “outside” sections of the public area which frequently served as office space as well, and also the most interior, or, ura, rooms of the female domain due to his role as the father and husband of the family.38 If the inner rooms can be termed as the private informal spaces of the home used for daily contact and sleeping, the public space of the elite residences were usually split into two; one in pure western form, the yōkan, the other in pure Japanese form, Nihonkan. In the Iwasaki mansion built by the most famous entrepreneur family of Meiji Japan who built the Mitsubishi group of companies, there were grandly decorated Western style rooms used for entertainment and official visits frequently with the implication that there would be foreign guests. Tsuda Ume’s father had added a parlor to their residence in Tokyo after she came home from America where she held afternoon tea gatherings and entertained her Japanese and foreign guests. In the Itō residence, the family preferred to have dinner in the western style dining room downstairs which were very jolly occasions for the young Ume. Count Itō also entertained foreign and Japanese friends here as well in parties attended by Saigō Takamori and other important figures of the period. On the other hand, many of these elite homes also made sure that there was a pure Japanese room arranged in studied simplicity with an heirloom vase or painting in the alcove. This Japanese room was again part of the public space of the home meant to represent an offical image. It was commonly used for serious family gatherings, performance of the classical Japanese arts, or to entertain a distinguished Japanese or foreign guest, who was known to be familiar with Japanese ways.39 The western and the Japanese public formal rooms carried appropriate cultural symbolism for the users. When Count Itō entertained friends in the context of Tsuda Ume, the western room is used often on these occasions which transpired around the 1890s. On the other hand, Ibrahim, the Tatar visitor who now visits Count Matsura Akira (1840–1908) in his residence in 1908, was ushered into the formal Japanese room with a tokonoma, the ceremonial alcove and treated to the performance of tea ceremony by his daughter.40 Perhaps it was considered more appropriate to receive this Central Asian visitor who had just arrived from Siberia via Vladivostok with an Asianist agenda in mind in an Asian-style Japanese room. The three types of rooms in an elite Meiji home represent a perfect symbolism of what the Meiji elite tried to realize in their reform programs. The pure West image in the parlor and the dining room as with the western dress of the elite women and men on formal occasions represented the Meiji effort to be exactly like the West on a public and formal plane in order to gain equality. One dressed appropriate to the

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image of the room to be used for a formal occasion. Again Tsuda Ume complains how she was forced to change quickly into her western gown from her kimono which she wore when upstairs because Count Itō in an impromptu manner had asked for her to join a party being held in the western style dining room downstairs. In contrast, the pure Japanese formal room adhered to the image of an unadulterated Japaneseness, perhaps reminiscent of Shintō ceremonies and shrines which did not amalgamate western culture in any overt form.41 Finally, the “personally real” mixture of the two elements in a confused but comforting fashion in the private inner rooms reflected the daily amalgam of the western and the Japanese in the daily lives of the Japanese. In contrast to the “pure” Japanese/Western rooms, this, “third sphere” was an informal eclecticism which combined in an amalgam both cultural elements in a non-structural and seemingly haphazard and comparatively confused manner. Yet, this confused or informal mixture which was neither pure Japanese nor pure Western clearly offered more sanctuary to the more “private” side of a person. The accounts of Ume and Lebra’s aristocratic families, indicate that it was in these inner rooms of mixed element that individuals allowed for themselves the expression of emotive feelings and sensibilities in a freer and relaxed manner. Apropos Elias, the emotive aspect of the Japanese individual self image was at liberty in the culturally “impure” and “undefined” cultural combinations of the inner rooms, whereas the rational self image was allowed to operate in the formal dualistic eclecticism of the Meiji “public” image which was split into western and Japanese compartments. The Meiji elite’s use of western culture close to their person in dress and home represents a solution to the problem of multi-cultural existence with western culture— the Wa (Japanese) and Yō (Western) pattern. Outwardly, the “Japanese” method of cultural dualism appears to have solved the problem of having to live with western culture as a formal public image but one suspects that large areas of tension remained for the individual. Perhaps it was not so much the ability to live “Japanese style” per se that offered a sense of security and emotional comfort to a Meiji individual as has been frequently claimed, for to be pure Japanese also entailed a formal act in the domain of rationality even in the privacy of one’s home. Rather, it was the nondescript hodgepodge “inner room” combinations without any clear definition that allowed for relaxation and the ability to be “natural” and live out one’s “emotive” side.

Etiquette Nothing brings out this problem of the rational and the emotive in a cultural context more than the Meiji dictates on public propriety, manners, and etiquette. As with many other issues. Meiji governmental orders dictated a new set of public morals and propriety for the general public directly through various public rules of behavior or more indirectly though national education. Some of the concern for a new set of Meiji norms of manners and public behavior was influenced by western cultural norms that was taken as “civilized behavior”. The Meiji leaders were very sensitive about foreigners making fun of them and sometimes the authorities encouraged new forms of public propriety to make Japan acceptable to the nineteenth century self-centered westerner as “civilized”. “So foreigners will not laugh at you” was written on many tablets in public spaces to inculcate the new image of Japanese society. Phallic statues used in the fertility faith of Japanese peasants were razed

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to the ground because it was immoral or uncivilized in the new westernized Japan. Workers in Tokyo could not go about in loincloths and had to wear Happi coats.42 Manners and etiquette books of the nineteenth century reflected some of the Wa Yō solution and some of its problems. Etiquette or Reigi in Japanese society carried a very important weight in the socialization of the individual to society as part of the civilizing process. Based on the Chinese Confucian teaching on the matter, etiquette was seen as the reflection of the moral fortitude and virtue of an individual as well as the means with which he or she could relate to society via specific rules of conduct according to the hierarchy of a social relation. Etiquette rules which were quite detailed and complicated, were developed by the Kyoto court aristocracy, the kuge, from Chinese teaching. With the ascent of the warrior samurai class to power, the kuge passed the tradition of courtly etiquette to the warrior class during the Muromachi age of the fifteenth century. By the end of the Tokugawa age, kuge and samurai manners had spread to the wealthy members of commoners from the merchant and peasant class with cultural sensibilities. While many schools of etiquette existed, the Ogasawara ryū or école was the most dominant during the Tokugawa period known for its subdued elegance and style.43 During the Meiji period, one of the early concerns of the elite was to devise a new school of etiquette that would be suitable for a wider public to help national integration in a population that had lived quite separate cultural lives and had developed divergent forms of behavior ranging from the rough rustic manners of the average peasant to the stylish dandified etiquette of the late Tokugawa urban samurai of Edo. The major problem was to adapt some of Tokugawa feudal etiquette to the needs of a socially more mobile and international Meiji society. The Meiji Reigi was devised to be a fairly uniform standard for the nation as opposed to the class distinctions of the feudal era. But, the authors of the new Reigi books also reflected a strong intention to reinforce the familiar norms of propriety according to social and sexual hierarchy. There was a prolific outpouring of manners and etiquette books that reflected an avid public interest in suitable etiquette for the age of civilization and enlightenment. The Meiji era was a time of new horizons in the social aspirations of many after the abolishment of the hereditary class divisions of the feudal era. And many etiquette books were obviously geared for a public that was making a swift transition from their previous social status under the hereditary class divisions of Tokugawa society to a contemporary one with much more fluid delineations between commoners, gentry, and aristocracy. Many etiquette books were published to provide new guidelines for schools, the new middle class, the Meiji aristocracy, the Meiji bride, and so on. The numerous reprints of the Ogasawara guidelines which were adapted to Meiji needs revealed the Wa and Yō of the nineteenth century Japanese individual in ethical and social terms as well as in manners. The texts divided the world of etiquette into two—that of Wa which usually covered a major portion of the text. Sometimes this was the central portion of the page. The second section—that of the Yō or the western section—was usually a much smaller appendix in the back or a thinner column at the top of the page.44 The Japanese section of the Ogasawara texts described the importance of social harmony and the consistency of morality and form in the classical Chinese, Li, or Rei concept. Special emphasis was given to describing the three seated bows, shin, gyō, sō which in that order paid respects

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to persons of higher, equal, and lower status. Reigi texts described daily life in detail from the manners of arranging dinner tables to attending festivals and the appropriate decorations in the home for each season and festival. Etiquette in married life described in detail the ways in which the wife was to show deference to the husband and his family members. A wise woman should spend at least an hour or so for her make-up and grooming otherwise she might lose her husband warned one textbook.45 The new age required new forms of body behavior. Etiquette books had to grapple with the challenge of devising a standing etiquette that had not been an issue in Tokugawa days when propriety was restricted to seated positions on the tatami. Thus, the familiar Japanese standing bow was devised with gradations according to status in line with the classical sitting prostrations.46 The Meiji reigi for brides showed how one could bow while standing in a room with European furniture while wearing a kimono.47 School textbooks were concerned with the manners of general conduct as well as specific ceremonial gestures that served the needs of how the nation was to perform bodily expressions of obedience and respect to symbols of the state such as the flag. One school text illustrated in detail how students were to be instructed to advance a prescribed number of steps forward and pay their respects to the Emperor’s portrait by raising their arms up straight in 45 degree angles with their eyes lowered to the floor.48 Most elementary school reigi texts also cautioned the reader about the separation of girls and boys in school activities, and explained different manners for each that enforced sexual hierarchy.49 In most of these texts, western manners were always included as part of the bunmei kaika agenda of Meiji reforms. A typical introduction to an etiquette book usually explained the need in terms of now that Japan was part of a competitive world of rivalry among nations and the international world, knowledge of western manners was necessary for the progress of the country. One text warned that while Japan may win a lot of battles, she will be doomed to lose all at the conference table by a lack of knowledge etiquette, for Western Powers use etiquette as a tool in war and competition.50 While many texts managed to posit etiquette in the political agenda of nation-building and gaining equal status with the West, some books which were meant more for the members of the aristocracy wrote in a more congenial manner. One such text with Count Ōkuma’s introduction discusses how etiquette and good breeding are important for social interaction and conviviality, citing the teachings of Lord Chesterfield whose writings on manners were quite de rigueur for upper class British society.51 The etiquette books usually limited instruction in western manners to the handshake, wearing appropriate clothes for various occasions, how to eat properly at the table for example not to slurp one’s soup, and a few other topics that advised proper behavior during brief encounters with westerners in their homes, or at dinner parties. Special advice was given to the “ladies first culture of westerners”. Japanese men were advised not to show their anger when western women are present. Proper manners for a western style marriage was described with the comment that marriage in the West was based on love and courtship that were peculiar customs. The reader is warned this is neither similar nor appropriate to the tradition of arranged marriage customary for Japanese couples. After treaty revision at the end of the nineteenth century, nationalism also creeps into some etiquette textbooks. The Meiji 32, Meiji reishiki book argues against the

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“recent” opinions that claim it is no longer necessary to imitate the manners of those round eyed and red haired foreigners. In contrast to the brief accounts of popular reigi books on western manners, the books for the aristocracy and the upper class elite had much more detail. It is clear that the authors assumed only the upper classes would have prolonged interaction with westerners and therefore detailed knowledge of their manners was crucial. Here texts for the women of the new Meiji aristocracy seem to carry special importance as in the example of the reigi book used in the School for Peeresses, which had the most voluminous discussion of western courtly manners including a rather detailed section on its history since the middle ages.52 Aristocratic elite women in Meiji Japan were expected to know everything about the Ogasawara school but they were also expected to know in great detail the fine points of western courtly manners including the various dances to be performed at evening balls, and the manners of high tea. The issue that remains unanswered in this fascinating body of literature on manners is where the morality of ethics fits with respect to western manners. While there is no explicit choice expressed in the books themselves, it would seem from the reigi texts that the Wa Yō dual eclecticism of manners delineated morality and ethics to be operative primarily in the Wa world of etiquette where each gesture revealed a certain virtue of sociability and morality. In every case the Wa etiquette was shown to be appropriate solely in a Japanese moral and social setting, whereas the Yō etiquette was to be used only with foreigners who were out of the Confucian setting of reigi. One can imagine the dilemma this world of eclecticism offered for many individuals ranging from giving way to one’s wife only when she was in western dress to a more profound issue of how to envision a stage of individual and civic morality in western style etiquette form that was prescribed for foreigners only when it was only the Japanese etiquette forms that dealt with the relation between etiquette and morality.

OTTOMAN TURKEY Dress and headgear Politics of dress starts in the Ottoman empire in the early years of the nineteenth century as part of the reforms of Mahmut II and the Tanzimat order of 1836 with the adoption of the European male dress coupled with the Ottoman headgear the “fez” for soldiers and state employees during the reign of Mahmut II. By 1874, Edmondo de Amici observed that old fashioned Turks continued to wear versions of the old turban and flowing robes, the kaftan, and especially religious men, the Islamic scholars ulema continued to dress traditionally. But, he notes that the Tanzimat, or the New Order Turks wore an lstanbulin redingot, an adaptation of the French word for the European tunic like the Meiji haikara was for “high collar”, and had only kept the fez, as a distinct Ottoman headgear. The red maroon colored cap called the fez has a curious history reflective of this age of reform. Officially adopted as the headgear of the dynasty in the 1820s, the fez was said to have been inspired of possibly the north African or perhaps the Greek headgears in the empire. Sultan Mahmut II abolished the Janissary elite military corp of the Sultans since

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the fifteenth century,with draconian measures and established the new western style army who were at the same time given a very traditionalist Islamic name the Asakir-i-Muhammediye, “the soldiers of Muhammad”. So was the traditional tall headgear and baggy trousers of the Janissaries which were supposed to have added a ferocious and dramatic affect as the elite corp marched to battle, replaced by the new western style uniforms for the new army that was to train in western style military science. It was designed to complement the new western style military uniforms which now replaced the tall headgear and baggy trousers of the Janissary elite military corp of the Sultans since the fifteenth century who were abolished with the draconian measures of the reformist sultan.53 The fez was not simply a symbol of being a muslim, however, in an empire that had through long standing custom been based on the special political privileges of the Ottoman muslim elite and the military power of the Ottoman elite corp and the Turkish soldiers. By the middle of the nineteenth century the non-muslim subjects of the empire such as urban Greeks and Armenians frequently chose to wear completely western outfits with a European hat. However, the non-muslim elite who now had the chance with the new reforms of the 1820s and 1830s to enter into the higher echelons of Ottoman service also insistently wore a fez, which reflects the dynastic and elitist symbolism of the gear beyond its religious connotations.54 In contrast to the Ottoman reformist Pasha, the military and bureaucratic rank comparable to a General or top civilian administrator, the second generation Young Turks who were to become the opposition movement that organized the Young Turk revolution of 1908, had even discarded the Istanbulin tunic. Preferring European jacket and trousers, dainty small ties, the new intellectual figures of opposition cut a dandy figure with their walking sticks and carnations on their lapels. According to T. Gautier, by the end of the century there was even a museum of old attires convened in the mosque of Ahmet III known as the Blue Mosque which displayed 140 mannequins with former Janissary, Pasha attires. Thus the Ottoman experience with western male dress, became a permanent fixture of the emergent secular minded reformist elite in and outside of government, except for the headgear which was the sensitive area of controversy comparable to the Japanese debate over male hair-cuts as symbols of reform.55 In the case of the Ottoman Turkish male elite, what strikes one is the obsessive controversy over the European hat that was associated as a last straw of iconoclastic reformism that is reminiscent of the controversy over samurai top-knots and women’s hair in Meiji Japan. By the early twentieth century, Turkish nationalists wore a fur cap inspired of Caucasian styles the so-called Enverite fur cap, instead of the ‘old-fashioned’ fez of the older elite that they had overthrown in the coup-based revolution of 1908. Those who were even more reform minded took the daring step of wearing a European hat especially when out of the country as it was prohibited by Sultan Abdulhamid II, the despotic modernist ruler of the last three decades before the 1908 revolution. The bowler hat was a symbol of defiance, but it was also a convenient means to blend into the crowd to escape the spies of Abdulhamid in the streets of Paris.56 The prevalent use of a distinct nascent headgear by the Ottomans throughout this age and the controversy over the European hat reveals the symbolic nature of Ottoman reforms in a sea of western oriented laws, edicts that transformed Ottoman

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polity profoundly from what it was before the nineteenth century. The western dress plus the fez reflected the typical Ottoman approach at this time of using western cultural elements and ideas as supportive components to Ottoman polity. The official ideology was not to incur an official process of westernization, unlike the early Meiji reformers, but to strengthen the empire in its own indigenous character. The ideal of Ottomanism, though it failed in the long run, was to have an empire, albeit with some strong Islamic colors, constituting of the many religious communities who had been declared to be equal under law to muslims by the nineteenth century reform edicts of 1839 and 1858. A photograph of Tevfik Pasha, the ambassador to the court of St. James in London in 1912, together with ambassadors from Europe and Japan, reflects this eclectic mixture to maintain the status quo in a stronger and firmer state. In the photograph, Tevfik Pasha wears his Fez in addition to his uniform of protocol that distinguishes his attire from the other ambassadors including the Japanese ambassador who is in pure European style.57 By the Kemalist republican revolution of 1923 that rejected every eclectic mixture which the Ottomans had devised, the fez was banned as a symbol of the break with Islamic theocracy. But it can be argued that the issue was actually dynastic. The fez experience reveals very conveniently the pattern of Ottoman eclecticism which envisioned a symbiotic amalgam of western culture and the nascent forms as a combined public image. The pure Western imagery of the Meiji elite that was balanced with the pure Japanese one was not attempted in the Ottoman case. The dynasty and the bureaucratic-military elite saw western culture as an irrevocable component to the Ottoman entity of the empire’s reform that however did not favor a program of complete westernization. A similar process can be recognized in female attire with however the distinction that Ottoman elite women were not expected to be symbols of westernization as public images in the sense of the Meiji elite women. The nineteenth century transformation of Ottoman female attire in Istanbul, the urban capital where most of the elite families lived, entailed first the discarding of the so-called Oriental salvar, or baggy pants and the three skirted flowing household dress, üçetek, which are familiar forms in the Orientalist oil-paintings by European artists such as Delacroix, Matisse and others. In place of the traditional house attire, Ottoman women privately adopted the nineteenth century European dress at home with the puffy skirts, the thin waisted corsets, and the chignon hairstyle. The Tanzimat lady of the nineteenth century wore the same fashions as the Meiji elite women of Tokyo except that she had to do it at home and not in public.58 Public life for Ottoman women dictated the requirement to wear a long skirted veil which covered practically every part of the body to fit the strict rules of covering required of muslim women. Yet, during this age while Ottoman elite women wore the veil whenever they were in public, even this garb of religious modesty and seclusion ended up being westernized. According to Şeni, the veil was transformed to resemble the European women’s coats as a public garb. By the late 1800s, the imperial government was forced to issue a series of edicts which had little effect, admonishing the Istanbulite women who were flaunting risqué veils that incurred the criticism of the muslim populace. Still the women insistently wore public garbs that looked more like coats and their faces were covered just so with a transparent silk veil.

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Late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Ottoman women’s magazines of Istanbul reflect the transitions in the transformation of female attire. The ideal is the high-browed Edwardian lady with her loosely put up chignon, the 203 atama of Japanese women after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, who stood graceful and erect in her excruciatingly corseted thin waist and long skirts.59 For the women of the Young Turk Revolution, a simpler middle class ideal was preferred perhaps reflective of the nationalist and mass oriented ideology of this group. The politically active women of the Young Turk organization such as Halide Edip, though from Istanbul elite circles, preferred the spartan look of a black veil much shorter than the garbs of the Ottoman ladies and her face usually uncovered even in public.60 By the late 1910s, the Turkist urban veil transforms itself into a quasi flapper demi-monde skirt and short hairstyles and becomes the stuff of “national fashions” as a popular journal of the day declared. The revolutionary Young Turk government in 1908 was forced to use military measures to control public attacks especially on educated muslim women who poured out into the Streets after the declaration of the Constitution. There was an enraged male public outcry over women who now went about with their arms and legs naked and dared to even “talk” to men directly in the streets.61 At home the western dress which was by now the permanent attire of the Ottoman elite women also underwent middle class modifications with the Young Turks. The mother figure in an education journal of the day is shown at home in a simple long western style dress with none of the frivolity of the Pasha ladies. The Young Turk woman suffices with a kerchief tied around her hair much like her contemporaries in Eastern Europe that serves as her modest head cover when entertaining relatives and friends at home.62 Compared to the male dress, the Ottoman and Turkish Republican controversy over women’s attire is even more intense as it became part of the reform agenda which abolished in 1926 Islamic law together with the Christian and Jewish religious legal prerogatives with respect to marriage and family, that had served as the multi-legal basis for the complex customary civil code of the empire. By the early years of the 1923 Republic, it was clear that the modicum of veil left over from the gradual dress transformation in the ranks of the elite would be a symbol of the “halfbaked eclectic Ottoman reforms which had failed”. Nor surprisingly, the Kemalist leadership made an issue of banning the veil for the female government employees of the Republican state, who were expected to serve the cause of Revolution. Women in complete western dress now became symbols of pure westernization policies on par with the nineteenth century elite women of Meiji Japan. The difference however was that the republican revolutionary guard under the leadership of the first president Kemal Ataturk had made a permanent irrevocable choice of official public attire that symbolized westernization as the only road to Turkish modernization via secularism and state leadership.63 In comparison to the Japanese form of an eclecticism of duality, the Ottoman use of western cultural forms for women during the nineteenth century was again eclectic but of a different symbiotic quality than that for Ottoman men. The veil and the western dress were not interchangeable. Women were free to wear whatever they wanted at home, but the public mores dictated that they had to wear the veil in public with its religious-political symbolism. The use

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of western dress at home however, represented what seems to be a collective trend for members of the elite in the transformation of the cultural identity at home in their private lives. The photographs of Ottoman royal women from the dynasty and their circle of elite women from the bureaucratic families shows us the full scale adoption of European fashions. But unlike the Meiji aristocracy who had similar pictures taken which were also used as public images, similar photographs of Ottoman princesses in tiara and gown were for the private eyes of only very close family members and had no public meaning ascribed to them. It was as late as 1910 that Kadriye Ihsan the secretary to the Ottoman Women’s Association was to be the first woman, in veil of course, to allow her photograph to be published in the press.64 The use of western dress more liberally at home in privacy especially with respect to mixed company reveals that the self-perception of Ottoman Turkish men and women as progressives occurred first in the private realm of the family. Obviously, the public realm of reform did not allow for complete expression of westernization in dress in line with the more traditionalist quality to the reform program. Needless to say Ottoman women did not join balls and receptions in palaces à la Rokumeikan, as well. However, the Dolmabahce, the new European style palace of the Sultan’s which was built during the nineteenth century in Istanbul, has a curious clouded glass partition in the ball room that reflects the uneasiness which the partial westernization choice created sometimes. The Ottoman royal women and their entourage who were dressed in their European finery but “safely” beyond European sight, were allowed to sit in this concealed separate corner away from the public eye of the local and foreign dignitaries, while they could enjoy listening to the music and the conversations in the ball room. Ironically, while Islamic dictates were very strict about the behavior and dress of men and women in public, religious custom left the individual free at home where cultural choices could be made with much more freedom. As long as one wore a veil in public, it did not matter what one wore under the veil, or so it seemed at the time.

Home The invasion of western cultural forms into the privacy of the Ottoman household is reflected in the adoption of western furniture and subsequent subtle changes in the inner arrangement of the rooms as well as interior decoration in elite urban houses during the same period. Duben discusses the character of the Ottoman Turkish family as a segmental structure of households which together constitute an extended family. Compared to the Japanese extended family where even for elite families separate branches tended to set up their own households, in the Ottoman arrangement most subordinate households usually of the sons tended to live with the patriarch of the family under the same roof, which meant that these homes had to accommodate fairly large populations of sons and their families plus the servants and other dependent members. In many ways, the arrangement of the home reflected the same household segmentation on a physical plane. Each household member of usually a conjugal family of married children, elders, or unmarried close relatives lived in independent rooms that surrounded the main living room, or the sofa or the “head room” or bas oda

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as it was called. This was where the family members congregated. Similar to the multifunctional character of Japanese tatami rooms, the household rooms were multifunctional and flexible in use, serving as the quarters for day and night for each conjugal family or single or widowed relatives and servants. The individual oda, or rooms were flexible units and could be added or subtracted pending transitions in the extended family. Not interconnected to each other through corridors, the rooms represented the privacy of the individual members as a household and at the same time their equal subordination to the male patriarch who had the prerogative of using the main living room.65 The living room was the public space of the home where visitors were entertained that compared to the tokonoma room in the nihonkan, the Japanese section, or the public dining room or parlor in the yōkan, Western section of an elite Japanese house of the Meiji period. Similar to the male character of the “omote” or the public rooms in the Meiji elite homes, the Ottoman sofa was also the place for the male gatherings of family and friends in a society that practiced the rules of sexual segregation which were perceived to be according to the customs of Islam. In Istanbul and Anatolian houses the living room was, therefore, also called the selamlik or the male quarters as opposed to the inner rooms, named the harem, where the women were dominant. Hence both in private homes as well as in the Istanbul palaces, there were clear cut divisions between the harem, the private quarters for women, and the public spaces were reserved for males only. Even nineteenth century Istanbul villas based on European designs tried to adapt to social mores in this respect and had an extra room in the interior that served as the harem for the women which could be visited only by the immediate male relatives of the family. In this sense, the practice of sexual segregation by the Ottoman families and their adaptation of architectural designs to that end were somewhat similar to the practice of sexual segregation among elite Meiji and Taisho families in room use as noted by Lebra.66 European furniture infiltrated elite homes during the nineteenth century with some adjustments. By the end of the century for most elite homes the use of furniture was quite prevalent in all the rooms. Sleeping habits changed for example as massive beds, brass or mahogany was recommended, replaced the traditional custom of spreading out mattresses and quilts of the floor similar to the Japanese style. Hence the multifunctional quality of the rooms declined as they became permanent bedrooms. If one applies Elias to the Ottoman environment in this case, and sees the home as a reflection of an individual’s perception of rationality and emotive sensibilities, one aspect of the European style interior of the Ottoman home was that as Ottoman Turkish family members lived in a culture which enjoyed communality. Therefore, the European chairs, and sofas were lined close to the walls of the rooms facing inward to a common communal space. In a culture where communal conversation and deference to the patriarch prevailed, arranging separate sets of seats that would have to face each other back to back as frequently shown in the fashion journals of the time was unthinkable. In the European style palace Dolmabahce that was built during the nineteenth century, the Sultan’s imposing armchair took the central position in any given reception room with other chairs, which were leaned against the walls and lined in a circle, emanating toward the left and right of the Sultan’s seat. What strikes the observer of this decorative arrangement is not so much the obvious deference shown to the Sultan’s seat which is central and with the others facing it,

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but rather that the communal circular form of seat arrangement was preferred for the chairs of subordinates. Instead of having the ruler sit alone and supreme facing a hierarchy of subjects seated in front of him, in each room of the new European style palace his chair is placed in the middle of a familial form of arrangement as that of a patriarch.67 The intrusion of new ideals in human relations also made itself quite apparent in the Ottoman elite household environment. The Ottoman home was an active arena to practice the desire of progress as many accounts of the nineteenth century show. The nineteenth century home was frequently the first arena to break the strict segregation of men and women in Islam. Thus as in the case of the veil, Ottoman households had become the space where intermingling between the sexes, unveiled women in western clothing who were frequently being educated for the first time in a western curriculum in addition to the traditional subjects of religion, and the ambitious sons imbued with the ideas of progress and reform, had to face the existent authority of the patriarch—a combination that surely carried the potential for confrontation and conflict.64 During the nineteenth century Istanbul elite families started visiting close friends as mixed couples, diluting the male domain character of the Selamlik or the male public quarters of houses. By the turn of the century, women’s magazines illustrated living room arrangements which were clearly no longer for just male friends but indicated the gradual transformation of the original Selamlik or the male quarters into the formal living room, or the salon of Turkish homes today, from the French term which was adapted into Turkish at the time. This was the public room assigned for entertaintment and visitors which was furnished with the most expensive status symbols of the family with western furniture. The former male quarters, now the salon living room, had become a public space of sexual integration where men as well as women and reserved to present the best formal image of the family to society.68 One can sense that the transition in the Ottoman home to the “Europeanized” salon became the center of tension similar to the parlors and the tokonoma rooms of Meiji elite homes that required formal public behavior. Ayata sees the salon as the domain of a psychological tension for family members even today. You have to be on your best behavior, dress properly, and minding European-inspired manners. The salon therefore has continued to conflict with the relaxed, informal, emotional, and warm inner self of the individual family members. It is noteworthy that for their emotional relaxation, Ottoman family members who underwent this transition to the salon still continued to use the inner rooms that derived from the harem as the domain of intimate and relaxed behavior and relations. Ayata notes that whereas the salon is arranged in communal style with the best European style furniture, similar to the patriarchal arrangement of the nineteenth century palaces, the inner rooms in present-day houses, which are frequently called the “sitting rooms” are decorated mainly with a functional purpose in mind with European style furniture and possibly a more distinct Turkish style of a raised bedding next to the wall looking out the window, of less quality and attention. It is in this inner domain however without a clear-cut public image of any claim that one can sit relaxed and free from the dictates of etiquette for the salon. The tension of civilized behavior terms apropos Elias between the inner emotional self and the rational had invaded the sanctuary of the home. In Ottoman society the use of western cultural forms had intruded into both the public and

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the private lives of the individuals which reflected their eclectic composition to be more western in its entire form in comparison to the Meiji elite who had divided the public spaces in the home into the parlor, the tokonoma room, and so on of the Wa and Yō division. On close observation however, the Ottoman elite’s arrangement of western forms, in this case the furniture and the use of rooms, was an eclecticism of intimate symbiosis between the Turkish and the Western elements where the latter was made to conform to Turkish social and emotional sensibilities—the communal arrangement of the furniture and the extra sitting room for relaxation derived from the former harem.

Etiquette Just as the Meiji era etiquette texts reveal the social and ethical realm of Wa and Yō eclecticism, the nineteenth century and early twentieth century Ottoman etiquette and manner textbooks reflect the symbiotic character and dilemma of the educated Ottoman. While Ottoman etiquette did not have the written voluminous literature that Reigi did in the Chinese and Japanese traditions, Adab, or propriety was very important for the close elite circle around the palace in the empire. Adab in Islam meant to be cultured. Citing F. Gabrieli, Ohtsuka notes that Adab, which had a meaning of custom or habit in pre-Islamic days, attained delicately varied meanings with the evolution of Islam. The emphasis was on the ethical and practical meaning of the word, and it meant courtesy, good upbringing, and so forth. In the Ottoman period, imperial polity as well as communal customs dictated a strong deference to elders as well as those in authority. One never turned one’s back to either. The Ottoman gesture of greeting, the temenna, was the three phase hand greeting, the first one touching the heart, then the lips, and finally the J head as an expression of loyalty and deference. Kissing the hand of again those who were older or in authority was customary. Eyes were to be kept to the floor while talking to a superior or a woman, and hands and feet were to be kept away from sight as much as possible. In pre-nineteenth century elite homes as well as those of the non-elite, one sat on pillows in raised beddings which leaned against the walls of living rooms; one sat on the floor, sitting cross legged or on one’s knees, the latter usually in the case of women similar to the Japanese style. Taking off shoes at home was customary and survived not only because it was considered as part of cleanliness, but also because the gestures of prayer in the mosque or at home in privacy required sitting and prostrating on a carpetted floor after taking off shoes. Both styles were customary as it continues to be in Anatolian households even today. Ali Sami the first photographer of the palace in the late nineteenth century has a picture of his family members dressed in historic Turkish attire with women sitting on the floor serving coffee and the men reading a book while cross legged on the bedding next to the wall. Predictably, this was a studied pose for an Orientalist image that Sami wanted to portray, because by the early 1900s his other family pictures show that everyone was usually in western dress sitting in European furniture.69 Although the clear transition from Ottoman manners to more European ones is not clear, one suspects that when in the early half of the nineteenth century Mahmut II ordered western dress for dynastic officials, which was followed by the construc-

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tion of a western style palace for the Sultans, the mannerisms of the court changed accordingly. Another concept that is related to manners is that of Had, or one’s station in life or the limits of one’s social position. Therefore custom required that one behave according to one’s Had, in suitable deference shown to those in a superior position.70 Whereas Adab and Had referred to the proper gestures of manners to show deference to others according to one’s station in life, Ottoman custom provided a separate term for the moral breeding that a person had to have which was Terbiye, a term difficult to translate. Terbiye means more than simply manners as it was inculcated through religion or Din, meaning Islam, and Aile, the family. Thus the concept is closer to the moral content of “propriety and breeding” or Reigi in the Japanese sense, although the domain of physical behavior required of breeding is somewhat separate from the subject of Terbiye or breeding, as it is more dictated by Adab or proper manners. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Ottomans made the distinction between Din terbiyesi, when they devised ethics textbooks for the newly instated secondary schools and Adab-i-Muaşeret, meaning etiquette and manners in the secular sense. And here the distinction becomes more clear. A textbook from 1913 which has also incorporated the Young Turk ideology of the 1908 Revolution is quite explicit as to what religious breeding meant: it was to be a good and moral person and a good citizen. The book explains to elementary school children that to have religious breeding means did not simply mean to perform your religious duties, but also to be a good and kind person “who does not even harm an ant”. For the author, love is what makes the hierarchal world of the Ottoman child go around. One was supposed to love one’s parents, friends, relatives, the Sultan, the Ottoman state, and of course God, presented in that order. In this world of love, obedience to one’s elders, or itaat, was a strict requirement. Family breeding or aile terbiyesi in the same text presented interesting versions of the same themes. One was strictly forbidden to argue with one’s elders as if they were your friends, whereas argument between friends was a possibility. One had to be grateful to the protection and love of elders and should confess one’s wrongs in a courageous manner. The Ottoman child was also expected to take care or his of her parents when they are older without complaints. European laws in which children are held legally responsible for disabled parents were cited in addition to the usual religious arguments for filial behavior. The family above all was the source of one’s honor and respect (şeref-namus). Hence breeding dictated that the young person behave in ways that would not bring shame to one’s family honor. Toward the homeland, nation, the state, and the Sultan, one owed respect and loyalty as one does to one’s father.71 While the ethical content of breeding was clear, for the Ottomans there was no clear cut distinction between Turkish manners or European manners in the Japanese sense. Things were left rather vague. However, late nineteenth century Adab books that introduced alafranga (alla franca a term that contrasts with “alla turca” meaning things Turkish), or European manners to elite circles did so not as an alternative to native manners but as a main teaching that ought to be adopted as “civilized behavior” for the worldy Ottoman in this new international world. Ahmet Mithat, known for his volumnious publications on the worthy aspects of western culture, a

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man who tailored for himself the role of being an Ottoman Diderot, wrote a famous book on the subject, Alafranga Adab-i Muaşeret, on European Style Manners, which was published first in 1897 and became one of the most popular books of the day. Mithat starts his work with the admonishment that for 30–40 years the style of alafranga or European manners has been unfairly criticized as being a type of loose behavior, obviously the European style of the elite had not gone unnoticed by the general public. Ahmet Mithat states that he would like to correct this image once in for all to show how alafranga is a reasonable and necessary form of civilized behavior expected in our new age. The book deals with tips on proper behavior especially for the travelling Ottoman who frequently went to Europe in trains. The subjects deal with manners suitable at the Hotel, at restaurants, in balls, and the explanation of European customs such as Christmas and New Year. In many ways this is a book comparable to the advice of the Meiji texts which were meant for the aristocratic elite, especially the one advised by Count Ōkuma on international social interaction, who were expected to have intimate interaction with westerners. In contrast to the Meiji texts on European manners for the aristocracy, however, there are limits to Mithat’s adoption of western manners. He detests dancing as a form of corruptive behavior. Mithat declares in a fit of defiance that plays on the exotic strangeness of some Chinese dishes “As we do not need Chinese barbecued leeches for civilization! So we do not need western dancing!”72 The question is where does the issue of morality come in this context of European style manners? For Mithat the answer is simple as he passingly notes again in the introduction of his work that while traveling in Europe it is mandatory for one to keep one’s conversations within the boundaries of Din and Had. In other words, within the European manners of alla franca, the Ottoman individual was expected to adhere to the norms of religion and breeding learned at home. The close symbiosis of the Ottoman eclectic pattern is revealed once more in this advice. While western culture, in this case, the learning of European etiquette was presented as a proper and by implication an irrevocable process for the Ottoman reader, it had to be adjusted internally by nascent religious values and notions of behavior suitable to one’s station in life, just as furniture had been adjusted to serve communal life in the family. Again as with the fez, the Ottoman was to be western in general demeanor but had to make sure he could keep a distinguishing identity through one’s inner mores. The challenge of the “civilizing process” had become an internal issue that was irrevocable and at the same time a singular fairly inflexible mixture of the form and context of European and Ottoman elements.

CONCLUSION The nineteenth century Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turkish elite created eclectic patterns which incorporated western culture into their personal lives as reflective of the “civilizing process” required for the reform milieu of the age. The Japanese device was more overt in its categorizations of Wa and Yō whereas the Ottoman approach appeared more of a choice leaning toward the discarding of nascent ways and the adoption of western forms. On the other hand, it was clear that the Ottomans were actually combining the two elements, one nascent the other western, in a symbiotic fashion. In the Ottoman form of eclecticism, the European

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cultural forms such as household arrangements and the content and form of manners had to adjust to an inner mental nascent concern. At the same time, this modification was also reflected by native forms such as the fez or the veil that were attached to the western one. This seems to have compensated for giving up the old ways by Turkifying or Ottomanizing “internally” the western elements in turn. The Japanese approach did allow greater freedom to the individual who could move in and out of Japanese and western identities both in dress and home, even in manners. However, the pattern was not a liberal one for it carried with it a high degree of rigidity in each category itself and the fact that each had to be kept apart. One could not easily transport aesthetics or principles from one to the other at will nor could the western forms be so easily “softened” by nativization and as in the Ottoman case. The interchangeable quality to the Japanese form of eclecticism also left unanswered the question of whether the cultural identity of progressive Japan could continue to be strongly dependent on the western public image. As it became more obvious toward the end of the nineteenth century, the eclectic pattern of the early Meiji was debatable in a later Japanese agenda that chose to heighten the weight of the Wa category in place of the Yō with the intensification of nationalist desires. The Ottoman eclectic mixtures was less “western” than the pure western category of the Meiji, and less flexible as it constituted a singular system of eclecticism, but it seems to have had the stronger pontential to be irrevocable. Once the mixture was established as a new lifestyle, the next Ottoman generation, at least within the boundaries of this circle, could only debate within these new terms and not in terms of an alternative shift to a more nascent former cultural milieu that had already been discarded. In other words, once the Janissary costume and the Turkish furniture and dress were discarded, they no longer constituted an alternative self in the manner of the Wa forms of Japanese eclecticism. It is clear that the Japanese pure western image of Yō that counters Wa represented a psychological attitude that was more accepting and flexible toward a swifter acceptance of western culture in its larger entity even if this was for a limited period of time and within a limited sphere of everyday life. In contrast, the Ottoman approach to western culture seems more restrictive and inflexible from the start which signified a slower invitation to the introduction of western culture. However when permanently accepted in this modified form, it permeated all facets of personal life as in the case of dress, household furnishings, and manners. A comparison of the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turkish elitist eclecticisms also shows that the political and social meaning of the home environment differed. The Meiji home was also very much a public arena for reinforcing the public Wa and the Yō images of Meiji reform in addition to being the primary environment for reigi moral and social obligations. In contrast, the religious customs of dress and sexual segregation that determined the mores of individuals in the Ottoman case were primarily concerned with the public image and behavior of individuals. The sanctity of private home life meant that one did not need to adhere to public images of religion at home to that extent. This phenomenon curiously left a free home environment where cultural change could be exercised without interference from the outside. The eclectic pattern of the Ottoman veil was similar. It did not matter what one wore under it as long as one was veiled when in public.

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The familiar taboos of both societies against that which was “alien” or “threatening” also influenced the way the Japanese and the Ottomans shaped their eclectic mixture. For the Japanese, being western had a ritualistic quality to it as it was sometimes a studied performance that did not necessarily have a direct bearing immediately upon the inner Japanese social world, although it certainly did in the long run. The western dress, the parlor, and etiquette while in the long run they became “nativized”, for the duration of the Meiji period, these forms had a specific political agenda to revise the treaties and to realize successful interaction with the Great Powers. The initial purpose of these western forms was usually not to have them permanently infiltrate into the inner moral and social realm of Japanese among themselves, although exceptions were quite obvious as in the case of the Tsuda family. As the Reigi texts implied, western culture at the personal level was for public purposes, and was meant on many occasions for western eyes only. The eclectic pattern of Wa and Yō also meant that one could keep relations with westerners to defined and prescribed spheres. The Ottoman taboo was to make sure that one would not convert to Christianity while adopting western forms and that one did not lose one’s Ottoman dynastic identity. The obsessive concern with head-gear and women’s veil even more so, brought out the controversy and taboo issues very well. In etiquette, one also had to keep to religious mores, lest western ways overtake. Hence while western culture was infiltrating the home and personal life of the Ottomans perhaps at a greater scale than the Meiji Japanese, the Ottoman challenge of living thus imbued in western culture at home was to make sure that one did not convert to Christianity or lose one’s dynastic identity. Both the Ottomans and the Meiji Japanese experience showed however that western cultural forms carried important political messages for an individual. While the Japanese message on western culture as a reform image for Japanese society was more clear, it was also meant for a western audience, even if somewhat theatrical sometimes as in the case of the Rokumeikan affair. The Ottoman message was compromised to a nascent identity from the start and the western audience was not that important for their adoption of these cultural forms. This is most striking in the case of Ottoman women who swiftly adopted western fashions and discarded their old harem attire while remaining completely out of the sight of the Europeans. Hence they were hardly in a position to be a public message of westernization to westerners. On the other hand the Ottomans, too, were quite sensitive about western opinion although in a more convoluted manner than the Meiji Japanese elite. In a rebuttal of Renan’s harsh critic of polygamy in Islam as barbaric, Namik Kemal, a Young Ottomanist intellectual of the nineteenth century wrote an essay furiously defending Islam. The defence is ironic for intellectuals like Ahmet Mithat and Namik Kemal himself, were also critical of arranged marriages and polygamy in essays for the Turkish audience. One has the impression that their defense was more for nursing a wounded pride than any firm conviction on the matter. Urban marriage behavior in the Istanbul households of the late nineteenth century also confirmed the critical attitude of intellectuals toward polygamy at home for there was a distinct decline of polygamous marriages. Response to western criticism of Islam on the subject of marriage was even more complicated by the fact that Namik Kemal attacked Renan in the Istanbul press, which did not give much chance for Renan, who wrote in

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Paris, to read the rebuttal. In a similar vein, Mustafa Kemal, who was to become the first president of the Republic after 1923, writes in his memoirs that he was very annoyed when Europeans made fun of his friend’s fez while travelling to Europe. So when they came to Paris the first thing they did was to buy a hat and become anonymous.73 Sensitivity to western opinion also reflects the different role Westerners played in this nineteenth century quest of cultural adoption in both societies. While many Europeans also served the Ottoman government in its reform projects, in general Westerners were not that intensely involved in offering liberal amounts of public and friendly advice to the cultural choices of the Ottoman elite. In contrast, the Japanese and the Westerners, particularly those resident in Japan, appear sometimes to be partners in a joint venture of Japanese reform. One could not possibly imagine Mrs. Clearidge writing a letter to the Ottoman Porte to advise Ottoman ladies not to wear corsets that would harm their health, though they had started wearing them already just like the elite Japanese women of Tokyo. Even though the Ottoman realm was much closer to Europe geographically and there was certainly more contact at a private and public level between the populations of both worlds, there remained a “psychological” distance between the Ottomans and the Westerners when it came to cultural choices about reform in contrast to the convivial atmosphere between enthusiastic Western advice and a receptive Japanese attitude that reigns especially in the early Meiji reform era. Finally, it seems apparent that the use of western cultural forms also brought with it new tensions into the personal lives for the individuals in both societies. The nineteenth century Japanese and the Ottoman now had to reorient the customary rational and emotive phenomena of their nascent cultures, compounded with the rational and emotive of a foreign one that one had to live in. The personal requirement was a heavy task. The individual had to keep the tension between the rational and the emotive, plus the need to preserve a sense of cultural and personal identity. These tasks had to be consolidated in multi-cultural environments which also experienced a faster pace of social and economic change as time went by. Most members of either elite society probably managed to handle these conflicts and remain as normal healthy individuals. In retrospect, however, in both the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turkish experiences, the individual family members of such households understandably must have felt most secure in the inner rooms of the home where little definable cultural consistency was attempted.

NOTES 1

Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976). 2 Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 3 For a recent work on the subject of western culture and the Ottoman/Turkish elite during the nineteenth century see, Serafettin Turan, Türk Kültür Tarihi (Turkish Cultural History) (Ankara: Bilgi Yayinevi, 1990). For a recent work that also deals with the subject of western culture in everyday life, see, Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1888–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For the standard work on the subject of Turkish modernity see, Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). For western culture in the Islamic world see, Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: W. E. Norton, 1982);

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4 5

6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21

H. A. R. Gibb and H. Bowen, Islamic Society and the West: Islamic Society in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle and Co., orig. 1904, reprint 1985) pp. 154–155, 279. See, Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) and Robert E. Ward, and Dankwart A. Rustow. Political modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964) for the standard modernizationist treatment. The discussion of the Hakone Conference in the beginning of the Princeton series of modernizationist studies of Japan reflects a critic of the modernizationist approach from the perspective of democracy. See Edward Said, Orientalism, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) for the criticism of modernism and western imperialist vision of the “Orient”. Ward and Rustow, 1964 for the political history of Japan and Turkey; Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), for the history of the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey. For western culture and Japan see, George Sansom, The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe: Honda Toshiaki and Other Discoverers 1720–1798 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969). Extensive treatment in, Yanagida Kunio, Japanese manners and Customs in the Meiji Era (Tokyo: Ōbunsha, 1957); Ōkubo Toshiaki, Meiji no shisō to bunka (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Bunkan, 1988); Shibusawa Keizō, Japanese Life and Culture in the Meiji Era (Tokyo: Ōbunsha, 1958). Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The values of Preindustrial Japan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); Ronald P. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965); Hayami Yujiro, A Century of Agricultural Growth in Japan: Its Relevance to Asian Development (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975); Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan 1600–1868 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Shaw, 1977, Vol. 2. IIber Ortayli, Imparatorlugun En Uzun Yüzyili (The longest century of the empire) (Istanbul: Hil Yayinlari, 1983). Lewis, 1968, pp. 74–127 on reform. Lewis, 1968; Shaw, 1977. In passim for background to Ottoman history. Lewis, 1968; Shaw, 1977. In passim for background to Ottoman history. Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics, Wisconsin University Press, Madison, 1985); Carter Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Nur Yalman “Ningen seishin no kansei: isuramu ni okeru cho-nashonarizumu no mondai”, Shisō, 1993. 1 No. 823: 34–50. Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Ilber Ortayli, “The Family in Ottoman Society” in Nermin Abadan-Unat, ed., Family in Turkish Society (Ankara: Turkish Social Science Foundation, 1985; Siddik Sami Onar, “Islam Hukuku ve Mecelle” (The Mecelle civil code and Islamic Law), Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Türkiye Ansiklopedisi (The encyclopedia of Turkey from the Tanzimat to the Republic), vol. 3, 1983, pp. 580–587. Chamberlain, p. 279; Ward and Rustow, p. 461. Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 7–16. Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, Vol. 1, The Civilizing Process, (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1982); same, State Formation and Civilization, Vol. 2, The Civilizing Process (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1982); same, The Society of Individuals (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Elias, The Society of Individuals, 1991, pp. 8–9, 27–34 for the history of man’s malleable self image as a composite of social structure, pp. 76–86 for the emergence of the rational image of man and the perception of the separation and interaction of the rational and the emotive in the individual.

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

Elias, State Formation and Civilization, 1982, pp.229–295; same, The Society of Individuals, 1991, pp. 115–129. Chamberlain, pp. 63, 122–126; Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983) pp. 33, 96; William Reynolds Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1976) pp. 17 Chamberlain, p. 45. Seidensticker, p. 93; Yanagida, p. 28. Meirokuzasshi, pp. 269–275. “Yoshiki fujin sokuhanhō (Regulations for western style coiffures for ladies) in Ishi Kendō, et al., Meiji bunka zenshū (Tokyo: Nihon Hyoron Shinsha, 1955) Vol. 8, p. 425. Tomita Hitoshi, Rokumeikan: Nise seiyōka no seikai, Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1984. Yoshiko Furuki, ed., The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda’s Correspondence to Her American Mother, New York: Weatherhill, 1991); Lebra, p. 189. Chamberlain, 122–126; Seidensticker, p. 97. Chamberlain, 122–126; Attic Letters, p. 76. Attic Letters, pp. 268, 289, 291. Lesley Blanch, Pierre Loti: The Legendary Romantic, (San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanowich, 1983) p. 196, Chamberlain, p. 126. Susan Hanley, “Material Culture: Stability in Transition” in Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, eds, Japan in Transition From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 447–462; Edgar Lajtha, La Vie Au Japon (Paris: Payot, 1936), p. 46. For strict dress code and requirements, Attic Letters, pp. 138, 145 robe décolltée, Lebra, p. 230 tiara and robe décolleté. Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, transl. by Eiichi Kiyooka, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960). Nuances of the politics of the dress is apparent in the case of Fukuzawa, the early Meiji liberal advocate of learning from the West. Fukuzawa preferred to wear the hakama which would seem to reflect a free and autonomous self image that contrasted with the high collar dress of government bureaucrats. On the hand a few decades late when Toyama Mitsuru and others Asianists insisted on being seen in public in hakama, the very same attire had by now acquired the symbolism of being ideologically nativist and Asianist which was critical of the superficial westernized policies of the “haikara”, high-collar, Meiji government; John D. Pierson. Tokutomi Sohō 1863–1957: A Journalist for Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 228–230; Abdürreşid ibrahim, Alem-i-Islam, Japonya’da intisar-i-Islamiyet (The World of Islam and the Spreading of Islam in Japan), Ebulula Matbaasi, Istanbul: 1910), pp. 289–290. In Ibrahim’s text, Tomizu surfaces as an avid Asianist against Russian interests who favors befriending Tatar-Turkic populations; Komatsu Kaori, Komatsu Hisao, Caponya (Tokyo: Daisanshokan, 1991), p. 171. Tomizu Hirondo (1861–1935) was professor of law in Tokyo University who was forced to resign from the university in 1903 as a result of the crisis over his declaration that Japan should go to war with Russia that initially alarmed the civilian and millitary authorities who were biding for time to resolve issues with Russia. Tomizu was popularly known as Professor “Baikal.” Known for his nationalist views, he advocated that Japan should expand all the way to the east of Lake Baikal in order to contain Russia’s power. He become a lawyer and was elected five times to the Shūgiin, House of Representatives. He also advocated Japanese imperialist policy for Africa like Britain. For Tomizu’s pamphlet on Afurika no zentō (the Future of Africa) published in 1899 that concluded Japan should expand influence and profit in Africa, see, J. Calvitt Clarke III, “Mutual Interests? Japan and Ethiopia before the Italo-Ethiopian War 1935–36, Florida Conference of Historians, Presentation, (2000):1–14. See footnote 3 based on Furukawa Tetsushi, “Japanese Political and Economic Interests in Africa: The Prewar Period,” Network Africa 7 (1991):6–7. Hanley, pp. 450–454 for houses; for the civil code and the family system, Chamberlain, p. 279; Sansom, pp. 444–450. Attic Letters, pp. 22, 116, 311; Seidensticker, p. 245; Lebra, pp. 147–162. Lebra, pp. 156–162; Seidensticker, p. 245; Attic Letters, p. 22.

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40 Ibrahim, p. 265. Alem-i Islam, pp. 215–216. Count Matsuura Akira was an active political figure of the early Meiji years, the former daimyo of Hirado domain of Hizen who supported the SatsumaChōsū against the Tokugawa forces in the battles before the Meijii Restoration. Matsuura who was heir to the tea ceremony school of Chinshin-ryū, explains the gesture as a special cultural favor to Ibrahim who is considered a close friend and connects the traditional Japaneseness of the cultural event as representative of political Easternist/Asianist solidarity between the Tatars/ Turks and the Japanese: “We have hosted you according to our own tradition and rules because we consider you as close to us ... The Tatar Turkish people are racially our brothers and also Easternism which unites us today will be our great strong relationship in the future.” 41 Attic Letters, pp. 63, 289. 42 Chamberlain, pp. 258–262, 423; Seidensticker, pp. 42–45, 92. 43 Kōdansha Encyclopedia of Japan, article on etiquette, vol. 2. pp. 232–234. (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1983) article on Ogasawara school, Vol. 6. p. 68. 44 Ogasawara shō rei taizen, Meiji 14 and Meiji 27; Shinsen tatsu reishiki, Ogasawara, 2 volumes, Meiji 16. 45 Wayō danjo reishiki, Meiji 34. 46 Shinsen tatsu reishiki, Ogasawara, 2 volumes, Meiji 16. 47 Meiji reishiki, Meiji 32. 48 Seitō reishiki tzūkai, Meiji 26. 49 Shōgakkō gyojihō, Meiji 9; Shinhen reishiki sakuhō tzūkai, Meiji 45. 50 Seiyō danjo kōsaihō, Meiji 39. 51 Kōsaijutsu shūyō, Meiji 42. 52 Wayō reishiki, Meiji 28. 53 Turan, p. 221. 54 Turan, pp. 216–222. 55 Turan, p. 222. 56 Turan, p. 221. 57 Şefik Okday, Büyükbabam Son Sadrazam Ahmet Tevfik Pasa (My grandfather the grand vizier Ahmet Tevfik pasha), (Istanbul: Ata Ofset, 1986), p. 35. 58 Nora Şeni, “19 Yüzyil Sonunda Istanbul Mizah Basininda Moda ve Kadin Kiyafetleri” (Fashion and women’s dress in the satire press of Istanbul in the end of the nineteenth century), Kadin Bakis Acisindan (From the Perspective of Women), (Istanbul: Iletişim yayincilik, 1990): 44–67. 59 Mehasin (Virtue) an Ottoman ladies journal, (Istanbul: Durnarsiyan Matbaasi, 1324) 1908 issues. 60 Halide Edip-Adivar, Ateşten Gömlek (Shirt of Fire), (Istanbul: Atlas Kitabevi, orig. 1922, reprint 1973). 61 Şehmus Güzel, “1908 Kadinlari” (Women of 1908), Tarih ve Toplum (History and Society), no. 7, Vol. 2, (July, 1984): 6–12; Zafer Toprak, “Milli Moda ve Carsaf” (National fashions and the veil Boğazici, Winter 89 issue: 35–40. 62 Tedrisat-i, Ibdidaiye Mecmuasi: Nazariyat ve Mahmat Kismi (The journal of middle school education and curriculum: section on theory and information), Vols. 1–2, 1325 (1909). 63 Turan, p. 231. 64 For elite women in European dress see, Okday, p. 82; Abadan, p. 17; Engin Çizgen, Fotoğrafci Ali Sami 1866–1936 (Photographer Ali Sami), (Istanbul: Haşet Kitabevi, 1989). 65 Alan Duben, “Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Ottoman-Turkish Family and Household Structure”, Family in Turkish Society (Ankara: Turkish Social Science Foundation, 1985); same, with Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: marriage. Family and Fertility, 1888–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991). 66 Duben, “Nineteenth and Twentieth Century . . . ”, pp. 110–111. 67 Mehasin, 1906 issues, illustrations of European style furnishings for the home No. 3 pp. 132–137; Turan, 1990 for European furniture at home; the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul. 68 Jale Parla, Babalar ve Ogullar: Tanzimat Romaninin Epistemolojik Temelleri (Fathers and sons: the epistemological basis of the Tanzimat novel) (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 1990) for the theme

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of family conflict in the Ottoman novel; Ortayli, Imparatorlugun En Uzun Yüzyili (The longest century of the empire), p. 102 for sexual integration; Mehasin, 1909 for the salon; Sencer Ayata, “Statu yarismasi ve Salon Kullanimi, Toplum ve Bilim, 42 Summer 1988: pp. 5–25. Ayata applies the theory of Elias to present day “salon” use in the urban cities of Turkey, which offers an insight into the symbolic meaning of the earlier transition from the male quarters to the late Ottoman salon living room which also allowed for sexual integration. 69 Kazuo Ohtsuka, “How is Islamic Knowledge Acquired in Modern Egypt? Ulama, Sufis, Fundamentalists and Common People”, in Tadao Umesao et al., Japanese Civilization in the Modern World: Culturedness, no. 28 (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1990): pp. 67–68, citing F. Gabrieli, “Adab” in H. A. R. Gibb et al. The Encyclopedia of Islam (New Edition) (Leiden : Brill, 1960); Çizgen, 1989, picture of traditional Turkish family seated on the floor and on a raised bedding. The boys sit on the raised bedding, cross-legged, reading a newspaper as the girl who is in traditional Turkish female dress is seated on the floor “Japanese style” on her knees as she is preparing Turkish coffee; Ekrem Işin, “Adab-i-muaseret” (Manners), Tarih ve Toplum (History and Society), no. 44, Vol. 8 (August, 1987): pp. 31–37; same, “Abdullah Cevdet’in Cumhuriyet Adab-i-muasereti” (Abdullah Cevdet’s manners for the Republic), Tarih ve Toplum (History and Society), no. 48, Vol. 8, (December, 1987) : pp. 13–20. 70 Shaw, 1977, Vol.1 for Had. p. 166. 71 Ministry of Education, Ottoman, Devre-i-evveli 2nci sinif, Ameli Malumat-i-Diniye (Practical religious knowledge for the second grade middle school), (Istanbul: Şems matbaasi, 1332, [1913]). 72 Ahmet Mithat, Avrupa Adab-i-Muaşereti Yahut Ala Franga (European manners or Alla Franca), (Istanbul, 1894); also, Parla, p. 69. 73 For the Young Ottomans and the defense of Islam in the name of modernity, see Serif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962; Duben and Behar, 1991 for monogamous trends: Parla, 1990, for Mithat and Namik Kemal, pp. 69–70; Turan, 1990, for the fez versus the hat.

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❚ First published in Günter Distelrath and Peter Kleinen (eds), Fundamentalismus versus Wissenschaft?, Bonn, Bier’sche Verlagsanstalt, 2002, 191–211.

11

A Comparison of Turkish and Japanese Attitudes Toward Modern National Identity a

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uicide of individuals despairs us for it unmasks for a moment the despondency of life. This is even more so in the case of the suicides of men and women of letters, which has inevitably struck those who remain behind not only as a tragic loss of their public role but because it frequently brings home the despondency that results from the civilizational dilemma of the age. In this respect it is not unusual to find a number of suicides of such public figures especially in “oriental” societies such as Japan and Turkey, which has had to undergo a dynamic yet at times traumatic pace of civilizational shift in the process of constructing modernity. That process began with the tension of a bi-cultural and even bi-civilizational mode as a result of the importation and adaptation of modern industrial civilization from the West by generations of elites over a short period of time into the existing alien/native cultural milieu. I have termed this historical trauma the double-tension of the anguish of the civilizing process adapted from the use of the term “civilizing process” by Norbert Elias who discusses in great depth the emergence of the image of the human individual as divided between the rational and the emotive, which inseparably interact. The psychological modifications, which were necessary for the modern individual, entailed the control of impulses and the emergence of the public persona through changes in courtly culture, role of sports and dance, and the increasing public controls exerted over private exercise of violence. For Elias, social and psychological changes molded the behavior of the individual in the context of societal interests, which were shaped by the growth of a market economy. Whereas we tend to think of the individual as a phenomena independent or at least autonomous of society in the Western tradition of thought, Elias’ studies have infused a historicity to that idea by exposing the history of man’s malleable self image as a composite of social structure in the Western historical experience. The argument, therefore, contests in historical terms the ideal image of the modern individual in Western thought as a free being liberated from the family and the community. In sum, the real “modern man” of the West is an individual, whose ties with society are permanently impaired

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ideologically and yet he / she is also part of it in reality under these new conditions of the civilizing process. In the Elias typology, the Western European individual has had to live within the tension between the interconnected rational and emotive sides to his / her mental nature that ideologically has a problematic relation with family and society. While Elias is Euro-centered in his focus, which highlights only the perception of the above description that fits the tension-ridden personality of the Western and Northern Europe, still his analysis signifies the social, cultural, and psychological components that shifted the perception of the rational and emotive for persons and is connected to the emergence of a culture of modernity with an underlying problematic self-perception of the modern individual.1 In the case of such socio-cultural environments as Japan and Turkey, which lay outside of the cultural boundaries of the Western world, the necessary importation of Western culture and its industrial civilizations suggests the “doubling” of the tension of the rational and the emotive in the self-perception of the modern individual. Especially the members of the elites of such societies as Japan and Turkey were in the position of being pioneers in the construction of a culture of modernity, which frequently appears to have meant that he or she has had to struggle with the complexity in the shifts and replacements of the rational and the emotive side to their self perception as a persona perhaps even before the members of the mass population, who did not have a direct interaction with the demands of the imported “Western world.” The eclectic cultural world of Japanese and Turkish modern individuals implies a cultural and societal context that by definition has had to struggle with the eradication/adaptation of the rational and the emotive societal context of the past and the problematic importation of the rational and the emotive societal context from the West resulting in a psychology of the modern individual that has to deal with a bi-cultural and bi-civilizational societal context of modernity for the individual. In sum, we may know something about the institutional and material aspects of modernity that entails the importation of Western culture, which is at the basis of “Westernization” in the larger sense of the word, but the psychological history of Western culture beyond its “boundaries” is yet to be written. The stories of the modern Japanese and the Turks who have had to develop their persona as modern individuals through a persistent, and at times quite troubling, interaction with Western culture remains untold. One hesitates to presume much about the psychological consequences of Western culture outside of the West without the availability of any significant studies of the subject, but the history of “Westernization” seems also to entail a history of the suicide of the modern individual in the case of Japanese and Turkish societies. To be sure, the history of the intensity with which the construction of Japanese and Turkish modernity took place, should not be reduced simply to a history of engendering the darkness of a suicidal environment. Still that there is a history of suicides of artists and intellectuals in both societies, which have become representations of the civilizational dilemma, which they thought was between the East and the West. The incidence of such suicides as a public performance illustrates a special despair in the world outside of the cultural frontiers of the West. In the cultural dilemma of the day, individuals in the “Orient,” as they saw themselves, had to come to terms with the conflictual requirements of native and Western elements and become modern individuals as a result. Sometimes the narratives of such suicides as a public statement point to the particularly charged nature of the challenges, which face

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the prospects of modernity to persons living in regions where modern industrial civilization has invariably arrived with its Western historical bag and baggage. Marginal as they may seem, two suicides, one from late Ottoman Turkey, the other from Japan, come to mind although other cases could be selected as well. While the traditional attitude of Islam in Ottoman society did not condone suicide following the religious tradition of the monotheistic religions in the Near East, a number of Ottoman intellectuals of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century committed suicide. Although personal reasons may have been involved, those suicides were performed as public statements on the civilizational issues of modernity. Significantly, they are also frequently interpreted by the saddened public as an unfortunate consequence of the trauma of having to deal with the problematique of despair at the unsolvable character of the civilizational dilemma of Westernization, modernization, and national identity. A man of letters of the late nineteenth century in the last decades of the Ottoman empire, Besir Fuad (1857–1887), known as the first Turkish materialist and positivist who also admired Spencerian sociology and the literary current of naturalism, had a short but brilliant career in Istanbul as a writer. He is known for having made a controversial impact on the public forum of the age with his books on Voltaire and natural sciences that argued in favor of the ideals of the Enlightenment criticizing religious dogmatism and advocating the supremacy of scientific thought. Besir Fuad was educated in Western schools beginning with the Jesuit schools of Syria, and later moved on to the Imperial Military Academy of Istanbul. He became especially famous for his book on physiology Beser (Humanity), which introduced the positivist science of physiology of the human race to the Muslim audience of late Ottoman Istanbul. He also wrote a prolific number of articles in the press arguing against the dogmatic perspective of religious thought against the sciences. Although he did not attack Islam directly, Besir Fuad’s attack on religious intolerance of science, using the Voltairian argument against the conservative character of the Catholic church, manages to incite controversy in the public debate. While we do not know the private causes of Besir Fuad’s psychological trauma, he suddenly committed suicide in a very public manner, which left the lingering impression that it was partly caused by the frustration Fuad felt as an enthusiast of scientific thought at the slow progress of traditional Ottoman society. The argument is that his personal problems were intertwined with the larger civilizational crisis, he felt due to his modernist and Westernist world view, which caused his alienation from the traditional Islamic heritage. In his suicide, Besir Fuad cut his wrists and wrote a scientific account of the physical changes in his body as he bled to death at his desk, with his last words repeating to the end the lines that he was “drowsy.” Written in shaky handwriting, Besir Fuad performed in his last statement, the ultimate gesture of the nineteenth century positivist: he instructed family members and the authorities that his body should be donated to the Imperial School of Medicine to be used to further scientific knowledge in the instruction of the science of autopsy (Okay, 1969, pp. 74–94 for detailed account of suicide: Hilav pp. 9–14). To this day, the suicide of Besir Fuad, which was representative of other suicides of intellectuals in the modern era, is remembered as a pathological version of the basic frustration that Turks feel at times over the unsolvable quality of personal and public modern dilemma of the individual, who has had to face the clash between the Turkish and Western cultural processes in our times.

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In contrast to Besir Fuad in ideological terms but similar to him in terms of the performance quality of his suicide, Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), the brilliant man of letters and novelist of twentieth century modern literature, who despaired at the hollowness of post-war Japanese culture, committed suicide in the traditional Japanese samurai style by cutting his belly on top of the Self Defense Agency headquarters in Tokyo. Accompanied by his self-styled small army, Mishima’s action was an “active nihilism” as Keene notes. In committing the traditional seppuku, Mishima hoped to end his life while he was still in vigorous youthful appearance. It was an act inspired from an aesthetic sense of life, which at the same time portrayed Mishima’s desperation to beware the Japanese public of the loss of their spiritual and cultural heritage under the materialism of modern civilization. In contrast to Fuad, Mishima’s suicide did not immediately create a sense of public mourning among the elite as his advocacy of a return to the romantic nationalism of Japanese militarism simply fell on deaf ears to most Japanese at the time. However, in the course of years, for many Japanese, the event has remained as a permanent memory of the dilemma experienced by twentieth century Japan symbolizing the loss of Japanese cultural and political values because of the imitation of modern civilization (Keene 1971: 225; Kato 1997: 349). It was a performance that was not to be forgotten. To be sure, there are other attempts at suicide, or, suicides in the history of modern Japanese intellectuals such as that of Dazai Osamu or Kawabata Yasunari that correspond perhaps more to the psychological anguish of Besir Fuad than the rightist ideological tone to Mishima’s act. But, the public performance quality of these two cases and most importantly the pointed referential quality of their actions to the civilizational crisis of the need to accept modern Western culture as part of modernization. Their suicides as public performances serve to jolt us to an awareness of the existence of a potential trauma that is inherent in the very historical process of embarking upon the construction of modernity from alien shores of Japanese and Turkish culture to that of the West that was home to the emergence of modern industrial civilization earlier. Compared to the pessimistic tone of noting the history of modernity in Japan and Turkey as the history of suicides, the subject of this paper on the dilemma of prospects for democracy and civil society versus Oriental identities in Eastern and Western discourses through the comparison of the Turkish and Japanese attitudes toward a modern national identity, Westernism, fundamentalism, and tradition is indeed a much “healthier” historical process. The majority of the Japanese and the Turkish people have survived through multiple layers of adaptation to the points of challenge that is brought with the continuous waves of influence from the outside world of the West. It is the historical outcome that was dictated by the very decision of earlier generations in both countries to undertake the modernization of each society by the acceptance of Western civilization as the motor force of change despite its pitfalls and dangers. The subject at hand is not a simple history of the East versus the West or modernity versus tradition as frequently our attempts to interpret the history of constructing modernity were locked in the binary vocabulary of modernist ideology. The complex nature of the above adaptive response to the problematic of modernity that brings with it the cultural heritage of the modern West via the Enlightenment and the bag and baggage of the recent historical process of Euro-American Western civilization

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needs to be recognized. On the other hand, post-modern critics of the Enlightenment as Euro-centered or as a phenomena of Western thought with little relevance to universality, do not offer a means for understanding this complex history as well. As indeed Edward Said notes in Culture and Imperialism, post-modernism in the West has served upon the ahistorical weightlessness, consumerism, and spectacle of a new order. It appears as the weak thought at the end of modernity as a period term in the history of the West. However, for the rest of humanity living in the “Orient,” as this author would like to restore the old fashioned term of the nineteenth century with a new twist, intellectuals and public servants like myself are concerned with the construction of modernity itself in a prevailing cultural environment that is still dominated by the heritage and orthodoxy of tradition, the “real” one of custom in daily lives, “sans” the state engineered invention of tradition exposed by Hobsbawm, although that modern invented variety of tradition also exists as part of the construction of modern ideologies.2 This is a world that structurally possesses also the old and the new cultural processes of the “modern” that is indigenous to the local environment and at the same time encounters the incessant infusion of the “modern” from the contemporary Western world outside. To complicate matters even more, the so-called “modern individual” is compelled to position himself / herself within the context of the local and the global simultaneously in an environment that is shifting constantly the self-perception of the rational and emotive in differing societal and cultural milieus, where there is no single defining self-perception of the modern individual but a composite of multiple perceptions and definitions of the rational and the emotive. The contextual definition of the modern individual engenders a multi-personality frame for the person who faces the challenge of having to constantly “decipher” and contextualize in order to understand the behavior of others from divergent worlds of individuality, and at the same time achieve a flexibility in shifting and contextualizing one’s own self-awareness of the rational and the emotive. The environment also carries the risk for the modern individual of constructing a rigid personality of multiple layers of repression resulting from the inability to find places of emotive expression because of the boundaries of cultural identity such as the choices of Westernism, secularism, or traditionalism that reject either the indigenous or the Western components, which would have provided such a venue in the name of a preferred form of modern identity. Hence, the understanding of the complexity of the Turkish and Japanese experience in modernity cannot be dismissed away simply with the delegitimation of the ideological baggage of modernism that might be suitable in the post-industrial society psychology of the members of the capitals of the West. The process of constructing modern industrial civilization is still continuing in Turkey, probably to be the first modern industrial society of the historic Middle East. Modern industrial civilization has been accomplished in its material aspects in Japan, the first modern industrial society outside of geocultural boundaries of the West. Hence in these two environments, the vocabulary of the Enlightenment still remains as valid realities for the formation of private lives side by side with the critical perception of the very process itself. To observe the construction of modernity with its inherent problematiques in the frontiers of twentieth century modernity such as Japan and Turkey, one needs to develop the sense of Greek tragedy, where human beings are fated to inevitable catastrophe because of the flaws in their character but even more so

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because “divine gods” play games with human kind. Deringil poetically describes the desperate efforts of the late Ottoman elite to save the empire with an uneven record of modernizing reforms in the terms of a Greek tragedy that applies to the situation of the modern individual in Japanese and Turkish societies. They frequently are in the midst of a “true tragedy in the Greek sense of seeing what is coming, of knowing what to do to avoid it and yet of being unable to resist the march of events” (DERINGIL 1998: 176). This is why I have chosen to restrict the boundaries of the complex topic with the need to consider the prospects for democracy and civil society. Today we are aware of culture as a hybrid, encumbered, entangled, overlapping configuration that cuts across and has always cut across even in the past the national boundaries of history and geography. Particularly our understanding of Oriental and Occidental schisms or the binary logic in defining the West versus the non-West, or at this conference, the East versus the West has undergone radical criticism and revision so that we have become aware of the interlocked character of the historical experience of the populations of the world in the last two centuries. That interdependency had been ignored or silenced with the ideological and the intellectual construction of the East and the West by Western minds during the rise of the West and modern imperialism. The awareness of the sophisticated historical reality beneath the surface of the Eastern and Western discourses on Orientalism or Occidentalism as ideological constructs, however, does not help us develop the vocabulary or the strategy for the prospects for democracy and civil society of individual liberties for—whether we like it or not—these two crucial concepts pertain to a desirable way of life for the contemporary individual in any society or culture derives from the historic process of the Enlightenment and the ramifications of these ideals in the ups and downs of European history since the French Revolution. To put it simply: it is perhaps not difficult to relocate the potential for the production of the material aspects of capitalism in the Confucian ethic or the Samurai ethic etc. in place of the Protestant ethic of Weber. But it is extremely difficult to rationalize with a convincing argument nativist revisionist arguments for Chinese-style democracy, or, Iranian-style human rights, etc. in the face of what these political ideals have come to mean legally as well as in practice in the modern West. The practice of democracy and human rights in the West was not a given reality however, in view of the fact that these values could be firmly installed only after the historic experience entailing the horror of the Second World War, which had to be fought in order to destroy fascism in the West. The oppression in the so-called Socialist vision of the “Iron Curtain,” could be lifted only with the end to the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union. It is clear that an awareness of the hybridity and interconnected character of the shared culture of modernity between the East and the West such as in Japan and Turkey, still needs to be integrated with the universal aspiration for democracy challenging conflicting class, ideological, and political differences in modern society and cutting across cultural and civilizational differences. A comparison of the Turkish and Japanese attitudes toward a modern national identity, therefore, reflects the number of characteristics that stem from the historical experience of both countries especially since the formation of a modern state structure during the nineteenth century in defining the modern individual within a hybrid bi-cultural environment. This experience distinguishes their modern expe-

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rience from that of the populations of the modern West, for the self-image of the modern Japanese and Turkish individual entails the uneasy acceptance from the beginning of the need to live in a bi-cultural or, multi-cultural hybrid modern civilization in one’s person. In other words, whether Japanese or Turkish polity dictate an ideal; pure Western or native identity in official ideology, the average Japanese and Turkish individual already knows from everyday life that modern life has to be bi-cultural in varying mixtures of culturality in the city as well as the provinces. It is an experience that can only be experienced in some circles among the urbane, émigré circles of Western societies. At the ideological level to be “modern” as a Western modern individual claims to be a “native” construct and not an imported one from an alien civilization. One has to note the changing and historic character of the construction of modern national identity that uses eclectic and hybrid mixtures of Western and native cultures as part of modernity. Both the Turks and the Japanese have had to construct eclectic mixtures of their native culture and Western culture in the past to form a modern national identity, which also underwent a history of varying degrees of Westernization or nativization a number of times. Furthermore, it is likely that they will continue to reconstruct new eclectic mixtures of culture in forming their national identities in the future as well. In the case of the Turkish attitudes toward a modern national identity, during the nineteenth century the Ottoman Turks constructed a more traditionalist version of their modern national identity in that the mixture of Western and native elements had a symbiotic character, which was compatible with the desire for keeping a dynastic and traditional quality to an imperial heritage: for example the shariat and the other religious codes of a multi-cultural and multi-judicial tradition had to coexist and cooperate with the new Western codes, which were dictated by the modern state bureaucracy and Sultanic edicts. This is best exemplified in the dress code of the modern Ottoman that complemented the Western uniform and male dress with a unique headgear termed the Fez, a modern invention of tradition, which represented modernity in line with the dynastic loyalty of the modern Ottoman subject. For some Muslim Turks it carried the added meaning of in keeping with the Islamic loyalties of the modern Ottoman as well (Esenbel 1994: 168–175). On the other hand, the public formality of Islamic custom was not challenged with the adoption of a public image of emancipated women in dress as well as in action in view of the evolutionary character of the Ottoman vision of modernity, which chose to be selective about the adoption of Western civilization. Yet, modern Ottoman women became components of a modern national identity for Turks as they shifted from the traditional veil to its modernized versions, which left the face bare and participated in public education and in time work places designated for women. In many instances this process of living modernity in cultural mixtures was (and still is) termed as a life of alaturka (“in the Turkish way,” as in Turkish coffee) or alafranga (“in the Western way,” as in Nescafe instant coffee). Most significant in private lives, urban Turks, who were to be the formers of future national identity in the Republic of Turkey were becoming Westernized in their cultural attributes such as wearing Western dress, using Western furniture, etc. That implies a history of deep private identification with the accruements of Western culture as part of the modern national identity of being a Young Ottoman or a Young Turk. In contrast to the eclectic character

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of the late Ottoman, the Turks of the Republic of Turkey that was founded in 1923 have constructed the modern Turkish national identity of complete and inflexible acceptance of the Western way of life, dress code, as well as the political constructs of secularism and republicanisms with the aspiration for a modern industrial economy. Today, rather than the late Ottoman version, the established ideology of modern national identity for Turks is derived from the Republican version of a national identity that equates modernity in Turkey with the adherence, sometimes with a vengeance, to the ideals of the Republic together with the pure Westernized public image of men and women. In line with the de-emphasis on the cultural accruements of Islam in the Republican ideology of secularism, modern Turkish identity in this official or establishment version derives its nativism from the performance of Turkish folklore and adoption of the multi-cultural code of Anatolian civilization, and in more radical versions a utopian vision of Central Asian roots. Following a similar line of narration, the Japanese attitude toward modern national identity entails the Meiji history of eclecticism, which had a character of separate but equal equation of wa and yo, Japanese and Western components, both usually products of recent inventions of tradition and modernity in order, to define the civilizational ambitions of modern Japan. The adoption of Western norms and forms in legal, bureaucratic, economic realms—just to give some examples—was assumed to be a complete revision that did not allow for the coexistence of tradition in a formal manner although concern for tradition might influence the practice in these different sectors of modern life. Unlike the Ottoman, the modern Japanese ideal of the Meiji era (1868–1912) was a different pattern of eclecticism that assumed the posturing of being completely like the West when required, and a separate and pure category of being completely Japanese when necessary, as a means for handling the need to rationalize the acceptance of modern Western civilization for the sake of instigating progress in a Japanese environment. The history of modern Japanese identity experienced the closing down of the window of Western culture in the prewar history of Asianism and ultranationalism during the thirties and the forties. The window of Western culture opened up again in the post-war era, which expanded on the Meiji Westernist vision living in a “harmonious” mixture with Japanese culture, without the combative tone of the pre-war currents of nationalism (Esenbel 1994: 157–165). The two differing types of “solutions” to cultural hybridity within the context of modernity are devoid of total harmony, however. There is an enduring psychology of resistance and posturing against the West and its civilizational components within the garb of the hybridity in the praxis of modernity in Japan and Turkey that I believe this psychological atttitude accounts for the periodic bouts of national resistance and stiffening of individual and collective responses to what is perceived as the hegemony of the West The history of hybrid multi-culturality in the case of the Japanese and Turkish attitude toward a modern national identity profoundly differs from the cosmopolitanism and the mutuality that resulted from the coexistence of natives with Westerners in an imperialist and colonial setting during our modern century. Again Said reflects on the ironic harmonious coexistence of people from different ethnic backgrounds under the Western colonial administrations of the Near East that no longer is possible in the emancipated national regimes of today. In the long run, the success of the Turks and the

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Japanese in avoiding the prospects of being defeated to the threat of modern Western imperialism and being colonized, seems to have fostered parochial rather than cosmopolitan attitudes.3 Even the nineteenth century and pre-war intellectual debate in Japan and Turkey reflects this posturing of resistance and opposition to the totality of the Western experience and is formed out of the binary logic in the Western debate about the Orient versus the Occident of the nineteenth century. Responding to the Orientalist perspective of the Westerner imperialist, the intellectual argument for having a modern Ottoman or Turkish identity reflects the binary logic of the East and West in a critical argumentation with the West. For those, who chose to define their relationship with the modernity of the West in a combative tone, the argument for a modern identity for the Ottomans surfaced in the debate of Islamic spiritual values and Western material civilization.4 The rational also rings home in the terrain of the Asian intellectual debate during the nineteenth century in trying to keep a native existence in the wake of Western imperialism. In Japan the wakon-yosai argument (“Japanese spirit, Western techniques”) of the new Japanese nationalists and later the militarists that argued for a similar dualistic national identity in terms of Japanese values and Western technique has the same quality of combativeness and suspicion about the worthiness of the cultural values of Western civilization; a serious concern about the uprooting of traditional collective and family life, the lack of spiritual meaning in modern industrial society, and the decline in the practice of native customs. In the case of Japan, this is the Japanese revolt against the West that engendered the intellectual currents of culturalism and the debate on overcoming modernity (Najita and Harootunian 1995: 734–768). The debate is ongoing today as well and can be read frequently occasion in the editorial pages of Japanese and Turkish papers even if the political agenda of these pre-war currents are no longer valid. One has to recognize that the bi-culturality of the Japanese and Turkish agenda of modernity even in its most “benign” or co-operative form with the environment of the West will entail a boundary of resistance, a kind of “paranoia” about the West, that will reflect in a tone of rivalry or cocky response at times, which stems from the hardened individual and collective psychology of perceiving a successful history of national resistance to imperialism. Sato Seizaburo who is critical of the idea of clash of civilizations paradigm of Huntington, for example, sees the history of sharing a modern industrial civilization as the fertilization of civilizations but at the same time he deciphers the arguments for a nativist form of modernity such as Chinese capitalism or Malaysian modernity as representative of the boundaries of resistance to unchecked flooding of Western cultural influences that will decompose the inherent local societal framework of Asian countries (SATO 1997). The existence of a modern national identity in Japan and Turkey in this nationalist tone that curtails the liberality and cosmopolitanism of a bi-cultural framework needs to be analyzed to evaluate the prospects for civil society and democracy both historically and in the present day. To be sure, the public space that is created from the successful construction of a modern state and the avoidance of the colonial imperialist experience in Japan and Turkey has its structurally positive aspects with respect to the prospects for the construction of a viable civil society and democracy. In contrast to the Third World malaise of questioning

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the self / stringent nationalism / inferiority complex to the West, the Turkish and Japanese on the average share these traumas in much milder form than that of the post-colonial world. For example, the adoption of the Western script by the Republicans in Turkey after 1928, or the increasing use of the Western dress by Japanese men and women today, reflects the ability of the members of these two societies to accept Westernization in great intensity without feeling encumbered by the cultural hegemony of a foreign power. While the numerous occasions of Westernization currents in both Japan and Turkey have been subject to criticism or debate in the national political and intellectual scene, this criticism has had an in house-character as it has transpired between rival native elites. Hence the critics of Westernization have by and large avoided the paranoia of viewing Westernization as a product of the direct hegemonic intervention of Western imperialist / colonial interests. The nationalist streak of Japanese and Turkish identity seems to endure it as a kind of “inner colonialisation” similar to the imposition of a modern civilization upon the rural population of the provinces by the native Parisian French elite of the capital for the sake of making “Peasants into Frenchmen” in Eugene Weber’s terms (Weber 1976). The Japanese and Turkish attitudes toward modern national identity, encourages the possibility of developing such norms as democracy and human rights in a context of civil society as a nation and not as the idealistic agenda of a few cosmopolitan individuals. While the history of democracy has continued to encounter problems of cultural and political adaptation in Japan and Turkey as attested in the standard volume on the subject written by Ward and Rustow (1964), the fact that the political and social history of the prospects for establishing a firm democracy has continued to this day to be the concern of not just a few but many in the populations of these countries. But there is also a negative side in the modern national identity in Japan and Turkey. The energy of emancipatory politics of independence and the protection of national sovereignty has left a hard streak of inflexibility in the national rhetoric adopted in the private and public posturing of the authorities as well as sections of the national public toward the deciphering and acceptance of alien and other elements within and without. The history of Japan and Turkey for the last century witnessed the eruption of numerous ethnic, class, political conflicts, especially during periods of economic and social change of a destabilizing order. The authoritarian character of the pre-war state in Japan and the dominant role of the military in an empire-building polity, the very instruments of sovereignty, have also brought with it a public culture of suspicion of everything but the state ranging from multi-party politics, liberalism, and leftism. But it was not the Japanese authorities alone who shared in the lack of tolerance for the other. The average Japanese also revealed a fear of the alien as seen in the mob attacks on resident Korean workers and leftists during the mayhem after the horrible Kantō earthquake of 1923. Many Japanese were enthusiastic for the prospects of building an Asian empire and did not need government goading for this purpose. In today’s Japan, the authoritarian Meiji state, the public riots, and imperialist aggression of the past no longer exist. But, the Japanese public still faces the agenda of having a viable democracy commensurate to an autonomous civil society. Asians and Westerners alike criticize the lack of interest that the average Japanese person shows toward the plight of Asians, or the agenda of the “Korean

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comfort women.” Many human rights issues such as the discrimination against children of international marriages, or the burakumin, who are the Japanese descended from an outcaste population of the feudal period, remain unsolved and perhaps will remain so. These issues are among the many that blemish the record of Japanese democracy and civil society. On the other hand, the dilemma of Turkey appears to be worse and on a megascale compared to the relative peace of Japanese society and politics. The broken history of the practice of democracy in Turkey that began after the Second World War, the authoritarian nature of the legal and structural character of the Turkish state that remained in its European pre-war mode, the ensuing problem of ethnic conflict, and finally the issue of religious revival recently has engendered a chequered record of human rights, individual liberties, and democracy despite great efforts on the part of many in the Turkish public to counter or modify these negative aspects. Hence, to put it simply, the modern national identity of the Japanese and the Turks, which can be “praised” for ensuring a successful resistance to co-optation by Western imperialism, has been also the fertile ground for the counter forces in state and society to actualize democracy, our universal paradigm cited in the beginning of the paper. The hybridity and the complexity in the civilizational mixture of Japan and Turkey did not always help the immediate agenda of human rights and democracy. This is heightened as a problem especially so if one chooses to reject the émigré alternative and live in the multiproblem environment of these societies today as a committed participant in the modernist project. The issue of religious fundamentalism, a popular term used for the recent world trend among communities and individuals to revive the ideas, values, rituals, and symbols of the traditions of religion to answer the malaise of modern industrial society, forces one again to encounter the problematique of civil society, democracy, and modern national identity in Japan and Turkey today; this time in the context of fundamentalism in religious movements. The argument in earlier generations that religious reaction doubted the validity of scientific reason is not a relevant issue today. Göle has convincingly argued that fundamentalism today appears to be a product of modernity and its participants appear to seek a new form of identity that promises the meaning of life from the practices and norms of religion in modern life. Islam fundamentalism does carry a discourse that is charged with the critic of the impersonal nature of industrial society—also associated with the malaffect of Westernism. In practice, however, these individuals represent a new wave of identity crisis as a result of the construction of modernity in its structural and material framework for the last century (Göle 1996; Toprak 1996). Compared to Turkey, even though the Japanese experience in the revival of religious activities and currents in Japan has not engendered the image of being a political threat as much as the revival of Islamic currents has done, still, the emergence of the militant version of Buddhism in the Sokagakkai movement, the development of the Kōmei party with a religious tone for clean government, and finally the resurgence of new religions, represents the controversial visibility of religious themes in modern Japanese society today (Reader, Andreasen and Stefansson 1993: 121–128). To be sure, much of this revival has been integrated into the political process as in the case of the presence of the Kōmei party which has formally severed its ties with the Sokagakkai, in the Japanese Diet for some time and despite

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public suspicion of the Sokagakkai as an inward-oriented and militant religion, the organization has established a life of educational and missionary activities in Japan and abroad, participating in its own fashion in Japanese civil society. Curiously, the Sokagakkai has recently extended its activities in Turkey, frequently in the guise of teaching Japanese language and culture. Politically, the issue of religious revival in Japan has become more charged in terms of the problem of democracy and individual rights because of the recent horrible subway attack by the fringe religious organization, the Aum sect, which killed eleven people and injured five thousand with sarin gas. The event, which has shocked the Japanese and world public opinion, has caused the outburst of soul-searching and worried public debate in Japan especially in the press about the basic issues that remain serious concerns for the members of society on the role of religion in the context of democracy and individual rights for the freedom of worship. Hardacre notes the questions as central to the conduct of all democratic societies and not necessarily unique to Japan, and they can be taken as directly relevant to the issue of religious revival and fundamentalism at the non-political level. What are the rights of children and the young in matters of religious freedom? More pertinent is the question how can society simultaneously uphold the rights of privacy and religious freedom on the one hand, while protecting itself from terrorist attack, on the other? How can communal religious associations coexist with local communities, each exercising the full range of democratic rights, without either misusing democratic institutions to subjugate the other? Taken from the article of Hardacre, these questions which trouble the Japanese public are directly relevant to how Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey has to be handled in keeping with the challenge to construct a society of democracy and individual rights (Hardacre 1995). That the questions are applicable for Turkey proves to us the universality of the issue that cuts across the cultural boundaries of Japan and Turkey. In the case of the heritage of state shintō, the native faith of the Japanese people that was made the core of the ideology of imperial worship and Japanese uniqueness in pre-war nationalism, was disestablished by the American occupation as part of the measures to eliminate militarism and the political use of religion by the Japanese state, and the new constitution, which has totally completed the separation of state from religion, the role of religion and politics continues to be a severely debated issue in Japan and abroad. The recent revival of some of the ceremonies and rituals of state shintō by Japanese politicians is interpreted in liberal, leftist, and Japanese Christian circles as a sign of unacceptable nationalism. In 1984, the former prime minister Nakasone visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tōkyō—which serves as the shrine for the war dead of about 2.5 million in Japan’s modern history since the Meiji Restoration of 1868—has been the symbol of the revival of nationalist practices. Today, the issue of state shintō practice is not seen in the light of innocent religious practice by critics and any similar gesture on part of the Japanese political elite is taken as an immediate warning for the revival of militarism in Japan (Reader, Andreasen and Stefansson 1993: 176–178). Compared to Japan, the emergence of communities, which are practicing forms of Islamic revivalism and fundamentalism addresses similar issues of individual rights and democracy and is compounded with the existence of a highly

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charged political and institutional opposition from the secularists, Republicanists, and most significantly the Turkish Armed Forces, which sees itself as the protector and guarantor of the secularist Republican regime founded by Kemal Ataturk. Hence, the prospects for democracy are immediately endangered with the inflexibility in the political and ideological arena. The Islamist fundamentalists’ approach to matters of religion and modernity appears doctrinaire and reactionary to sections of the public, especially those who represent the national modernist vision of Westernism and secularism that had won out in 1923. The recent successes of the religiously oriented Refah (Welfare) Party to form coalition governments and the striking election victory of the party in municipal elections in 1994 for a while had created the aura of a successful accommodation of politicized Islam to the modern political process, thereby enhancing the prospects of the future of democracy in the true sense. Such intellectuals as Nilufer Göle and Binnaz Toprak, with a firm foundation in a secularist educational and social background, have advocated the desirability of dialogue between the secularists, reformist elites in a liberal spirit with the moderate Islamist groups in order to construct the viability of a national political consensus. Yet recent events have shown that the structural framework of politics in the Republic of Turkey that has resulted from its construction of modernity contains little allowance for an accommodation and solution. With the intervention of the military in the form of National Security Council instructions to the government on February 28, 2001, the measures taken by the authorities, partly supported by some of the liberal and mainstream press as well, have suddenly toppled the Islamist political party from power. Recent governmental orders that ban the use of the outward forms of the new currents of Islam adopted by the university students such as the headscarf of women, the conservative beards of men, have also become the targets of attack. The mayor of Istanbul has just been removed from office due to a court decision about his political speech of a number of years ago. Ironically, he has been also banned from holding political office because of a poem that he recited in the speech, which carried strong Islamic overtones for it had been written against Western aggression around the turn of the century. This incident shows the closure of the process of national identity formation in the bicultural, eclectic, nationalist form as the poem once meant to be a poetic call for resistance against Western imperialism can no longer be used as an identity in the domestic conditions of politics that the resistance had created.5 The above account of the difficulties in incorporating fundamentalism and its social and political expressions in Turkey, contrasts with Japan where despite the prevalence of concerns with religious and nationalist currents, the issue of national identity is debated at a more consensus oriented political platform so far. A recent humorous event in Japanese politics has struck this author as quite significant in this respect. On January 13, 1998, Kyōto Shinbun gave the news that Mr. Ibuki and Mr. Tanigaki, members of the present Hashimoto cabinet, caused great fun as they arrived in the cabinet meeting in traditional Japanese male attire, the hakama, to make publicity for the beauty of the Japanese dress. Elected from areas in Kyōto, which traditionally produce Japanese dress, they are members of the bipartisan group for parliamentarians for the revival of Japanese dress, which apparently has 63 members. The group advocated the use the Japanese hakama attire in the opening ceremony of the Diet as a measure to show the aesthetic beauty of Japanese dress.

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A highly unusual incident in view of the fact that probably in the dusty corners of the Japanese legal code, the early Meiji regulation of 1872 that public servants have to dress in Western attire probably still stands. Prime minister Hashimoto responded with satirical humour commenting on the behaviour of the two young enthusiasts with the advice “make sure that you do not step on your hakama,” a charming problem of modern day Japanese men, who are not used to the habit. The two parliamentarians responded with conviction that they will “brace themselves” for the occasion and proceeded to visit the Diet and attended the session in the seats reserved for the Cabinet According to the reporter of the paper, forgotten was the dire problem of fiscal reform and the ongoing debate between the government and the opposition parties on the issue, the day was spent in relaxed conversation about the merits of the beautiful kimono. This paper has to conclude with little accomplished in terms of providing constructive solutions and ideas that can enhance the prospect of civil society and democracy in the Japanese and Turkish bouts with national identity, Westernism, tradition, and recently fundamentalism. Perhaps the only merit of the paper has been to show the complexity of the history of these ideas in human action and their historicity. In many ways, Turkey today resembles the society of inflexible modern individuals of pre-war Japan where politics and identity faced the problems of mutual intolerance, befitting an authoritarian state framework, and the country was in the midst of the industrial revolution. Had the shifts in the perception of the rational and the emotive with the infusion of Western culture and the double tension of the civilizing process given birth to the modern individuals with repressed inflexible personalities that fuelled the conflicts of the day? What was the role of the psychological history of the cultural and material components of Westernization and modernization upon the formation of the psychological character of the modern individual in Japan and Turkey? This paper can only venture to illustrate the various questions regarding the subject. On the other hand, the history of the present cannot be explained away as a previous stage of history, for we all share in the contemporary concerns of our times. In the Japanese case, it has now become possible that the questions of identity can sometimes be subject to political humor, which can be an effective measure of diffusing potential conflict. This is still not possible in Turkey. One hopes it will become possible in the future. The above essay suggests that the self-image of the modern individual in Japan and Turkey have shared similar dilemmas.The suicidal state of mind that justifies suicide as a consequence of the despondency of the modern individual in the wake of the challenges of modern civilization, the cultural dislocations that compounded tension of modernity upon the self-perception of the modern individual as having to survive in the midst of the dilemma of civilizational identity, the “uncosmopolitan” rigid persona engendered from successful resistance to Western imperialism, and the modern individual’s search for cultural personal meaning during the “eye of the storm” of the industrial revolution through a “return” to a nativist past or to the revival of religious spirituality. The inflexible modern personality, which has been constructed out of the repression of the emotive in the traditional culture, the malleability of the self-image of the modern individual in Japan and Turkey, faces the prospects of constructing democracy and civil society.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Deringil, Selim (1998): The Well-Protected Domains. Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909. London: I. B. Tauris. Elias, Norbert (1982a): The Civilizing Process. Vol. 1. The History of Manners. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Elias, Norbert (1982b): The Civilizing Process. Vol. 2. State Formation and Civilization. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Elias, Norbert (1991): The Society of Individuals. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell. Esenbel, Selcuk (1994): The Anguish of Civilized Behavior. The Use of Western Cultural Forms in the Everyday Lives of the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks during the Nineteenth Century. In: Japan Reviewl994, pp. 145–185. Fuad, Besir, Şiir ve Hakikat Yazilar ve Tartismalar, (Poetry and the Truth Writings and Debates) prepared by Handan Inci (Istanbul: YKY, 1999) Göle, Nilufer (1996): Authoritarian Secularism and Islamist Politics. The Case of Turkey. In: Norton, Augustus R. (ed): Civil Society in the Middle East. Leiden: E. J. Brill, pp. 17–43. Hardacre, Helen (1995): Aum Shinrikyo and the Japanese Media. The Pied Piper Meets the Lamb of God. In: Institute Reports. East Asian Institute. Columbia University. November, pp. 26–31. Hilav, Selahattin, “Besir Fuad`in Mektubat`ini Okurken” (Reading the Letters of Besir Fuad) in Besir Fuad, Şiir ve Hakikat Yazilar ve Tartismalar, prepared by Handan Inci, (Istanbul: YKY, 1999), pp. 9–14 Hobsbawm, Eric and Terrance Ranger (ed.) (1983): The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kato, Shuichi (1997): A History of Japanese Literature From the Man’yoshu to Modern Times. Surrey: Japan Library. Keene, Donald (1971): Landscapes and Portraits. Appreciations of Japanese Culture. Tōkyō and Palo Alto: Kodansha International. Mardin, Serif (1962): The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Najita, Tetsuo and H. D. Harootunian (1995): The Japanese Revolt against the West. Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century. In: Duus, Peter (ed): The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 6. The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 711–774. Okay, M. Orhan (no date): Ilk Turk Pozitivist ve Naturalisti Besir Fuad [The First Turkish Positivist and Naturalist Besir Fuad]. Istanbul: Dergah Yayinlari. Reader, Ian, Esben Andreasen and Finn Stefansson (1993): Japanese Religions Past and Present. Sandgate: Japan Library. Said, Edward W (1994): Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Sato, Seizaburo (1997): Clash of Civilizations or Cross Fertilization of Civilizations. In: Japan Echo 44, Summer, pp. 28–39. Toprak, Binnaz (1996): Civil Society in Turkey. In: Norton, Augustus R. (ed): Civil Society in the Middle East. Leiden: E. J. Brill, pp. 87–118. Ward, Robert E. and Dankwart A. Rustow (1964): Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weber, Eugene (1976): Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France 1870– 1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

NOTES 1

Elias 1982a: 8–9,27–34. For the history of man’s malleable self-image as a composite of social structure see Elias 1982a: 76–86. For the emergence of the rational image of man and the perception of the separation and interaction of the rational and emotive in the individual see Elias 1982b: 292–295, Elias 1991: 115–129 and Esenbel 1994: 145, 185.

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2

Said 1994: 399; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983: 1–14, 102–62, 253–307 for the invention of tradition by the Great Powers during the nineteenth century to foster a loyal citizenry. 3 Said 1994: 333 for the nasty mix of tribal chieftains, despotic barbarians, and so on after the whites leave. 4 Mardin 1962: passim for a seminal study of the rationalization of Islam in the name of modernity by the Young Ottomans of the nineteenth century. 5 A survey of the liberal paper Yeni Yuzyil during 1998 shows the build up of increasingly authoritarian measures against fundamendalist Islam.

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❚ Paper presented at The introduction of Modern Science and Technology to Turkey and Japan (Internation Symposium), Kyoto, 1996, 251–7.

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Remarks on the Modernization of Japan and Turkey in the 18th and 19th Centuries a

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omparisons of the history of modernization in Japan and Turkey continue to interest layman and specialist alike. This is particularly true in Turkey where, because of Japan’s dramatic victory over Russia in 1905, Japan has long been admired as the rising star of the East. Unfortunately, very few studies have attempted to compare the two countries in a serious, scholarly manner. One exception is, of course, Ward and Rustow’s well-known study, Political modernization in Japan and Turkey, which analyzed the comparative problematic from a modernist perspective. Although that work examined the transfer of knowledge from the West in the context of political, economic, and educational modernization, it did not deal at length with the issue of the transfer of science and technology.1 To my knowledge, the only other occasion when a systematic discussion of this issue took place was a brief workshop held at Boğaziçi University (Istanbul) in the early 1980s. How should we compare the adoption of Western science by Japan and by Turkey? One would have to conclude that Japan is far more advanced than Turkey in terms of the assimilation of Western science. A sober reminder of this gap is seen in the remarkable ability of prewar Japanese scientists to develop Nobel-winning research in the modest conditions of a developing Asian society, compared with the dismal slowness of their Turkish counterparts—and this despite the fact that the ideal of modern science and technology was enthusiastically advocated. An anecdote related to me by Professor Ömür Akyüiz of the Physics Department of Boğaziçi University wonderfully illustrates this stark contrast in the development of science in the two countries. Mehmed Akif, the great Turkish poet who wrote the lyrics of the national anthem and a veterinarian by training, visited Berlin in 1916, where Albert Einstein worked from 1913 to 1933. While in Berlin, Akif heard about Einstein’s theory of relativity and his idea of the equivalence of matter and energy. Mehmed Akif appreciated the modern science of the day and upon his return he incorporated it into his poetry. In one poem, the Poet urges Asym, an imaginary young man (most probably his own son) and his friends to go to Europe for further education, especially in positive science. He explains how in Europe,

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They seek the “Corpuscular Power of matter”. Wishing to harness this remarkable power. Number of heads spend thousands of effort ... For, from one drop of substance, they’ll extract, Not millions of but endless power.2 As Akyuz comments, this was before 1920. Yet in his view no one seems to have followed up on the hint. The study of relativity and quantum physics were not mentioned seriously in Turkey until 1942, and appeared as regular university courses only in the 1950s. The first Turk to receive a Ph. D. in physics (Sorbonne, 1926), Fahir Emin [Yenicay], never bothered to teach the fundamentals of modern physics for a long time. By contrast, Akyuz explains, a young Japanese electrical engineer, Nishina Yoshio, visited Europe in the 1920s, attracted by modern theoretical physics, and before 1930 had engaged in the first application of relativistic quantum physics. Upon his return to Japan, Nishina gathered a group of young and able students, and initiated them to modern theoretical physics. Two of them, Yukawa Hideki and Tomonaga Shin’ichirō, would win Nobel Prizes for their revolutionary work. How can this radically different encounter with modern science and technology in Japan and Turkey be explained? One key factor harming Ottoman efforts was its heavy burden of defense expenditure. In what might be described as a “war orientation”, the Ottoman poured huge amounts of capital into holding its far-flung empire together militarily. By contrast, Tokugawa Japan prospered economically despite the continued existence of feudal boundaries and military rule.3 Tokugawa Japan was in essence a demilitarized population of mostly peasants. Hence, although Japanese domainal lords and the Shogun faced occasional peasant uprisings, these uprisings rarely presented the degree of military danger that the ethnic and political rebellion of armed leaders in the Balkans, or the clash of powerful imperial armies such as the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs presented to the Ottomans. In other words, the Ottoman style of empire building dictated the need for a costly military infrastructure. Large portions of Ottoman resources were drained by defense. In Japan, on the other hand, while the military aristocracy was an unusually high proportion of the population—close to 10 percent in some areas (in contrast with the usual 2–4 percent of most monarchical orders)—the Japanese samurai managed with the sword as the principal weapon to keep order in a society of peasants prone to discontent due to high taxes. All in all, Tokugawa Japan was a society at peace. In short, an important factor in Japan’s acquisition of Western science was the strong material foundation of Tokugawa Japan. Tokugawa Japan’s robust economy can be seen in its rich urban culture. Edo, the center of the Tokugawa national government, grew to a city of one million. The urbanization of the aristocracy went hand-in-hand with the flourishing of a sophisticated urban culture of leisure in which samurai and wealthy merchants enjoyed the pleasures of the floating world—in poetry, theater, and the erotic amusements of the courtesan quarters. The Tokugawa era witnessed sustained economic and population growth, the rise of a small elite of wealthy commoners, the foundation of a productive economy of

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rice agriculture, and healthy domestic trade. As T. C. Smith masterfully argues in his work, The agrarian origins of modern Japan, the wealth of the Tokugawa cities, the surplus of its villages, and the enterprising spirit of its wealthy commoners formed the foundation of modern Japanese capitalism in the 19th century, once the Meiji regime adopted a conscious policy of modernization.4 This raises the next fundamental contrast in the historical circumstances of these two countries: the challenge of implementing new policies on a national level. The Ottoman Empire was an amalgam of territories covering a subcontinent, and encompassing complex populations that were distinct in every sense (linguistically, religiously, culturally). Japan, on the other hand, an island nation, had a well-integrated population which shared a common cultural identity, evident in language and in cultural praxis. While executing self-conscious shifts in national direction (as during the Meiji period, 1868–1912) was by no means simple, such dramatic changes in national orientation were much more plausible in Japan than in the decentralized, sometimes fragmented Ottoman state. In addition to these differences was the West’s very different attitude towards Turkey and Japan, especially during the 19th and early 20th centuries. During the 19th century an important measure of political power was the possession of territory. To the expanding powers of the West, Japan was a poor prize. It was, after all, but a small, mountainous island with meager natural resources. The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, was land rich and presented a rich trophy for expanding nation-states. This relative lack of Western interest in Japan, combined with Japan’s rapid adoption of Western legal and political structures, insulated Japan to an important degree from the rapaciousness of 19th century imperialism. I propose at this point to pause and rethink the entire narrative of this comparison. Where does the secret, if any, lie in the emergence of modern Japan after 1868 into the world of the Great Powers, while the Ottomans by that time came to be known as the Sick Man of Europe? I believe that more than anything else it was the special circumstances of the Meiji era, which made the qualitative difference in the history of reform. This difference facilitated Japan’s assimilation of science and technology, the so-called nerve center of modernity. Granted, the Tokugawa heritage was important, but I differ from the recent fascination with Tokugawa data as the source of all that was modern in Meiji Japan. Instead, I would emphasize the psychology of the early Meiji generation of leaders. Their boldness enabled a radical and total campaign of reform and adoption of Western civilization, thus quickening the birth of modern Japan, in contrast to the piecemeal style of Japan’s early modern rulers. The old and new were not allowed to coexist in modern Meiji Japan: the old was forced to revise itself in terms of the new. In the wake of establishing a national secondary school system, the traditional schools were abolished. Even the dress of traditional Japan, the kimono, was reformed to fit Western forms of propriety.5 The radicalness of the Meiji reform quest compares in spirit to the radicalness and iconoclasm of the Turkish Republican Revolution after 1923 under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In no sphere is this more apparent than in the realm of diplomacy. For the 19th century elite of Meiji Japan and Ottoman Turkey, the revision of the unequal treaties was a common diplomatic goal that informed their respective policies. Yet, because of the strong ambitions of Western imperialists in the Near East and in the Balkans, Ottoman bureaucrats endured stifling conditions of diplomacy.

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By contrast, because Japan existed on the periphery of Western ambitions and never became the primary object of imperialist design, Japanese diplomats for the most part avoided the problems encountered by Ottoman officials. Each act of reform in Meiji Japan was designed to realize the aim of treaty revision. Meiji leaders were obsessed with this goal. The cosmopolitan Ottomans sometimes resigned themselves to the immediate impossibility of the situation, and simply searched for spheres of maneuverability within the restrictions of the treaty system. The Meiji public as well as the decision-makers, on the other hand, had treaty revision and only treaty revision as the first priority in their reform program, known by its four slogans of military strengthening, economic prosperity, civilization, and enlightenment. This comparison, therefore, brings us to the question of global conditions as they affect any society in its quest for reform, especially when it contains the policy of importing science and technology. While the Ottomans were trying to balance power in their relations with the West (the homeland of modern science and technology), their diplomacy did help improve relations with France and England to the point of gaining some help in setting up modern civilian, military, and financial institutions. But toward the end of the 19th century, one senses a cooling of relations between the Ottomans and the British due to their clash of national interests and the overtures of the Ottomans to Germany. In contrast, the Meiji leaders who had the advantage of not being a primary objective of imperialist design by any Western power, were brilliant in their diplomatic policy of moving closer to Great Britain and finally convincing this 19th century superpower to revise the unequal treaties in 1895. In 1902, Japan formed a staunch alliance with England as expressed in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. In narrating the history of reform in this the age, the diplomatic successes of the Meiji leadership cannot be overemphasized. Whether one likes it or not, knowledge is power, and diplomacy has played a decisive role in the history of the transfer of knowledge from one civilization to another. A roster of the foreign advisors who served Meiji Japan shows the strength of Anglo-Saxon education, science, and technology. Meiji Japan was officially accepted in 1902 by the great powers as a European-type nation with no legal compromises. This was a tremendous diplomatic victory as well as national turning point for Japan, for it gave Japan access to the full knowledge of the industrial societies of the age. Again, with respect to the diplomatic context of the history of science and technology, one can also argue that compared to its relations with Japan, Western ties to the Europeanized Ottoman polity of the 19th century gradually became cooler. The last strong-willed Sultan, Abdulhamid II, viewed himself as a rival in the imperialist game of Pan-Islamism, and opposed Western interests in order to protect the empire from its ambitions. By contrast, until the rise of an aggressive form of Japanese nationalism at the end of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Westerners residing in Tokyo during the Meiji era reflected the general Western enthusiasm for modern Japan. With the interesting exception of Pierre Loti, who loved the Ottomans and disliked the Japanese, Western public opinion did not see the modernizing Japanese as part of a dangerous oriental “yellow peril” but rather as a charming people whose efforts at modernization were remarkably admirable. Reading the diaries of Western participants in the Meiji experience of reform, such as Lafcadio Hearn and Basil Chamberlain, one sees that the modern Japanese and some of their Western sympathizers were acting

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almost as partners in this quest for modernity. The Westerners who were involved in the project of Westernizing, Christianizing, and modernizing Japan may have been at times overbearing, but they were involved sincerely. The Ottoman elite lacked the flexibility of the Japanese in their approach toward Western missionary zeal. One could hardly imagine an Ottoman minister allowing some Muslims to convert to Christianity in order to improve relations with the West, and gain Western help for reform. Yet the young minister of education, Mori Arinori, who was educated in the United States, and is known as the founder of modern national education in Japan, argued in favor of allowing some Japanese to convert to Christianity as a means of gaining Western favor.6 The history of European Christendom and that of the Ottomans as the Sword of Islam simply wouldn’t allow such a flexible approach to religion, merely for the sake of modern knowledge. Moreover, the historical rivalry between Christianity and Islam presented a very different psychological environment from the Buddhist and the Shinto animistic heritage of Japan, one that did not pose an immediate threat to Westerners. In diplomatic terms, one could top this discussion with the suggestion that by the end of the 19th century the Ottomans, who used to be a close ally of Great Britain in her foreign policy against Russia, were now replaced by the militarily promising Meiji Japanese, who were to prove worthy of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 by defeating Russian interests. As the new Star of the East, Japan was to enjoy British favor until the late 1920s, a fact that surely helped the development of education and science in Japan. Finally, piecemeal reform in Ottoman education seems to have provoked the emergence of rival social and cultural elites that used the slogan of religion versus modernity in order to legitimize their political claims to power. This appears to be a fate that Meiji Japan largely avoided. In terms of the political stability so critical to reforms, the antagonism between the strong-willed Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876–1908) and radical reformers like the Young Turks seems to have cracked the political integrity of the top elite. The Young Turks, late 19th century Ottoman reformers with a strong nationalist agenda, resembled the Meiji leaders in spirit. This rivalry for power ultimately led to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. By contrast, the relationship between the Meiji Emperor, who did not exercise strong power but was a unique symbol of religious and political unity, and the reformist elites, who held the reins of power in their hand as imperial bureaucrats, was much less hostile. Furthermore, the Meiji elite emphasized the development of a modern economy, and this required modern science and technology. By the end of the 19th century, then, Japan had built up a modern sector in its traditional economy which was export oriented, based on the latest technology of mass manufacturing for such large markets as the United States and China. This appears lacking in the Ottoman case, whose modern sectors of manufacturing exhibit small-scale production of a peripheral character integrated with European trade. In conclusion, comparison of the history of science and technology in Japan and Turkey reveals the complex layering of historical conditions that influence the behavior of nations, rather than proving the similarities or differences between Japan and Turkey. If there is a lesson to be learned, it is this: history is not a moral book of lessons. Instead, we must contemplate a wide range of historical factors influencing the quest for science and technology in the formation of a new world.

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NOTES 1

Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. Rustow, Political modernization in Japan and Turkey, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964) has no direct references to science and technology, and briefly skirts the issue in the discussion of education and economic growth. 2 Translation by Ömür Akyüz from Mehmed Akif, Safahat. 3 Hayami Akira, in Marius B. Jansen & Gilbert Rozman, Japan in transition from Tokugawa to Meiji, (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1986), 280–317. 4 T. C. Smith, The agrarian origins of modern Japan, (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1959). 5 Selçuk Esenbel, “The Anguish of Civilization: Western Cultural Forms in the Everyday Lives of the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks During the Nineteenth Century,” Japan Review, 5 (1994): 145–185. 6 Ibid.

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❚ First published in Sonoda Hidehiro (ed.), Kokusai Nihon Bunka Kenkyu Senta International Symposium, S.N. Eisenstadt, 1998, pp. 223–36.

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Commentary for the General Discussion on Japan in a Comparative Perspective a

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his Symposium was organized for the discussion of Professor Eisenstadt’s thought-provoking book on Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View, that has been recently published by the University of Chicago Press. The work is based upon the fundamental conceptual contrast between the rise of Axial Civilizations such as that of China, Europe, and India, which were defined by the universalistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism and experienced the tension between the transcendental and the mundane, versus the pre-existing Non Axial civilizations that reflected the particularistic cultural self conceptualization of local communities. These communities organized as tribal orders and reflected ethno-communal animistic religious traditions. Non Axial civilizations tended to be dominated by the institutions and cultures of Axial civilizations as in the case of the Germans who converted to Christianity or the Turks who converted to Islam. Others were pushed out of the margins of history such as in the case of the Mongols. Japan is the only Non Axial Civilization that has given birth to a continuous, autonomous history which produced a sophisticated culture that can only be found in Axial Civilizations. According to Professor Eisenstadt, it is this “unique” character of Japanese history that explains the strong inclinations toward the Japanization of processes of change particularly during the revolutionary transitions that entail the acceptance of Axial Civilizations. Such processes can be recognized in the case of the acceptance of Chinese Civilization in the seventh century and in the case of the acceptance of Western Civilization in the construction of Japanese Modernity. The voluminous work that handles Japanese Civilization from its Antiquity to the rise of Modern Japan with the 1868 Meiji Restoration is structured as a comparative study with Europe, China, India and other historical experiences that situates Japan in a global historical framework. The contention of the author is to take Japan analysis out of its familiar restrictions of an Euro-centred bilateral contrast or the parochial Nihonjinron or Japaneseness approach and in turn explain the character of Japanese Civilization in a truly multi-faceted comparative framework. A work of this magnitude is an important opportunity to discuss the larger questions of methodology in social sciences that is not simply related to the study of Japanese Civilization. Here a number of issues come to mind that invite a discussion

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of methodology together with an evaluation of this monumental work, Japanese Civilization. First, the book makes it once more clear that we need to develop a fruitful systematic method of collaboration between social scientists who are interested in general patterns of human behavior and the specialists such as historians, anthropologists, economists and so on of a particular area of study. In this case, it is obvious that the two groups have advantages and disadvantages which need to be framed in a positive collaboration network in order to co-join the strong points of both approaches. The social scientists who ask questions of magnitude such as those of Professor Eisenstadt are able to construct a debating platform about the global context of human history that attempts to decipher the outlines of general and universalistic societal forms which relates to patterns of change which the specialist detects in local and regional context. The advantage of such a universalistic approach is the effort at trying to understand cultural behavior in a comparative framework that will provide an explanation that can go beyond the terms of the culture itself. The method will therefore enable the expansion of the horizons of reflection about a particular culture in this case that of Japan by subjecting Japanese historical narrative to questions of Axiality, Non Axiality that have a universal platform. On the other hand, the specialist as in the case of those who work in Japanese Studies, has the advantage of language skills, the use of local sources, that breeds familiarity with the internal discourse of the culture about itself in studies about the politics, religion, culture and so on of the Japanese people. The advantages and disadvantages of the two different methods are clear in Professor Eisenstadt’s book about Japanese Civilization. By the very nature of the requirement that the social scientist has to rely on the studies of the Area specialist of Japan, the author has to use these secondary sources on Japanese society as primary sources without practicing “internal criticism” of documents that the father of modern history Leopold von Ranke advocated for the construction of a historical narrative by a scientific method. While as historians, we may no longer be so confident about the scientificity of Ranke’s historical methodology that relied heavily on the use of primary sources and a naive belief from our perspective on the uncontested ability of the written document to tell history as it actually was, still most students of history know that the written word contains not just information but also an argument about the information which imbeds the subjective perspective of the source. Thus, while the discussion of Japanese Civilization is based upon the series of studies of Japan specialists, the author cannot penetrate into the historiography of the literature that serves as the foundation of the book’s argument. On the one hand, the debate within the field of Japanese studies between different generations of scholars in Japan and in the English language literature produced primarily in the United States, or, the possibility of factual weaknesses or mistakes in the literature of the specialist, do not / can not enter into the analytical framework of the social scientist’s evaluation. On the other hand, the specialist may have the advantage of being sensitized to the existing discourse about Japan as a separate phenomena than the information about various aspects of Japanese behaviour. However the specialist such as myself may end up so engrossed in the particulars of the world that one has chosen to study that such universalistic issues at the level of Professor Eisenstadt’s work escape our attention. Furthermore, Japanese studies publications will reflect the limited vision of the author about any comparative framework. For example, Western scholars of Japan will sometimes posit a concept of the

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West as a contrasting or comparative framework to that of Japan for the sake of comparative analysis that remains superficial at the level of “we in the West” or “in contrast to the West” simply on the basis of being a native member of the western world. And this self-confidence of positing the West as a comparative frame in the hands of the specialist is sometimes done without a clear picture of the state of the art in the historiography about the construction of history of the processes about the so-called Western World. In this sense, Professor Eisenstadt’s work is superior to that of many specialists for the author sets the comparative analysis of Japanese Civilization in a systematic framework that discusses at length the various components of comparison within a conscious rational understanding of the history of the idea of the West in its own discourse. However, how do we solve the problems which are inherent in both approaches? I think that Professor Eisenstadt’s work can provide an opportunity to discuss the possibilities of devising a new framework of collaboration between social scientists and the specialists in Area Studies. My suggestion would be that a monumental study such as this one about Japanese Civilization would have benefited greatly if there was a process of collective interaction between the specialists and the author to expose the questions of debate and the pitfalls of the specialist literature prior to the preparation of the work. I am thinking in terms of possible committees, or workshops that bring the two types of minds together to help the construction of the narrative by the author. This indicates our need to restructure our approach to Area Studies. The framework of Area Studies which was formed in the post-war period and was primarily a product of the development of scholarship in the United States now needs to be reconsidered to handle new and different questions. It is clear that the existing framework lacks the ability to infuse Area Studies with the currents in theory and other fields of study so much so that an approach that was supposed to enrich the understanding of a particular culture such as that of Japan now exhibits the character of a limited and familiar debate about Japan in which almost the same themes come back and back again: Nihonjinron, Japanese modernity, conflict versus harmony, feudalism, uniqueness versus universality. The framework is always the West as a monolithic entity which is frequently the United States in the back of the minds of the authors. However, surely Japan will look different if the comparative framework and the questions of the study of Japan are asked for example from the history of the monarchy in Europe, the caste tradition in India, the empires of the Near East. Professor Eisenstadt has brought emphasis on an important thesis for the understanding of the history of modern civilization as the relationship between state and society. In the case of Japan, his argument stresses the primary role of the state and the relative weakness of an autonomous civil soeiety, which contrasts the Japanese experience with that of Western Europe, United States, and Canada taken to represent the West. Basing its roots in the highly regulatory character of the Tokugawa state during the Japanese history of feudalism, in Eisenstadt’s view, the Meiji state and its vestiges create an image of Japanese modernity which is unique in the sense that it derives from the dominance of state structures, state oriented elites and counter-elites, and political networking which is concurrent with a relatively weak civil society. This historical situation is argued to be unique to Japan due to its Non-Axial civilization that is not rooted in an Axial civilization with universalistic principles, and has resulted in the “conflation of state and civil society within the broader

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national community”. (S.N. Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996) p. 35). The theme of Japan’s modernity and its post-war democracy as a highly regulated form of a modern capitalist society that contrasts with the asssumption of the separation of state and a civil society capable of an autonomous political / economic / social history in the West is perhaps the most significant thesis of the study in terms of understanding the variations in the global history of modernity in our age. Since the second half of the nineteenth century the global history of modernity is not only continuing in the societies ideologically and historically accepted to be part of the West but it is also increasingly shifting to the region of the late developers or the newly developing societies of the Non-West, namely those countries in Asia and other continents that have became integrated into the world system that was initially formed with the rise of the West. The book argues, most Western scholars seem to have difficulty understanding the basic cultural and institutional features of modernity as it developed in Japan, especially its status as a highly controlled yet non-totalitarian, indeed, formally and to some extent actually democratic society. This observation of Professor Eisenstadt is very important for it points to a common intellectual barrier in the minds of Western scholarship on Japan in which frequently the idea of the West in the mind of the student of Japan is a pristine vision of the West which lacks the deconstruction of the ideology of being Western. This vision which forms the contrasting “other” for Japan (one can cite other entities such as India, China, and so on as well) is often derived from the intellectual and ideological idealization of the political process in the compressed idea of the vision of the West that is derived from the intellectual heritage of Western thought. It is frequently the idea of the West as we have learned from such great savants as Locke and Hobbes who form our ideas for the idea of democracy, liberty, constitutionalism, or our concepts for the role of rational bureaucracy and the industrial urban classes as seen in Weber and Marx in the construction of modernity in the West. The idea of the West is used without a clear discussion of the intellectual paradigm itself or an awareness of the historical complications of the actual praxis of these ideals in action in the history of the West. Therefore, those who have difficulty in understanding Japanese political behavior contrast it to the ideal of politics in the image of the West. They probably would have difficulty in understanding the actual historical experience of the societies that are seen as part of the West which frequently contrasted with the ideal models of the great Western savants themselves. I would like to discuss this issue with an example from the book. Professor Eisenstadt cites the difficulty of most Western scholars to understand the workings of Japanese politics in Western terms. One suggestion would be that in order to overcome the difficulty in understanding Japanese parliamentary politics, it would be perhaps more relevant to study the practice of politics in the history of pre-war and post-war Italy, and take into account the role of the United States in Italy in the immediate post-war period, the political domination of Christian Democrats in national governments in the post-war period despite the visibility of Socialists and Communists in local Italian politics, and an informal network of power holders as seen in Italian regional politics which remain in the hands of “unofficial / unlawful” forces such as that of the Mafia. Such a comparative study might explain better the seemingly mysterious workings of decision-making in Japanese politics that is argued

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to be based on behind the scenes negotiations between differents participants, and the accommodative tendency of the ruling party to the opposition, all of which represent the weakness of an ideological dimension. (Eisenstadt, p. 150) This comment does not intend to bring out a strong counter-argument that the Japanese due process of politics does not have its culturally defined modes of behavior. It is just that frequently much of the assumptions of Western oriented scholarship on Japan inflates the conceptural framework of uniqueness or Japaneseness because of an analytical framework that takes a “should” be approach of a pristine image of politics in a monolithic idea of the Modern West. The idea of the West is frequently not dominated by countries such as Italy or Spain which are also part of the history of the modern West, but probably by the perception of the experience as an ideal in the United States. The work of Harumi Befu and Josef Kreiner on the variations in the model of Japan in different cultural and generational environments has been an important corrective step in questioning this binary opposition of the idea of the West versus Japan in contemporary scholarship by showing its historiographic process. (Harumi Befu and Josef Kreiner, Othernesses of Japan: Historical and Cultural Influences on Japanese Studies in Ten Countries. (München: Monographien Band I Harausgegeben vom Deutschen Institut für Japanstudien der Philipp-Franz-vonSiebold-Stiftung, 1992)). Recent scholarship on the Middle East is also concerned with the debate on the similar issue of what if there was any role of Civil Society in the Middle East. It is significant to note that the recent study edited by Augustus Richard Norton begins with a critical discussion of Max Weber’s brief remarks on the nature of Islamic urban life. Lacking what he considered to be the decisive feature of formally organized urban communes (Gemeinde), he disqualified Middle Eastern cities from consideration as autonomous political units, unlike the cities of mediaeval Europe. (Augustus Richard Norton, Civil Society in the Middle East, Volume Two (Leiden E.J. Brill, 1996), p. xi) The whole argument of the work is to show that there were and still are civilian networks, organizations, institutions which function as a kind of civil society in the Middle East. The articles try to counter the Weberian image by deciphering local / indigenous historical phenomena that extends the definition of civil society to a comparable common platform. Thus Professor Eisenstadt’s concern in attempting to explain the relation of state and civil society in Japan in a historical and sociological comparative perspective can be understood as the reflection of an intellectual movement to overcome two binary propositions about Japanese Civilization: The classical rejection of the cultures outside of the West including that of Japan is the explanation of the idea of Modernity. This Euro-centered / Orientalist view was developed by the great Western thinkers of the nineteenth century such as Marx / Weber and others. However, the Occidentalist counter argument was also developed by the Asian thinkers who were frequently well-versed in Western thought and were motivated by the search for a national identity in their own modern experience. The counterargument for unique Japaneseness, nihonjinron, developed by Japanese thinkers which challenged the nineteenth century western rejection of Non-Western forms of modernity by an alternative and nationalist explanation of modernity is quite typical of the critical Occidentalist mode. I would suggest that Professor Eisenstadt’s work that takes Axiality / Non Axiality as a basic uni-versalistic paradigm which makes Japan unique but explainable beyond the nationalist perspective, and the articles of

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the Norton volume on the Middle East that seek to redefine the idea of civil society in Islamic turf, represent a trend in Western scholarship that intends to “decipher” in new terms the role of Non-Western civil society / societies that aims to cut across the above binary opposites perspective. However, it is also clear that in these works, the centrality of the conceptualization of state and society is clearly derived from the Western idea of the history of the political economy of modern Western civilization which argues that civil society has been crucial for the emergence of the modernity of politics in terms of liberty and democracy: civil society is seen as the embodiment of autonomous, self-regulating institutions that have the potential to be the foundation of self government and democracy that can counter the power of the state. Here, I would argue that the image of the potent role of the state and the relative weakness of civil society that is acknowledged as a major aspect of Japanese modernity by Professor Eisenstadt is in need of discussion. This is in view of the importance of the relation constructed between the state and civil society in the political economy of the politics of modernity as defined above. I would like to begin with a question about the book’s evaluation which sees an imposing role of the state in Japan throughout its history that exhibits itself as the conflation of state and society with historical deep-set roots. Needless to say, there has always been a sense of unity between the culture of civil society and that of Japanese polity during the time of the Yamato state as well as the later Heian court or the feudal governments in so far as sharing the idea of a culturally and ethnically homogeneous tradition. And it is also convincing to argue that the idea of national polity, kokutai, as it was argued by the Japanese, especially the nationalist Mito school during the Tokugawa period and later by the Meiji thinkers entails the unity of state and society under the sacral entity of the Emperors without a clear line of division between state and society. But, according to my understanding, the Japanese state “forced” a conflation of state and society by and large as a result of the state building process after the 1868 Meiji Restoration. The relationship of the Tokugawa state to the “non-state” civil society of feudal Japan, if the feudal class structure and the institutions of the commoner population of merchants, peasants, and artisans in the town and the village can by seen as part of Japanese civil society, was quite ambivalent. In the words of Philip Brown, the early modern state in Japan exercised the mannerisms of a flamboyant state with great claims to authority but when it came to practice there was great acceptance of autonomy and diversity which was exercised by the non-state institutions of society. In my opinion as well, the Tokugawa state’s stance toward the village which housed more than 80 percent of the civilian population, existed in a great deal of autonomous political / economic / social space which left the peasants in self-governing bodies as long as they were not rebellious. It is noteworthy that in the case of rebellions as well, while the feudal authorities lost no time in suppressing them, in actuality, many of their demands were accepted. This was not because of a voluntary choice on behalf of especially the Tokugawa Shogunate to be particulary nice to peasants (a contradiction in terms in any feudal polity) but it was due to the “limits” of state power in view of the autonomy of the countryside in historical terms. In my opinion, by destroying and reorganizing Japanese society, both its towns and villages, for the sake of modernity, the Meiji state, modeled on the nineteenth century European nation state, instigated this conflation of society into the state power structure. (Philip Brown, Central Authority and Local Autonomy in the Formation of Early Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993);

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Selcuk Esenbel, Even the Gods Rebel: Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising. (The Association for Asian Studies Monograph, 1998); James W. White, Ikki: Social Conflict and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995)). We have to consider this idea of the conflation of state and society in a country such as Japan as also reflective of the compression of time and space in our imagination of the modern experience. In contrast to the eighteenth century and even the nineteenth century which was dominated by the transportation and communications technology of the clipper ships and pony expresses, only to be quickened by the introduction of railroads and other automotive means in its later phases, the twentieth century has been a turbulent and fast moving process in our imagination both with its World Wars, Holocausts as well as automobiles, jet planes, satellites, and now the internet. Eric Hobsbawm has astutely touched upon this quickening process in our minds by the title of his recent work on the twentieth century as the Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century. (Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1996)). Here, I would also argue that the compression of time in our imagination about the twentieth century is also due to the extraordinary expansion in the role of the state in the hands of power holders to manipulate everyday life for the construction of modern industrial civilization in twentieth century terms—this relates to the extraordinary domination of the state over society that the author notes in the history of modern Japan even compared to Germany and Turkey. The acceleration in the potency of the state to control society in the twentieth century contrasts with the historical process of the industrial revolution as we note it in Europe starting with England and its gradual spread to the continent. We should remind ourselves that our century has experienced a re-industrialization process with the strong intervention / guidance of the state in view of the World Wars and the Great Depression that makes the image of an Adam Smithian vision of the gradual and evolutionary emergence of market economy, the English Industrial Revolution of the merchant industrialists of the cities of Lancaster or Manchester, recede back in our memory as slow-moving times. Furthermore, it is not just late developers such as Germany, Japan and Turkey that have relied on state mechanisms and the systematic manipulation of so-called civil society for constructing a modern industrial civilization but when looked at carefully, the New Deal of the United States, the Stalinist Industial Revolution of the Soviet Union, have many things in common with the experience of Japan or for that matter the other so-called late-developers in magnifying the role of the state over that of civil society. I am not suggesting that the experiences of the United States, Soviet Union, or Japan are identical, but one suspects that there was a lot of conflation of society into the state in the bastions of the West that frequently do not enter into analysis. Furthermore, in such situations as that of Japan and Turkey the process of civilization in the terms of Norbert Elias has a double-burden of constructing modern industrial civilization as not only a means of integration into the modern age but also as a means for national resistance against Western imperialism and domination in cultural terms. The enigmatic character of Asian nationalism should be taken into account to explain the lack of serious ideological differences on universalistic principles in politics: frequently it is not the lack of principle, but the existence of the nationalist perceptions that have given priority to the principle of resistance against

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the West over the political principles of the left or the right in political behavior that has colored the state engineered modernities in Japan and Turkey to seem as “a conflation of state and society”. Both societies have their share of political behavior that does not look quite explainable from the perspective of the ideological left and the right as defined by Western political thought. For example, the contradiction of the need for a nationalist agenda against the West in the politics of modern industrial civilization explains why sometimes outside observers find it difficult to explain the existence of Japanese Marxists who collaborated with pre-war militarists by serving in the South Manchurian Research Organization that was an arm of Japanese imperialism in Manchuria, or that some even “converted” to nationalist causes. To explain such behavior as simply the ambivalence of principle in Japanese political behavior is not a sufficient explanation to the ears of the historian. The recent work of Louise Young on Japan’s total empire shows us the inside story of how the construction of Manchukuo in the thirties was not the conspiracy of a few wild nationalist officers but actually entailed the collaboration of a wide range of “civil society” groups. Many leftists and liberals as well as nationalists saw Manchukuo as a Utopia for a settler’s paradise, the actualization of a Modern Asia that was an alternative to the British Raj, Dutch or the French Indo-China or the Foreign Settlements in Shanghai that dominated for a long time the form of modernity for the Asians. (Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)). Similarly, observers of modern Turkish history have found it difficult to explain the lack of “principled behavior” by sections of the Republic of Turkey after its foundation in 1923. The observers have frequently commented on the collaboration of former Marxist intellectuals with the cause of the Turkish revolution. Even the neutrality of the government during the Second World War which astutely played the Allies against Germany and remain a non-belligerent state in a policy of active neutrality has been at times criticized as an unprincipled behavior for not having taken a firm stance against fascism. (Selim Deringil, Turkish Foreign Policy During the Second World War. An Active Neutrality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 185 for criticism of foreign policy). The seemingly ambivalent forms of political behavior in Turkish politics as cited above can only be understood in the context of the nationalist ideology of the young Republican generation which sought to construct a western style state to save the nation in their minds from the dangers of colonization by the western empires after the destruction of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War. Therefore, sometimes the complexity of twentieth century history explains better the behavior of “Orientals”, such as the Japanese or the Turks, than comparative analyses of specialists in Area Studies which pose structural contrasts with the West. To give a similar example again from Japanese Civilization, in Japan the ruling party’s accommodative stance and the weakness of the opposion in Japanese politics is seen as derived of a Japanese cultural norm in addition to the structure of the parliamentary system. Here, Eisenstadt’s work refers to the evaluation of specialists who cite the prevalence of the ruling party’s accommodation to the politics of the disarmament treaty by adopting the politics of the opposition as their own. From the historical perspective, we should remember that Japan’s pre-war and immediate post-war developments made a profound impact in the minds of the post-war conservative ruling circles who firmly believed that the revival of a militarist Japan

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would be lethal for the future of the county even though they may have found the pre-war ideological currents of nationalism not completely anathema at the time. Thus, this curious accommodation between ruling circles and the opposition is not so much a “cultural phenomenon” but it is quite understandable in view of the prevalence of a consensus in the post-war generation of ruling conservative circles of Japan for avoiding the resurgance of militarism and the economic drain of remilitarization after the “dark valley” of the thirties and forties. The conservative Yoshida Shigeru’s vision of Japan’s need to reconstruct her economy by making sure that the countries of south and southeast Asia would not conclude that Japan was returning to the path of militarism and the hope for the eventual expansion of economic relations with China is historically the immediate background to the seemingly close relations between the ruling circles and the opposition over the disarmament treaty rather than any anthropological explanation of Japanese political behavior. (J. W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954 (Cambridge (Massachusetts): Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1988), pp. 387–388). My final point in this general discussion of the symposium that is inspired from the monumental work of Professor Eisenstadt is that the vision of the Japanese generations that were involved in the construction of Japan’s modernity in modern times makes more sense as a twentieth century modernist vision than an early nineteenth century one: this explaines the contradiction in the strong primordial, sacral vision of Japanese modernity as lacking a universal message. My personal desire for the work of Professor Eisenstadt’s work on Japanese Civilization, especially the sections dealing with the period after the 1868 Meiji Restoration would have been to include the political / ideological / intellectual voice of the Meiji-TaishoShowa Japanese individuals, for this collection of voices was very universalistic in claim while concerned at the same time by the need for a nationalist self definition though the primordial, ascriptive, sacral, natural terms of the native culture in the words of the book. Professor Eisenstadt hits an important point by bringing on the stage of Japanese modernity the role of the terms of the primordial, ascriptive, sacral, natural, and hierachical understanding of modernity in Japanese society. The reference to the primacy of the sacral and primordial terms of Japanese identity in modernity refreshes our memory by reminding us of the importance of Shintoism, Emperor-based nationalism, the sacral / mythical basis for Japanese imperialism as part of Japanese modernity and the unique connection between the idea of ethnic homogeniety and Shinto with the idea of the Japanese nation. This may be my particular understanding of Professor Eisenstadt’s emphasis on the Non-Axiality of Japanese civilization, but the book brings immediately to my mind the importance of the survival of the traditions of the native beliefs, practices, which are formulated from the heritage of the Shinto religion during the modern period as a framework for the self explanation of national identity that the Japanese have been constructing. It conflicted at the same time with their own modern desire for universality in the Japanese quest for modernity as an Asian phenomenon. It is this tension between the irrevocable components of the ideology of modern Japanese identity both as a sacral self at home that however has had universal claims abroad in Asia which is the interesting component of Japanese modernity. The history of Japanese nationalism had a different profile on the Asian mainland than the sacral image at home. The crude reflections of this universal claim was represented in such slogans

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as Hakkoichiu (the eight corners of the world united) that was used by the Japanese nationalist imperialists to justify the foundation of an East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere during the Second World War. However, the slogan has its roots in the Meiji era, and the Japanese political and intellectual involvement in Asian revolutions was quite deep: The ups and downs of which remain to be studied. Japanese nationalism abroad was Asianism as a universal message, albeit with danger to the takers, that acted as a de-stabilizing factor by destroying the ingrained interests of older empires in Asia by helping Asian liberation. (John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon Books, New York, 1993), p. 178). Attempts to see the European comparability of Japanese modernity for example by searching for the roots of the Japanese work ethic in Tokugawa ideology to explain the emergence of Japanese capitalism in compatible terms with that of Protestant Europe has also silenced the role of the Shinto religion both as an ideology as well as a social praxis of communal life: specifically the role of the Japanese ideology of Shinto as religion in the construction of modernity. The overemphasis on the Western oriented heritage of Modern Japan from the early Meiji era also had silenced the dynamic process of Asianism that begins with the late Meiji period and develops as the idea of Modernity in the twentieth century which was defeated with the war, but before the war it was perhaps more potent than the Westernist early Meiji heritage in taking the message of Japanese modernity abroad. How this historical phenomena of sacral, primordial identity is to be reconciled with the loud voice of the modern Japanese which saw the role of Japan as also universal as an Asianist vision is an issue that needs to be probed further. For the modern Japanese, as we see in their writings, this new Japan was not only a part of the history of the construction of modernity, but for many, especially in the pre-war era, Japan was to be total modernity: even more modern and universalistic than the West. For the Japanese nationalists of the pre-war era the slogan was surpassing modernity (kindai no chokoku) that brought a special modernist ideology to the ideology of imperial loyalty and the sacral origins of the imperial household. The ambition to be more modern than the established modernity of the imperialist West was the motivating agenda of the nationalists as well as the leftists some of whom were invariably interested in the compatibility of the vision, hence their collaboration at times with the empire-building agenda in Asia. This contradiction invites me to introduce into the analytical framework of understanding the modernity of Japanese civilization to be not just the late-comer or latedeveloper form of modernity, but the historical frontiers of modernity in the twentieth century that actually destroyed the modernity of the nineteenth century. In other words, as is clear from the general framework of this commentary so far, I am taking the idea of modernity for Japan closer to our time to the period after the Meiji period which ends in 1912 to the period including the Second World War rather than the culmination of Japanese conditions of Modernity in the Meiji period or simply the post-war period. According to Modris Eksteins who creatively argues in his work on the Rites of Spring, taking its title from the avant-garde ballet and symphony of Stravinsky that attacked nineteenth century sensibilities for romantic music and dance, the Great War (First World War) and the Birth of the Modern Age emerged with Germany in Europe, the homeland of the avant-garde in the Arts as well as modernity in war and economy. Germany represented the frontier of modernity that defied Paris and London, the nineteenth century centers of modern civilization

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in the capitals of the colonial imperial powers of the West. By attacking the “West” from the frontiers of its modernity, Germany in this destructive fashion brought on the twentieth century. I would expand Eksteins’s analysis and include Japan into the venture of constructing the twentieth century by destroying the nineteenth century of the western empires in Asia with its aggressive industrialization and imperialism that were more modern than those of the nineteenth century. (Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989), pp. 55–90). If during the nineteenth century, the vision of Modern Japan for the liberal intellectual such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, the founder of Keio University required that Japan catapult itself outside of Asia which is expressed with his slogan of “datsu-A”, and plunge into Western Civilization, this was not for a pacifist end. Fukuzawa as his later works acknowledge also argued that a Modern Japan will lead the modernization of Asia out of its slumber in a mission of Enlightenment. Many influential Japanese agreed with this one to one relationship from their own perspective. The list ranges from British style parliamentarian Count Ōkuma Shigenobu to the famous politician of civilian party politics of the twenties Inukai Tsuyoshi, and the familiar nationalist ideologues such as Tokutomi Sōhō and Ōkawa Shūmei. Despite their important political differences, it is significant to note that all had a common agenda for a Japanese Asianist destiny in forming a modern empire in Asia as a universal vision which would also liberate the Asians from their own nineteenth century: the sociopolitical force which created Modern Japan was not just the national polity of sacrality constructed in Tokyo for the population of the home islands but also modern Manchukuo constructed in Harbin. In conclusion, the work of Professor Eisenstadt is very important for it courageously confronts the larger issue of the meaning of Japanese Civilization which the specialist is incapable of confronting due to the particularistic approach of his / her methodology. It is the difficulty of reconciling these two approaches that provides food for the intellectual inquiry to study Japan. For this reader, the work has engendered new questions and issues about the understanding of Japanese Civilization which has made this commentary possible. The arguments about Non-Axial Civilization, conflation of state and society, the primordial, ascriptive, sacral nature of society and self-identity are challenging notions that need to be discussed further together with the issues that remain outside of the orbit of the book’s analysis.

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❚ First published in New Perspectives on Turkey, No. 35, Fall 2006, 5–19.

14

Reflections on Japanese and Turkish Modernization and Global History a

T

he trajectories of Japanese and Turkish modernization momentarily captivated the imagination of social scientists and historians during the 1960s as a testing ground for the analysis of the structural and institutional processes that went into the making of the modern in the world outside Europe and the US since the second half of the nineteenth century. The classic work on the subject is the volume edited by Robert Ward and Dankwart Rustow, Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (1964), which was published as part of a Princeton University Press series on comparative modernization in Russia, Japan, India, Turkey and China.1 A collection of articles by the foremost specialists in Japanese and Turkish Studies, the volume is representative of the kind of modernization theory prevalent in the American academy at the time. Despite its shortcomings, the volume remains a classic and a singular attempt that brought Japan and Turkey together within the field of modernization studies. Ward and Rustow construct their framework by defining modernization as a process distinct from westernization in terms of political and cultural changes of identity; they claim to disregard the differences of such politically divergent regimes as democracies, communist totalitarianisms and constitutional monarchies. Accordingly, modernization is defined in structural terms of industrialization, secularization, social mobility, science and technology, education, the shift from ascribed to achieved status, and a rise in material standards of living. These are concepts which still dominate our everyday understanding of modernity, despite strong criticism and suspicions in current academic discourse. In the 1960s, modernization was described in terms of increasing control over nature.2 However, our current assessment of that process is probably better represented by the jaundiced view that humans have destroyed nature. In Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, Roderic H. Davison, Kemal H. Karpat, Peter F. Sugar, Arif T. Payaslıoğlu and Frederick Frey discussed Turkey in terms of traditional society, environmental and foreign contributions, economic and political modernization, education, mass media, civil bureaucracy, military, political leadership and political parties. John W. Hall, Robert A. Scalapino, William W. Lockwood, R. P. Dore, Shuichi Kato,

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Masamichi Inoki, Roger F. Hackett and Nobutaka Ike contributed parallel essays on Japan on each of these topics. Following a systematic comparison, Ward and Rustow concluded that Japan completed an earlier and more mature process of political modernization that involved the formation of a nation-state. Japan underwent the institutional and social processes of transformation outlined above, with a take-off period between 1868 and 1890, the Meiji Restoration period. Turkey, on the other hand, lagged behind by 40 years, with a take-off period between 1908 and 1928, a timeframe that conflates the Young Turk Revolution with that of the Kemalist Republican one. Environmental, foreign, and indigenous conditions were quite different in both cases: Japan had the advantage of not being the target of western imperialist expansion, of having a highly educated population and culturally homogeneous conditions suitable for the quick building of a modern nation-state. In the case of Turkey, the 40 year gap was fed by such disadvantages as being on the crossroads of western imperialist aggression, a low educational level of its culturally and ethnically diverse population, and the pains of salvaging a nation-state out of a dismantled empire. Still, the authors conclude that Japan and Turkey shared a common experience in terms of successful defensive modernization against the specter of colonization, able leadership of a practical and pragmatic political elite, and a prominent modernizing role of a strong military. They are neither alternatives, nor a case of success and failure. Rather, Japan is placed at one end of the modernization spectrum, whereas Turkey is in a position somewhere in the middle, but still in a position better than the rest of the Middle East.3 The political agenda of the volume by Ward and Rustow and other modernization studies in the series has been seriously criticized in the US academy. From the perspective of the critical leftist scholarship prominent in the United States during the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Princeton series represented the stronghold of area studies scholarship based on US Cold War policies in Asia, which had resulted in American intervention in Korea and Vietnam. The result of the modernization studies, including the volume on Japan and Turkey, did express a partiality to Japan’s experience as a kind of ideal type which avoided a communist revolution, and yet managed to modernize its economy, society, and political structure without undue instability. In a critique of modernization studies scholars in the US academy, John Dover accused their approach as slanted towards emphasizing in Japanese modern history the factors that represented stability and harmonious development, but disregarding factors of crisis or conflict—such as pre-war ultra-nationalism, imperialist aggression in Asia, militarism, the misery of the disenfranchised peasantry, and the suppression of the strong labor movement.4 Recently, Harry Harootunian has strongly attacked 1960s modernization studies scholars for pushing Japan as an anti-Communist Asian model of modernization for the use of US foreign policy, but lacking in significant theoretical and methodological explanation of the modern as it was globally experienced.5 Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey forms the background to this special issue bringing together essays on Japan and Turkey by Selçuk Esenbel, Binnaz Toprak, Hiroshi Mitani and Selim Deringil as well as a commentary by Zafer Toprak. These papers constitute individual reflections on aspects of Japanese and Turkish modern history and questions of modernity that were not dealt with in the volume by Ward and Rustow. In this sense, the essays constitute a re-reading of that

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book 40 years after its publication in the light of the debates about the overall shift in the modernization paradigm. They also reflect each author’s preferred perception of what constitutes the modern experience today. The product of a series of workshops held at Boğaziçi University and Tokyo University between 2000 and 2002, and organized by Suzuki Tadashi of Tokyo University, the following essays each in their own way posit questions that help construct a more global perspective and open up the conceptual framework of the original study. As a contribution to the intellectual history behind the political and cultural framework of Japanese and Chinese nationalism, Hiroshi Mitani’s paper traces the long journey of the concept of Asia as a geo-cultural entity from Europe to China and Japan (for that matter to the rest of that continent as well) in the early modern period. The journey of the idea of Asia as an intellectual and geographic concept makes us aware of the process by which the peoples in the far east of the continent started thinking of themselves as Asians, a category that previously did not exist in their vocabulary of self-identification. Here, Mitani demonstrates how the division of modern history as that of Europe / West and that of Asia as separate categories is questionable from the outset. He discusses how geographical concepts which form the foundation of civilizational and cultural identities—such as European or Asian— have been historically formed in the context of global history. Mitani’s essay is in line with recent criticisms of cartographic positivism. For instance, Jeremy Black and Brian Harley have reconstructed the history of map-making in the west, by drawing attention to its cultural and ideological character as part of the scientific endeavor of drawing the global map according to Euro/American historical and cultural values that reinforce the western-centered vision of world supremacy.6 Recent works by Karen Pinto, Giancarlo Casale and Çiğdem Kafesçioğlu, who have picked up the topic of re-interpreting Ottoman maps as socially constructed bodies of knowledge to serve the Ottoman imperial idea, are interesting comparable studies in the same vein.7 Mitani takes the story beyond the boundaries of the cultural vision of the west and looks at its global implications from the geo-historical position of East Asia. He expands the analysis by showing how the European vision of the world map first overpowered existing territorial views of the globe in China and Japan and then was reinterpreted by Chinese and Japanese nationalism—and subsequently by Japanese imperialism—to serve their own ends. Selçuk Esenbel picks up the same global journey in the intellectual and political interaction between early-twentieth-century nationalist and emancipatory movements in the Islamic world (including Turkey and Japan) that provides a peculiar justification for the Japanese Asianist militarist vision of modernity. By then Asia had become an indigenous term of self-definition for Japanese political actors and intellectuals. For them, Asia constituted the modern future under Japanese leadership, a future that would challenge the declining modernity of the colonial west. Japan’s modern experience is better known as an inspiration for the nationalist and political actors in the Islamic world, and in the Turkish context as an alternative and desirable model of modernity more suitable than that of the west. Yet, we should also consider Colonel Hashimoto’s idealization of the Kemalist revolution as an ideal Asian military-led revolution suitable for Japan and Okawa Shumei’s vision of a pan-Islamic movement as the Asian International which would help Japan ride the crest of Asian emancipation and empire. These examples strikingly show how

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the modern history of Turkey and the Islamic world was perceived by Japanese right-wing intellectuals and political actors who took the lead in pushing for an innovative right-wing, or kakushin uyoku, Asian revolution during the 1930s as the dynamics of Asian modernity. In a sense, the historic journey of the concept of Asia, as traced in Mitani’s article, was the basis for twentieth-century political action in Japan. It is also clear that the west was not the only category that defined the modern for Asians. They also looked outside the west at their contemporaries as desirable revolutionary models with strong military leadership. Selim Deringil examines the Japanese as well as the Ottoman gaze toward the western world as parallel historical occurrences, with interesting similarities and differences that connected the Japanese and the Ottoman Turks’ perspectives of western hegemony to their policy-making style in their mutual efforts at reform and catching up with the west. While Ward and Rustow’s book discusses the attitudes of western powers towards Japan and Turkey as one of the given factors of modernization, the authors ignore Japanese and Turkish attitudes toward the west and westerners in the nineteenth century, attitudes that shaped decision making by political elites in both countries. According to Deringil, the Ottomans shared with the Japanese a defensive attitude against the west; yet, they differed in their approach to the need to import western civilization. Deringil’s article makes use of the memoirs and journals of travelers from both of these non-western polities, who were pioneers in transferring images of the western world to their own environment. His conclusion suggests that the Ottoman statesmen of the late nineteenth century were pragmatically, and perhaps cynically, aware of the inevitable reality that they would stick out within a larger community of western (read Christian) nations.8 The Japanese appear much more aggressive in their challenge to the west and desire to carve out an Asian empire for themselves, an empire that would vie for joining the western club of world powers on an equal footing. Compared to the Japanese, who were suddenly forced to open their country to the west in 1853 by Commodore Perry of the US fleet, the Ottomans did not feel alien in Europe, since it had been part of their historical world. The Ottomans did not make a shopping list for studying in depth European civilization as an alien entity; the Japanese did so in the 1872 Iwakura mission which traveled around the world immediately after the 1868 Meiji Restoration, after the traditional Tokugawa feudal polity had been abolished and replaced by a modern state. The Japanese systematically studied in situ all aspects of the Euro/American “enlightened civilization” (the Japanese term of the day)— that is, industry, parliamentary politics, state structure, women’s education and the technology considered necessary to bring Japan the same status as western powers. In comparison to the systematic aggressive effort of the Japanese to destroy “backward customs” and adopt western institutions wholesale, thereby revamping the face of Japan, the Ottoman view toward western civilization appears more phlegmatic. Forced to operate within a system of international relations that threatened the empire, Ottoman statesmen were probably still confident that their adoption of western institutions to complement their own was a viable alternative to enable the empire’s survival. This is an imperial attitude in some respects more reminiscent of the attitude of late-nineteenth-century Chinese mandarins who hoped to strengthen the Sino-Confucian civilization of the Qing dynasty by adopting some western institutions.

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In her article on the gender issue in Japanese and Turkish modernization—an issue completely ignored by the male-dominated modernization discourse in Ward and Rustow’s book—Binnaz Toprak tackles the framework of that volume on two fronts. First, by providing a study of the actual conditions of women in modern Japan and Turkey, she deciphers the myths about traditionalism and modernity in the images of Turkish and Japanese women. Second, the choice of topic challenges the maleoriented cultural bias of the social science discourse of the previous generation, a discourse that did not factor in the experience of half of the population as an integral part of the modernizing process. In view of the symbolic significance of women’s emancipation and modernity for the ideology of the Turkish Republican revolution, her article demystifies the subject especially in view of the fact that, while an important image for the justification of Japanese reform efforts ever since the 1868 Meiji Restoration, the “modern woman” has not held a comparable symbolic role in political debates in Japan, as she has continued to do so in Turkey. Interestingly, the statistics on Japan’s level of socio-economic development in 1960, as outlined in Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, provides a convenient benchmark to put the Turkish women’s prospects into perspective. Japan’s development indicators in 1960 were 98 percent literacy, 37 percent of the population in agriculture and a per capita income of around USD 1,500 to 2.000.9 The corresponding figures for Turkey were 39 percent literacy, 77 percent agricultural population, and half of the amount of per capita income. By emphasizing the effective role of post-war industrialization as the impetus to the development of Japanese women’s conditions, Binnaz Toprak unveils the ideological framework of women in Turkey as symbols of modernity. But at the same time, she points to the difficulties that lie ahead for Turkish women in view of prospects for Turkey’s economic and industrial growth. Finally, Zafer Toprak proposes that we adopt a global perspective to study the Ottoman economy in his commentary. He emphasizes the global processes that went into the making of a modern economic transformation in the late Ottoman Empire. His commentary challenges the classic thesis of decay in national historiography, which claims that the political and military decline of the Ottoman Empire also brought about its economic decline. Furthermore, in contrast to Ward and Rustow, Zafer Toprak hints at the connections between European and Ottoman economic processes within the framework of global economic dynamics. This is in contrast to the essays in Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey which dismissed the productive character of economic changes in the late Ottoman period simply as cases of dependency distortions. It is revealing to observe the difference between the terminology used in Ward and Rustow’s book (especially in Peter Sugar’s article) and Zafer Toprak’s perspective. What Ward and Rustow described as “semi-colonization” and “hyper colony,”10 Toprak prefers to describe as “proto-globalization” during the long-term integration of the Ottoman economy. His approach leaves the hyper colony thesis aside and instead links Ottoman economic dynamics, especially at the turn of the century, to the post-imperial and early republican history of Turkey, with a subtext that is suggestive of the historical roots of Turkey’s economic integration with the European Union today. Each essay in this special issue, therefore, addresses issues of modernity and global interaction in its own way and asks new questions. Inevitably, strict boundaries of what is modern and what is traditional are blurred as a result. Binnaz Toprak observes

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that Japanese people mark western holidays, but sometimes also wear traditional attire. For Deringil, Ottoman statesmen end up as quite the accomplished contemporaries in comparison to their Japanese counterparts, although politically weaker. According to Esenbel, Japanese militarists looked towards Ankara rather than Berlin or Rome as the inspiration for their Asian revolution, an image quite shocking to our standard vision of Turkey’s revolutionary legacy as a safely westernizing venture. In a similar vein, in Mitani’s article, the boundaries between the so-called east and west, or Asia and Europe, as historical categories are blurred. Even the idea of Asia is not originally Asian, but has undergone a process of becoming so. However, for Zafer Toprak the Ottoman economy was not being destroyed, but rather integrated into Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. Interaction, links, connectedness, contemporary-ness are key words that stand out. Each author from his or her own vantage point enables us to view the history of modernity—in this case through the examples of Japan and Turkey—as a shared global process of change, rather than in terms of national and indigenous dynamics only. All in all, the papers constitute a reflection on Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey by introducing themes and conceptual questions that were not touched upon in that volume. The essays also raise new questions that need to be addressed in future studies about Japan’s and Turkey’s experiences with modernity. Modernization studies of the 1960s, including Ward and Rustow’s book, exhibit conceptual constraints that invite discussion. An effort at defining the national factors in the modernizing process of the nation-state, the modernization perspective was a product of post-1945 American social science scholarship that aimed to replace what previously would have been termed the westernization or the civilizing of Asian and African peoples. By reducing the role of the west and redefining westernization as a non-regional structural process, the modernization perspective tended to leave out the significant transnational and cosmopolitan framework of the imperial polities of the nineteenth century and at the same time disregarded the connections among these countries sharing a global history with western powers. In this analysis, empires and their varying polities were lost. They only provided a contrasting background to the emergence of the twentieth-century modern nationstate constructed on the ashes of empires that were inevitably destroyed in the early twentieth century. The role of western influences was a given factor, not organically linked to the future nation-state. Therefore, while replacing the politically incorrect term of westernization, modernization simultaneously disregarded the history of the west beyond the geography of the western world, not only as a colonizing power, but also as being a part of the transformation of countries outside its cultural borders. Re-reading Ward and Rustow’s book today shows how much our perception of the twentieth century (in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, the shortest century) is conditioned to primarily focus on history as a series of events that occurred within a given society as an inner transformation of the national. This perspective places relatively little emphasis on the concurrent links of the national to global historical dynamics at the time. Needless to say, a problem of studying the transformation of polities and societies such as Japan and Turkey is that the conceptual tools have been derived from the European experience of modernity—for example, from the emergence of nationstates, the French Revolution, the rise of Euro/American capitalism, western imperialism, the scientific and industrial revolutions, and so on. Therefore, Euro / American

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history is frequently seen as the basis of the forces of modern history, as the very essence of the definition of modernity, whereas countries outside of the perceived geographic and cultural boundaries of the western world have been lumped together in the residual category of non-western. The latter were expected to experience a replay of an earlier European historical experience, if they were up to it or lucky, or sometimes under proper colonial tutelage. To give credit where it is due, Ward and Rustow were aware of this problem. In their concluding remarks they suggested that the study of Japan and Turkey shows the existence of various models of modernity (not alternatives, as is argued by some social scientists today) and recommended that the earlier experience of European countries should be studied in similar systematic fashion to expose the diversity in the European transformation to modernity.11 Another point concerns Turkish social science scholarship on the topic of Japanese and Turkish modernization at the time of the publication of the Ward and Rustow volume. Never translated into Turkish, the book itself was generally ignored in the Turkish debate on the question of Turkish modernization / westernization, with the exception of a few works that made brief references. During the 1960s, the only work that undertook a serious comparative analysis of the Japanese and Turkish revolutions in Turkish was that of Doğan Avcıoğlu who described both experiences from a Marxist perspective as national bourgeois revolutions.12 Avcıoğlu viewed Japanese modernization as a coalition of feudal and bourgeois elements in an absolutist regime which engendered capitalism under an authoritarian regime without its accompanying liberal and democratic processes.13 Reflecting the mainstream Japanese Marxist scholarship of Takahashi Kohachiro on the subject through Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth and other important works such as those of E. H. Norman, and T. C. Smith, Avcıoğlu’s brief analysis still stands as an accomplished evaluation from a Marxist perspective.14 It is interesting to note that Avcioğlu disregards Ward and Rustow’s work in his book, although his book appeared five years after the former, an omission that alludes to the political and ideological gap between the American orientation of the modernization debate and the contemporaneous Turkish intellectual milieu. Unlike Marxist-oriented Turkish scholars for whom Japan has not been a major topic of interest (perhaps because it was assumed that such an interest would reinforce a right-wing perspective of developmentalist political economy, authoritarian methods and traditionalist culturalism), Japan’s and Turkey’s encounters with modernity have constituted a popular topic of comparison for Turkish intellectuals and political figures of a mainstream and right-wing tendency (the Turkish version of kakushin uyoku, as it were). Yet, often the overall treatment of the topic did not go beyond a lamentation about how unsuccessful Turkish efforts have been in contrast to the striking success of Japan, the rising star of the east. A thoughtful example of the conservative perspective on Japan’s developmental experience is Mehmed Turgut’s detailed study of Japanese industrial policy as an instructive model for Turkey.15 A former minister of industry and energy who served in many of the Justice Party cabinets of the 1960s and 1970s, Turgut saw Japan’s industrialization as a viable example that Turkey should follow. He criticized Turkey’s policies accordingly. There are also important, if only few, exceptions to the conservative approach in comparing Turkey’s and Japan’s developmental trajectories. For instance, Esenbel

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and Demircioğlu have brought together for the first time articles by mostly Turkish scholars on Japan in an edited volume that aims to look at Japanese history and contemporaneous development from the perspective of the Turkish experience.16 The book includes a wide range of topics—such as labor law, banking, economic models, secular constitutions, and international relations. Another notable work is that by Huri İslamoğlu-İnan who has emphasized Japan’s ability to industrialize, even though it lacked a European institutional background.17 Since the late Ottoman period there is also a tradition of Islamist intellectual debate since the late Ottoman period on Japanese modernity as a suitable alternative for Muslims, an alternative that would avoid the cultural westernization that was dominant in the Turkish experiment. Late Ottoman intellectuals’ fascination with the activities of Pan Islamist figures such as Mehmed Akif and Abdürreşid İbrahim, who had political and intellectual involvement with Japan, is an interesting undercurrent of late Ottoman Turkish history. They perceived Japan as a successful model for having incorporated traditionalist attitudes and religious traditions and, hence, as an example against which to critique the strongly secular dynamics of the Turkish republican model which, according to them, failed in nation-building and Japanesestyle rapid industrialization. Needless to say, this idealization of Japan as a suitable model for a Muslim society because of its traditionalist policies has dismissed the significance of westernization, secularization and the social crises that went into the Japanese transformation.18 Along the same lines, it is worth mentioning that Ward and Rustow made a passing reference to the Japanese advantage of accomplishing an innovative symbiosis of traditionalist attitudes and institutions with modernity, a symbiosis that reinforced dualism in the process of constructing a modern society, such as the clever use of the notion of the divine emperor and the samurai ethic for strengthening political unity. In contrast, the authors assess Turkey less likely to succeed, because of the abolishing of the Caliphate and the hard-line secularism of early Kemalist reforms against the Islamic tradition.19 It is interesting to note that the current Turkish Islamist approach to the Japanese experience ironically takes off from this point of criticizing Turkish modernization as lacking the cultural and spiritual instruments of the Japanese use of tradition. A notable exception to the perspective favoring the culturalist mode of the Japanese experience is an essay by Abdülkadir Buluş that avoids the simplistic positing of this country’s experience as an alternative to the west.20 Following a fine discussion of the roots of Japanese capitalism and a comparison with the Ottoman state, Buluş ends his essay with the open-ended remark that such a comparison exhibits methodological difficulties due to differences in social, cultural, economic and religious social formations. He argues that each society has to give birth to its own developmental process out of its own structural character and that it is not realistic to expect the possibility of an identical adaptation of either the western or the Japanese model of development. While informative and offering a pragmatic answer to a profoundly difficult question, this comment begs elaboration.21 It also raises the danger of creating a vicious circle that prevents us from pursuing comparative study to understand the complex phenomenon of modernity. Prospects for fruitful comparative studies in the future lie in focusing on a clearly defined singular topic that provides a focused instrument for discussing modernity by bringing in research from regional studies beyond the reductionism of the west and the rest. A recent book edited by Huri İslamoğlu, on the institution of private

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property in China, India and the Ottoman Empire, brings together specialists from each field and represents a good example of a multi-regional analysis of modernity from the perspective of economic history, even though the book’s title has retained the east versus the west terminology.22 Another notable comparative work, although focusing on a different region, is Faruk Birtek and Thalia Dragonas’s edited volume on the dilemmas of citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey, two countries which emerged from the heterogeneous historical legacy of the Ottoman world. The book highlights the political problems of nation-building, or rather nation-engineering, an issue which Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey was unable to fully explore, other than suggesting that it was easier for Japan than for Turkey.23 For the historically minded, however, a number of new strategies of investigation which possibly imply a new curriculum of training, are in order, aiming to cross the borders of nation-state analysis into a new terrain of research. Herein lies the benefit of global history as a new perspective on international history. By focusing on the international and intra-national connections within a historic spatial and temporal setting, this method will engender a new set of questions that will provide the means to plunge into uncharted territories and bring to the surface material left unstudied in the past for ideological or methodological reasons. The student of modernity can connect the historical experience of a generation across national, geopolitical and cultural boundaries, as a shared one that dismantles the nation-state trajectory of analysis and expands modernity to a global platform. Historians recently have begun to realize the importance of the global, not so much as an ideal or a model, nor as a value-laden framework for positive or negative comparison (that is, in terms of east versus west), but as historical processes that took the shape of political, economic and intellectual interaction–connectedness of the so-called external social phenomena with the domestic stage of events. The global approach is especially relevant for the historical study of the modern era, an era in which western military and techno-industrial developments and western colonial and imperial expansion quickened the connections between peoples and regions. The perspective of global history encourages the study of the organic links between the national and the international at any given moment in historical time. However, it presents problems in the training of historians, for it requires mastery of the languages of archival material in several countries. Based on the use of multi-linguistic materials contemporaneous with each other and a firm understanding of the debate on the historiography in each respective region, such an analysis obviously expands the nation-state frame and connects historical processes beyond the divide between European and / or American, Asian and African histories. Such an approach would place emphasis on the historical role of transnational political / religious / ethnic networks, the global interaction of ideas via the press, and attitudes and intellectual discourses that cut across national boundaries. The fields of Chinese and Indian historiography have been particularly fertile in the engendering of a global and transnational perspective for understanding modern history beyond the nation-state. Studies that adopt such a broad perspective set the stage for contention against linear histories of China and India by drawing attention to supranational historical factors.24 For instance, Rebecca Karl’s recent study of Chinese nationalism and revolutionaries around the turn of the twentieth century

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reveals how Chinese revolutionaries debated their agenda of nationalist awakening in the light of the Young Turk revolution of 1908. Her study shows how the global interaction of ideas and experiences were connected to this revolutionary moment.25 Thus, historians increasingly turn their attention to topics that extend the historical stage across the political borders of the state and the nation by drawing attention to the history of diaspora or émigré populations within the home country and overseas, or to informal connections of diplomacy that cut across national institutions. The familiar topic of the global economic interests of firms and the unfamiliar topic of world powers’ intelligence operations as well as international revolutionary movements constitute subjects that invite attention to the study of the global.26 In sum, a global perspective can help us embark upon the study of alien shores as a shared experience that brings light to the shadows that govern (again in the words of Hobsbawm) our interesting times.27

REFERENCES Avcıoğlu, Doğan. Türkiye’nin Düzeni: Dün-Bugün-Yann. Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1969. Baran, Paul. The Political Economy of Growth. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957. Birtek, Faruk, and Thalia Dragonas, eds. Citizenship and the Nation-State in Greece and Turkey. London: Routledge, 2005. Black, Jeremy. Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Buluş, Abdülkadir. “Japon Kapitalizminin Kökenleri ve Osmanli Devleti ile Bir Karşılaştırma.” Divan, no. 2 (2002): 135–95 Casalle, Ciancarlo. “The Ottoman Age of Exploration: Spices, Maps and Conquest in the Sixteenth-century Indian Ocean.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 2004. Deringil, Selim. The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909. London: I. B. Tauris, 1998. Dower, John W. Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975. Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Esenbel, Selçuk. “Japan’s Global Claim to Asia: Transnationalism and World Power Japanese Pan Asianism and the World of Islam: 1900–1945.” American Historical Review 109, no. 4 (October 2004): 1140–70. ——, “Japon Aydınları ve Batı Bilimi.” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 40 (1988): 35–42. ——, “Japonya’da Islahat Düşüncesi ve Ulusal Kimlik.” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 54–55 (1991): 65–75. ——, “Türk ve Japon Modernleşmesi: ‘Uygarlık Süreci’ Kavramı Açısından Bir Mukayese.” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 84 (2000): 18–36 Esenbel, Selçuk, and Murat Demircioğlu, eds. Çağdaş Japonya’ya Türkiye’den Bakişlar. İstanbul: Simurg, 1999. Harley, John Brian. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Harootunian, Harry. History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2000. İslamoğlu-İnan, Huri. “Introduction: Why European History.” O.D.T.Ü . G e lişme Dergisi 22, no. 3 (1995):221–25. İslamoğlu, Huri, ed. Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West London: I. B. Tauris, 2004. Kafesçioğlu, Çiğdem. “The Ottoman Capital in the Making: The Reconstruction of Constantinople in the Fifteenth Century.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1996.

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Karl, Rebecca. Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Norman, E. Herbert. Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State. New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1946. Pinto, Karen. “Ways of Seeing: Scenarios of the World in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination!” Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 2001. Smith, Thomas Carlyle. Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan: Government Eterprise, 1868–1880. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955. Sunar, İlkay. State and Society in the Politics of Turkey’s Development. Ankara: Ankara Universitesi S. B. F.Yayınları, 1974. Takahashi, Kohachiro. “La Place de la Revolution de Meiji dans I’histoire agraire du Japon.” RevueHistorique (October-November 1953). Tözeren, Selçuk. “Japon ‘Eğitim Modeli’ve Doğu Batı Sorunsalı.” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 25–26 (1984): 23–38. ——, “Japonya’da Toprak Düzeni ve Kapitülasyonlar.” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 25–26 (1984): 39–58. Turgut, Mehmet. Japon Mucizesi ve Türkiye. İstanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1985. Ward, Robert E., and Dankwart A. Rustow, eds. Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. Rustow, eds., Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964). Ibid., 3. Ibid., 456–57. John W. Dower, Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E.H. Norman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 3–102. Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). For a discussion of the role of nationalism and Euro-centrism that went into the making of maps and world atlases during nineteenth-century imperialism, see Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). For the argument that maps were texts of meaning and socially constructed forms of knowledge that served as a form of power, see John Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Giancarlo Casalle, “The Ottoman Age of Exploration: Spices, Maps and Conquest in the Sixteenth-century Indian Ocean” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 2004), Çiğdem Kafesçioğlu, “The Ottoman Capital in the Making: The Reconstruction of Constantinople in the Fifteenth Century” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1996), Karen Pinto, “Ways of Seeing: Scenarios of the World in the Islamic Cartographic Imagination!” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 2001). Selim Deringil, The Well–Protected Domains: Ideology anad the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876-1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998). See title page for the comment of Said Paşa in a memorandum prepared for the Sultan. Ward and Rustow, eds., Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, 6. Ibid., 440. Ibid., 464. Doğan Avocıoğlu, Türkiye’nin Düzeni: Dün-Bugün-yaın (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1969), 37–47 (for the Japanese development). Ibid., 37–47. See, Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), E. Herbert Norman, Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1946), Thomas Carlyle Smith, Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan: Government Eterprise, 1868–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955), Kohachiro

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15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Takahashi, “La Place de la Revolution de Meiji dans I’histoire agraire du Japon,” Revue Historique (October-November 1953). Mehmet Turgut, Japan Mucizesi ve Türkiye (İstanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1985). Selçuk Esenbel and Murat Demircioğlu, eds., Çağdaş Japonya’ya Türkiye’den Bakişlar (İstanbul: Simurg, 1999). Huri İslamoglu-İnan, “Introduction: Why European History,” O.D.T.Ü. Gelişme Dergisi 22, no. 3 (1995). Also see, İlkay Sunar, State and Society in the Politics of Turkey’s Development (Ankara: Ankara Universitesi S. B. F. Yayınları, 1974). For an exposé of the Pan Islamist vision of japan, see Selçuk Esenbel, “Japan’s Global Claim to Asia: Transnationalism and World Power Japanese Pan Asianism and the World of Islam: 1900–1945,” American Historical Review 109, no. 4 (October 2004). For a discussion of the economic resources of industrialization, traditionalism, westernizing elements and social crises in modern Japanese history, see Selçuk Esenbel, “Japon Aydınarı ve Batı Bilimi,” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 40 (1988), Selçuk Esenbel, “Japonya’da Islahat Düşüncesi ve Ulusal Kimlik,” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 54–55 (1991), Selçuk Esenbel, “Türk ve Japon Modernleşmesi: ‘Uygarlık Süreci’ Kavramı Açısından Bir Mukayese,” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 84 (2000), Selçuk Tözeren, “Japon ‘Eğitim Modeli’ve Doğu Batı Sorunsalı,” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 25–26 (1984), Selçuk Tözeren, “Japonya’da Toprak Düzeni ve Kapitülasyonlar,” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 25–26 (1984). Ward and Rustow, eds., Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, 434. Abdülkadir Buluş, “Japon Kapitalizminin Kökenleri ve Osmanli Devleti ile Bir Karşılaştırma,” Divan, no. 2 (2002). Ibid. Huri İslamoğlu, ed., Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004). Faruk Birtek and Thalia Dragonas, eds., Citizenship and the Nation-State in Greece and Turkey (London: Routledge, 2005). See, Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). Rebecca Karl Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). See, Esenbel, “Japan’s Global Claim to Asia.” Spellings of Japanese words have disregarded macrons to indicate long o and u sounds.

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❚ First published in Boğaziçi (Bosphorous) Research Paper SBE/HIST 88–03, pp. 1–51.

15

The Study of Local Administration in Early Modern Japan: The Case of Nakano Tenryo- During the Tokugawa Period, 1637–1868 a

INTRODUCTION

M

uch debate has ensued concerning the definition of the term feudalism used in Japanese history. Most would agree that the term is suitable as a politico-legal concept to describe the vassalage and enfiefment practices that formed the backbone of samurai warrior class rule over land and population since the 12th century.1 However, scholars also recognize that during the Tokugawa period (1600–1867) Japanese feudalism underwent great change. The institution of government authority by centralized controls over social and economic life was characteristic of the Tokugawa takeover, which ended the prolonged civil war between many domain lords and largely removed the pockets of local power in the rural areas. In fact, the standard term used in Japanese scholarship for the period has been “centralized feudalism” to distinguish from the more decentralized and unstable feudal order of the previous warring states period between the 15th and the 16th centuries.2 The isolationist policy and strict social regulation of the Tokugawa order have warranted much criticism especially by Japanese scholars for whom the period has been an “ancient régime”. Yet, it has also been undeniable that the results of the Tokugawa measures were quite successful for the rulers. The “Pax Tokugawa” peace of the military rulers, the Shoguns who had come the power in the 17th century, lasted for more than 200 years until the eve of the Meiji Restoration of 1868.2 On a national scale, the Tokugawa polity differed from the centuries of regional power as it was a careful balance between vassal domain lords (daimyō) domains (han) and a national government, the Bakufu, headed by the Shoguns. By 1868, the Bakufu controlled one fourth of the agricultural territory of Japan, the rest being divided among 270 private domains. While daimyō households were autonomous in their internal affairs, only the fudai, the “inner lords”, or, those who were the vassals

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of the Tokugawa family prior to the decisive Sekigahara battle of 1606 which had brought them to power, had the privilege to take part in the national government together with Tokugawa relatives and retainers. The other lords, adversaries who had accepted vassalage only after the battle, were considered untrustworthy. Called the tozama, the “outer lords”, they were kept out of Bakufu service. All received their fiefs from the Shogun who ruled on behalf of the Emperor, the religiouscommunal head of the native Shintō faith residing in Kyoto. The Shoguns, thereby, had systematized the vassalage practices of feudal society to institute a uniform legal foundation for land tenure and political order in the country.3 The social order of the regime also exhibited rough similarities to those of medieval Europe, although there were social trends that gave what has been also considered as an “early modern” character to Tokugawa society. Here, the Japanese experience was quite different, at least, from the classical image of feudality gained of medieval Europe. Continuing a late 16th century trend, the Tokugawa Shoguns established a hereditary class order; the ruling samurai warriors, vs. the peasants, the merchants and artisans. The peasants, tied to the land, were cultivators and sole tax payers to respective samurai governments. However, unlike the serfs of Europe, over time, the Tokugawa cultivators, mostly small and middle landholders, had come to resemble a landed peasantry. Furthermore, unlike rural manorial lords, the samurai did not have direct ties with their “official” tenures. Forcibly separated from their rural fiefs by the initiative of the daimyō in the late 16th century, they had transformed into urban bureaucrats and soldiers in the service of the domain lords, or, the Tokugawa Shoguns, and resided in towns and cities. While the samurai had entered the direct service of the lords and received stipends from the various governments, the peasant villages had been left on their own. No longer the cultivators of rural seignors, the Tokugawa peasants had become subjects and tax payers of governing authorities. For many historians of the pre-war generation (WW II), whether influenced by Marxist thought, or not, the Tokugawa order made things worse for the commoners who were now suppressed and exploited by the arm of government. However, recent studies in Japan and abroad have tended to view the Tokugawa order in a better light, emphasizing the growing urbanization of society, sophistication of government and other new trends. More important, the great late 17th and 18th centuries have been recognized as a period of change with an “agricultural revolution” that fed the growth of a market economy. There were economic changes that acted as a stimulus toward new cultural trends reflective of heterodox ideas and tastes among samurai and commoner alike.4 Particularly, the emergence of merchants, landlords, well-off peasants out of the traditional economy is well treated in a number of important works on the subject that also link the period with modern Japan.5 Yet, the Tokugawa peace suddenly ended in 1854 with the arrival of Commodore Perry and his black ships to force the Shoguns to accept “free trade”. The event instigated a political crisis over the signature of the treaties in 1858, leading to the demise of the Bakufu and the establishment of a new regime, only a decade later, in 1868. The standard account of the Meiji Restoration is one of political loyalties that concerns moves among the ruling class to replace the Shoguns who had “lost face” by signing the treaty without the explicit approval of the imperial court in Kyoto. Accordingly, the 1854 crisis led to an anti-Bakufu movement among young and ambitious samurai of lower status, who took advantage of the political vacuum

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left by the Shoguns. By 1868, social upheaval, economic crisis, exasperated by the impact of international trade, had made things worse. Still, in the end, it was a coalition of rival tozama domains, Satsuma, Chōshu, Tosa, Hizen, who had become centers of radical militants, that took over the Bakufu after defeating the Shogunal forces in battle.6 Feudal loyalties, rivalry, domainal interest figure highly in the drama of the Restoration. The swift destruction of Tokugawa polity, therefore, has been a great concern for scholars on Japan who have looked for long-term causes to explain the event. Certainly, the social and economic changes of the 18th century have been recognized as an essential cause leading to the destruction of feudalism. Market forces, wealthy commoners, were trends that literally “ate” into samurai revenues, leading to the perennial fiscal crisis of the Baku-han governments. On the other hand, the social dissolution of rural society with the emergence of income differences, rent farming, class conflicts has also been seen as a fundamental dynamic that brought everything down by the time of the 1854 crisis. Peasant uprisings, noticeably more frequent and destructive in the latter part of the Tokugawa period, have received special attention in this regard as a “social energy” that destabilized society.7 Still, the swift decline of Tokugawa polity perhaps had more “insidious” causes that were not readily seen in conflict-ridden situations such as uprisings. A major factor was that the local administrative “arm” of the Bakufu which had ensured regional stability for centuries, could not respond to the needs of latter day governmental reforms. While in-depth studies of domainal administrations are available for the period before 1700, the inner political-economic relations between the samurai and peasant worlds have yet to be brought to light.8 In fact, the traditional local administration of the Tokugawa period between 1616–1868 has been commonly described as system of political control which samurai governments instituted over peasant communities, that gave government assurances of taxation, law and order, but left the peasants largely autonomous in the conduct of their internal village affairs. Although such internal autonomy was recognized, however, the political power of the peasants is generally thought to have been almost nil beyond village boundaries.9 Accounts of local administration are invariably based on official documentation which reflects the traditional samurai view of village controls as the lowest link in the hierarchy of domain administration; the political reality of 1868 in which samurai leadership was the dominant political force that established the Meiji state, has also furnished contemporary historians a retrospective view that accords a secondary role, at best, to the Tokugawa peasantry in the political evolution of Modern Japan.10 Yet, the same producer class has received tremendous attention in post-war research in Japan and abroad for the significant social and economic role peasants played in the making of the industrial society that supported the Meiji state.11 Accordingly, the feudal peasantry of the Tokugawa village emerges to become the wealthy rural entrepreneur landlords and the commercialized labor force of the post 1868 modernization process due to their nascent transformations in the Tokugawa era. This is a historically realistic view that takes into account careful empirical research of decades, and provides an analysis of continuum for the “early modern” transition of late Tokugawa society into modern Japan. However, despite the sophistication of the post-war retrospective view of peasant life compared to the “exploitation” thesis characteristic of pre-war historiography, one is still left

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with a rather compartmentalized and artificial broad view of late Tokugawa history. The political and socio-economic spheres are seen as separate realities, at times to the extent that the strong ties which always bound the samurai to the peasants in Tokugawa society are denied to have had an effect in bringing about historical changes. Socio-economic changes of the growth of the market economy during the 18th century, especially in the central provinces of Japan, can also be seen to have given rise to the stronger presence of commoners in local administrations of mostly Tokugawa and small fudai territories. Of course, from the point of view of government a condition of weakening of local controls and authority is a negative factor that alludes to the concepts of decline of authority, or of decline per se. But, it must be emphasized that from the standpoint of the periphery, the same development meant a positive advancement of local political influence, and thereby socio-economic development of the population itself. To be sure, most Tokugawa peasants were concerned primarily with local issues rather than national developments. However, especially Tokugawa regional administrations, called tenryō, included a large measure of peasant influence on the conduct of administrative affairs that went beyond the boundaries of the village community. The case of Nakano tenryō, a Bakufu administered territory in present day Nagano prefecture, suggests that Tokugawa territories, in particular, reflected a gradual weakening of samurai political controls in local administration by the 19th century. Partially determined by the nature of feudal authority established in 1600s, the lax administration of tenryō was due to the increase in the influence of village and town communities over decision making concerning taxation and other matters. The modus vivendi of feudal rule, social and economic trends of the 18th century, and finally, specific political clashes between peasants and their administrators had varying degrees of influence over this outcome.

THE MODUS VIVENDI OF FEUDAL RULE The characteristics of Tokugawa administrations during the centuries before 1868 suggest that there were differences in control mechanisms of the Tokugawa Bakufu and the daimyō private domains since the early periods, that was in part responsible for the obviously lax administrative practices of Tokugawa tenryō in later decades. The Bakufu had to administer a very large region, about a quarter of the central Japanese island of Honshū, and the land was dispersed among different domains. The Tokugawa tax and stipend systems, firmly established in the early 1600s, were based upon the assessed rice yields of a territory that was called the kokudaka of a land. The system was accomplished through the completion of a nation-wide land survey at the time. A koku was about 5 bushels of rice. In 1868 all of Japan was supposed to have an assessed rice yield of 30,000,000 koku according to the tax documents. About 8 million koku of the above belonged to Bakufu territories, of which 4,500,000 koku was estimated to be the tax burden of the land. However, since the middle of the 18th century, some Tokugawa territories usually paid taxes in cash rather than kind, although the exact percentage is not clearly known. In all likelihood, this meant that the real value of the tax, when paid in cash, was lower than the official figures for taxes in koku.12

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In Tokugawa administrations, officials were sent from Edo without a strong military and administrative body of samurai like the domains had. In time, this situation caused local controls to weaken even more because the Tokugawa Bakufu was also given extensive responsibility for the supervision of both its own financial and economic life and the country at large, which probably made it impossible to counteract this decline in local controls over the periphery. Nevertheless, Bakufu constraints at national level are not sufficient as explanations to understand this decline. An inquiry on how local administration worked during the Tokugawa period is needed. Furthermore, it has to focus on the manner in which political controls were practiced through a network of intermediary offices at the village and town levels, filled by the local population. Both domain and Bakufu governments made use of the social and most often the economic élite of the local area in order to transmit political power from the above to the grass-roots level of the village through intermediary offices of the village headman, called shōya, or, nanushi. However, tenryō administrations tended to rely on many other intermediary offices filled by town merchants, tax payer peasants as samurai administrators were few in number. Inevitably local interest of these classes became a crucial determinant in de-facto administration, rather than the interests of the Edo Bakufu. These intermediary officials recruited from the subjects of the tenryō were at the same time active members of nascent political traditions and enduring social and economic ties of urban and rural communities, which confronted the authority of the samurai at the grass-roots level. Furthermore, strongly linked to the realities of the rural world, peasant political traditions that determined the distribution of power in the villages, had been created largely independent of samurai governments. Even in the self-sufficient communities of early the Tokugawa years, the peasantry distributed village political priviliges to the social élite of a heterogeneous class made up of a conglomeration of smaller divisions. The samurai had given the general appellation hyakushō to the entire agricultural population in the traditional feudal class divisions of the Tokugawa legal system. However, domain documents as well as accounts of daily village life frequently show indigenous divisions based upon economic as well as social distinctions that divided the peasantry into a hierarchy of social strata. Divisions of peasants according to the means of production in agriculture had created self-cultivators, tenant-farmers, and landlords. Furthermore, economic relations within agriculture usually overlapped social differentiations as well. Social status and priviliges, recognized by samurai governments, however, were accorded to each individual on the basis of whether they were taxpayers, regardless of their social and economic state. Therefore, independent taxpayer households who were given the right to participate in village government were an honored group called honbyakushō. Others, excluded from such status, were registered as dependants of honbyakushō. They were referred to by such various names as mizunomi, nago meaning servants. Lineage differences also helped peasants define these social differences and determine the distribution of political power in villages. Frequently, honbyakushō with illustrious lineages, sometimes of samurai origins called gōshi in many domains, traditionally monopolized certain offices in village administrations and were incorporated into local samurai governments as the communal leaders of the peasantry.13

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The pattern suggests that beneath the authoritarian measures of the age, strong traditions of village self government which had grown during the previous centuries when cultivator villages emerged from the breakdown of the Shōen manors, still persisted. In many instances, these traditions were simply incorporated in modified form into samurai administrations.14 Thus, left largely intact in their internal affairs, the peasants continued to have village autonomy within the feudal order after the inception of Tokugawa rule. This situation reflected, in many cases, the nature of political controls of the 1600s to be based upon a modus vivendi reached with the grass-roots political power of the villages. During the course of the land survey to establish the kokudaka tax system, a “forced consensus”, as it were, formed the basis of relations between samurai government and peasant villages. The history of the Nakano tenryō was also representative of this pattern.

THE LOCATION OF NAKANO TENRYŌ Before 1868, Bakufu controlled territories in Shinano province which covers Nagano prefecture north of Tokyo today, were located in Takai and Minochi gun* of north Shinano and Saku and Ina gun of south Shinano. The revenue of the Bakufu held territories in 1868 was 320,106 koku. The main part of this area was administered as daikan tenryō headed by Bakufu governors called daikan who were appointed from Edo.15 The Nakano tenryō spread over Takai and Minochi gun of north Shinano. In 1868, it had a total of 61,000 koku (54,298 in earlier records) in revenue from around 150 villages. Nakano town was the seat of government. To the southwest was Susaka domain, with Susaka market town as its center. To the north was Iiyama domain, and to the south Matsushiro domain. Finally, another small domain Shiiya (Rokugawa) had a small area near Susaka in the Takai gun next to Nakano tenryō.16 In all of Shinano, aside from the Bakufu territories, there were 14 other domains headed by fudai daimyō (vassals of Tokugawa before the decisive battle of Sekigahara in 1606) and tozama daimyō (domain lords who had accepted vassalage in 1606). In north Shinano Matsushiro domain with 100,000 koku revenue was one of the largest domains of the province after Matsumoto of 60,000 koku. The Sanada daimyō family, a tozama, had ruled the territory since 1620 and throughout the Tokugawa period played an important military role in the security of northeast Shinano.17

THE ADMINISTRATION OF NAKANO TENRYŌ: 1637–1868 Like other Bakufu territories, Nakano tenryō was supervised by the Kanjō Bugyō, the treasury of the Tokugawa Bakufu in Edo. The daikan of Nakano was appointed from among the retainers of the Tokugawa household. By the 19th century, the daikan not only frequently changed but they had also become accustomed to living in Edo rather than their own territories. Most of the administration was therefore done by a small staff of daikan retainers in close cooperation with the intermediary officials recruited from the community. The daikan came to Nakano only once a year and stayed for a month during the fall season to supervise the collection of taxes. During the rest of the year the small daikan office in Nakano was manned by

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a staff of 10–15 retainers of the daikan. The intermediary officials, recruited from the local population, in rough order of importance were the gunchūdai, torishimari, nanushi, kumiai sōdai. None received a salary but they did have certain social priviliges such as using shōji paper screens, using surnames, and their taxes were reduced in exchange for their services.18 The head of this network of regional administrators was the gunchūdai who was selected by the five leading merchant families of Nakano town, and approved by the daikan office. Serving at the same time as the goyokake, domain merchants in change of fiscal and commercial affairs, the gunchūdai assisted the daikan office in paperwork, transportation and collection of taxes, mediation of petitions from villages to the daikan office, and in general acted as a go-between of the villages and the daikan administration. The next set of intermediary officials was recruited from among the hyakusho taxpayers in the tenryō. These were the torishimari and the nanushi.19 Both positions represented the rural population in local government, and in turn, were responsible for the supervision of the peasantry, combining the dual role of government administrators and communal leadership. Torishimari and nanushi were the crucial links to peasant communities, whose allegiances could sway the direction of political controls to the advantage of samurai governments, or, villages. The difference between the torishimari and nanushi was one of hierarchical order of supervision, and it was due to differences in their respective sources of political power. The nanushi, usually called shōya in other parts of Japan, was recognized by the local samurai governments as the indigenous leader of the village. Not appointed directly from above, the nanushi seemed as the sole link of government authority with the autonomy of the village. Among his duties were the allocation of the lump sum of taxes to each communal member according to his ability to pay usually determined by size of landholding, the dispensation of justice in internal criminal affairs, responsibility for the unlawful behavior of peasants for which he was held accountable by the samurai governments. On the other hand, the torishimari (of Nakano tenryō) was a supra-nanushi position appointed directly from the daikan office which recruited wealthy landlords to supervise a number of nanushi and watch out for peasant revolts. Similar to the position of an older status called warimoto in this region, the torishimari were actually instituted by the daikan after the peasant unrests during the Tempō era crop failures of 1830s when tenant confrontations against landlord exploitation combined with an all out revolt against daikan taxation. The daikan of the times explained the reason for the new appointments to be due to the behavior of the nanushi who were “helpless in controlling the peasants” as they often sided with the villagers.20 Finally, the daikan office organized the 150 tenryō villages into a federation called kumiai, with village representatives named kumiai sodai in order to facilitate communication in the region. Actually, the daikan had really incorporated into its administration the indigenous federative organizations of the local villages which peasants had devised in order to organize the usage of common lands, prepare jointpetitions, regulate irrigation and reclamation. 150 villages of the tenryō made 99 kumiai groups whose heads channelled information to and fro between the villages to the daikan office.21 All these rural administrative organs were connected to the inner world of the village communities where communal consensus and economic interests bound members of village strata to each other. Thus, bound by communal ties without

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which they could not survive, intermediary officials, even those recruited from the landlords, were not always loyal servants to daikan authority and acted as a supporter of mass interests, especially during times of widespread discontent.

THE NAKANO DAIKAN OFFICE, PEASANTS, AND TAKAINO VILLAGE A brief survey of the tenryō’s history between 1637–1868 under Tokugawa rule reveals numerous areas where village influence had gained, in time, a leverage over the conduct of local affairs of government. The Nakano area had originally belonged to the Kawanakajima domain during the internal warfare period before Tokugawa rule. The tax system and land surveys that established the base of assessed tax revenues of this territory under Tokugawa rule was actually completed during 1600–1603 by Mori Takamasa, who was briefly the daimyō of Kawanakajima domain. The area had always had a group of village samurai, jizamurai, who lived on their farms with serf-like servants, and represented a local political and military force. The village samurai of especially Minochi and Takai gun, had resisted the successive attempts of previous daimyō to survey the villages.22 But, in 1600–1603, the Mori daimyō was able to bring the villages under his control, even though his officials had to fight with local samurai in a series of skirmishes resulting in 600 casualties. The Mori administration, however, chose to leave the village samurai intact in their local political power once the survey was successful, reflecting the modus vivendi between domain and local political powers. The village samurai became a class of hereditary village officials, the nanushi and warimoto, enabling them to also keep some status symbols as well.23 Village power had been broken by the Mori government, yet the establishment of a semi-centralized control over the villages characterized the nature of feudal controls from the outset. After the area became a Bakufu tenryō in 1637, the partial continuum of village power had a number of consequences during later periods. On a political plane, the accordance of an intermediary position to taxpayers back in 1603, had also provided the villages the administrative positions through which they could control local decisions and tax administration at the grass roots level. The impact of economic growth and social change in this area from the middle of the 18th century onwards, had transformed the make-up of local village classes who filled the intermediary offices in the tenryō. During the 18th century, the political power of the samurai descended nanushi and warimoto declined, at the same time, many self-cultivators and a few landlords of humble origins from reclamation territories who constituted an emerging middle class, had taken over the controls of the tax collection machinery. Successive political confrontations in Nakano tenryō villages at the turn of the 19th century, established reformed village governments by new regulations which stipulated the popular election of taxpayers, regardles of origins, to positions of political power in the villages.24 In fact, Takaino village, a backward mountain community of Kami-takai gun was representative of many villages where political conflicts had led to popular elections. After a clash between the hereditary nanushi and the community, in 1859 a new election code was drawn up by the village that stated “all can stand for office.”25 Furthermore the administrative procedure of Nakano tenryō typical for the late 18th and early 19th centuries, also reflected the new village political influence in the tenryō. A written agreement of 1827 signed between the local nanushi, many

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recently elected to office, and the gunchūdai merchants of Nakano town, stipulated that nanushi had to be always consulted for the determination of administrative levies, the repairs of the daikan office, even room and board expenses of meetings for administrative affairs. A council of nanushi had the right to dismiss from office any gunchūdai who did not perform his duties, and appoint a new merchant for the job.26 In conclusion, by the 19th century, peasants of Nakano tenryō were able to exercise important influence over local affairs through the intermediary officials of the tenryō administration, that protected their peripheral interests. Political leverage of villages went beyond communal boundaries, though it never spread out of the tenryō. Peasant mentality of the Tokugawa order had accepted the political divisions between remains to be real separations and did not attempt to break it of the feudal political order. But, peasants in such areas as Nakano had gained agreements which gave them some representation in local administration in order to control taxation. This may be a far cry from the demand of “no taxation without representation” of a more radical political revolution, but peasant influence in local matters especially that of the upper and middle class who frequently filled posts of village government had weakened Tokugawa authority.

THE ANEI ROKU SŌDŌ, OR THE 1777 UPRISING Village intermediaries were spokesmen for peasant interests during daily interactions with the daikan office, but it was the peasant uprisings against taxation that perhaps revealed best the dual nature of their intermediary position within local administration. There was an important anti-tax uprising of Nakano tenryō in 1777 known as the Anei Roku Sōdō brought about by the attempt of the then national authorities, the Bakufu to increase taxes at a time of severe economic conditions. During the late 18th century, Nakano tenryō was the typical of many domainal administrations where attempts of Shoguns starting with Yoshimune during the 1740s to increase agricultural taxes resulted in hundreds of uprisings. Coupled with natural disasters, crop failures, the late 18th century uprisings leading to the famous Temmei revolts of the 1780s were particularly violent with mass participation.27 In Nakano tenryō, Nakano Daikan’s orders for higher taxes to be paid in kind and before spring to balance the Bakufu budget came in 1741, but for many years local warimoto and nanushi sidetracked the edict by repeated appeals. Finally, it led to a showdown in 1777 when the local tenryō staff gave a last order. In turn, the nanushi and other leaders of a Kijima village kumiai in the north organized a gōso, or, a “forced appeal”, in essence an uprising against the measure. After widespread devastation in the area especially against those communal leaders who had paid the tax and the Nakano gunchūdai seen as an arm of the tenryō office, the incident was surpressed by military force. Although many were punished for their “seditious acts”, the Tokugawa authorities also quietly accepted local demands for tax collection practices. This was indicative of the compromise of the central authorities with local interests, but it also spelled the death knell to the Tokugawa government’s drive for more revenues needed in Edo (present day Tokyo), the major city of Japan at the same time the headquarters of the Bakufu.28 Although the narrative of the uprising is not the main concern of this study, the event was important for having revealed the communal character of the uprising. The nanushi of Kijima village was a leader together with other village officials.

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All were caught and punished for their participation. The village communities had also organized political action using the kumiai network of the tenryō administration. Suffice it to say, the tenryō administration that had been founded upon the inclusion of local traditions, had now become the “means” for those below to pressure those above. Noteworthy was also the consequence of the uprising in the tax collection practices of the tenryō. No new land survey had been conducted in Japan since 1600s, in Nakano since 1603. After 1777, any serious attempts to tamper with the tax collection practices of Nakano tenryō was not attempted again until 1868. In fact, secondary sources also confirm that many tax oriented uprisings of the late 18th century were quite successful in having their demands accepted, through at the high cost of harsh punishments that followed the upheavals.29 This suggests that the political fight of the peasants to preserve the tax collection terms of the 1600s was quite successful at this stage in Nakano as well as in many other areas. Henceforth, in Nakano tenryō, the tax practices and yield figures of 1603 were protected by the peasant communities and continued to be the base for taxation until 1868. However, much later the Meiji land surveys of 1871–1873, the first such attempt in Japan since the early Tokugawa survey, in order to set up the modern land tax, strikingly revealed that production in agriculture had in the meantime risen to amounts more than twice the figures in the official Tokugawa records.30 The 1873–75 land survey of Takai gun alone revealed that there had been an 86 percent increase in paddy field and 49% increase in upland day fields. In 1878 and 1884, the Meiji government made new surveys since the 1870s surveys were still suspected to have been underreported. With these new surveys, the amount of land put in cultivation in the tenryō area was put at 92% more than that shown in the Tokugawa registers. Economic historians have also noted that per acre yields in Japan had risen as well due to the 18th century improvement of agricultural cultivation techniques. This meant that the official tenryō total yield, always recorded as 54,298 koku, or, a very close figure in the Tokugawa registers, was a fictive figure. In fact, production was actually more than twice, or, at least 108,596 koku for most of the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century until the Restoration.31 The peasants of Nakano tenryō had resisted attempts to change these figures in 1777 for a very good reason. Any shift in the constant tax figures would have destroyed the social and economic life of the villages. The influence of peasant power over the local administration was perhaps possible, mainly because after 1777 the Tokugawa authorities had preferred to compromise over taxes for the sake of stability. Still, again it was a significant “modus vivendi” between feudal rule and the agrarian class, which had allowed for the emergence of a local autonomy in determining tax affairs. The example of Takaino village in Kami Takai gun of Nakano tenryō again was a case in point. The Mori survey of 1607 had set up an official tax base of 1789,099 koku; for the next 261 years the same village paid taxes from a slightly revised base of 2,213 koku, of which 633 koku was the major agricultural tax. Yet, the early Meiji surveys showed agricultural production in Takaino Was actually around 4,300 koku, twice the official figure. In addition there was a large amount of income earned from especially agriculture based rural industries of oil and sake, in addition to silk products, charcoal, woodwork, which tended to escape the taxation process.

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Hence, the constant tax base of the early 17th century, had clearly encouraged the retention of greater income in the village that was earned through close ties to the market economy of the area where most of their products produced from an agrarian economy were sold.32 The social and economic conditions protected by a constant tax figure was obvious. Unchanging tax figures had ensured that surplus production remain in local hands. After all, landlords and tenants in Nakano tenryō could not have formed rent farming if the government share of the surplus had not decreased. One can also easily see that the underreported tax base indirectly ensured the growth of the local market economy, the accumulation of wealth in the hands of landlords, even some peasants. Certainly the middle class of self cultivators must have had a great stake in the tax tradition. And, their emergence as a Vocal Voice in village of tenryō politics in the latter part of the Tokugawa period, can be seen as an outcome of the economic growth not siphoned off as taxation by the government. Ultimately, one can also recognize the formation of an economic surplus that was to serve as the foundation of capital for rural industries in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods.33

THE DAIKAN VISIT AND TAX COLLECTION On a larger plane, the peripheral orientation of the tenryō administration in the latter half of the Tokugawa period revealed its relevance to these social and economic trends. The typical daikan visit to Nakano tenryō and the customary tax collection practices of the early 19th century decades showed that it was the structure of the local administration that now guaranteed the constant tax base. When he came around in the ninth month (autumn equinox—23rd Sept.), the daikan made a quick patrol of the villages and held various meetings with the nanushi, torishimari, and gunchudai to learn of local conditions and give orders.34 These meetings were called the moshiwatashi, where the daikan would try to reach a compromise on how much tax should be collected that year. Rather than survey the crops, he patrolled ten to fifteen villages a day. Usually wined and dined by the nanushi, probably just to keep him safely away from the fields, the daikan would accept the annual crop yield assessment, taka-chō-tome, offered by the nanushi at this time.35 These customs ensured that the actual agricultural figures would not be used in the tax assessments which with minor upgrading used the same figures since the Mori survey of 1603. Next, the gunchudai prepared the average of the market prices of rice in the nearby town market. Susaga, Iiyama, and Zenkōji.36 Termed the kokudai, the conversion rate used for cash payments of taxes, a common practice here since the 18th century, was reached through a compromise between the gunchudai, nanushi and the daikan. Invariably, it was customary to keep the tax conversion rate quite low, that is to say a much cheaper price of rice was used for the calculation than the going market prices for the month. If there had been a bad harvest, or, any other type of economic distress, naturally the intermediary officials would press hard for a really low rate, meaning less taxes for the government. Finally, the villages paid their taxes according to the set conversion rate applied to their official tax yield as designated in the taka tō chōme. All taxes, which included the major agricultural tax as well as additional commercial levies, were paid in three batches. First in the fall in the 11th month (about Nov.) before the daikan returned; at New Year (end of January beginning of February);

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and finally the third month of spring (March—April) when winter crops, household goods were sold in the spring town markets and the major cash payment of the tax burden was made.37 The scheduling of the third payment to spring was a peasant demand which had originally been accepted by the daikan office after successive petitions in the 18th century. Finally, the village nanushi received a receipt, kaisaichō from the daikan office enumerating the cash payments made for each kind of tax and levy that year.38 An overall assessment of how incapable the Nakano tenryō authorities were to siphon off the concealed surplus produce of the land is striking. Much of it had also to do with the structure of local administration by the 19th century. The official men rates, or, the tax allotment portion was supposed to be 50% of total yield in paddy, slightly less, 30% in upland dry fields with comparatively lower yields. This rate had been established with the Mori survey of 1603. Although the official kokudaka was also determined to be 54,298 koku for most of the time in the next two hundred years, the concealed increase in production as brought to light in the Meiji surveys made the actual total yield figure closer to 108,596 koku for at least the latter half of the Tokugawa period. Nevertheless, the total agricultural tax, nengu, collected every year was always kept as the constant figure of 27,149 koku in the documents. Furthermore, as it was customary in this region to pay taxes in cash, except for extraordinary grain taxes paid only rarely and only with great opposition, the manipulation of tax conversion rates in the kokudai mechanism ensured a decreased value of the tax revenue in terms of rice purchasing power. Table 1, gives estimated percentages of the tax revenue for Nakano tenryō to estimated total yield that indicates the actual value of the revenue in rice ranged between 15–25% of total yield for years 1838, 1843, 1844, 1845, 1852 for which figures are available.39 Even if one assumes variations of crop production throughout these years due to natural causes, the figures clearly show that the real taxation capability of the Nakano tenryō authorities hardly came close to the 50% mark claimed in the official records. To be sure, the low level of government taxation did not mean that agricultural production automatically produced an equitable social and economic condition in the tenryō rural society.40 The phenomenon of feudal rule and social differentiation among peasants made it inevitable that only an upper class of landlords, usually wealthy rural industry owners collected the cream of the surplus through rent. But, as attested by many, increases in agricultural wealth together with the emergence of a market oriented commercial sector were changes in which the bulk of the selfcultivator peasants had a great stake. Without this economic context intimately tied to the workings of the tax administration in Nakano, the tenryō peasants would not have emerged as such a strong political voice in village and thereby tenryō affairs in the early 19th century. In fact, it was largely their motivation to gain social and economic independence from larger extended families, or, the initial harsh tax terms of the early 17th century that had created such trends in general.

CONCLUSION The case of Nakano tenryō indicates that there were some exceptions to the general description of effective feudal controls of the rural population as authoritarian and inducive of peasant obedience, or, unquestioning loyalty for the latter half of the Tokugawa period. Varying degrees of political influence from the subjects existed

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within different administrations. Further case studies of local administrations in different regions under domainal and Bakufu rule would aid toward gaining an overall picture of local administrative practices making up the relative “stability” of the Tokugawa order. That the Tokugawa tenryō housed a laxer administration compared to that of many private domains was generally suspected. This is one reason why the Bakufu could never quite solve its fiscal crisis in the late 18th century and early 19th century reform attempts. The Nakano tenryō case indicates that there is a strong case to be made for the grass roots political acumen of peasant communities who were capable of manipulating the administration toward their interests. From their perspective, their efforts had hit at the heart of feudal rule by gradually shifting the function of local administration away from serving seignoral interests, in this case resident in the Bakufu headquarters, Edo. On the other hand, this situation also explains the unevenness of samurai political power on the eve of the 1868 Restoration. As Craig noted, the domains of the anti-Tokugawa coalition, especially Satsuma and Chōshū were large southern domains where oldfashioned samurai political power and values shaped the government. In other parts of Japan, especially in Tokugawa territories and small domains, samurai controls had most likely come to have a decentralized nature which, ultimately, weakened those governments. In sum, lax administrations with strong commoner presence had helped the demise of the “ancien régime” of Japan in 1868. The fundamental question is, of course, who had been responsible? From the perspective of social history, the verdict is clear. The peasants of Nakano tenryō, the “ruled of rural civilizations” in Ladurie’s terms, had struggled hard to loosen the reins of seignoral domination over their produce.41 Their efforts had been mostly gradual as the long term social and economic trends of the 18th century had shown. Yet, occasionally the peasants had introduced a dramatic twist to “quiet” trends of reclamation and yield increases. The 1777 uprising, the 1827, 1859 village agreements were typical of turning points that had been preludes to long term trends by opening up new avenues of political power. However, there were elements in the story that did not owe to that extent to the social dynamic. In fact, the very nature of the political order, the so-called modus vivendi of feudal rule consisted of Bakufu actions or even causal daikan visits, which were concerns of the samurai world. Here, probably, such historical dynamics as warrior class institutions and domainal rivalries, had been essentially responsible for the character of Tokugawa administrations set up in the 1600s. The results were complex. In Nakano tenryō, a constant tax base ensured in 1603, “allowed” for the economic accumulation in the hands of the peasants. In fact, this was desired by the Bakufu authorities who placed primary importance to the expansion of the agrarian tax base. However, in the end, the peasants became a social force to be contended with. In 1777, peasants of Nakano tenryō had successfully warded off a latter day attempt of the Bakufu authorities to siphon off the increased resources of the land. Their success, in turn, had ensured the preservation of an administrative tradition which no longer served the direct interests of the samurai. The post 1777 typical tax administration of tenryō such as Nakano, in turn, probably impaired the ability of the national government to siphon off resources necessary for later reforms and ensure its survival under a possible crisis. In sum, history moves on, the protagonist of the moment changes due to the irrevocable trends of the past that allows for the pendulum to swing from one level

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to another of human reality. While the Tokugawa order in Nakano tenryō had not been radically destroyed by 1868, the history of the local administration was but one microcosm that revealed the interaction between social, economic, political histories, or history in the larger sense which had created the societal transformation of Japan.

APPENDIX 1 Excerpt, the 1859 Takaino village headman elections regulations ....The Takaino village nanushi duty has for some years been performed by the following: Genzemon, Saiemon, Shichirōji, and Yagoemon of Horinouchi (kumi). However, their frequent maladministration has not been proper. Furthermore, due to complications which have not been clarified in the taka survey during the turn of Saiemon last year, it has been decided that all of Takaino can be selected (for the position of nanushi). According to an agreement, Mizusawa-Chūzen, Kubo, Kami-Shimo Akawa, Araibara, Murasaki-Futatsuishi, Horinouchi, and Semponmatsu kumi* have been joined to form six kumiai (federations), each to serve on rotation for one year (as nanushi). Mizusawa-Chūzen kumi have joined the ballot for the first time and Kinemon of the same kumi has been asked to fill the position (of nanushi) because he received the highest number of ballots.1 Furthermore, on Ansei 5, 8th month (1859), the taka survey as well has been completely corrected under the witness of village officials and komae sōdai (representatives). Its provisions are given below without mistake.

APPENDIX 2 The 1827 gunchūdai agreement between the villages of Nakano tenryō and the gunchūdai of Nakano town1 We are grateful that our villages from the old domain of your excellency have reverted back to you. In respect to the above, concerning the gunchūdai matter, since we have indicated the circumstances of our intention to want to rotate the position to the office (Daikan-shō), they have shown kind understanding. Therefore Tōbei of Kanebako village of our old domain and Zenemon (?) of Agemachi have been selected to be the mediators (tachiiri) and furthermore Jūemon has been selected to be the wari-moto. So the following has been decided upon: 1 2 3 4

Concerning the allotment of the gun taxes, the register should first be viewed and countersealed by the daikan office and then the allotment should be made accordingly. If the warimoto shows negligence in his duty, the gun (all the gun villages) without hesitation should be able to request redress of the person. Concerning the repair of the daikan office, the current market price of the carpenter wages and timber should be used for the calculation. The carpenter’s fee should be one bū per ten days. Furthermore, the stipend should be seven silver bū and five mon. 259

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5

Concerning the cost for staying at the inns, the room and board expense is to be determined to be 64 momme for each. But during specially bad years, when the price of rice is high, the cost should be determined upon special consultation. 6 Concerning not just the matter of repairs of the daikan office but everything, including the surrounding fence and such, the gun should be consulted on the matters of the carpenter, all other jobs, timber, and such. Upon the gun’s overseeing the above, the repair shall be made. For small repairs such information is not necessary. All goods in the daikan office, whether new or old, regardless of number or age, should be made into an inventory of the estimation of the value and should be told to the gun. 7 The salary of the gunchūdai position is to be two ryō, and the allotment of brush, paper, and sumi expense, which is to be one bū in gold. The gun villages and the tachiiri have jointly sealed the above agreement to the effect that they have no disagreement to the above decisions.

APPENDIX 3 Table 1 Tax Nengu Revenue Of Nakano Tenryō

Market price of rice; ryō Tax revenue per koku 1838 1843 1844 1845 1852

21,845 ryō 12,487 16,699 9,947 20,092

+ 1.379 + 1.000 + 1.075 + 1.636 + 1.408

= = = = =

54, 298 koku

108, 596 koku

Rice worth of revenue in market prices

% of official kokudaka

% of estimated kokudaka

15,841 koku 12,487 15,699 6,068 14,269

24.5% 21.4% 24.4% 15 % 23 %

14.5% 11.4% 14.4% 5% 13 %

1. Yumoto Toyosata, Shinano “Bakufu daikan no shihai chi”, pp. 47–49, 58; Market prices of rice given in gold ryō per one koku from the following; Yumoto Toyosata “Shinshū Nakano Tenryō ni okem torishimari yaku sei”, in Shinano 25:5, pp. 55–71; 25: 6, pp. 32–46; 29: 6, pp. 29–50; “gusō o meguru”… The Tokugawa monetary system was based on copper, silver, and gold coins minted only by the Bakufu. The standard gold coin, the ryō, equalled four gold bu. The value fluctuated, but in the 19th century one ryō tended to equal 5 silver, 1000 mon of copper. The rates were periodically fixed by Bakufu law. After 1868, 1 ryō equalled 1 yen. The bulk of tenryō tax revenue included agricultural tax, the nengū. A minor portion constituted of commercial levies charged for industry, business, water-wheels, etc. Naturally there were occasional extra levies called goyokin, or, okimae collected particularly in times of fiscal distress. This work does not take them into account as they were obviously attempts by the Bakufu to get revenue due to the limited official tax resources and did not represent a regular policy.

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NOTES 1

For the debate on the application of the term feudalism in Japanese history see the standard article on the subject in, John W. Hall, Marius B. Jansen eds, Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan, (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1970), pp. 15–51, “Feudalism in Japan—A Reassessment” by John W. Hall. 2 Sansom George, A History of Japan, 1615–1867, C. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963); Inoue Mitsusada; Kodama Kōta, eds Nihon no Rekishi vols 12 and 13 of total 26 (Tokyo: Chuōkoronsha, 1966) for standard historical surveys of the Tokugawa period. Appropriateness of the term “centralized feudalism” will be discussed in Hall’s article. See, Conrad Totman, Politics in the Tokugawa Bakufu 1600–1843 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967) and John W. Hall, Government and Local Power in Japan, 500 to 1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966, paperback 1980) See Hall, pp. 330–74 for best and most detailed source in English on the steps taken by the Tokugawa to assert their control over Japan in the early seventeenth century. The usage of “centralized feudalism” as a concept in Japanese scholarship is well documented in the classical work reflective of the same perspective, E.H. Norman, Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State, (New York’s Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940). 3 Totman, op. cit., for relations between the Shoguns and their vassals. The Japanese Emperors provided sacred authority to various military rulers since the 12th century when the court lost its political power and lands to the warriors who had established their domination in the regional administrations. Although most Japanese were Buddhists, the Imperial court also served as a symbol of legitimate authority for the cultural and ethnic unity of the Japanese as represented in the native faith, Shintō. See, Herschel Webb, the Japanese Imperial Institution in the Tokugawa period (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968) for further examination of the function of the office of the Emperor in the Tokugawa period. 4 For a good threatement of Pre-war Marxist historiography see, Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Pre War Japan (Princeton: Prince University Press, 1986) However, since the Tokugawa were the “ancien régime” for the post 1868 generations the critique of the feudal order as backward was common to historical interpretations outside of Marxist circles as well; for the standard “sympathetic” approach see the Princeton Studies in the modernization of Japan, published in the late 1960s edited by Robert E. Ward, Marius B. Jansen, William W. Hockwood, R.P. Dowe, Donald H. Shively, James William Morley. For interpretive essays see, Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. Rustow, Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964). 5 Charles D. Sheldon, The Rise of the Merchant Clan in Tokugawa Japan, 1600–1868: An Introductory Survey (N.Y.; Locust Valley: J.J. Augustin, 1958); Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959). 6 Standard accounts of the Meiji Restoration are given in, W.G. Beasley, The Meiji Restoration, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972); Marius B. Jansen, Sakamoto Ryōma and the Meiji Restoration, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Albert M. Craig, Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961). Cited as one of the “most important interpretive works in English on the early stages of Japan’s modernization”, Herbert E. Norman’s Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940) gives the more critical approach which was common during the Second World War. Although either revised or rejected by recent scholars the work stands as a class based interpretation, seeing the Restoration as a “feudal-merchant” coalition. 7 Voluminous literature is available for Japanese peasant uprisings in Japanese since the pre-war research of Kokushō Iwao and Onō Takeo. Recent scholarship has continued the tradition with a new emphasis on the cultural mentality of rural tradition of protest. A recent work of such “Annales” leanings is that of Katsumata Shizuo, Ikki, (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1982). In English see, Hugh Borton, Peasant Uprisings in Japan of the Tokugawa Period, (New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1968 orig. 1937). The concept of peasant unrest as a destabilizing force is still debated. But the standard work linking the uprisings as a causal factor to the Meiji Restoration is that of the eminent post-war Japanese scholar, Toyama Shigeki,

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8 9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Meiji Ishin, (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten 1972); A recent English language study is that of Anne Walthall, Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century Japan, (Tucson: the University of Arizona Press, 1986). Aoki Kōji, Hyakuskō Ikki no henjiteki Kenkyū (Tokyo: Shinseisha, 1966) p. 133 gives 3, 804 cases of peasant unrest, from small scale, local class conflicts among rich and poor in villages and towns, to regional uprisings. For a recent interpretation of the Meiji Restoration as a social revolution see also, H.D. Harootunian, Toward Restoration (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970). Op.cit., Hall, Government and Local Power, pp. 370–4. Harumi Befu, “Village autonomy and articulation within the state”, Studies in the institutional History of Early Modern Japan, ed. by John Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.) pp. 301–304. The above article gives the standard account of domain and Bakufu administrations in the Tokugawa period. The endurance of samurai traditional values and political power that underlined the organization of the restoration movement by the tozama domains Satsuma, Chōshū has been indicated in Albert C. Craig’s work Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration (Cambridge, 1961). William G. Beasley in The Meiji Restoration. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972); and Toyama Shigeki’s Meiji Ishin (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1972) also recognize the old fashioned samurai attitudes of the Meiji leadership. Thomas C. Smith, Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford University Press, 1959) and James I. Nakamura, Agricultural Production and the Economic Development of Japan, 1872–1922 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1965). Both specialists of rural transformation during early modern Japan emphasize the socio-economic changes of the Tokugawa era that contributed to the making of modern Japan. Nakamura finds the agricultural surplus of the pre-1868 period to be the critical source of economic growth for the industrialization process after 1868. Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan 1600–1868; (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Other works of above authors continue the research concerning economic change in the Tokugawa and earlier periods. Wakita Osamu, “The Kokudaka System: A Device for Unification”, Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1975), pp. 297–320; Kozo Yamamura, “From Coins to Rice’: Hypotheses on the Kandaka and Kokudaka Systems” Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 341–67. Smith, Agrarian Origins, for details on inner village status differences, especially pp. 12–23, 50–64. The role of the gōshi in Satsuma is given in op. cit., Marius Jansen, Sakamoto Ryōma; and Robert K. Sakai et. al., The Status System and Social Organization of Satsuma, (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975). Prior to the 12th century rise of the military class to power, the imperial court owned several manors, called Shōen. Their breakdown was due to gradual usurpation in the hands of regional magnates who organized bands of samurai as their retainers. See, Hall, Government and Local Power; Totman, Politics in the Tokugawa Bakufu; Sasaki Junnosuke with Ronald P. Toby in Japan Before Tokugawa: Political Consolidation and Economic Growth, 1500 to 1650, eds John W. Hall, Nagahara Keiji, Kozo Yamamura, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 271–294. * gun: district, an administrative unit housing scores of villages. Nagano-ken, Nagano-ken chō-son shi, 3 vols. (Nagano: Nagano-ken Cho-son Shi Kankokai, 1986). 1:770–78; Nagano-ken, Kami-takai-gun shi, Nihon gunshi shiryo Shusei: chubu chiho (Nagano: Kami-takai-gun Kyokukai, 1972 reprint of 1914 ed.); same, Shimo-takai-gun shi, Nihon gunshi shiryo shusei: chubachino (Nagano: Nagano kenka Takai-gun Yakushōhen, 1974 reprint of 1922 ed.) Above works have detailed accounts of geography, demography and other aspects of old Bakufu tenryō, and daimyō domains in Nagano prefecture. Nagano-ken, Nagano kensei shi, 4 vols. (Nagano: Nagano-ken, 1971–73), 1:33–34; and Kami-takai shi hensankai, Nagano-ken Kami-takai shi, 3 vols. (Nagano: Nagano-ken, 1960– 64), Rekishi-hen: pp.318–51 give a description of the administrative history of Shinano province during the Tokugawa period. Shakai hen gives the social history of the same; Henceforth referred to as Rekishihen, and Shakai hen.

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17 Ibid., sources. 18 Rekishi-hen, pp. 303-22; Yumoto Toyosata, “Shinshū Nakano tenryō no nakama shihai kizō. Shinano 23:6 (May 1971): pp. 15–26; idem, Shinshu Nakano tenryō no nakama kizō,” Shinano 23:7 (June 1971), pp. 59–68; idem “Bakufu daikan no shihai chi zaiya chu no dōkō,” Shinano 24:7 (July 1972): pp.33–53, I am particularly indepted to Yumoto on the tenryō administrative structure as it developed during the Tokugawa period. 19 Rekishi-hen, pp.403–409, 437–39. 20 Yumoto Toyosata, “Shinshū Nakano tenryō ni okeru torishimari yaku sei”, Shinano 25:5 (May, 1973): pp. 55–71. 21 See, Yumoto Toyosata, “Shinshū Nakano tenryō no onfure dentasshi keitō,” Shinano 20:3 (March, 1968): pp. 35–48; Hirasawa Kiyoto, Shimo Ina chicho no chusei matsu yori kinsei e no sui-i, (Iida: Hirasawa Kiyoto-kun Ronbun Kankōkai, 1969), pp. 65, 80, for explanation of kumiai organization. 22 Rekishi-hen, pp. 405–406. 23 Ibid. 24 Rekishi-hen, pp. 437–39; Popular elections by new social groups in villages were a common trend in many regions at the time. See the standard account in op. cit., Smith, The Agrarian Origins, pp. 180–200. 25 Ansei-taka ren-in-chō, Document in Takayama village office, present name of Takaino. The document gives the new election regulations agreed to by the Takaino community after an uproar over taxes collected by the traditional hereditary village head households the Oda and the Nashimoto families. Probably of samurai descent, both had carried privileges of nanushi status from the Mori survey of the 17th century. See translation in Appendix 1. Most nanushi elected after such clashes were usually self-cultivators with commercial interests that gave them a slightly better if more precarious position in economic terms. Though wealthy landlords of humble origins occasionally supported such confrontations, they were largely “tax payer revolts”, led by peasants with modest landholdings, usually the majority of the community. 26 1827 Torikiwame ichi rei no koto, Takayama-mura, Nagano-ken, in Takayama-village office documents; Rekishi-hen, pp. 437–48. The Torikiwame ichi rei no koto was an agreement signed between the nanushi of Minochi gun villages who had recently been ordered to rejoin the tenryō after a period of belonging to other domains, and the merchant gunchudai of Nakano town. Takaino village acted as an intermediary for the agreement. See translation in Appendix 2. 27 Op. cit., Borton, Peasant Uprisings; Walthall, Social Protest pp, 45 for Temmei revolts. Among the 3,804 uprisings between 1600–1868, the late 18th century revolts, 560, in number between 1750 and 1800, were particularly noted with alarm by respective samurai authorities as a sign of ills that required some sort of reform, usually envisioned as a return back to the days of vigorous samurai rule in the early 17th century. 28 For the Nakano uprising of 1777 see, Rekishi-Hen, pp. 620; and Nagano-ken, Nagano-ken shi, kinsei shiryo hen: Hokushin chiho (Nagano: Nagano-ken Shi Kankōkai 1971–79) 8: part 2: 778–93. Both give an account of the famous Nakano sōdō Uprising. The second source is a compilation of documents on the event. 29 Op.cit., Hugh Borton, Peasant Uprisings, pp. 39–66. 30 The issue of the Meiji land surveys which revealed sizeable concealed, underreported agricultural yields around the country is very important for the analysis of the emergence of a modern economy in the Meiji period. The subject is still debated among scholars. But, recent works have shown that agricultural productivity which had increased in the 17th and 18th centuries had remained concealed through the usage of official documents harkening back to the early Tokugawa surveys. See, op. cit., Nakamura, Agricultural Production, pp. 3–21, for the statistical proof of the matter. In Nakano tenryō, the results of the Meiji surveys are included in the Shakaihen, pp. 11–14; Nakano ken chō-son shi: 1; for Meiji surveys in Takai villages. 31 Shakai hen, pp. 11–14; Nagano-ken, Nagano-ken chō-son shi, 3 vols, (Nagano: Nagano-ken chō-son shi kan kō kai, 1936) A gazetteer of Takai gun and other gun villages, the work includes Tokugawa and Meiji records on each village, including the Meiji land surveys which upgraded crop and acreage figures; Nakamura, for per acre yield increases in Japan. pp. 13, 233.

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32

33

34

35 36

37

Nagano—ken shi, 8: part 2, appendix: 49. The village tax yield assessments, the kokudaka, were never revised for tenryō documents between 1603–1867; Takaino village tax documents for years 1832–1867; Takaino village tax documents for years 1832–1868 also kept the same figures with minor variations; Nakano ken chō-son shi; 1: 770–71 results of 1873–1875 land surveys in Takaino give 4353 koku of crops, twice the official figure, also close to the 4353 koku of numerous crops is also confirmed in the village documents. The implications of the constant tax figures of the Tokugawa villages for economic surplus has been noted for several village by Smith. See his important article “The land tax in the Tokugawa Period” reprint from Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XVIII, No.l, (Nov. 1958) in Studies in the Institutional History; pp. 283–299 for rough estimation of the constancy trend. Smith however did not include possible actual production figures that would have radicalized the trends even further.; op.cit., Nakamura. Rekishi hen, pp. 366–76; Yumoto Toyosata, “Shinshū Nakano tenryō no nakama,” Shinano, 23: 6, pp. 15–16; idem, same title, Shinano, 23: 7, pp. 59–68; idem, “Bakufu daikan no shihai”, Shinano, pp. 33–35. See above sources for tax collection practices in Nakano tenryō during the early 19th century. Yumoto Toyosata, “Bakufu daikan no shihai”, Shinano, pp. 33–35. Rekishi hen, pp. 375-76; Yumoto Toyosata, “Gusō o meguru”, tangan tōsō no hatten katei “Shinano” 29:9 (September 1977), pp. 29–50, esp. 33–36. An envoy from Iiyama domain would come during the ninth month and bring the market price present in that town market. The gunchudai then prepared the average of the three town prices for three grades of rice: good, medium, and inferior. The average price attained was called the ritsu-sōba (standard price), as opposed to the market price, the ji-sōba (price on location). E. Papinot, Historical and Geographical Dictionary of Japan, (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., reprint 1974) pp. 836–839. The traditional Chinese lunar calender adopted by the Japanese ordinary contained 12 months, i.e., 354 or 355 days. The first lunar month of the year was that in which the sun enters the sign of the Fish; This placed the new year month between Jan. the 20th of Feb. the 19th. But when the delay in the solar year did not bring the 13th lunation to the sign of the Fish, a 13th month was added and called the intercalar month, urū-tsuki. In this case the year had 383 or 384 days. The payment of taxes like other annual village activities closely followed the seasonal patterns. The equinoxes and solstices which mark the middle of Chinese seasons were important administrative dates. Although the Chinese months do not correspond exactly to those of the Gregorian Calender, a rough correspondance would be the following. 1st month Jan 20 - Feb 19 2 nd ” Feb - March 3 rd ” March - April 4 th ” April - May 5 th ” May - June 6 th ” June - July the spring equinox March 20 the summer solstice June 21 the automn equinox Jept. 23 the winter solstice Dec. 22 Chinese seasonal dates Feb 5 th May 5th Spring May 5 th Aug 7 Summer Nov 7 Fall Aug 7th Nov 7th Feb 5 Winter

7th month 8th ” 9th ” 10th ” 11th ” 12th ”

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July Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec

-

Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov Dec Jan.

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38 Rekishi hen, pp. 375–76; Yumoto Toyosata, “Gusō omeguru”, pp. 33–36. 39 See Table 1, for figures of 19th century taxes. 40 Authors such as Smith, Nakamura, too, concede that economic growth should not be assumed to have brought wealth to all. Agrarian poverty so well described in many contemporary records was real. Peasant uprisings which erupted after a series of natural disasters were frequent scenes of horrible famine conditions. But, under normal conditions, one has to recognize that economic growth in agriculture as well as commercial by-employments, frequently a by-product of agricultural production, was a fundamental factor enabling the majority of self cultivators to gain a relative liberation from relations of dependency to large families. 41 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian, transl. by Ben and Sıân Reynolds, (Sussex: The Harvester Press Ltd., 1979), pp. 79–82. APPENDIX 1 1 Ansei roku taka ren-in chō. Takaino village document in Takayama village. * kumi: neighborhoods of a village. APPENDIX 2 1

Bunsei 10 toshi 10 gatsu. Torikiwame ichi rei no koto. Takaino village document in Takayama village.

APPENDIX 3 1

Table 1 Tax Nengu Revenue of Nakano Tenryō.

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❚ First published in Sven Saaler and Wolfgang Schwentker (eds), The Power of Memory in Modern Japan, Folkestone, Global Oriental, 2008, pp. 337–59.

16

The Remembrance of the 1871 Nakano Uprising in Takayama Village as a Contemporary Trauma in Village Life Today a

INTRODUCTION

T

he trauma about the past survives in our present memory. For many Japanese residents of Takayama village today, remembrance of the 1871 Nakano Uprising encapsulates a collective and personal trauma of the present, even though none could have seen or experienced the event that happened more than a century ago, just after the 1868 Meiji Restoration. In my view, the suppression of the Nakano uprising by the ‘modern state’ of Japan as represented by the new Meiji regime, catapulted the entry of the people in this region into the history of modern Japan as silent victims who suffered under a permanent label of having been ‘traitors’ to the new imperial polity that suggests why this memory of the past is still in some respects even today so traumatic for the surviving members of Takayama village (or, formerly, Takaino village). If they had been peasant rebels of the feudal Tokugawa era which had ended only a few years ago in 1868, probably, the memory of this defeat would not have caused such a painful wound in the village collective psyche for the following generations. Thus the story of this traumatic memory is actually more about the political regime of twentieth century Japan and the underlying rhythm of life memory in rural Japanese communities than about the events of 1871 per se. This article will attempt to understand the rural twentieth century memory of Takayama and it will hope to reflect upon the personal experiences of this author concerning the trauma of memory of contemporary Takayama residents. A mountain village spread out in the valley going up to Yamada springs in Takai mountain, Takayama village, a large community of about 5,000 residents is located east of Nagano city in central Japan that is part of Nagano prefecture, the old Shinshū or Shinano province of historic Japan noted for its rugged mountains inhabited by rustic highlanders. Takayama was called Takaino during the Tokugawa period (1600–1867) and belonged to the tenryō, ‘celestial domains’ of the Tokugawa

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Shogunate, the feudal government of Japan (also Bakufu), the national military rulers of Japan between 1600 and 1867 until the Meiji Restoration of 1868 brought a new political elite to power. This is a story of the role of memory for the Takaino peasants and their descendants today concerning the 1871 Nakano uprising which their forefathers had organized as a militant protest against the high taxes demanded by the new regime, but it is also the story of the author herself evolving as a historian of modern Japanese history who chose to study this uprising many years ago. My encounter with the uprising memory of the Takaino inhabitants began while I first undertook research on the topic of this early Meiji revolt in Nagano city and Takayama village during the autumn and winter of 1977 as part of my research for a PhD in Japanese history. This experience was followed by subsequent visits in 1983 and 1999, and continued communication during these years which has formed my lasting relationship with the community to this day. Back in 1977, the memory of the uprising for present day Takayama residents did not entail the major topic in my intellectual agenda then, although I had taken note of its significance from my personal experience talking to the village residents. The result of these series of encounters and my research on the topic was the volume Even the Gods Rebel that came out in 1998 and which can be seen as my ‘historical narrative’ of the event that was profoundly inspired from the Annales school perspective which had impressed me in my graduate years. Hence, the analysis went beyond the 1871 event and attempted a long durée analysis of the political, social and economic processes of the community in the region. I was particularly inspired by the works of the grand historian of the French Annales école, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie on the Peasants of Lanquedoc and Montaillou as examples of local peasant community studies which bore into the roots of conflict in the existing social and economic conditions. The conclusion of my dissertation was that the village community had not suffered that much under the feudal regime as is commonly argued. However, they suffered abruptly for the change of governance to centralized authority from Tokyo and stiff tax demands of the radically minded Meiji authorities who desperately needed cash for the army and the project of the modern state. The final revised version of the dissertation was published in 1998 in book form with a new title that added the words Even the Gods Rebel, referring to my growing awareness of the role of Shintō traditions in forming the mentality and organizational foundation of Japanese peasant rebellion (ikki) while I pursued my investigation on the topic after it had been finished as a dissertation which had led me to materials of a cultural/religious character. Still, the study, in the final analysis, was primarily based on the available written documents on the topic in which I made a brief reference to the memory of the event as a traumatic one for the surviving members of the families who had experienced the catastrophic events of the 1871 uprising and the subsequent government tough measures of suppression leading to the severe punishments of Takaino peasants.1

THE TAKAYAMA UPRISING AND TAKAYAMA IDENTITY According to my narrative in the Rebels study, the Nakano uprising was one of the yonaoshi, ‘world renewal’ uprisings of the early Meiji years that sparked off an upheaval of unprecedented violence and destruction in this mountainous

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hinterland of central Honshū. The upheaval had begun in the mountain village of Takaino just south of Nakano town, the seat of local government, the Nakano tenryō, one of the celestial domains belonging to the central feudal government the Tokugawa Shogunate, or Bakufu, which had been toppled by the 1868 Restoration. The new government which had been established in the new nation’s capital Tokyo had recently converted all shogunal land to prefectures (ken) after the 1868 Meiji Restoration in this region as well in the transition to centralized administration, meaning that the new regime had taken over the territories of the old Bakufu. However, at the moment, the feudal domains belonging to the 270 odd great lords, daimyō, were still left under the authority of their lords who had been appointed as governors. Immediately after the Restoration not only the Shōgun himself but also the domainal lords had been persuaded to return their feudal charters to the emperor, in effect the new national government that had been established in the new capital Tokyo. But the former domain lords were temporarily left in their former realms as ‘governors.’ In fact, the complete abolishing of the feudal domainal governments of Japan was to take place in the summer of 1871, months after the suppression of the uprising in Nakano and the executions. My impression is that the decision in Tokyo was accelerated as a result of the social upheaval of those years. Peasant rebellions in former territories of the defunct shogunal polity such as the Nakano uprising were to be pivotal events that alarmed the new political elite in Tokyo and caused them to accelerate the steps to total abolishment of the former domainal system of local government with the measure of haihan chiken, abolishing the domains and establishing the prefectural form of national administration.2 The Nakano eruption soon enveloped the whole region in a destructive upheaval resulting in the destruction of village homes, stores, mills in more than 150 villages— at some point involving a spree of violence involving 150,000 people, an unprecedented violent upheaval for this region. By the end of the three day revolt between 8 and 11 February 1871, the fury of the peasant who felt unjustly treated by the stiff tax demands of the new Meiji government in Tokyo knew no bounds. They burned down the governor’s office in Nakano and killed, by lynching, two officials, the aide to the governor Ōtsuka Masatoku, a samurai of Shizuoka, and Hanzō the gatekeeper. Nakano town was in ruins and lost forever its dominant position in the economy of the region. The major houses and stores of the wealthy peasant landlords, the ōmae ‘big name’ great families, and the merchants of the town who were targeted as the especially hated enemy of the common folk, the komae ‘small ones’ of the villages, were burned and smashed in a millenarian anger of levelling. An unusually violent event, especially with the murders of two samurai officials, murders being rarely experienced even in the history of revolts in late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan, the uprising provoked a swift military occupation of the region by an army of a thousand hardened troops from Kyūshū, the seat of the revolutionary army, who set out inflicting systematic violence by raiding the villages and harassing the men and women. After a brief military tribunal formed by the Tokyo authorities, tough punishments were meted out to the local residents with the obvious objective of creating an example to instate the central government’s power over the local population who were considered to be an ominous threat to the regime by the leaders in Tokyo. The event revealed the discrepancy in the dual form of local government which co-existed in Japan between the new national prefectural administration of former

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Bakufu lands and the survival of the traditional domainal administrations of former daimyō now governors in their traditional realms. The Nakano event had been the last outbreak after a series of similar peasant revolts in neighbouring Matsushiro and Susaka domains that had erupted a few weeks ago on 15 January 1871. These domainal revolts had momentarily been successful. Peasants had had their demands accepted by the local ruler Daimyō Sanada of Matsushiro, and subsequently by the Susaka authorities as well. These previous peasant victories were to remain as a significant factor in the memory formation of the local population in Nakano who thought that the lord Sanada, who met the peasants at the gate of his castle on a white horse, had acted justly befitting the expected behaviour of a traditional feudal lord who was expected to act according to the norms of a moral economy. Late Tokugawa period feudal administrations in this region had become a series of local arrangements and compromises with the local peasant elites, perhaps because of the inroads of commercial life that brought wealth into the region or the political reality of the Bakufu government which increasingly avoided large scale peasant discontent that might endanger its national authority. For Nakano area peasants, therefore, a virtuous lord was supposed to hear the distress of the peasants in times of need and was expected to take appropriate measures for reducing their taxes or solving other problems. Sanada daimyō of Matsushiro had just played out this role that raised expectations in the tenryō public as well for similar concessions. The precedence of peasant victories in Shinano with the succumbing of the local daimyō to the tax reduction demands of the rebels, coupled with samurai-led revolts in other regions of Japan that year, was an ominous development for the Tokyo authorities, however. The eruption of a series of revolts in the Shinano region, especially their initial victories in forcing the local administrators to reduce taxes, convinced Kido Kōin, a major figure in the government, to bring Saigō Takamori, the commander-in-chief of the revolutionary army who was briefly away from the capital back into the government and accelerate radically the plans for abolishing all domains and instating a centralized mode of prefectures, namely abolishing feudal autonomous entities for good.3 In hindsight, the immediate suppression and tough punishment of the Nakano uprising in 1871 became an excuse for the Tokyo authorities for immediately establishing central government controls over all of the territories which would abolish feudal domainal autonomy for good. The extraordinary harsh treatment of the people in Nakano Prefecture (ken) was meant to be a show of force that differed sharply from the relatively ‘moderate’ handling of the Matsushiro and Susaka revolts by local daimyō. The Tokyo authorities overruled the concessions of Sanada daimyō and others. The Restoration Army which came all the way from Kyūshū island occupied the region. In Nakano, the direct occupation by the Restoration Army and the subsequent military tribunal created a harsh martial law occupation of the prefecture. The Nakano revolt while similar to the Matsushiro and Susaka ones, would be judged as against the new government because the territory was a national prefecture already whereas the contemporary domainal revolts next door were deemed as local skirmishes against the ‘feudal vestiges of old,’ a fine point of political manipulation which Nakano peasants simply found unfair and continued to feel that they were specially victimized, a feeling that survives to this day. Hundreds of Nakano villagers were arrested and interrogated. Torture was common practice. And many did not survive imprisonment. On 4 April 1871, the trial officials announced a

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verdict punishing the peasants of having committed crimes as chōteki, or ‘enemies of the Imperial Court’. The Nakano rebels were permanently branded as traitors to the emperor, a political crime that had not entered their mind at all. Reflecting the tough political vision of the Meiji authorities, punishments were meted out as twenty-eight persons, nineteen of whom were from Takaino were executed the very same day including the headman of Takaino, Uchiyama Oriemon of Mizusawa district in the village who was beheaded as the ringleader. The local wealthy landlord of the region, one of the wealthiest farmers of Nakano tenryō, Kubota Jūemon, a Takaino village official who had been active in leading the petitions drive prior to the outbreak of the peasant rebellion (ikki) died in prison after being repeatedly tortured. Refusing to sign a confession admitting to his guilt, Kubota was to be revered as a martyr for the peasant cause. What remained as a particularly painful memory to the families of the peasants to this day after more than a century was that all of the peasants who were punished in some form were condemned by the tribunal to be ‘enemies of the Imperial Court’ (chōteki), an idea that had not entered the mind of these traditional peasants for whom the fight was about injustice and high taxes in the familiar feudal tradition of Tokugawa peasant ikki. The trauma of the Takayama locals today stems in great part from this legal decision, which is, by the way, still in force, that their forefathers had been traitors to the Meiji Emperor.4 We also need to reflect upon the self-image of the Takaino peasants back in the Edo period which continued in the post-Meiji Restoration era in order to understand the trauma of the executions of 1871. The catastrophic event destroyed the Takaino communities specially privileged status as the leader village of the Takai valley mountain communities ever since the seventeenth century in political, economic, social and religious affairs. Takaino village housed the seat of the Takai mountain deity whose shrine is housed in the village today and the villagers were in charge of the ceremonies associated with the legends ascribed to Takai Mountain. To this day, the community is the site of the Shintō shrine worship for the mountain and organizes the annual religious festival for the whole region. Late Tokugawa and Meiji documents show that Takaino peasants saw themselves as a community of rustic mountain villagers with ancient communal traditions, a self image that keeps repeating itself in subsequent village publications to this day. During the Tokugawa period, Takaino village leaders are referred to as the torishimari, a supra village administrative position, or the leader of the honourable nine villages of the valley, who acted as interlocutors for the mountain people with the local samurai authorities whose headquarters was the Daikan office in Nakano town located in the great plains. Records indicate that this strong communal political tradition was at the basis of Takaino’s leadership of the rebellion against the new authorities in 1871. After the punishments, Takaino no longer remained as the leader village of the area as it had been under the Tokugawa although its large size always meant that the community carried weight in local affairs.5 The administrative change which was part of the revolutionary changes going on in Tokyo since 1868 had actually exacerbated the difficulties experienced by the local people in addition to the economic turmoil that was experienced in the region as in other parts of Japan as a result of the fiscal chaos with the Meiji Restoration and generally bad crop conditions. Typical of the revolutionary ardour of these early years, the new governor Takaishi of Nakano pushed zealously the stiff demands

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of the Tokyo regime for high taxes, bent on revising old ways and disregarding the dire conditions of the locality. According to the Tokugawa accounts, Nakano region was known as a poor area with a high level of tenancy, but also the stronghold of extended families which claimed descent from the landed samurai prior to the Tokugawa who had remained in the rural world as peasants. Hence strong communal and family ties also cut across the abject inequality in economic and social conditions among the poor tenant farmers and the few well-off peasants and landlord peasants who frequently filled important political positions and professed old elite status. Dominated by the hardy mountain peasants who adhered to ancient communal customs and practices, most villages eked out a hard earned living off the modest amount of land available in the valleys for agriculture, only suitable for growing mostly dry grains of wheat and barley or soya rather than paddy rice. Living in the well situated valleys which went down along the banks of narrow rushes of water that formed the numerous rivers of the area, mountain peasants especially of the Takai district where Takayama the scene of the 1871 uprising exists today, formed a distinct rural culture with its particular social and economic way of life where strong communal ties and age-old customs are said to have been kept alive in isolated, long-established village communities intimately tied to the use of the mountain ranges that cut off this eastern edge of Shinano province with Echizen. The assessment of the region in the Edo period records of the villages repeatedly stressed the special dire circumstances of these proud honbyakushō, an attribute that the local peasants also frequently made sure would be effectively used in their selfdescription to the authorities especially for tax deductions. However, Nakano mountain village farmers noticeably had become major participants in recent years in the late Tokugawa period after 1853 with the commercialized economy of the region in silk worm production and exports via Yokohama to Europe. The inroad of international trade in late feudal Tokugawa Japan that was forcibly opened by the United States in July 1853 with the arrival of Commodore Perry’s fleet in Uraga Bay, had already transformed the social and economic scene in the Nakano region as in many other areas especially in Shinano province which become a major exporter of silk products to the global markets for the rest of Japan’s economic modernization until the 1929 Great Depression. Poor peasants had gained an important side income. The well-off peasant landlords showed signs of developing entrepreneurial schemes by exporting silk products. The ensuing fiscal and economic turmoil of the late Tokugawa and early Meiji years however had made this new economic sector vulnerable to social and economic crisis as well, crushing the economic conditions of the villages even more.6 This image of Takaino as a mountain village with strong community solidarity customs survives to this day in the recent ‘reinvention’ of Takayama as a community that lives in serenity in an especially beautiful natural haven within high mountains amidst forests of Japanese cedars and pine. According to the popular brochures and books about Takaino published today, this is a community with its own distinct interesting stories and ancient historical legacies. The popular publications mostly written by the village historians and educational committee under the tutelage of the Mura yakuba, village office staff, intend to pass this fine heritage to the young people of the community and to visitors as a tourist locale. The Winter Olympic Games, which took place in the Kami Yamada region next door in 1995, appears to have provided the incentive for this image making in Takayama by encouraging the

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publication of materials on the heritage of the village which mostly puts emphasis on the beauties of nature and the folklore of the village with hardly any reference to the 1871 uprising. During my research, I have used an early twentieth century local village almanac published in 1936 by Nagano prefecture which already expresses this rugged and old fashioned mountain village identity that continues the Tokugawa-Meiji self-image into the 1930s. In the 1936 publication, the Takaino inhabitants are described as having a ‘courageous temperament of honour’, a community of hardy peasants who ‘though not culturally developed, had preserved simple and honest old fashioned ways’. However, the same almanac does not refer at all to the most dramatic event of Takaino history, the 1871 Nakano uprising which reveals to us the existing censorship of this catastrophic event in village memory by the contents of local publications after the Meiji period. Therefore, I want to draw attention to this extraordinary survival of community self-censorship both in everyday communication and in Takayama village publications that draws our attention to the existing trauma about the uprising, especially the execution of family patriarchs as traitors, within the social relations of Takayama in the context of the existing debate about memory and place as methods for historical inquiry.

HISTORY AND MEMORY Historians have begun to ascribe special attention to the importance of living memory of individuals and communities that have undergone traumatic experiences as a valuable source which documents as oral history important historic experiences which are frequently deleted or in most cases rationalized out of the written narratives for political reasons. The case of national histories that avoid addressing socially and politically unacceptable events in the past of that nation which would be detrimental to the interests of the state is a well-known case in point. Frequently these memories are also disregarded because historians who depend on the written documents usually reflecting the perspectives of the metropolitan academic institutions have distanced themselves from the existing information about historical events at the local level from the cultural legacy of the inhabitants whose individual, family, and communal experiences represent an account that gets untold in the construction of the historical narrative by the historians of a distant psychological geography. The study of memory in France about the political and social trauma of the Vichy Syndrome has opened up the field of the study of collective memory as a subject in history. French studies have revealed that the post-war construction of French memory as the victory of the résistance contradicted in many respects the actuality of the collaboration or at least benign passive co-existence of many French citizens with the reality of the Vichy regime. Henry Rousso7 discusses the field of memory as plural, evolving, living phenomena that in its evolution and ‘distortions’ constitute historical information about the impact of events and their meaning for the survivors. The Vichy Syndrome, for Rousso, represents the changing meaning of wartime memory for historians and discussions in the French public about identity, the question of anti-Semitism, personal histories, etc. Interestingly enough, Rousso argues that the study of British historian Robert Aron on the broken mirror of the post-war claim on the resistance as the primary agent of French historical experience paved the way for the resurgence of a critical appraisal of the memory of the

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Vichy regime among French historians, reflective of the role that foreign scholars ‘alien to the trauma of the event’ can play in breaking the ice with respect to a selfcensored topic of the past within a historical community which experienced the event. To me this is an analogy which perhaps explains my role in the subsequent events in Takayama village after the publication of Even the Gods Rebel, which acted as a catalyst for the community to verbalize the 1871 Nakano uprising trauma in a town meeting which took place in 1999 where I spoke for the first time in a public event about the 1871 Nakano uprising.8

TAKAINO AS THE MATRIX OF UPRISING MEMORY Takaino village has continued to be the matrix of uprising memory for the descendants of the victims and the families of the village at large, reinforcing the continuation of a psychological trauma. The editors of the recent Takaino village almanac which finally came out in 2005 with a detailed account for the first time, prefer to refer to Takayama village as a ‘site for the silent mourning of the uprising’ for generations after more than a century has passed over the executions.9 But, in truth, there is no specific site for mourning the 1871 victims in Takayama village. So the whole village then is a site for mourning in silence. Edward S. Casey exposes a philosophical argument in which he pays attention to the significance of place as the concrete setting of local culture that has been minimized in importance with the awareness of the linearity of modern time and the infinity in the extendibility of space, both reinforcing the essentialist and universalistic claim on historical processes. Casey has argued that the displacement of place, real places that contest and reverse the Utopian sites within a given society, constitute heterotopias or real places such as cemeteries, gardens, places of crisis, and punishment. In our case, this would mean the hidden grave sites of the executed Takaino peasants in present day Takayama village constitute such heterotopia sites. Casey’s argument brings back the significance of place as local knowledge, cultural geography. The place is the matrix, a medium in which something is bred, produced or developed.10 Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin discuss the issue of memory from a rich array of perspectives including the historical, psychological methodologies, referring to the role of art, cultural institutions, body gestures, concept of time in regimes of memory today with reference to the historical changes since the early modern age in European culture.11 Alessandro Portelli’s seminal work on oral history as method has outlined the contribution of oral history to archival methodology of historians. Suppressed memories and oral history therefore serve as a method to bring out the elusive quality of historical truth. The authors discuss the search for justice of being recognized as a victim and redemption that is particularly relevant to the understanding of the Takayama trauma about the uprising.12 Portelli’s study of the murder of the Italian worker Trastulli in anti-NATO demonstrations of 1946 reveals that it remains an unsettled account and problem of return of respectability of those executed still lingers. The situation is very similar to the Takayama residents for whom the return of respectability for their forefathers executed in 1871 remains to be a lingering problem that is not easy to solve even after so many years for it would require a new legal decision on part of the Ministry of Justice or a special amnesty passed in the Japanese Diet in Tokyo.

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The unspeakable as traumatic memory is very relevant to Takaino where the topic became a taboo after 1871 and could not be publicly discussed until 1999 when the publication and the author’s public lecture on Even the Gods Rebel enabled the community to confront the emotional side of the memory for the first time. Takaino offers for us the site where the ‘silent’ long memory about the uprising, which for the generations of local families since 1868, still shape the self-image of Takayama residents for whom the events associated with the uprising, even in later years, stand out in their broken narratives as very important turning points of modern Japanese history. Yet, for us, the urban and intellectual memories of Japan as a society are shaped by the questions of the recollection or amnesia concerning the so-called larger turning points in Japanese history, such as the Second World War, the Atomic Bomb, the post-war reconstruction of Japanese society. We forget that rural memory in small communities of Japan is probably very different regarding the Japanese twentieth century experience than the intellectual/mediatized memory that we confront in metropolitan Japan such as Tokyo.13 For me, the memory of the Nakano uprising for the Takayama residents that survived in modern Japanese society reflects Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the traces of the truth from the past in memory that survives in modern society and surfaces suddenly as flashes of remembrance.14 Takaino offers an example of such a site where silenced memory of a distant catastrophe that has survived as immediate memory still exists.

REMEMBRANCE IN TAKAINO My first encounter with the problem of memory in Takayama began when I arrived in today’s Takayama in the fall of 1977 as a graduate student after months of research with the historians of Nagano Prefectural History Committee (Nagano kenshi kankōkai) in the grounds of the prefectural office in Nagano city. My colleagues and mentors, Professors Yanagisawa and Furukawa, had already gently cautioned me that the residents of the village were still uncomfortable about this traumatic event in their history. So I should not expect immediate response to my questions. I spent the rest of that year working comfortably in the village administrative office (yakuba) where the elders of the village administrative office, Mr Kubota and Mr Matsuyama, welcomed me and showed me to the room where the village archival material was kept in a wooden (kiri) chest. While reading and taking photographs of representative materials which were really more about the history of Takaino in the Tokugawa era, I gradually developed the perspective of the work which I chose to adopt which was to be a long durée approach on the history of the peasants of Takaino that would go beyond the documents about the immediate event. This hopefully would make my study an interactive study of the village and the uprising. Better yet, not many people had studied this event even though the topic of peasant uprisings was quite well researched in Japan during the 1970s as it had already constituted a classic topic of an ongoing theoretical debate about the nature of Japanese capitalism in Japan. The topic of peasant rebellions in Tokugawa Japan had also just gained importance in the US academy as a major issue of conflict in Japanese history. Before myself, only the late Yokochi Jōchi, an historian of Tokugawa peasant ikki who had met an untimely death recently, had been in that room in the Takayama village documentation office. I felt especially nervous when I discovered that the

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bundle of documents in the kiri chest had last been pored over by Yokochi, who used some in his chapter on Nakano upheaval (sōdō) in his seminal work on Shinano uprisings, which was published posthumously by his friends and colleagues with an introduction by Shōji Kichinosuke.15 Having been already told of the sensitivity of the residents about the event, I chose to ask questions on the uprising sparingly and in a very general way so as not to insult the sensibilities of these two gentlemen and the staff of the office who were showing hospitality to this rather strange figure—a Turkish woman from Istanbul having suddenly appeared at their door. Since I was not from the United States which would be at least not so unusual as there were many American scholars in Japanese Studies, I remember the first day that I arrived when my hosts had spread out a world map on the table and pointed out to me Turkey on the map commenting excitedly about how I came from all the way there. While I was studying in the archive room during 1977, Mr Kubota and Mr Matsuyama started dropping by regularly to say hello and share a cup of tea. As the conversation inevitably led to the uprising, they began voluntarily offering personal reminisces from stories they heard when they were children. One of them insisted that some families in the village have blamed Kubota Jūemon, the powerful landlord of the region, the ōgumigashira of Takaino, a village officer, who died while being tortured for three months during the military tribunal after the uprising was suppressed. The accusation was that Kubota, who was quite an ambitious character, instigated the community into this revolt in an irresponsible manner causing the calamity which ruined so many thereafter. The records in the village office and the documents pertaining to the uprising in the Matsushiro domain records indicate to us that the Nakano uprising began as a communal organization of Takaino with full solidarity among the rich and poor and the unanimous decision of the village council to be followed by the Takai-gun villages which traditionally belonged to the local kumiai or district organization of the area. Kubota’s name is on every petition which was submitted to the governor’s office prior to the uprising that indicated the acceleration of tension in the region when the traditional process of nanushi, headman, petition appeals was given no consideration at all by the Nakano authorities. However, the fact that he refused to the end to sign a confession which was necessary to finalize the verdict, which would have resulted in execution in his case as well, has made Kubota Jūemon into an enigmatic figure, a hero for some, a victim, or gimin, for the cause of the Takaino peasants. This was the gist of the treatment of Kubota which subscribed to the public academic image of the man as a hero, by and large coloured by the progressive views of the authors in the Japanese academy who were concerned with the social and economic history of peasant revolts as part of people’s history of Tokugawa and Meiji Japan from the bottom. As I note in the first footnote of this article, the academic work available at the time in 1977 on the Nakano uprising was sparse, and constituted only the brief mention of the event in the general studies of the famous Ikki historians, Aoki Keiichirō and Aoki Kōji, the few articles in the Takai Journal special issue that came out in 1971 by local historians Kanai Akao, and Aoki Takajū, and the brief chapter in the work of the late Yokochi Jōji. I was given a copy of this fine collection of articles with the comment that the publication had caused a flurry of responses in the village with some criticizing the public acknowledgment of the event, or at least the version given of the uprising in academic studies. The publications which reflected the social and economic history perspective of politically progressive (Socialist or Communist Party) images were very much part

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of the social historians’ perspective at the time which put an emphasis on the rightful defiance of the people and with a political economy analysis of the class analysis of the region. The Takai group had managed to collect a most valuable set of interviews with some residents, mostly comments by elderly men and women who remembered stories about how the Meiji soldiers harassed the community and that the community fled to the woods shouting that the akaoni (red devils, referring to the uniform of the Kyūshū troops) were coming. The stories were already dramatic narratives of memories of the uprising: that young Kōzō, executed for the murder of Ōtsuka, from Kubo-gumi district in Takaino whose members dominated those executed, spat on the ground heroically and his blood shot out like a rainbow, or, that the sound of the execution device brought in from Tokyo which sounded like a guillotine made a scary cracking thump as it fell on the head of the victims. I have incorporated those stories into my account, but back then I did not analyse them as part of the ongoing memory which remained almost like a wound in the village psyche, at least for some people. At some point during my stay, I asked about the graves of those eighteen Takaino peasants who were executed, having been already warned by my Nagano friends that the graves were undisclosed to all, I was not surprised to be answered that nobody knew where they were buried and that they were probably hidden away in unknown sites. I felt that this information was probably not true, but I respected the opinion that my Takayama hosts preferred not to tell me about them. Hence, as it will be noticed in my introduction for Even the Gods Rebel, I sufficed with the comment that the uprising has left bitter memories in the village to this day. After I completed my dissertation, I had a chance to visit Takaino, present day Takayama, in 1983 again, and this time I went to the village with Professor Furukawa to present a copy of the dissertation to him and another copy to the village as an expression of my gratitude for their help in its preparation. On this occasion, again we were able to meet with the village educational committee members who then took me to the set of tomb stones at the back of the Kubota family home and showed us the stone of Kubota Jūemon. Again, for the rest of the victims, the comment was ‘Nobody knows.’ My full understanding of the extent of the village inner dynamics about the memory of the uprising really deepened during my final visit to Takayama in the winter of 1999, one year after the publication of Even the Gods Rebel in the United States. I had the opportunity to visit Nagano prefecture in late January of 1999 and again met with Professors Furukawa and Yanagisawa. When I was a visiting scholar in Tokyo, I again slipped away to Nagano on my own whenever I had the opportunity to visit Japan. On this occasion, I visited the new history museum and research centre, the Nagano Rekishi Hakubutsukan. I formally presented published copies of the Even the Gods Rebel volume, which had just come out, to my friends and the museum. I saw that this was an occasion of joy for all of us. The local village paper held an interview with me about the book. We made plans that when I visited Japan again next autumn that we would all go to Takayama again and I would personally present a copy of the book to the village library. The discussion was that perhaps this would be an occasion that would help break the public silence about the public discussion of the uprising by the community. For example, a problem that had remained was that Takayama was probably one of the very few villages in Nagano prefecture which had not written a sonshi, a village history, a common scholarly activity in many Japanese villages which have such a highly literate culture. The major handicap for this delay was we surmised, the fact that nobody could agree on how the Nakano upheaval should be treated in the

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almanac, indicating to this day how this memory continued to impact on the public perception of ‘village event’ even in 1999—more than a century after its occurrence. My final visit to Takayama took place in December of 1999, when the village office’s historical society asked me to give a talk to the community, which would be the first such public conference on the topic directly addressing the residents to date. With great excitement and a degree of premonition, we arrived in Takayama on 10 December 1999 and had a very talkative emotional meeting in the village office with Mr Aoki Hiroyasu and many members of the village staff who started dropping in to greet us. I presented a copy of the book for the village library. I even met a friend who again remembered me from back in 1977, apparently he gave me a lift to the train station many times when it snowed, and he had come that day for the meeting. Mr Aoki and the others commented that they were a bit nervous whether there would be enough of a turn-out considering that the subject matter was touchy. In fact, the meeting was to be initially held in a modest sized seminar room and the historical society was quite satisfied if only fifteen or twenty people came. However, word came that there was such a turn-out that plans were made immediately to move the talk to the elementary school auditorium that could seat more people. When I came to the lecture hall, there were at least a hundred men and women, and some children, who had all come to listen to this story about the Nakano uprising. After a brief introduction, I gave my talk in Japanese covering a brief outline of the book, showing some graphs and basically transmitting my analysis of the uprising as part of the history of the political traditions in the village and also some commentary on the economic conditions concerning silk worm commercialization. The main point of the talk was that the Takaino peasants had developed a strong mechanism of negotiation with the Tokugawa governors (daikan) over an annual rate of taxation. During the 1871 ikki, the peasants called this ‘the Tokugawa family arrangement’. The fact that the peasants positively referred to this arrangement shows clearly that taxes had in fact declined in the late Tokugawa period and not increased, as is generally argued. The second point was that this was a communal uprising, in which everybody had agreed. And this consensus is reflected by the fact that no uchikowashi, or smashing of the wealthy, took place in the Kami Takai-gun villages, which formed the initial organization under the leadership of Takaino, and that under the circumstances of the day, it was justifiable. By the middle of the talk, I realized that the lecture was creating an emotional impact that at least I was not prepared for. Quite a few in the audience were looking at me with great intensity and emotion. There was a middle aged woman sitting in the front row who was constantly crying, wiping her face with a white handkerchief. A man was sitting next to her in farmer’s clothes with muddy boots as if he had just come straight from the fields with a worker’s white bandana wrapped around his forehead. He again was listening with great intensity, visibly moved. I had the feeling that what I was saying was maybe not that important but that somebody was addressing the event at all was what was significant for the mood of the audience. After prolonged applause, people started asking questions. The first question was by a gentleman in the audience who asked whether I could confirm the exact number of Takaino executed, as apparently there was a controversy about the topic. I answered that it was actually listed in the Matsushiro final verdicts as twenty-two people but that all other accounts cite eighteen or nineteen depending on whether they include the death of Kubota in the number. Apparently twenty-two was probably the correct number. Another important question was from a young politician who

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was a member of the Nagano prefecture council. His question was quite rhetorical. He asked what I as a foreign scholar of this topic would comment on the question of whether these victims of the uprising ‘should have their honour restored’ (meiyo o kaesu beki ka nai ka). I answered that they had not lost their honour in the first place and that under the circumstances of the day, any one under these conditions would have revolted. I offered the explanation that the Nakano uprising had occurred more than a century ago and that it was already an academic subject as proven by my work on the subject. We discussed that this book could be of some use in the petition that will be placed in Tokyo that even a foreign scholar has studied this subject which will take the uprising out of its political and legal context. After this moving encounter, we were dined by the village historical society members who honoured us with a prayer to the ancestors of the village as an expression of their appreciation for the visit. Before leaving for our rooms in the local inn (ryokan), Mr Aoki said we should be ready the next day early in the morning with snow boots for we would trek off to visit the graves of the executed Takaino residents. The next morning we visited first the home of a Kubota-gumi resident local farmer, also an amateur village historian, Mr Katsuyama who greeted us. Then we started our journey hiking up into the deep forest with Mr Katsuyama as our lead following a map in his hand which was on white rice paper that I immediately remembered from back in 1977 as typical of the early Meiji documents in the kiri chest, with the graves drawn in ink (sumi) as crosses at designated locations deep within the forest. It was an extraordinary experience. We moved up the hill in such an uninhabited area that Mr Katsuyama had to cut open a path for us with a machete type knife through the dry wood and grass which had filled the forest. One by one we started seeing the lone tombstones placed in isolation in various locations within the forest. Some were mere rocks or large stones. Others were quite well carved tombstones with names chiselled on them. All of them had the same date of the day of execution on them. After this silent visit to the forest graves, we went up the hill into the public cemetery and here we visited some of the tombstones of family members whose stones had been moved into the public family cemeteries in the last ten years or so. Even in these cases, many of those stones that were finally brought into the family cemetery were somehow placed apart from the rest, or, were a simple rock in contrast to the elaborate sculpted stones that represented the rest of the family. The most disturbing scene in this journey into the past living in the present of Takayama today was when we visited, again in Kubo-gumi, the district from which most victims of the uprising came, the house of a woman who had hidden the stone of her ancestor who was executed in 1871 in the backyard of her cottage, placing various thrown away goods, wood planks and a number of roof tiles around the tombstone in such a way as to hide it away from the public eye. In fact, one could see that Mr Katsuyama was also disturbed about this and did not want to draw attention to the place in order not to be seen by the resident of the house who was fortunately away. He briefly pointed out the stone and in a quiet voice explained the pathetic scene and made a move to leave the premise. The other dramatic scene was in the public cemetery within the premises of Horinouchi district where the jagged edged triangular rock of Katō, whose name is chiselled on the rock again with the date of execution, stands upright in almost a gesture of defiance. The explanation was that the rock faced north in the direction of Nakano city, the seat of the Governor’s office of Nakano prefecture, which was burned down in a

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show of resentment. Both Mr Katsuyama and Mr Aoki explained that to this day there were a few in the village who refused to talk to Nakano families whom they blamed for this tragedy and in turn that Nakano residents to this day were not on speaking terms with Takayama people. To me, this journey which took a whole day until sunset was one of the most moving personal experiences that I have had in my life. More than twenty years had passed since I had arrived in this village and finally, maybe without realizing it, my research and book had invoked some kind of catharsis in that town meeting. This was a gesture of gratitude offered in friendship by the local Takayama residents. As we returned to our ryokan, the conversation moved to a rather spiritual theme partly in cheer but partly in sobriety that my life must have been destined by some previous karma back in Istanbul to forge this fated relation (goen) with Takayama so that the community could overcome their grief, maybe visiting the graves was a move of closure in this regard. My relations with Takayama will probably never end and will evolve as the memory of the uprising also evolves into new stages about the historic and personal self-identity of many Takayama residents as well as that of mine as a scholar of Japan in Istanbul with a special relationship to a mountain village in Japan. My friends, Professors Yanagisawa and Furukawa, interestingly enough, have commented that they would not have been invited to visit the graves because after all they are outsiders, but I suppose my position, as being so alien and so outside of any context in Japan, may have made it easier for the community to come to the meeting and for the historians of Takayama to escort us to the graves. Some unresolved issues still remain. Uchiyama Oriemon’s grave, the headman nanushi executed as the ringleader, is still in an undisclosed location. We visited all but his grave. Mr Aoki and Mr Katsuyama said they do not know where it is. I have a suspicion that this is because first he was from Mizusawa-gumi, an identity correction that I had discovered during my research, as the available records and the published material had mistaken him for another Oriemon of Araibara-gumi, also a rebel. This group consisted of relatively poor farmers and families of recent status unlike Kubo and Horinouchi from which the rest of those executed came and whose graves we visited. I think that since both of our guides were from Horinouchi and Kubo they did not feel it right to barge into Mizusawa. Another explanation that comes into my mind which probably no one can prove is that maybe Oriemon of Araibara was executed in place of Oriemon of Mizusawa who got away. This is not so unfeasible as oral accounts mention that many escaped into Echizen and Echigo for good. Furthermore, some years ago, the Japanese newspapers reported that the descendants of the ringleader of the famous Chichibu peasant uprising of 1881, the last peasant revolt of Japanese history against high land taxes, were discovered in Hokkaidō because his ancestor had covered up his traces and escaped to Hokkaidō with a new identity.

THE TRAUMA OF MEMORY IN WRITING Until recently, the only written account of the uprising by the Takayama community was a brief summary of the revolt in the beautiful history of Takayama through photographs that was published quite recently in 1996 by the Takai district history publications society (Takai gyoshi-shi kankōkai). It illustrates the history of Takaino and Yamada villages, which in 1936 had united to constitute today’s Takayama village.

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But the sōdō account concerns Takaino alone, as Yamada stayed out of that organization. The editor is Professor Yumoto Gun’ichi of Hōsei University and a former member of Nagano prefecture history editorial committee. A close reading of the account gives us the basic known facts about the uprising; however there are some comments which reflect the villages historic understanding of the event as of 1996. The text deals with the issue of responsibility in an ambivalent manner by explaining in a detached manner that it is still not clear whether Takaino peasants started the revolt as accused in the first place. However there were dire circumstances such as destitution, fiscal chaos, and the twenty-one Takaino residents who lost their investments in the Hokushin company founded by Nakano merchants and landlords for silk worm exports that had just gone bankrupt. The start of the uprising is attributed to the mistaken assumption of regional villages who took the smoke of a funeral pyre in Kubo-gumi near Takamori shrine, the holiest ancient shrine of Takaino that houses the spirit of Takamori the grand son of Susanoo who is supposed to have settled in Takaino as an ancestral figure, also representing the deity of the mountain, as a sign of revolt. Of course, my assessment from looking at the interrogation records, where no such apologetic explanation was put forth, shows that the ringleaders of the ikki were Kubo-gumi peasants who always ran at the forefront of the uprising crowd and who were very militant throughout. They had been directly involved in the two murders during the attack on the Nakano prefecture office. In my opinion, the uprising format had used the customary form of a Shintō festival (matsuri) in many of its practices which indicates that the Japanese matsuri and the ikki tradition share the same roots. Thus, to me it makes sense that the initial organization began in Takamori shrine which is the starting holy ground for the local matsuri as well. The account in the documents cited by the photographic history of the village gives us new information about what happened in the first lunar month of the fourth year of Meiji (1871), on the day when Takaino was hit hard by the Meiji troops who proceeded to arrest and round up hundreds from the village. Semponmatsu district participants hid up in the mountains. Mizunaka-gumi men huddled in fright in Tsukioi ancient castle ruins up in the deep forest. It is said that the women took food to them at night. On the twenty-seventh day of the second month, twenty-eight people from all over the region were executed, the number again in slight variance with the trial documentation that I had perused (six by decapitation, twenty-two by strangling and hanging). In addition, 124 men were punished with hard labour that of course ruined the livelihood of the families as able-bodied men were not available to work in the fields. Some were sent away as gang labour in reclamation projects. The account tells us that hundreds were punished in some way, and that this was unprecedented and an unimaginable harsh treatment, a comment indicative of the traumatic experience. The Takaino victims are here given as nineteen in all constituting the majority of those executed which made Takaino stand out publicly as the community accused for the uprising. The headman Oriemon was beheaded as the ringleader, three others from Kubo-gumi were beheaded, fifteen were killed by strangling, most from Kubo-gumi, ten in all. Ōkumigashira Juemon is said to have stubbornly denied responsibility of the allegations, narrowly escaped execution but on the fifteenth day of the third month, he died under torture. The account which I have cited above from the 1996 history album gives for the first time the suffering of the rest of the community in detail. The text tells us that many

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others died of torture. Those released came home and immediately expired at the doorstep. It concludes that there are many such accounts but the true number of those who suffered is not known. The photo album account reveals the cause for the lingering of the communal disturbance about the event in the following narrative: ‘For more than a hundred years thereafter the talk of Nakano upheaval became taboo words of silence (anmoku no kinku). The reason is because of the attitude of the government to the bereaved families.’ What the authors of the volume explain here is a most striking example of the difference in the concept of historic time in Takayama which acts as a place of memories with a sense of local time unlike the time in the narrative of national history, and the forced silence that prolonged a traumatic memory of the event for so long. The account tells the reader that the Takayama residents lamented the fact that the ringleader of the Matsushiro upheaval, which took place only a month ago before the 1871 Nakano uprising, a Jiemon from Yamada village near Matsushiro, has been celebrated as a local martyr, a hero, the favourite son of the home country who opened the gates of modern times by striking the match of rebellion against the Sanada daimyō of Matsushiro domain, the remnants of backward feudal government against the shining light of the Meiji Restoration. On the other hand, the Takaino ikki leader Oriemon and the rest are still deemed to be traitors and criminals. Apparently, what this surviving image of being unfairly treated in comparison to the Matsushiro rebellion, has survived in the memory of the village to this day, goes back to 1937, when Army General and later Prime Minister Hayashi Senjūrō ordered the construction of a grand monument with a statue of Jiemon that was established in the main square of Kami Yamada town. General Hayashi had a populist image of the peasantry and gave importance to the history of a people’s struggle for the building of modern Japan in the name of the emperor. Therefore, during his brief term as prime minister, Hayashi had ordered the building of various patriotic statues of Tokugawa peasant rebels who fought a people’s fight against backward feudalism thereby paving the way for the Meiji Restoration. In contrast, the book tells us that the graves of the nineteen Takaino victims are lone single graves located in places no one knows in the middle of the mountain, even in a family graveyard placed apart from the rest. However, a plain rock which has been sharpened at the edge with the name Katō and date cut into it, is turned facing the North, clearly to stare in defiance at Nakano city’s skyline. The rock is at the cemetery behind Yotsuya that we had also seen in our tour. The 1996 account reveals to us the years of suppressed memory that survived in Takaino when the subject of the ikki became a taboo for such a long time. The village acted as the matrix, the place where the event and the memory of the ikki have been produced and reinforce the collective remembrance as a suppressed disturbing memory. The book also tells us that the remembrance of the Nakano uprising among the villagers today has continued to disturb relations among local families even to this day. It concludes that even though this is an event of more than a hundred years ago, the bitter experience and the unresolved nature of the communities’ resolution of the matter where even a site of public mourning does not exist are apparent in the treatment of the graves to this day. An unresolved issue is the legal question of rehabilitation of the uprising victims in the eyes of the community which still suffers from the sense of loss of face over the trauma of this calamity in the early Meiji period that befell their families.

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Finally, it is a very gratifying turn of events that the Rekishi or History volume of the Takayama Village Almanac, the Sonshi has finally come out in 2005 as the second and most detailed publication of the topic in the village after the 1996 Takai history through photographs volume.16 The Sonshi has been able to treat the history of the uprising in such a detailed public account for the first time as part of Takayama’s history. I am very happy to note that my study has helped breached the taboo on the topic as the section on the uprising starts with a reference to the AAS publication and with the perspective that we chose in 1999 for the village meeting on the occasion of the book’s publication to deal with the communal emotional attitude over the topic: placing the uprising in an impartially sounding historical context making it possible to discuss it publicly. The Sonshi also points out the problems that have remained to this day. For example, the narrators reveal to us the reason for the hidden graves. The families of the victims were not allowed to bury the remains in the family cemeteries, and this was the reason why they were buried in hidden sites. Furthermore, only natural stones and rocks, some of which still survive, were placed on the sites as tombstones, which means that the carved tombstones were probably made and placed on the sites later. Many from the families of the punished were forced to leave Takaino for good. Those who remained faced discrimination and prejudice from others, who blamed them for the punishment of the village. The families of the victims could not overcome the stringent memory of having lost face even into later times. This for me explains the outburst of tears and emotions at the 1999 meeting. Some corvée labour conscripts who escaped from jail after 1871 lived at home hidden from sight for years. The topic of the Nakano upheaval was taboo for more than one hundred years, again repeating the comment that we find in the previous publication on the pictorial history of Takai. The editors of the Sonshi comment that bureaucratic propaganda and official historical perspectives continued from pre-war times and have resulted in a very troubled history education in the village in the post-war years, making me aware again of the curious difference in the concept of time for the community from the rest of national historical time in Japanese historical imagination in urban metropolitan academic circles. The authors of the Sonshi note again that a significant problem that remains is the movement to return the honour of those punished, which would mean that some kind of legal document from the Ministry of Justice or maybe a parliamentary resolution of a sort would lift the verdict of chōteki, enemies of the court, traitors, from the judicial records. Despite the discussion in 1999 during my talk about the need to start a movement with that objective, still today, there appears to be difficulties in realizing this corrective measure. Even in this day and age the problem of the Takaino victims is that they were sentenced as criminals against the modern state of Japan that had been forged in 1868 and they were not ‘lucky’ to have been the enemy of the feudal governments of the Tokugawa period which had still survived next door in Matsushiro. It means that the bureaucratic memory of the Japanese state in modern times has survived to this day despite the radical transformation that we claim has taken place in Japan in the post-war period when the pre-war Meiji state and legal frame was replaced by the democratic institutions of the occupation reforms. But then, maybe this replacement has not been as thorough as we assume. The new Takayama Sonshi concedes this political irony of present day Japan by concluding that the villagers’ inability to acknowledge the uprising as a historical event of the past, has created the continuous mourning atmosphere

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which I have encountered, and that even today, the rehabilitation of the victims is an unresolved problem. Courageously, the authors of the Sonshi have concluded that the rehabilitation of the victims of Nakano upheaval who fought for the sake of Takaino villagers by exerting their utmost with their lives in dignity under the conditions caused by the change and turmoil of the Meiji transitional years, is a contemporary agenda that cannot be ignored as an important issue of human rights education. In a way, historical conditions here act as a way to justify an acceptance of the victims as rightful agents of the village’s history. Oral accounts of memory such as what I have narrated above show that in Takayama, the Takaino trauma of the 1871 Nakano uprising is surprisingly alive to this day. As Jenny Edkins explains, the past and present is not linear in this memory but the two elements coexist all the more in the case of a past traumatic experience which has not been redeemed through mourning or some kind of a commemorative performance.17 For the Takaino residents of old and their descendants today, as Portelli has shown in the evolution of the epic of the death of Luigi Trastulli, the upheaval is a symbolic memory of the justifiable and decent defiance of the peasants. However, the Takaino residents could not express this sense of redemption and mourning because to this day the process of absolving of guilt has not been granted from the abstract level of the national authorities. There is still a problem of closure about this event which is seen in the continuation of individual grudges, pathetic attitude towards the hidden tombstones, even the emotionality of the topic to people who did not live even close to the time of the uprising. Yet it is as if it happened yesterday.18 Unlike Matsushiro villagers who soon made an epic of the heroic defiance of the day because of the military ideology of the 1930s that made heroes of anti-feudal peasant rebels, Takaino villagers did not have the opportunity to sing epics about their heroic act for unlike the Matsushiro peasants who revolted against a feudal previous regime, they are enemies of the modern state—to this day. The remembrance of the Nakano uprising and the traumatic memory of the residents as a historical continuation has been deeply instructive to me as a historian of modern Japan. We are frequently under the illusion of the time perception of the history of contemporary Japan in its global turning points of the national and the imperial memory which accounts for the great divide of the pre-war and the postwar epochs with the Second World War and the road to war leading up to it as the great catastrophic dark valley of the Japanese experience. Yet while two world wars including the catastrophe of the Pacific conflict and the radical transformation of today’s post-war Japan took place, for Takaino families their village’s link with their past as memory has made it incumbent on them to keep the graves of the executed village members hidden from public eye, perhaps in shame. This is instructive of the importance of community memory in rural Japan that has a different time frame and a rhythm of modernity which has its own pace unlike that of the big cities like Tokyo. For Takayama residents, General Hayashi enabled Kami Yamada to overcome its own uprising trauma even though his role in national politics as a militarist nationalist is a negative one from the perspective of official post-war historiography which is critical of pre-war ultra-nationalism and militarism. That Takayama village cannot accomplish the cleansing of the name of these victims also makes us wonder whether at the inner workings of government the memory of the Japanese state is also operating on a time scheme that is keeping the legal legacy of the Meiji era more alive than the official narrative of Japan.

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The memory of the 1871 Nakano uprising which survived among Takayama families as silenced suppressed memory enables us to realize the multiple new questions that one can ask about Japanese history which cannot be derived from the written discourses of historical narratives from the academic centres of big cities.

NOTES 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

Selçuk Esenbel, Even the Gods Rebel: The Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising in Japan (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies Monograph vol. 57, 1998); Selçuk Esenbel Tözeren, Takaino Village and the Nakano Uprising of 1871 (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1981). For Japanese treatment, see Yokochi Jōji, Shinano ni okeru yonaoshi ikki no kenkyū (Nagoya: Yokochi Jōji Ikōshū Kankōkai, 1974); Kanai Akao ‘Nakano sōdō-ki’, in Takai, 15 Janurary 1971, pp. 48–75; brief summary and references in well known Ikki studies such as Aoki Keiichirō, Nihon nōmin undō-shi, 5 vols. (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha,1958–60); Aoki Kōji, Meiji nōmin sōdō no nenjiteki kenkyū (Tokyo: Shinseisha, 1967) Aoki Takajū, ‘Ishin-ki Shinshū nōmin ikki no dōki’, in Takai 15 (1971), pp. 1–12.; brief references in English language works, see Herbert P. Bix, Peasant Protest in Japan 1590–1884 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); James W. White, Ikki: Social Conflict and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Esenbel, Even the Gods Rebel, p. 250 Ibid., p. 219 Ibid., pp. 234–47 Ibid., pp. 37–51 Ibid., passim. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Harvard University Press, 1994). I would like to thank Arzu Ozturkmen of The Department of History, Bogazici University who has made me aware of the importance of memory in history. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, pp. 1–26. Rousso refers to the work of Robert Aron. The subsequent work of Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de memoire’, in Representations 26 (1989), 7–25; Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, Realms of Memory. Rethinking the French Past (Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 1–20 have helped establish the study of French memory about the war since the 1980s. Takayama Sonshi Hensan Iinkai (ed.), Shinshū Takayama Sonshi Dai ni maki, Rekishi hen (Nagano: Takayama Sonshi Hensan Kankōkai, 2005), pp. 520–30. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (University of California Press, 1997), pp. 23, 202, 285, 299, 339. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (eds), Regimes of Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 10–12. Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. ix, 1. The critic and the historian are in common with the detective. Long durée of memory and culture after an event including errors in the historical account is an aspect of truth that needs to be taken into account; see Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin, Regimes of Memory, p. 4, for early modern Europe, p. 10, for contemporary regimes of memory see companion volume, Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin (eds), Contested Pasts (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). Radstone and Hodgkin, Regimes of Memory, pp. 10–11, 41. Ibid., p. 176. Yokochi, Shinano ni okeru yonaoshi ikki no kenkyū. Takayama Sonshi Hensan Iinkai (ed.), Shinshū Takayama Sonshi, Dai ni maki, Rekishi hen (Nagano: Takayama Sonshi Kankōkai, 2005), pp. 520–30. Jenny Edkins: Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. xv Portelli, The death of Luigi Trastulli, p. 26.

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❚ First Published in Early Modern Japan, Spring 2003, 31–86.

17

The People of Tokugawa Japan: The State of the Field in Early Modern Social/Economic History a

EARLY MODERN SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF JAPAN: THE TOKUGAWA LEGACY

P

ost-war historians of Japanese socio-economic history argued extensively in favor of a Japanese version of the Whig perspective on history in which practically everything in the Tokugawa early modern leads to the modern age of Japan as an indigenous and stable evolution. Many of us in the field who are dealing with the Tokugawa period have also been greatly intrigued by the politicized question of Japanese global power or at least its dramatic beginnings with the 1868 Meiji Restoration, a kind of a revolution that catapulted Japan alone among the countries of Asia into the company of the great powers of the West. It is therefore not surprising that in her recent accomplished geo-historical study of the social and economic processes of proto-industry in early modern Japan, Kären Wigen begins with similar concerns in her recent book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750–1920, (1995). In discussing the peripheralization of the Ina Valley in South Shinano an arena that links the Tokugawa and post Meiji periods through the perspective of global market forces, Wigen comments aptly, “Japanese development poses one of the more insistent puzzles of modern history: how an isolated and decentralized state, far from the European heartland, managed to metamorphose in a few short decades into a formidable global power.”1 While the Whig interpretation suggests continuity and a smooth transition, Wigen suggests a sharp break. Here I treat the socio-economic history of the “early modern,” covering roughly the years 1600–1868, the Tokugawa period through the Meiji Restoration, but the broad question remains, how does one assess the relative balance between breaking points and discontinuities as we move from “early-modern” to “modern” Japan? For a long time, post-war scholarship in English joined the two periods so much so that it seemed as if the Tokugawa age was in a “Catholic marriage,” not only with the Meiji developments as its origin, preparation, and transition, but also with post-1945, contemporary Japan. The major controversy that underlines post-war

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research on socioeconomic history has been whether the Tokugawa legacy acted as a critical factor causing the “failure” of modernity in Japan or as a positive factor that illuminates the “successes” of a Japanese style of modernity. My generally chronological overview of the major issues and interpretations in the field of socio-economic history will assess studies that focus primarily on the commoner population of Tokugawa Japan. Ever since the nineteen fifties scholars have allocated special weight to the history of peasants and landlords in rural Japan for it is in this rural setting that the major conceptual arguments about Japan’s Tokugawa experience have developed in a comparative framework, juxtaposed with the history of the West as a divergent form of feudalism or as the early foundation of the “modern.” Beginning in the eighties, the field has advanced our understanding of the lives of ordinary people beyond the rice fields. The history of merchants and artisans in urban everyday life, the understanding of the culture of sexuality and gender, the social and economic world of the forest and the seas in the Japanese archipelago have followed en suite to enrich our knowledge of the variety and complexity of Tokugawa society. Scholars agree that Tokugawa people had to operate within well-defined boundaries of class, status, and power, partly because of the relative constancy of Japan’s geographic borders and the dearth of serious violent challenge to the order for some 250 years. The main outline of the socio-economic history of the population living under a feudal ethos has been described quite aptly since Sir George Sansom’s History of Japan. But post-war research in English has become increasingly capable of presenting the complex inner workings of how people lived, and the procedures they activated within the institutions of the Tokugawa body politic. The question of what constitutes the social and economic “early modern” in Japanese history is problematic as “early modern” is a term that, in common usage, assumes the history of Europe as the underlying determinant of the concept. What historians recognize as “early modern” in world history covers the period from about the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century and invariably takes developments in Europe from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, and the early Industrial and Scientific Revolutions as the primary mover in the generation of early modern conditions. There is a continuous debate in world history about whether episodes comparable to the historical experience of Europe took place in other parts of the world. Common denominators used by historians in general (including those who study Japan) as indicative of the early modern temper of any society include the following: First, historians indicate that an increasing concentration of political power in a centralized form of government (European “absolutism”) tended to replace the grass-roots hereditary power of local magnates who were typically connected to central authority in a federative framework that was dependent upon feudal ties of vassalage or some other form of reciprocal dependency. Second, the same early modern process is generally held to be in line with the more widespread circulation of goods and services seen in Europe, the emergence of a “commercialized market economy” domestically, and “mercantilism” in international contexts. Finally, the early modern era also witnesses increasing numbers of towns and cities that reflect a social and economic culture of urbanity. In European history, the free towns and townsmen of the early modern era in European states are seen to be the source for the political and social evolution of civil society and our notions and traditions of freedom and liberty.

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In Japanese history, the English literature suggests the early modern begins politically when the national rulers of the country beginning with Hideyoshi in the sixteenth century started to take direct measures to exercise the authority to tax and oversee the village administration of the peasants. Centralization in Japan took place as establishing domain government authority over all of the population. By the early seventeenth century, the Tokugawa Shoguns and local daimyo domain lords completed the establishment of the kokudaka total yield and tax allotment registers and the shūmon aratame chō registers of religious affiliation for each village. For historians dealing with the Tokugawa period as “early modern,” both developments form the basic indicators of “early modernity” by identifying procedures with which the social and the economic processes of Japanese history were closely connected to political authority until the end of the Tokugawa period. What especially marks the Japanese experience in this narrative as reflective of early modern processes is that governmental measures to control the population and regular inflow of tax went hand in hand with social measures to establish hereditary status distinctions that divided the population into the politically privileged ruling class of samurai, and the commoner population who were sub-divided into peasants, artisans, and merchants. Hideyoshi’s Sword Hunt (1588), which banned the use of arms by the commoners and relegated that privilege to the warrior class, is taken as the seminal event in this freezing of the classes. The edict was followed by the Tokugawa removal of samurai from the countryside into urban centers, where they became the standing armies and bureaucratic personnel of the Tokugawa and daimyo governments. Second World War scholarship had been critical of the Japanese experience as a negative, divergent process filled with hallmarks of her failure to become truly early modern in the idealized European historical narrative of a politically liberal process that was economically nurtured by the emergence of free market “capitalism” and socially determined by the rise of the urban bourgeoisie and the rights and a free citizenry. This negative view of Tokugawa Japan was best represented in E. H. Norman’s classic study of the origins of the modern state. Norman argued that the combination of centralized power with a rigid social hierarchy under a military class was a special problem of Japanese early modernity that diverged from the European experience. For those such as Norman who saw Japan in light of Pearl Harbor, the Tokugawa experience created a legacy of feudal elements in political organization and social rigidities that originated with the Sword Hunt and similar measures under “centralized feudalism.” These legacies were incorporated in the new political organization and were the basis for Meiji state formation. The persistence of Japanese centralized feudalism into the nineteenth century was the basis for the authoritarian character of modern Japan that led to militarism and imperialism; the distortion of the early modern in Japanese history explained the failure of democracy and the rise of fascism. Even recently, the doyen of Japanese history, William G. Beasley commented that the authoritarian social and economic measures which we have described as the mark of the “early modern” in Japanese history, “tried to stop the clock of history” and that the feudal ethos of government continued throughout the era, implying that Japan’s early modern experience was unlike the European one that charts the “clock of history” in our minds.2 This was the standard view of Tokugawa history for a long time, particularly until the advent of post-war research that re-evaluated the whole phenomena in a

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more positive light. Post-war scholarship has countered the Norman view first by a conceptualization of Japanese social and economic history that ascribes a special, privileged and positive role to the emergence of the peasant village community and its economic growth. With the dissolution of the ancient shōen (manorial estates), increases in agricultural productivity came about through the application of improved irrigation and better methods of cultivation that can be traced back to the thirteenth century, but it is really from the sixteenth century on that autonomous village communities become the basis of agrarian social and economic life. Encouraged by the Pax Tokugawa, peasants regularly produced, generation after generation, an increase in yields and undertook significant expansion in the acreage under cultivation (paddy fields under cultivation increased from around 946,000 chō in 1450, to 2,970,000 chō around 1720.3 This increased output underlay population growth from an estimated ten to twelve million in the later sixteenth century to about thirty million by 1700. This permitted the increased market orientation of the economy (the second hallmark of “early modernity”) with all its positive and negative components. Historians have viewed this development as a generally “positive” factor that helped dismantle the grip of centralized feudalism on the society and economy. A related issue that attracted significant attention has been the sixteenth-century emergence of castle-towns that provided the initial urban setting which encouraged the expansion of commercial activities within and beyond domain borders. Whether or not these castle-towns “could” become the bastions of political liberty and civil society (as in the European experience) while under the firm control of the military ruling class, for example, constituted one of the major questions concerning the character of early modern Japanese history. Finally, it is difficult to decide which events end the “early modern” era in Japanese history given the selective definition given above. A personal interpretation suggests that certainly the institution of the Meiji land survey in 1869, and the new Land Tax of 1872, in addition to the abolishing of the feudal laws concerning the social status traditions of the Tokugawa era during the same years, stand out as dramatic events which end the “early modern” in legal and institutional terms in Japanese history. Yet, research also indicates that the social and economic dynamics of everyday life and production appear to have lasted well beyond the 1868 Meiji Restoration.

RURAL HISTORY: THE PEASANT VILLAGE AND AGRARIAN ORIGINS Early post-war research produced excellent works that treated the history of peasants, merchants, or local history with an emphasis on tracing Japan’s rocky road to modernity beneath the samurai world of governmental institutions and political power. The regional study of Bizen by John W. Hall portrayed the local conditions in the context of regional power from early times through the early Tokugawa period.4 William Chambliss’s Chiaraijima village study brought to life for the first time the everyday in a peasant community—the intricacies of the social, economic, and inner-village institutional worlds.5 James Nakamura revealed the concealed Tokugawa production that underlay the Meiji economy.6 For the earlier period, Charles Sheldon traced the “Rise of the Merchant Class” in his study of the Tokugawa period, a study that remained for a long time the only major work that addressed the problematic impact of the merchants in Japan’s early modern and modern development. Tetsuo Najita’s seminal article on Oshio Heihachirō in the

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Craig and Shively volume, Personality in Japanese History, stands as the singular case of a study of an individual rebel who was not a peasant.7 These were milestones in the scholarship of early-modern / modern Japan that shifted our focus to the world below the sea of a dominant concern for the modernist impetus scholars located in the hands of the samurai political leadership. However, most post-war English-language scholarship consisted of studies on the samurai aristocracy, and the modernist agenda was ascribed to the “positive” role of elite institutions in Tokugawa history. This story painted a Japan able to modernize in a way that was a model of stability and evolution, one that was comparable to Europe, viable and constructive rather than destructively revolutionary. This was a sharp contrast to the critical appraisal of the Norman generation. The classic series produced by the Conference on Modern Japan (published by Princeton University Press in six volumes from 1965–1971) represents the parameters of the argument. The series incorporates the scholarly research of a whole generation of Japan scholars: John W. Hall, Donald Shively, Marius B. Jansen, William Lockwood, Ronald P. Dore, Robert E. Ward, James W. Morley, Edwin Reichauer, and others. The scholarship evaluated the scope of Japanese history from the Tokugawa to the postwar era from the vantage point of modernization theory and stood in critical opposition to contemporary Japanese scholars such as Maruyama Masao, Toyama Shigeki and Kawashima Takeyoshi. Within this context, the Tokugawa tradition and its legacy in the modern era emerged in a better light during the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies than that in which it had been cast by historians such as Norman. One has to note that this was primarily reflective of the post-war scholarship of the United States. This perspective was part of a larger debate in the States that constructed a positive image of Japan as a successful model of modernization for the “free world,” one where native tradition gave birth to European-like processes without the need for imitation. Donald Shively commented, “On the surface Japan appears to have turned away from her past traditions to follow Western models. But a close examination of the individual cases dealt with here reveals that the general product owed more than might be suspected to the quality of Japanese tradition.”8 The publication of Robert Bellah’s Tokugawa Religion, traced a Japanese form of Protestant ethic in Tokugawa Japan. Subsequently, Albert M. Craig’s seminal work on Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration pointed out the strength of the samurai feudal elements that enabled the “power of the Meiji state to respond successfully to the challenge of the West.”9 Herbert Bix reminds us astutely of the atmosphere back then with his opening line in Peasant Protest in Japan 1590–1884 (1986), that just after World War II, “scholarly writing by Westerners on Japan centered largely on its great tradition of elite politics and high culture. Interest in the vast majority who were peasants and workers was slow to develop.”10 There were significant exceptions. Thomas Smith, whose seminal Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (1959), is the first post-war study which looked at the people, translated mostly at this stage as the peasantry, on their own terms, arguing that peasants contributed to modernity not just in terms of surplus and economic value, but also socially. The Tokugawa peasants of Smith’s study adapted themselves to the dictates of the market and proceeded to construct a productive agrarian economy and rural industry through improvements in technology and methods of cultivation. Most significant is his argument about social change. The social mode

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of production shifted from the extended family cooperative to the individual nuclear family. Smith’s emphasis on the break-up of the old and the consequent release of energies afforded by high social mobility in the countryside, also provided the source of political conflict that challenged the traditional village power structure. Smith concludes with an image of rural Japan that serves as the training ground for the modern laborer, entrepreneur, and politician in the new Japan. The village is the progenitor of the social and economic dynamic in the modern era.11

STUDIES OF REBELLION AND CONFLICT The larger paradigm of Tokugawa socio-economic history is the continuing debates over the relative prominence of poverty and subsistence-level existence versus rising standards of living and economic growth in the villages, and over the role of demographic patterns which can be interpreted differently depending on which interpretation a scholar follows. The debate broke out with the major studies of Susan Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, which followed the significant arguments of Thomas Smith and James Nakamura. These studies mapped out a Tokugawa history of agrarian growth, commercialization, and the accumulation of surplus in a concealed economy. Kozo Yamamura outlined the decline in samurai income, a trend that led many to join commoners and engage in cottage industry and other kinds of employment.12 Hanley has furthered the “rising living standards” perspective in Everyday Things in Premodern Japan (1997), by arguing that standards of physical well being—sanitary conditions and efficient use of resources—in a material culture that created a general quality of life for Tokugawa peasants on a par with that of the English workers during the industrial revolution.13 She argues against the formal estimates of Japan’s per capita income on the eve of pre-war industrialization, and is critical of the crude measurement of per capita income used by mainstream economic analysis. She argues that it is an inappropriate standard, pointing to the absence of goods traded in the international market and, more importantly, cultural preferences and changing tastes within Japan’s pre-modern culture. The argument of those in the accumulation-of-surplus-and growth camp stresses the statistical revelation of a concealed surplus resulting from agrarian growth and the inability of the early modern state to revise the tax structure to capture gains from the growing economy—an act accomplished later in draconian fashion under the Meiji Restoration. If we accept this premise, the Tokugawa people achieved an improvement in living conditions through an “Industrious Revolution,” to adopt Hayami Akira’s well-known terminology. All these factors are seen to have sustained a growing population until the end of the eighteenth century, and increases in commoners’ wealth continued, albeit on uneven terms, with the very well off coexisting with those clearly impoverished.14 Given the “attraction” of discovering a gradual tax decline relative to the increased agrarian production in addition to rising commercial and industrial income, the growth argument has still needed to acknowledge the fragility of conditions for most and the class differences between landlords / wealthy peasants and tenants, as well as the poverty of significant sections of the peasant population and the vulnerability of the bulk of the producers and city dwellers to fluctuating ecological and market conditions. The debate reflects issues beyond Tokugawa history, e.g., whether the Industrial Revolution, starting with the West, has brought with it an

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immediate rise in the standard of living or any benefits at all for the majority of the people. The two opposing views, one stressing growth-oriented Tokugawa social behaviour, the other poverty, often emphasize different aspects of the same phenomenon— market fluctuations. In Takaino, the very same peasants who presumably were making tidy sums in the eighteen sixties producing silkworm egg cards for the international market were listed as destitute on the eve of the 1871 Nakano uprising because of a collapse in the export market. As Edward Pratt indicates, this volatility was typical, even for villagers who engaged only in domestic commerce before the opening of international trade.15 For critics of the growth perspective, the impoverished members of a Tokugawa society riven by class contradictions and increasing tenantization become the exploited base of cheap labor that marks the crisis-ridden body politic of early modern Japan. Those who assume this perspective point to the practice of mabiki (infanticide) as a sign of the inability of the average peasant family to survive the market forces and the widening, glaring gap between the rich and poor. Totman projects a significant challenge to the rising-expectations-and-growth model by firmly pointing his finger at the increase in self-exploitation of human labor. In his critical review of studies of Tokugawa peasants, he reacts to the use of the language of extreme rationalization of free-market economism employed by some scholars who interpret infanticide as voluntary birth control.16 In his study of Akita forestry, Totman also points to the fundamental question of what prompts humans to act at all, and what level of ecological disaster must befall a society before it is moved to confront its problems. The depletion of the Akita forest in northwest Honshu resulting from population pressure and the need for timber to support urban growth could be reversed only after the trauma of the Temmei famine (1781–88) forced commoners and authorities to take significant reforestation measures during the nineteenth century.17 Such analyses provide further evidence of the subsistence-level existence of many Japanese peasants who frequently succumbed to the forces of nature in famines, earthquakes, floods, and epidemics as well as fluctuations of a commercialized economy. In such conditions, even small shifts made the difference between survival and death. None of the scholars working in the field have solved the issues of growth, poverty, conflict, and their mutual relationship to perfect satisfaction, nor has either side, although opinion appears to lean toward acknowledgment of the primacy of growth in the market economy. So the question remains: Does the growth in the market economy engender an improvement in the conditions of commoners, albeit at unequal levels, or is it the actual cause of increased poverty and class contradictions. I find that in the case of Takaino, economic shifts helped the traditionally poor mountain peasants attain a degree of independence as taxpayers. I also think that the poor tenant and mizunomi (“landless”) peasants in many Shinano villages who are frequently seen as the product of recent social and economic contradictions, were not the social products of late Tokugawa market forces but had been there from the beginning as part of an old-fashioned mode of land tenure. At least in Takaino, most nauke (peasants who received “names” and were listed in village land registers) had been mizunomi originally and had gained sufficient “status” over time by expanding their economic assets to become registered peasants.

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Some consensual points emerge from the debate about the nature of the socioeconomic change in the Tokugawa society. First, I think all would agree that the formation of a new socioeconomic order was “married” to the move toward political centralization and the foundations of both the national government, the Tokugawa bakufu, and the domain polities in the early sixteenth century. Hence, a study of the socioeconomic layer in Tokugawa Japan cannot be divorced from the political history of the country.18 Second, the fundamental structure of the Tokugawa modus vivendi with the people regarding taxes and the implementation of social controls may have been shaken by conflict at times, but the institutions themselves remained intact. If the special form of centralization in the federative framework of the Baku-han order is the thematic concern of the debate on early modern political history, how people operated within its remarkably “frozen” structure of de facto and de jure boundaries constitutes the foundation within which scholars debate in the socioeconomic realm. There are also some agreed-upon “building blocks” of the debate. We know that the land surveys and kenchi-chō cadastral registers of koku-daka, total yield, and shumon aratame-chō registers of religious affiliation established a stable system of controls over a taxpayer peasantry. The registration of the total population in a closed system of class and status between the samurai, peasant, artisan, merchant, and subgroups such as the outcastes constituted a static social environment where, with some exceptions, social mobility between the classes through wealth, marriage, or merit was no longer possible. For the historians it is the inner village contradictions that appear to be the only source for mobility and conflict, representing the “catalyst” of “historical action.” This was also a remarkably non-violent society in contrast to its contemporaries in Europe or Asia. After all, there were no wars. The removal of the samurai from land, and their transformation into an urban military-bureaucratic class in service of the domain and Tokugawa governments, and the demilitarization of the peasantry resulted in the elimination of armed warfare and a stable political and military environment. This state of affairs was one major reason for the inability of the Tokugawa peasants to win dramatic victories against the ruling class. Nor were they the subjects or the objects of extreme bloodshed and “religious / ethnic cleansing” such as the armed warfare during the Peasant War in Germany or the Taiping Rebellion in China. Finally, we must note that the samurai constituted an unusually high proportion of the total population, close to 10 percent, which implies that no matter how flexible the praxis of law and authority may be, Tokugawa subjects were under the control of a very large armed military power. There were further constraints in the socioeconomic sphere. The mode of production of the Tokugawa producer was determined, constrained if you will, by “self-exploitation” of the human body and the collective solidarity of the family-community network. Tokugawa peasants and laborers did not have available to them extensive labor-energy of draft animals for farm work, nor the low cost camel or donkey for transportation (although the horse was used for transporting goods in some regions). This meant that increases in productivity depended upon better use of resources, innovations in technology (limited) and dissemination of existing know-how. But it also meant that producers had to increase working hours and concentrate on close regulation of the individual and the collective to get the maximum results.19 Nonetheless, the society also faced several crises: three major famines, the Kyōhō famine (1732–33), the Temmei famine (1783–87), and the Tempō famine (1832–36).

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Induced by years of adverse climatic conditions and natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, floods, earthquakes, the Temmei and Tempō especially were periods of widespread social upheaval. And hundreds of thousands, possibly a million died of starvation around the 1788 famine. These crises became arenas of violent confrontation between the countryside and the cities with their commoner and samurai elites.20 Recent studies of early modern social and economic history explore the history of the praxis within the above “building blocks” of the debate, and we are now able to see better the procedural manner in which the population acted within the limits of the system. The emphasis now is on seeing not just how the Tokugawa population increased their labors’ output, but also how they manipulated the existing customs of taxation, and put into practice the written and unwritten body of customary law. As elsewhere, holders of political power in Japan never “intended” to give up the existing exploitative structure, but in the case of the Tokugawa bakufu, recent research confirms its inability to radically change the tax customs to benefit the center. By its very terms of power, the bakufu in Shinano for example, had to be somewhat lax and in the long run incapable of significantly increasing governmental exploitation of the producers no matter how draconian the methods.21 Philip Brown outlines the practical constraints on early Tokugawa land taxation in his article on annual versus fixed assessments in the Kaga domain. In another article, he introduces discussion of the mismeasure of land in land surveying in the Tokugawa period.22 Seen in a cumulative manner, starting with the discussion of a gradual decline in taxation by Smith and a similar but less obvious surmise by Chambliss about Chiaraijima, the study of the structure of tax payment and its time-series still constitute the single available tool with which to grasp the nature of early modern exploitation of producers.23 The fight over taxes between those who pay and those who collect is a litmus test of how much political power from the center was capable of grasping the resources of the economy. Most would therefore agree by now that the de facto tax rate of the Tokugawa bakufu tenryō in an average year was only 20 percent of the total yield (and maybe lower). That the additional burden was placed on the population through goyōkin (“thank you money,” the term used for extraordinary levies, nominally loans) transport costs, and so on is all the more understandable in view of the limitation on raising land taxes to any significant degree. This situation also explains the stiff opposition to these extra levies especially in times of distress. But there were limits to how much the bakufu could extract through extra levies as well. Furushima, who actually does not take the Tokugawa period overall yield increase into consideration in his article in the early modern Japan volume of the Cambridge history, still provides a good example of the Tokugawa government’s tax dilemma. Furushima provides the 1844 bakufu budget revenue figure of a total of 4,011,760 ryō (the rice price was roughly 1 kokul 1 ryō for that year); the major portion was provided by the land tax 1,660,000 ryō, and most of the rest of the revenue provided by 583,000 ryō loan-repayments plus profits from recoinage of 839,000 ryō. The 1844 budget indicated that the official goyōkin that would be collected from the wealthy producers and merchants was a minor 23,629 ryō. Mining provided 62,000 ryō, and transportation fees 71,000 ryō, both again not close to revenues coming from taxes, loan repayments, and recoinage. The budget also reflects why the government resorted to tinkering with the fiscal system through periodic recoinage, a familiar method of early modern governments elsewhere.24

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Finally, when we leap to 1868, the Meiji government collected 2 million ryō, which was ostensibly in accordance with the formal kokudaka obligation of all tenryō lands, but the sum was worth only 300,000 koku of rice in the market (1 koku was worth 8 ryō in 1868), only a quarter of the value in kind of the 1844 tax revenue, revealing the dire straits of the new regime in graphic terms.25 The above may be a somewhat “lean and mean” way to explain our understanding of the taxation framework of the contest between samurai power and the tenryō peasantry. In sum, the recent discussions of the peasants’ side of the story of Tokugawa Japan have shown an awareness of the limitations of Tokugawa power, especially in the bakufu environment. The late nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties saw the fruits of what I call the Marcusian generation’s earlier interest in ordinary people that revived the “tension-ridden” issues of class conflict in order to highlight the nature of inequity and peasant defiance in Tokugawa society. The list is surprisingly extensive and rather concentrated when one remembers that practically all are dealing with the conflict issue of the Tokugawa-Meiji transition. It indicates what I think has been the underlying agenda of the conflict scholarship: to present a critical perspective on the question of modern Japan rather than just examining uprisings or revolts: to challenge that “rosy picture” of modernization. The path breaking articles were those of Irwin Scheiner on “The Mindful Peasant” (1973) and “Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants” in Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period (1978).26 The first of these was followed by Patricia Sippel, “The Bushū Outburst” (1977) and Donald W. Burton on “Peasant Struggle”(1978).27 The provocation for the burst of interest that followed probably came (among other sources) from the revival of Norman’s works on Japan (spurred by John Dower) that brought back criticism of Japan as an absolutist semi-feudal entity. Then the edited volume by Najita and Koschmann with the splendid title, Conflict in Modern Japanese History; The Neglected Tradition (1982) with contributions from Harootunian, Vlastos, Wilson, and others opened up the conflict debate in a full fledged manner. The book’s critical perspective places the Meiji Restoration in a setting of dissenting voices from all classes, including the peasant, merchant, and samurai, and—in the Meiji period—labor, intellectuals, and scientists.28 Mikiso Hane’s Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (1982) strongly criticizes the rosy picture of Japan’s modernization by shifting attention to the misery, suffering, and exploitation of the population, peasant conflict, dissenting voices, and social discrimination against the outcastes: the “dark picture” that also went into the making of modern Japan.29 The subject of Tokugawa-Meiji peasant conflict has inspired a sizable number of general studies and monographs that used narrative sources on Tokugawa uprisings and village documentation. Initially, the question that intrigued scholars such as Herbert Bix was whether the Tokugawa uprisings were revolutionary, following the classic debate on the subject in Japan since the pre-war era. The issue was difficult to pose for it had a tenuous historical base—no peasant-engineered revolution took place in Japan on a par with the revolutions in China and Mexico. Hence, in the Japanese case, the search has been more to decipher revolutionary action or revolutionary discourse that acted as an “energy” or as a force of “progress” in the words of Marxist historian Toyama Shigeki. The social force of peasant conflict is seen to have induced the Meiji Restoration, but the peasant movement remained

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“strapped” to the reins of power in the hands of the new samurai strata that came to power. Herbert Bix, whose work on Peasant Protest in Japan 1590–1884 (1986) introduced a sweeping panorama of the history of Tokugawa uprisings written from a dynamic and energetic perspective contrasts sharply with the single early study by Hugh Borton, Peasant Uprisings in Japan (1938), in which he saw uprisings as the “static” reflections of typical peasant revolts bom of agrarian crisis within a feudal order. Bix projects a firmly Marxian view that infuses linearity into social history: the Tokugawa phenomenon plays out as the progressive struggles of the peasant against a corrupt feudal order.30 He stresses the role of exploitation and injustice that enflamed the Tokugawa peasants to protest. In a different vein, James White, in his book Ikki (1995), covers the whole period of peasant conflict by developing a model of popular contention through statistical analysis of Aoki Koji’s data supplemented by his own extensive additions of data. He emphasizes the importance of context in explaining conflict and contends that conflict successfully brought benefits to protestors. White’s innovative methodology represents a new dimension in the explanation of conflict and brought forth themes that are relatively unfamiliar in peasant uprisings research: self-interest, opportunity, success and reasonable if not “rational” behavior. Whereas White explains peasant conflict in contemporary social science terms, in Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century Japan (1979), and Peasant Uprisings in Japan: A Critical Anthology of Peasant Histories, (1991), Anne Walthall exposes the mentalité of the late eighteenth century Temmei famine period upheavals. In her path-breaking studies of Tokugawa narratives and sources on peasant conflict, Walthall stresses the cultural and ideological components of the subject. Introducing the Annales perspective on social history, Walthall’s works decipher the commoner’s critical view of their Tokugawa betters. In peasant narratives, people such as Tanuma Okitsugu, the bakufu official who has been seen as an early modernizer in contemporary research, now surfaces as the exploiting evil culprit of the peasant. These approaches extend our perception of Tokugawa Japan beyond the twentieth-century modernist agenda, which disregards the critical perspective of the contemporaries of Tanuma.31 Stephen Vlastos presents a regional study of the Aizu and Shindatsu uprisings in central Japan in Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan (1986) with special emphasis on the late Tokugawa yonaoshi (“world renewal”) rebellions that carried the promise of a new revolutionary vision contemporary with the quagmire of the Meiji Restoration. Much debated as a representation of revolutionary aspirations by the peasants, the yonaoshi uprisings are seen to have been a by-product of the effects of international trade, which activated the political role of the small peasant producers of sericulture products for export. Positing the issue within the theoretical debate on peasant conflict between E. P. Thompson (moral economy demands of peasants in a subsistence economy) and Samuel Popkin (rising expectations of rational peasants in a market economy), Vlastos distinguishes the Shindatsu uprisings from the “Moral Economy” perspective of E. P. Thompson and the development of that perspective by James C. Scott’s analysis of Vietnamese peasant revolts: the Tokugawa peasants were part of the market forces of international trade and their circumstances could not be explained sufficiently with a moral economy paradigm—one which assumes

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a subsistence economy. However, he considers the late Tokugawa peasant to be extremely vulnerable within a market that entailed a “crisis of subsistence.” Vlastos projects the late Tokugawa period as one of intense conflict within the villages, between the rich and poor, that superseded the conflicts between the ruler and the ruled.32 While the field of peasant protest is dominated by macro-studies, the study of the peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano uprisings, Even the Gods Rebel: The Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising (1998), is a micro-study of an uprising that deals with village dynamics in the Takaino area (which organized the Nakano uprising) prior to and during the event. Similar to the Vlastos Shindatsu rising, the Nakano uprising was a yonaoshi in the northeast Shinano bakufu tenryō. The study looks at everyday village documents that reveal an image of the village in its ordinary communal praxis, circumstances quite different from that of a village under communal crisis and dissolution we customarily see in studies of uprisings based on government documents and village data that is immediate to the event. Compared to the general tenor of conflict literature, the Takaino study focuses more on the internal dynamics of the Takaino community, a solidarity reconstructed through conflict. It questions the assumptions we have about long-term community dissolution from the outward behavior of rebels typically described in uprising accounts.33 From the perspective of a growth-oriented view, the rising level of conflict in late Tokugawa society needed a new explanation and both White and Esenbel present a growth-oriented explanation for the conflict. White points out the insufficiency of the familiar explanation of conflict as the result of poverty and thankless exploitation. Conflict is not necessarily due to poverty and oppression per se but can also be due to competition among producers for more profit and to producer vulnerability coupled with the insistence of rural producers on further inroads into the market and tax system.34 Esenbel deciphers the overall concealed production in the economy and estimates a gradual decline in the value of taxes in proportion to total production, coming up with an evaluation similar to White’s.35 Many of the conflict studies cover both the early modern and the modern periods in a continuous manner that carries a risk of finding too many links between the Tokugawa and the Meiji history of conflict. The case study of the peasants of Takaino is a good example of a study of socioeconomic forces looking “backwards” into the Tokugawa period from an event that actually took place in 1871. William Kelly’s study of the Shōnai region in the Northwest, Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth Century Japan (1986), focuses on four cases of collective protest in the period 1840–1870, again crossing the Meiji Restoration into the late Tokugawa with a discrete vision toward the future. Finally, Roger Bowen’s Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: A Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement (1980) links popular protests in the Meiji period to the popular rights movement.36 The debate has been varied, the arguments having their Western counterparts— primarily because of the eclectic use of the paradigms in similar Western studies— ranging from a retake of the classic Marxist paradigm to Tilly’s focus on coercive states and communal conflict. Sometimes the English language scholarship on the Tokugawa disturbances risks facilely applying the debates in European history to Japanese data, perhaps an unavoidable deficiency of comparative history. This issue aside, Scott’s weapons of the weak, Ladurie’s history of ordinary people, the

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mentalité focus of the Annales school, Thompson’s perception of a moral economy and Popkin’s rational peasant perspectives are among the important sources of inspiration. The issue of conflict has, I believe, redirected the study of Tokugawa Japan, infusing it with the necessary tension to deconstruct the widely held rosy image of modern Japan. The ideology of modernism had largely removed the conflictual side of human nature, and the modernist description of the Japanese persona had portrayed the average Japanese as devoid of the ability to set the terms for a social contract with power. Conflict literature has helped liberate the Tokugawa period from such perspectives by empowering the commoner, perhaps initially with a degree of over correction, and liberated the period from being the “obedient” servant who provides support and preparation for the modern future.

LIMITS OF MODERNITY: PROTO-INDUSTRY AND VILLAGE PRAXIS Interest in the subject of conflict and popular dissent has not disappeared; there is much room for further research especially at the micro / regional level and through anthropological / historical study of the role of religion in conflict.37 However, contemporary research in early-modern studies has moved beyond the limits of debates on surplus and peasants per se, and has unveiled in depth the complexity of early-modern Japan. New studies of the social and economic terrain have increasingly blurred the line between the early modern and the modern by setting limits to the search for modernity in Tokugawa “sources.” Recent studies by Edward Pratt, Kären Wigen, and Herman Ooms present rich, detailed portraits that enable us to understand the inner workings of some of the elements in early modern society previously revealed only in general terms in the English literature. In Japan’s Proto-industrial Elite; The Economic Foundation of the Gōnō, Pratt analyzes the wealthy peasants, wealthy peasant cultivator / landlords who also engaged in multiple money-generating commercial pursuits. They were also the rural political and social elite. Much admired as the rural entrepreneurs of early modern Japan, the gōnō constituted a unique class which combined the roles of landlord, industrialist, financier, and merchant in one class, a role that differed from the experience of Europe during the industrial age when the commercial and industrial classes tended to be different strata and mostly urban. But in other respects the political economy of the gōnō is seen to have been similar to the earlier proto-industrial developments in Europe. Pratt looks at gōnō activities across time in the critical industries of tea, sake, and textiles in central and eastern Japan. Rather than firmly situating them as the direct ancestors of the modern entrepreneurs of Japan, in the manner of Shibusawa Eiichi as Smith and others argued, Pratt sees them as the products of a proto-industrial transitional economy.38 The book complements a line of studies on proto-industryry starting with Hauser’s on the Osaka Kinai region cotton trade (1974), David Howell’s study of Hokkaido fishing and fertilizer industries (1995), and Kären Wigen’s exploration of the proto-industrial economy in the Shimoina Valley of Shinano (1995).39 The perspective shared by Pratt and Wigen is that there were limits to the modernity of the Tokugawa legacy, thus moving them away from earlier scholarship that placed so much emphasis on the causal links of Japan’s Tokugawa tradition to modernization. Pratt argues that the rural entrepreneurs of Japan had a limited life in the

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history of industrialization. Proto-industry came to a close with the maturation of modern industry in the first decades of the twentieth century. Even if they were not completely swept away by Japan’s industrial revolution, by the nineteen twenties the wealthy landlords gave up direct cultivation and were replaced in their traditional role as diffusers of know-how in agriculture by state-run institutions. Many became absentee landlords or continued their economic role as bankers. Pratt’s evaluation of the rural elites differs depending on regional characteristics. In some, they acted as leaders in generating wealth that also benefited the poor of the community. In other areas the gōnō projects for new industries created impoverishment because peasants were subject to the volatile character of the economy. An accomplished study of an elite across a wide regional spectrum, Pratt’s study raises the question of what consequences followed from the gradual disappearance of the rural elite starting during the nineteenth century and its almost total dissolution with World War I and the Great Depression. As an intermediate elite, the gōnō had provided an element of stability to the community. One can surmise from Pratt’s analysis that without the presence of the gōnō to provide a source of local income and play some kind of a diffusionist role, the impoverished peasants fell victim to an agrarian crisis which goaded the young army officers of peasant stock to consider themselves, ironically, the patrimonial saviors of the village bent on uplifting the peasantry with a militarist strategy of violence.40 The interesting work of Brian W. Platt on the three generations of the Ozawa family, a member of the village elite, is especially successful in constructing a sense of the individual in the midst of historic changes that are usually analyzed only in abstract structuralist terminology. Platt’s article “inverts” the approach of most modern scholarship which focuses of different aspects of the class and status roles of people in Tokugawa history, and explores the multiple roles performed by a single family—a significant step illuminating the complex interlacing between class, family, status, culture in traditional societies that is frequently artificially severed in order to fit the historical data into assumed categories of social analysis.41 Kären Wigen’s study of Shimoina valley again takes us across the boundaries of the early modern and the modern as she applies a geographic perspective to the historical development of the silk industry after the opening of Japan to international trade. Looking at a sericulture environment similar to that of Vlastos’s study of the Shindatsu, she links the local and the global, economy and polity, geography and history in a complex web that again shows that it is not possible to separate the social and economic entities from the political and the international, especially in Japan. She negotiates a passage between the production of an integral economic complex in the Ina Valley from 1750 to 1860 and the process by which Japan emerged as an industrial power in East Asia in the last half of the nineteenth century. In the transformation, Shimoina silk production was subordinated to a single national center controlled by the metropol, Tokyo. Herman Ooms’s challenging study of Tokugawa village affairs, Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law (1996), engages us in a new look at the inter- and intra-village documents of litigation from a revised Weberian perspective, one we might call the political economy of law. Ooms is inspired by the writings of Pierre Bourdieu on early modern France and he constructs an engaging picture of the praxis of Tokugawa law at the village and community levels. Reworking the categories of class, status, and power through a model of convertible capital (economic,

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social and symbolic), he deciphers the inner workings of the village and its relation to power. Using tax documents, shumon aratame chō, petitions, and court documents, Ooms reveals a macro image of the juridical field and the specific power generated by laws. In this respect, we learn of the actual procedure of the distribution of the tax burden within the village collectivity that lay at the base of village autonomy under samurai rule and other procedures of actual litigation. The “mountains of resentment” chapter concerning the woman Ken, who persistently litigated against her community in order that it redress their complicity in the murder of her brother, gives hitherto uncharted detail about the processes of litigious contestation and the conditions of peasant women. His treatment of the outcaste community under the aegis of the state and compared to racism is significant because it is one of the few studies in English of the social structure of outcaste discrimination in Tokugawa Japan. Outcaste discrimination is also probably the only single research subject of the early modern period that is still politically and socially sensitive in present day Japanese society, so that the researcher faces special difficulties in gaining access to unpublished sources in many regions.42 Ooms’ work creates an image of political authority firmly intact, much more so than the peasant-conflict literature, and political power could successfully control the people through the fine-tuning of the symbolic value of status, thereby co-opting class-consciousness to put it in bluntly Marxist terms. From our perspective of preferred notions of universal law, the praxis of the Tokugawa customary arrangement of law seems to have been particularly situational and unilateral in the hands of the “secular” political forces. While Tokugawa “secularism” has been much admired in the secularist vision of modernism back in the nineteen sixties (in such works as Bellah’s Tokugawa Religion), at the same time, as Ooms notes, when looked at close up, Tokugawa law resembles martial law, which is interested in order more than justice. An interesting outcome of recent publications on Tokugawa socioeconomic history is that we have now a concentration of English studies on the ShinanoNagano region: my study of the Kami-Takai gun in the northeast, Kären Wigen’s study on Shimoina in the south, Herman Ooms on Kita-Saku district below Takaigun, Ronald Toby’s study of rural financial networks, and now the recent research of Brian Platt on a Shinshū family.43 Surely, this must be coincidental one first surmises, but perhaps not. I think that the role of the remarkably advanced level of local history in Japan and particularly the leadership of the accomplished historians of the local school system and prefectural historical institutes of Nagano have played a decisive role in why so many English-language authors chose to look at Japan through a Shinano lens. Similar to the commendable French tradition of combining the role of the research-historian with that of the high school teacher, the modern Japanese network of local historian-teachers is still alive in Nagano and must be credited with having developed the field of socioeconomic history at the local level to such a high degree that it has had ramifications in the work of non-Japanese scholars as well.

BEYOND THE RICE FIELDS: HISTORY OF URBAN LIFE, FISHING AND FORESTRY In contrast to the village and rural world in general, the world of the town and the city has remained until recently a relatively unstudied subject as a social and economic history. James McClain’s Kanazawa: A Seventeenth Century Castle Town (1982) and

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Gary Leupp on Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan (1992) are pioneer works in this field.44 Heretofore, the Tokugawa city is overwhelmingly the entertaining world of eighteenth century Genroku Japan, but not a socioeconomic structure or praxis in the manner of the Tokugawa village. The only major exceptions that come to mind are the earlier works such as William Hauser on Osaka cited above, and the unique research of Gilbert Rozman on Edo and Japanese urban networks; for a long time it was the village rather than the city that represented the social and economic character of Tokugawa Japan.45 Smith’s view of early modern Japanese economic growth as primarily of commercialized rural origins had contrasted the “rural conservatism” of the “Japanese” model with the “progressiveness” of the “Euro-Western” model of economic growth which was seen as having had primarily urban origins. Norman had been sharply critical of the feudal origins of Japan’s pre-war authoritarian polity that derived its conservatism from the rural character of Japan’s bourgeois development. Both views saw a sharp contrast between the Japanese and the European experiences that resulted in divergent political paths (however, Smith’s analysis searched for a balanced analysis that did not see Japanese rurality as a negative political factor). Both views saw European economic growth as rooted in commercialized towns and cities that gave birth to civil society and liberal thought. In contrast, Japan’s economic growth took place in the rural communities that were bastions of peasant conservatism. While much less so for Smith, the implication of this assumption has been that Tokugawa Japan lacked parallel social and political currents that encouraged the development of civil society. The recent volume of James McClain and Wakita Osamu, Osaka: The Merchants’ Capital of Early Modern Japan (1999), is path breaking in putting the city on the map of Tokugawa Japan, therefore, challenging the sharp delineation of differences between the Japanese and the European early modern experience. This collection of interesting articles by Japanese and Western scholars describes the layers of social and economic scenery, an autonomous administration in the hands of a merchant elite cooperating with samurai authority, urban communities and gangs, a pulsating commercial life, all as part of urban Tokugawa Japan with the implications that there was quite a lively autonomy of the “city” as an early modern environment. The work gives us the energy of urban Osaka including its history, local inari worship, jōruri entertainment, the life of mendicant monks, protests and so on.46 Cities may be centers of liberty and autonomy for the individual who is distanced from social constraints of the village, but they also have an underside that is more dangerous than the image of village communities of prudent hard working peasants. The new work of Phillippe Pons exposes the structures of poverty and crime in urbanity of Tokugawa Japan and today’s Tokyo. In his book on misery and crime in Japan, Pons has a sweeping vision of the past and present in urban Japan wherein also dwell the underworld of poverty and crime in liminal spaces of criminal subcultures of the yakuza—the familiar “mafia” underworld of Japan.47 Similarly, Nam-lin Hur describes the social scene of prayer and play in the Asakusa Sensoji temple district of Edo that survived as a small niche of Tokugawa urban popular religion.48 The Tokugawa city is finally being put on the map of an early modernity that, while not identical with the European scene, appears in step with the standard view of early modernity for Europe. Pioneer works in their field such as those of David Howell and Arne Kalland on the study of the sea, shift our obsession with the landlocked image of village Japan

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to its coastal environment. These studies offer an alternative image of Japan as a seafaring and fishing nation since the middle ages.49 Despite the importance of the sea in the Japanese diet and traditional economic activity, little research has been done on the history of Japan’s fishing industry. Arne Kalland’s work is a landmark approach that has opened a new path to understanding early modern Japan. Kalland’s study analyzes how fishing villages were integrated into larger regions and thereby simultaneously breaks the scholarly isolation of Tokugawa villages from the outside world. In his words, the study of fishing villages constructs the bridge between the city and the farming villages and unveils the regional economy of Tokugawa society. Combining anthropology, economic history and the methods of resource management, the study also re-examines late Tokugawa reforms to solve the famine and economic crises as part of an argument that brings back the role of government regulation of the village as a significant component in the modernization of Japan after the Meiji Restoration. In this context, the study of man’s exploitation and contestation of nature has gained new light. William W. Kelly’s earlier work, Water Controls in Tokugawa Japan, Constantine Nomikos Vaporis’s recent work on overland communication, Ann B. Janetta’s study of epidemics and finally, Conrad Totman’s The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Pre-industrial Japan all expose the issue of man’s manipulation of the environment that entailed the destruction of nature with all of its negative consequences for Japan.50

THE UNREGISTERED LIVES OF MEN AND WOMEN: STUDIES OF SEXUALITY AND GENDER A number of innovative, richly textured discussions of sexuality and gender identity have opened new windows to understanding the public and private lives of men and women. These recent publications show us that the field has attained an exciting complexity in terms of methodology and conceptualization, in tune with widespread contemporary trends in historiography. In comparison to the subjects of political economy such as proto-industry and village elites, recent discussions of the history of gender roles and the regulation of sexuality present an image of Tokugawa Japan that is the most “severed” from the post-Meiji history of modern Japan. One comes away with the impression that although social and economic processes and practices continued into the post-1868 era for some time, the modern state was more effective in modifying, eradicating, or mutating the Tokugawa legacy of gender and sexuality and replacing it with the “modern” Japanese images of man and woman / male and female, and that this was not necessarily a positive development. In the study of gender and sexuality, the Meiji / modern Japanese state does not seem to have played a liberating role. The modern state appears to have sacrificed an early modern sexual culture of flexibility for the sake of the civilizing process. The volumes edited by Gail Bernstein and Tonomura, Walthall, and Wakita have established the study of gender and the history of women as a significant new field in early modern studies.51 The study of women as labor in the family-based protoindustries of sericulture, textile, and in rare instances even in the male domain of sake breweries underscores the importance of female labor in upholding the household and providing crucial labor for by-employments. Read together with the Pratt

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and Wigen studies of late Tokugawa and post-Meiji proto-industry processes, these essays of rural and urban working women illuminate the way gender roles and reproductive roles were integral to the successful functioning of broad socio-economic processes. The overall tone of the rich array of studies on Tokugawa women, especially the farmwomen of the countryside, stresses the relatively flexible division of gender roles in the family, one where parents shared the chores of cultivation and child rearing. Recent studies describe a relatively greater freedom for females in the villages compared to the stricter social controls and confinement of upper-class samurai women and compared to Meiji women who were “reconstructed” under modern reforms. Interestingly, westerner visitors to Japan appear to have noticed the relative freedom and ease of the village women of Japan in previous times as well. Leupp cites Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth century who remarked on women’s ability “to go hither and thither as they list.”52 On the other hand, Yokota Fuyuhiko’s article on rethinking the Greater Learning for Women (Onna daigaku of Kaibara Ekken) sees it as the precursor of the Meiji ideology that defined women’s work largely in terms of maintaining the household and reproducing hens at home. Yokota argues that the Onna daigaku was the first step toward the establishment of the post-Meiji ideology of the good wife, wise mother and modern professional housewife.53 Similarly, the Tokugawa legacy of the authorized prostitution is also seen to have survived into the modern period in various forms, leading to the “comfort women” of the Pacific War. Both volumes attest long years of study on the history of women in Japan. These scholars bring forth new approaches to the history of women and promise an interdisciplinary breakthrough. The research is revisionist in that it aims to break through the prevalent Marxian tradition in Japan that emphasizes the areas of production dominated by men. Ann Walthall’s biography of Matsuo Taseko, a peasant woman from the Ina valley who was involved in loyalist anti-Tokugawa activities, brings to life the revolutionary environment in the last decades of the bakufu regime. Taseko emerges as a vibrant example of many women who step into an unusual role in a revolutionary environment. Walthall’s excellent study is a significant achievement in the writing of historical biography in Japanese history: It treats Japanese historical actors as complex individuals who represent the “not so famous and illustrious” and allows the reader to penetrate into the social history of the general population.54 The study of Japanese women has been launched with the close reading of the Japanese context through the theoretical and historical evaluation of women and gender pioneered in the scholarship on women in the West. The approach brings a significant comparative advantage to analysis of the subject, but there is much room for biography, such as Walthall’s. On the other hand, that the belated publication of Ella Wiswell’s work on Suyemura (1982) remains the best account of women in pre-war rural Japan suggests the need for greater efforts to penetrate the communal and family activities of everyday Japanese women in the Tokugawa period.55 Other scholars have focused on construction of the sexual in the male and female worlds. Beginning with Gary Leupp’s Male Colors and Sumie Jones’s edited volume (both 1995) that brought together studies by numerous scholars on sexuality and Edo culture have exposed the connection of the institutions of the public realm with the intimate world of sexuality in its various forms.56 The recent study of

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Gregory Pflugfelder on the subject of male-male sexuality (a term that both Leupp and Pflugfelder explain is historically more accurate than the European term, homosexuality) covering the period from the early Tokugawa to the contemporary age, maps in discourse analysis the praxis of sexuality in men, and as a by-product, that in women.57 In his study of nanshoku, or, “male-colors,” Leupp shows how male / male sexuality was intricately linked to the all-male monastic culture that arrived from China in the ninth century: the acolyte boys took the place of women because Buddhism did not condone heterosexual desire. The Japanese perception of homosexuality was quite similar to that of the Eastern Mediterranean perception of male sexuality as naturally bi-sexual. In contrast to the segregation of categories of sexual and gender identities in modern societies, the Tokugawa praxis of sexuality in both the male and female worlds carried a greater degree of ambivalence about sexuality in general. Beneath the regime’s disapproval of sexual conduct as unbecoming by Confucian norms, Tokugawa society widely tolerated behavior that allowed crossing into other sexual identifies. The public’s admiration of androgyny and the floating world of the courtesans attests to the combination of the sexual with the aesthetic and the artistic in early modern urban culture. The only subject in the field of sexual and gender identity studies that remains to be studied is the social and psychological history of romantic love between men and women, which is still frequently handled only within the framework of the shinju monogatari, or love suicide tales of Tokugawa literature. As Leupp notes, Tokugawa Japan had a profound distrust of intense romantic love relationships between men and women. Their legacy seems to have also influenced the historical study of the subject as well since there is still relatively less knowledge on the operation of the culture of heterosexuality in Japanese culture. Plugfelder provides a complex analysis of the discourse on male / male sexuality down to the post-WW II era where the legacy of Tokugawa sexual culture (primarily among men) is relegated to the shadowy marginal quarters of society. Setting his debate within the ars erotica and scientifia sexualis distinction of Michel Foucault, and between the sexual culture of the classical world and the orient versus that of the post-classical West, Plugfelder presents a “western” reading of the shifts in sexual culture in Japan. The emphasis is on the active encounter of the Japanese public with new notions / strictures about sexuality both within popular culture and within professional circles that have accepted the western legal and medical knowledge. Plugfelder avoids the usual Orient / Occident or East / West pitfalls of interpretation. The delicate way in which Plugfelder weaves French legal concepts and German medical discourse into the Japanese environment by showing their complex interaction with Japanese critical discourse is an excellent example of a realistic assessment of how Japan and the West, in this case Europe, fuse into a joint historical fate. Such studies show us that the psychological history of westernization is yet to be written. Plugfelder’s account of sexuality represents a good example of what I call the “anguish of civilized behavior.” Here, the civilizing process of constructing a modern persona out of an interaction of oriental and occidental social and cultural environments creates the “double” tension of bi-culturally determined spheres of the rational and the emotive for the psychology of the individual.

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SUMMARY AND GENERAL OBSERVATIONS Interpretive Trends A review of the literature on the Tokugawa people for the last two decades leaves one with the impression that there is a new image of Tokugawa society: these men and women were different from the modern people of Japan who are more like us, products of a homogenizing, assimilating modern state. Recent studies not only expose Tokugawa people as actors in a social and economic terrain, but reflect how their activities were irrevocably connected to the exigency of power and could in some measure manipulate it as well. One can summarize the new image of the Tokugawa “early modern” in social and economic history as the following. Rather than the formal contours of the character of Tokugawa society, our new emphasis is on the dynamic interaction between the de jure and the de facto of historical behavior; we are more attentive to deciphering the “due process” of the social-economic praxis. We now have multiple photographs that illustrate various sections of human behavior ranging from the construction of gender and sexual identities to the way the peasantry activated the institutions of samurai hegemony to make inroads in the system. Today, the Tokugawa body politic can be interpreted as an arena of negotiation and litigation. We notice the situationality and flexibility that accompanied the oppressive coercive power of a Tokugawa military which in some measure successfully co-opted local interests. To put it in Japanese terms, we now see more of the honne, the real intention of Tokugawa society in socioeconomic terms beneath the tatemae, the outward principle of feudal power. The Tokugawa village for example is no longer the oppressed community of feudal peasants that had been prevalent in the early stages of Japanese studies, nor is it like Tolstoy’s idyllic rural Utopia that was the precursor of modernity. The early modern village is instead the environment where conflict and consensus among peasants of varied classes, wealth, and status developed through their own procedures, In sum, the Tokugawa historical arena is now a stage where there is a significant degree of fine-tuning, the term that best describes our new approach to the early modern today. The early modern state was concerned about retaining their overall authority, but they were not that interested in penetrating into the details of community management or the personal lives of individuals in the way that the modern state can be; Tokugawa society is a world where urban authoritarian power could or had to be negotiated at the grassroots level. Therefore, the Tokugawa age sometimes appears as a collection of admirable qualities that were lost along the way to Japan Inc. Government was autocratic but flexible; law was not democratic but answered to the needs of the day with a complex situationality; culture was regional but appears “authentic” in the sense that it was not dictated from the metropolitan center; there was exploitation of the producers, but peasants negotiated their taxes and, if pushed, put up a good fight against the wealthy landlords and merchants as well as the governmental authorities in seeking justice; there was poverty but proto-industry as well. It meant that some were rich among the many poor, but proto-industry was the basis for the circulation of capital and the foundation of a rurally based production. In sum, the Tokugawa age rested on a modus vivendi between central power and local interest. At the personal level, the decentralized quality of Tokugawa life also suggests the “advantage” of a presumed absence of regulation over sexual desire and a balanced

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gender self-image at the commoner level compared to the highly regulated breeding required of the military aristocracy. Leupp notes, “Although the regime attempted to freeze class distinctions and regulate the minutiae of its subjects’ lives, it made little effort to police individuals’ sex lives.”58 In the newer literature the Tokugawa experience, in both its positive and negative aspects, emerges as quite distinct from the super-structure of the post 1868 modern sectors and this “early modern” legacy disappears by the Great Depression. Unlike the standard modernist view of the post-war period that interpreted the Tokugawa era as preparation for the future, new scholarship in some ways is again ambivalent about seeing the Tokugawa legacy as directly antecedent to the modern, especially in terms of its psychological history and economic history. The “Tokugawa Early-modern and the post-Meiji early-Modern,” to use Wigen’s words, combine within the prevalent form of a rural proto-industrialcommercial network in the Shimoina region of central Japan in a Tokugawa-style geo-topographic-social setting that, however, is temporary, vanishing during the Taishō period.59 The imposition of modern values through education, nationalist. ideology, and so on molds the men and women with “loose” habits into modern images of male and female behavior. The new writing has made us more conscious of the breaks and discontinuities of the early modern era before later times brought about total centralization, total industry, total war, and total empire. Our sympathy for the early modern age seems to play a role in this new image of the Tokugawa age. The recent studies, especially of the period from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, depict a lively proto-industry in the villages and flourishing bourgeois culture in the cities. In some respects this “liveliness” compares well with similar developments in France before the French Revolution. The customs of the early modern era in Japan still seem admirable in some respects, especially in how the individual man and woman fared under the early modern regime, before the “guillotine” of modernism struck Japan just as it did Europe. The strong points of the field are obvious. The study of early modern Japan has become sensitized to the use of comparative approaches through both theoretical constructs of social science and an interaction with contemporary research on the history of Europe. Hence, recent publications show sophistication in making comparisons with the Western experiences, by using contemporary research on various regions of Europe rather than a monolithic, idealized “West” as in the past. Research on the early modern history of France and England appears to be the primary choice of comparison. I would add, however, that research on Germany, which is less used, can provide useful insight into the history of Tokugawa Japan. On the other hand, the primary comparative concern of the scholarship is still with the historical environment of the First World; while understandable, that focus creates the danger of a special form of datsu-a, where the Asian environment to which Japan undeniably belongs receives less attention.

Methods and Materials This survey of recent publications on socioeconomic history of Japan shows the rich variety of topics and methodology in the field. The cross-fertilization of history

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with social science theory stands out, with “theory” ranging from the classic Marxist paradigm to post-structuralist approaches. The studies of growth, conflict, protoindustry, village law and society are reflective of structuralist approaches but there is great variety among them. Whereas Hanley and Yamamura used historical demography and economic history to describe Tokugawa economic growth, Wigen applies the geographer’s methodology to portray the development of proto-industry on a regional scale. White’s analysis stands out for his application of quantitative methods to a whole series of data on the Tokugawa period. In village studies, the use of theory contributed to a new sensitivity to the meaning of village documents such as the taka shirabe chō, shumon aratame chō, kenchi chō and the language of petitions. Scholars now understand them as texts beyond their formal content. We are now much more aware of the need to recognize that documents such as the takashirabechō, tax documents, kaisai chō, tax collection documents, shumon aratame chō, and the temple population registers, while they say something about the numerical framework of Tokugawa communal life are frequently more important as expressions of the social and political distribution of power than of economic reality as such.60 For Ooms, the rich variety of village documents are the means to a structuralist and functionalist interpretation of Tokugawa village praxis of class, status, power, and law. The new historical research on gender and sexuality also creatively employs a range of materials, from the familiar documentation created by the Tokugawa authorities to private diaries, woodblock prints, literature, and medical treatises. English-language scholarship in Tokugawa economic and social history is largely oblivious of the excellent research in European languages other than English. Recent European publications now get more regular reviews in English publications, especially in Monumenta Nipponica with the contributions of Peter Kornicki and Herman Ooms, but the field of English language studies on Japan has had difficulty incorporating new research from these languages. Research on Tokugawa social and economic history in German by Klaus Muller, the expert on pre-Tokugawa and Tokugawa economic history, studies by Regine Mathias Pauer, Erich Pauer and Reinhard Zöllner remain known primarily to the German-speaking academy except when these authors choose to write something in English.61 The study in French by Philippe Pons offers a fascinating entry into the underworld of poverty and crime in the liminal spaces of Tokugawa (and modern) criminal subculture but it is not widely known beyond France. The Internet and web pages of the Japanese studies research centres composed in many European languages, promises better access to the international world of Tokugawa Japanese studies. Recent research has the advantage of being able to rely upon the strong tradition of historical research in Japan. Sometimes unduly criticized in the past for being Marxist, there is now a healthy and balanced dialogue within the Japanese research on the village, conflict, gender and other topics. This situation facilitates interaction with our Japanese colleagues. However, it is also incumbent upon the student in the field of socioeconomic history to develop the necessary skills and “patience” to experience direct engagement with the rich sources of Tokugawa manuscripts in the archives and research centers in Japan. Some of the work reviewed here (e.g., Kalland, Walthall) would either have been impossible without engagement with handwritten documents or it would have been far less successful scholarship. We can expect that the need to use manuscript materials will increase as socioeconomic historians address issues

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(e.g., gender) for which our Japanese colleagues have not created compendia of transcribed sources.

Issues for Future Research Those of us who focus on the Tokugawa social-economic field have pretty much kept our gaze on the realm of the commoners: this made sense in the initial stages of transforming a field that needed to “liberate” the Tokugawa people from the hegemony of modernity. But such an emphasis leaves much room for additional research. The following appear to be some of the fundamental problems that remain to be addressed. While we have gained a better understanding of the inner reality of the village, the study of the socioeconomic world of the samurai and the urban environment remains foggy despite a handful of excellent works. For example, we know little about the inner praxis of a daimyo residence in Edo. Also at the high end of the social scale, we could use further work to supplement the recent publication of Lee Butler’s study of the kuge, the civilian nobility of Kyoto, whose eighteenth and nineteenth century history in particular remains largely unstudied.62 Prior to Butler’s study, our general impression of Tokugawa history suggested that the kuge lived a restricted life in Kyoto. Nothing prepares us for their sudden Bakumatsu arrival on the political scene as loyalists with a distinct dislike of the bakufu. A similar problem exists at the other end of the social scale, the bottom of Tokugawa society. The outcastes (eta, hinin, etc.) rarely figure in historical studies outside of Japan. While Ooms (Tokugawa Village Practice) has recently delved into aspects of this subject, we still have no clear idea of their communal life under the discriminatory customs of the Tokugawa regime. There is also no study of the history of childhood to parallel the very significant contribution of French historiography to our understanding of the shift between the pre-modern and the modern. Changing conceptions of infancy, childhood, and adulthood might offer insights and a path to resolve the debate on mabiki and other social issues as well. Another uncharted subject is the connection between the perception of the foreigner and the custom of using women as agents of diplomacy by the Tokugawa authorities, an interesting aspect of contemporary gender issues. I am thinking here of the late Tokugawa-early Meiji phenomena, the “Okichi” syndrome: the Tokugawa authorities assigned women to take care of the private and public needs of new male foreign residents as a kind of diplomatic ploy to placate the “barbarian.” (Okichi was assigned to serve Townsend Harris in Shimoda; her service and later suicide became the object of nationalist ideology.)63 On the economic side of the picture, the social and economic history of money and the role of the Tokugawa bakufu as a fiscal power offers the promise of learning how recoinage and currency manipulation interacted with social and political concerns (this is a new subject in European history which may offer methodological hints for Japanese historians).

Concluding Remarks The socioeconomic studies in early modern Japanese history reflect the flourishing of early-modern socioeconomic history in the historiography of Europe and

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other regions. After a prolonged obsession with the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries—the rise of the modern state and the industrial revolution—savants like the Annales historians Braudel and Ladurie helped us discover the period between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Academia has also benefited from the liberal atmosphere in recent years that is more tolerant of personal agendas of identity and choice. Subjects such as homosexuality, and sexuality per se would have been difficult to write and publish about a generation ago. In recent years many of the new studies on sexuality, proto-industry, law and society—again the history of Europe—appear to have been a significant inspiration for the comparative framework of the historians of early modern Japan. Ultimately, Tokugawa social and economic history now impels us to come to terms with the early modern character of governance over a population that was unquestionably subject to the supreme authority of its various rulers; however, within this framework the implementation of political power at the grass roots level was based on seasonal and cyclical negotiation with local power, the village elitelandlords and / or the broader community. Recent early modern Tokugawa social and economic history focuses on detecting the processes by which written and customary law were implemented by the bakufu and the local domain governments, polities whose absolute authority remained unquestioned. The contrast between the flexible nature of negotiation within the Tokugawa social scene and that of the draconian hand of the modern state in the form of the Meiji regime, however, should not lead to the idealization of one era over the other. The difference between the early modern and the modern in state-society relations actually illustrates a shift in the niches of tension, moving from the local level to the national. One can also suggest that the fight between the ruling strata and the ruled turned from a contest over how to implement power under a classic set of documents to a contest over the construction of new documents that defined new roles for state and society. Tokugawa people as we see them in the documents and as we narrate them in our imagination are “dead”; however, recent studies imply that the Tokugawa era was an entity unto itself that was doomed to “die” once the political will expressed through the Meiji Restoration began to construct a modern Japanese state and society. Many of the recent studies on Tokugawa social and economic history acknowledge this loss. The capital that is presumed to have been born of the Tokugawa protoindustrialization may have remained, and the know-how of community organization may have survived into the post Meiji era, but the human persona of the Tokugawa age (i.e., the gōnō) is lost forever. Recent research has demonstrated the significance of a dynamic approach in constructing the Tokugawa individual amidst the restraints of the geo-political situation in which they functioned. Ann Walthall’s excellent biography of Matsuo Taseko goes beyond the definition of gender history or women’s history per se. As John Breen noted in a review, it is an outstanding biography of this politically engaged woman who was a disciple of the late Tokugawa nativist, Hirata At-sutane and brings to our immediate “gaze” a living individual of the era.64 Platt’s recent article on three generations of Tokugawa village elites brings home the cultural, social and economic environments as they affected the lives of persons and generations, rather than exploring class or strata structures.65 In sum, the study of the people of Tokugawa Japan now prefers nuanced emphasis on the human element rather than analysis of social structures as fundamental category with which to interpret

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documents from the age. The bold analytical conceptualizations of the Norman and Smith generation of historians derived their precision from the discourse of the great nineteenth-century theoretical tradition in the social sciences. Today, neither Marxian theory and approaches nor Modernist agendas derived from Parsons or Weber survive in the same convincing form. Regardless of the differences of opinion among the early post-war generation, their common purpose was to explain the problematic relationship of late feudal society to modern Japan. Compared to that older generation, new social and economic research takes the Tokugawa age and its processes into the future in a relatively noncommittal manner vis-à-vis problems of modernity. Yet, while the bold analytical debate about the past and the present of modern Japan appears to have receded, the people of Tokugawa Japan have begun to have a history of their own. We can confidently state that the “People” of Tokugawa Japan are being “empowered” as actors by today’s scholars. They now are perceived to behave autonomously of a Whig role, if not independent of it. We have just begun to see them on their own terms, acting on the historical environment of early modernity in a way that has a distinct character of its own, and is not intentionally a preparation for a future “modern.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Contents General Studies Rural History: The Peasant Village and Agrarian Origins Studies of Rebellion and Conflict Limits of Modernity: Proto-industry and Village Praxis Beyond the Rice Fields: History of Urban Life, Fishing and Forestry The Unregistered Lives of Men and Women: Studies of Sexuality and Gender

General Studies Broadbridge, Seymour. “Economic and Social Trends in Tokugawa Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 8: 3 (1975): 347–372. Crawcour Sydney. “Economic Change in the Nineteenth Century” in Marius B. Jansen ed. Cambridge History of Japan: The Nineteenth Century, Volume 5, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ——, “The Tokugawa Period and Japan’s Preparation for Modern Economic Growth,” Journal of Japanese Studies 1:1 (1974): 113–125. Dunn, Charles J. Everyday Life in Traditional Japan, New York: Putnam, 1969. Hall, John Whitney, ed., Cambridge History of Japan: Early Modern Japan. Volume 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hanley, Susan B. “A High Standard of Living in Nineteenth-Century Japan: Fact or Fantasy?” Journal of Economic History 43 (1983): 183–192. ——, and Kozo Yamamura. Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan 1600–1868, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Jansen, Marius B. and Gilbert Rozman. Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Sansom, George. A History of Japan 1615–1867, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963. Sheldon, Charles D. “The Tokugawa Heritage” in William W. Lockwood ed., The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965): 17–47. Yamamura, Kozo. A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurship, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974.

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Rural History: The Peasant Village and Agrarian Origins Chambliss, William. Chiaraijima Village: Land Tenure, Taxation, and Local Trade, 1811–1884, Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1965. Furushima, Toshio. “The Village and Agriculture During the Edo Period,” in John Whitney Hall ed., Cambridge History of Japan. Early Modern Japan, Volume 4 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hall, John Whitney. Government and Local Power in Japan, 500–1700: A Study Based on Bizen Province, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Hanley, Susan. Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. ——, “Tokugawa Society: Material Culture, Standard of Living, and Life Styles” in John Whitney Hall ed., Cambridge History of Japan, Early Modern Japan, Volume 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Nakamura, James. Agricultural Production and the Economic Development of Japan 1873–1922, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Pauer, Erich. “The Years Economic Historians Lost: Japan, 1850–1890,” Japan Forum 3:1 (1991): 1–9. Smith, Thomas C. Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959. ——, “Farm Family By-employments in Preindustrial Japan,” Journal of Economic History 29: 4 (December 1969): 687–715. ——, “The Land Tax in the Tokugawa Period,” Journal of Asian Studies 18: 1 (November 1958): 3–19. ——, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization 1750–1920, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Toby, Ronald P. “Both a Borrower and a Lender Be: From Village Moneylender to Rural Banker in the Tempō Era,” Monumental Nipponica 46: 4 (1991): 483–513. Varner, R. “The Organized Peasant: The Wakamonogumi in the Edo Period,” Monumenta Nipponica 32: 4 (1977): 459–483. Yamamura, Kozo. “From Coins to Rice: Hypotheses on the Kandaka and Kokudaka Systems,” Journal of Japanese Studies 14: 2 (1988): 341–367. ——, Pre-Industrial Landholding Patterns in Japan and England,” in Albert M. Craig ed., Japan: A Comparative View, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Studies of Rebellion and Conflict Atwell, William S. 1986. “Some Observations on the Seventeenth-Century Crisis in China and Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 45:2 (1986): 223–244. Bix, Herbert P. Peasant Protest in Japan 1590–1884, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. ——, “Miura Meisuke, or Peasant Rebellion Under the Banner of ‘Distress,’ ” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 10: 2 (1978): 18–26. Boles, Elson Eugen. “Rebels, Gamblers, and Silk 1860–1890,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, SUNY, Binghamton, 1998. Borton, Hugh. Peasant Uprisings in Japan of the Tokugawa Period, Transactions, Asiatic Society of Japan, 1938. Bowen, Roger W. Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: A Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Burton, Donald W. “Peasant Struggle in Japan, 1590–1760,” Journal of Peasant Studies 5: 2 (1978): 135–171. Esenbel, Selçuk. Even the Gods Rebel: The Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising in Japan, Ann Arbor: Association of Asian Studies Monographs 57, 1998. Hane, Mikiso. Peasants, Rebels, and Outcasts: the Underside of Modern Japan, New York: Pantheon, 1982.

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Kawamura Tadao. “The Class Conflict in Japan as Affected by the Expansion of Japanese Industry and Trade,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1928. Kelly, William W. Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth Century Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Lewis, Michael Lawrence. Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Najita, Tetsuo. “Oshio Heihachiro (1793–1837),” in Albert Craig and Donald Shively eds., Personality in Japanese History, Berkeley; University of California Press, 1970. ——, and Victor J. Koschmann. Conflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Nimura, Kazuo. The Ashio Riot of 1907: A Social History of Mining in Japan, Terry Boardman and Andrew Gordon, eds., translated by Terry Boardman, Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Nomiya, Daishiro. “Peasant Uprisings: Nineteenth Century Japan in Structural Perspectives,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1992. Norman, E. H. “Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State” and “Feudal Background of Japanese Politics,” in J. W. Dower ed., Origins of the Modern Japanese State, New York: Pantheon, 1975. Rahder, J. “Record of the Kurume Uprising,” Acta Orientalia.14 (1936): 81–108. Roberts, Luke S. “The Petitions Box in Eighteenth-Century Tosa,” Journal of Japanese Studies 20:2 (1994): 423–458. Scheiner, Irwin. “The Mindful Peasant: Sketches for a Study of Rebellion,” Journal of Asian Studies 32:4 (August 1973): 579–91. ——, “Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants: Rebellion and Peasant Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan,” in Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner eds., Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period 1600–1868. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Sippel, Patricia. “Popular Protest in Early Modern Japan: The Bushu Outburst,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 37 (December 1977): 273–322. Smethurst, Richard J. Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870–1940, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Steensgaard, Niels. “The Seventeenth Century Crisis and the Unity of Eurasian History,” Modern Asian Studies 24: 4 (1990): 683–697. Vlastos, Stephen. Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Walthall, Anne. “Narratives of Peasant Uprising in Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 43:3 (May 1983): 571–588. ——, “Japanese Gimin: Peasant Martyrs in Popular Memory,” American Historical Review 91:5 (1986): 1076–1102. ——, Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century Japan, University of Arizona Press, 1986. ——, ed. and translator. Peasant Uprisings in Japan: A Critical Anthology of Peasant Histories, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. White, James W. Ikki: Social Conflict and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. ——, The Demography of Sociopolitical Conflict in Japan, 1721–1846. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Center for Japanese Studies, 1992. ——, “Rational Rioters: Leaders, Followers, and Popular Protest in Early Modern Japan,” Politics and Society 16:1 (1988): 35–69. ——, “State Growth and Popular Protest in Tokugawa Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 14:1 (1988): 1–25. Yasumaru, Yoshio. 1984. “Rebellion and Peasant Consciousness in the Edo Period,” in Andrew Turton and Shigeharu Tanabe eds., History and Peasant Consciousness in Southeast Asia, Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1984, 401–420.

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Limits of Modernity: Proto-industry and Village Praxis Brown, Philip C. “The Mismeasure of Land: Land Surveying in the Tokugawa Period,” Monumenta Nipponica 42:2 (1987): 115–155. ——, “Practical Constraints on Early Tokugawa Land Taxation: Annual Versus Fixed Assessments in Kaga Domain,” Journal of Japanese Studies 14:2 (1988): 369–401. Ooms, Herman, Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Platt, Brian W. “Elegance, Prosperity, Crisis: Three Generations of Tokugawa Village Elites,” Monumenta Nipponica 55:1 (2000): 45–74. Pratt, Edward. Japan’s Proto-industrial Elite: The Economic Foundation of the Gōnō, Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1999. Totman, Conrad. “Tokugawa Peasants: Win, Lose, or Draw?” Monumenta Nipponica 41:4 (1986): 457–476. Waswo, Ann. The Decline of a Rural Elite, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. ——, The Soil: A Portrait of Rural Life in Meiji Japan, Nagatsuka Takashi 1879–1915, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Wigen, Kären. “The Geographic Imagination in Early Modern Japanese History: Retrospect and Prospect,” Journal of Asian Studies 51:1 (1992): 3–29. ——, The Making of a Japanese Periphery 1750–1920, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Beyond the Rice Fields: History of Urban Life, Fishing and Forestry Crawcour, Sydney “Some Observations on Merchants,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan. Tokyo, 1961, 1–139. Gerstle, Andrew C. Eighteenth Century Japan: Culture and Society, Sydney, Boston: Allen and Unwin, Reprint Curzon Press, 1999. Hauser, William B. Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. ——, “Hard Times in the Kanto: Economic Change and Village Life in Late Tokugawa Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 23:2 (1989): 349–371. Howell, David L. Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Hur, Nam-lin. Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensoji and Edo Society, Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000. Jannetta, Ann Bowman. Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Kalland, Arne. Fishing Villages in Tokugawa Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. Kelly, William W. Water Control in Tokugawa Japan: Irrigation Organization in a Japanese River Basin, 1600–1870, Ithaca, New York: Cornell China-Japan Program, 1982. Leupp, Gary P. Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. McClain, James. Kanazawa: A Seventeenth Century Japanese Castle Town, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. ——, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru, eds. Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. ——, and Wakita Osamu, eds. Osaka: The Merchants’ Capital of Early Modern Japan, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999. Ramseyer, Mark J. “Thrift and Diligence: Home Codes of Tokugawa Merchant Families,” Monumenta Nipponica 34:2 (1979): 209–230. Roberts, John G Mitsui: Three Centuries of Japanese Business, New York: Weatherhill, 1973. Rozman, Gilbert. Urban Networks in Ch’ing China and Tokugawa Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.

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——, “Edo’s Importance in a Changing Tokugawa Society,” Journal Japanese Studies 1:1 (1974): 113–126. Sheldon, Charles D. The Rise of the Merchant Class in Tokugawa Japan 1600–1868, New York: Augustin, 1958. Totman, Conrad. The Origins of Japan’s Modern Forests: The Case of Akita, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984. ——, “Land-Use Patterns and Afforestation in the Edo Period,” Monumenta Nipponica 39:1 (1984): 1–10. ——, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. ——, “Preindustrial River Conservancy,” Monumenta Nipponica 47:1 (1992): 59–79. Toyoda, Takeshi. A History of Pre-Meiji Commerce in Japan, Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai, 1969. Vaporis, Constantine Nomikos. Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1994.

The Unregistered Lives of Men and Women: Studies of Sexuality and Gender Ackroyd, Joyce. “Women in Feudal Japan,” Transactions, Tokyo: Asiatic Society of Japan, 1959, 31–68. Bernstein, Gail Lee. Haruko’s World: A Japanese Farm Woman and Her Community, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983. ——, Recreating Japanese Women 1600–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Jones, Sumie ed. Sexuality and Edo Culture 1750–1850, Bloomington: Indiana University, 1995. Kondo Kazumi. “A Case Study of the Outcaste Problem in Contemporary Japan,” M.A. thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 1993. Leupp, Garry P. Male Colors; The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan 1603–1868, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Mulhern-Irie, Chieko ed., Heroic with Grace: Legendary Women of Japan, Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1991. Pflugfelder, Gregory M. Cartographies of Desire: Male-male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse 1600– 1950, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pons, Phillippe. Misere et crime au Japon du XVlIe siecle a hos jours, Paris: Bibliotheque des Sciences Humaines, 1999. Smith, Robert J. and Ella Lury Wiswell. The Women of Suye Mura, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. Stanley, Amy Beth. “Adultery and Punishment in Tokugawa Japan,” B.A. Thesis, Honors, Harvard University, 1999. Tonomura, Hitomi, Ann Walthall, and Wakita Haruko, eds. Women and Class in Japanese History, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1999. Walthall, Ann. The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Watanabe, Tsuneo, and Junichi Iwata, translated by D.R. Roberts. Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality, London: Gay Men’s Press, 1989. Yamakawa, Kikue. Buke no Josei (Samurai Women), translated by Kate Wildman Nakai as The Women of Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life, Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1992.

NOTES 1 2

Kären Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery 1750–1920, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. xiii. W. G. Beasley, The Japanese Experience: A Short History of Japan, London: Phoenix Press, 1999, p. 152.

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24 25

One chō is about one hectare. Conrad Totman, A History of Japan, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2000, p. 233. John Whitney Hall, Government and Local Power in Japan 500–1700: A Study Based on Bizen Province, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996 (reprint). William Chambliss, Chiaraijima Village: Land Tenure, Taxation, and Local Trade, 1811–1884, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1964. James Nakamura, Agricultural Production and the Economic Development of Japan 1873–1922, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Tetsuo Najita, “Oshio Heihachirō (1793–1837)” in Albert M. Craig, and Donald Shively, eds. Personality in Japanese History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970. Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, p. xiii. Albert M. Craig, Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967, p. 353. Herbert P. Bix, Peasant Protest in Japan 1590–1884, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, p. xiii. Thomas C. Smith, Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959. Kozo Yamamura, A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974; Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan 1600–1868. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Susan Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. 21. On demographic issues, see Satomi Kurosu’s review of recent literature in Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 10:1 (Spring 2002), pp. 3–21. Japan’s Proto-industrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the Gōnō, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999. Conrad Totman, “Tokugawa Peasants: Win, Lose, Draw?” Monumenta Nipponica 41:4 (1986): 457–476. Conrad Totman, The Origins of Japan’s Modern Forests: The Case of Akita, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984; Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Pre-industrial Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. James White, Ikki: Social Conflict and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 63. Some authors declare that this displaced leisure time, but I am not sure that we can trace the notion of leisure that is specific to our age back to the early modern age so easily. On the other hand Satomi Kurosu, in her bibliographic essay cited above, has shown us that contemporary research in the history of Tokugawa demographic trends has a “nuanced approach” which detects regional differences, followed by sustainable population growth that starts again in the nineteenth century in regions, especially in central Japan, with “advanced” commercialization and relatively higher living standards. Selçuk Esenbel, Even the Gods Rebel: The Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising, Ann Arbor: Association of Asian Studies Monographs 57, 1998. Philip C. Brown,” The Mismeasure of Land: Land Surveying in the Tokugawa Period” Monumenta Nipponica. 42:2 (1987): 115–155; “Practical Constraints on Early Tokugawa Land Taxation: Annual Versus Fixed Assessments in Kaga Domain” Journal of Japanese Studies 14:2 (1988): 369–401. Thomas C. Smith, “The Land Tax in the Tokugawa Period” Journal of Asian Studies 18:1 (1958): 3–19. Furushima Toshio. 1991 “The Village and Agriculture During the Edo Period” in John Whitney Hall ed., The Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 4, Early Modern Japan, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 492. Esenbel, Gods, p. 148.

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26

27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39

40 41 42 43

Irwin Scheiner, “The Mindful Peasant: Sketches for a Study of Rebellion,” Journal of Asian Studies. 32:4 (August 1973): 579–91; “Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants: Rebellion and Peasant Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan” in Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner, eds. Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period 1600–1868, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Patricia Sippel, “Popular Protest in Early Modern Japan: The Bushu Outburst,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 37 (December 1977): 273–322; Donald W. Burton, “Peasant Struggle in Japan, 1590–1760,” Journal of Peasant Studies 5:2 (1978): 135–171 Tetsuo Najita and Victor Koschmann, Conflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcasts: the Underside of Modern Japan, New York: Pantheon, 1982. Herbert P. Bix, Peasant Protest in Japan 1590–1884, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986; Hugh Borton, Peasant Uprisings in Japan of the Tokugawa Period. Tokyo: Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 1938. James White, Ikki Social Conflict and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 8–24 for the model; Ann Walthall, Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century Japan, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986; Ann Walthall, ed. and tr., Peasant Uprisings in Japan: A Critical Anthology of Peasant Histories, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Stephen Vlastos, Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, pp. 156–167. Selcuk Esenbel, Even the Gods Rebel: The Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising. Ann Arbor: Association of Asian Studies Monographs 57, (1998): see pp. 17–20 for the concept of community resilience to social dissolution. White, Ikki, pp. 293–303 for overall argument. Esenbel, Gods, contrast between Chart 1 on p. 124 and Chart 2 on p. 128. Roger W. Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: A Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980; William W. Kelly, Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth Century Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Studies by Richard Smethurst on tenancy disputes that took place after the Meiji Restoration into the twentieth century in, Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870–1940 (1986); by Michael Lewis on the famous rice riots of 1918, Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan (1990); Nimura Kazuo on The Ashio Riot of 1907 A Social History of Mining in Japan (1998) focus on conflict as a means of understanding prewar Modern Japan, but tangentially also provide insights into the previous Tokugawa period as well. I have noticed that there are some very interesting dissertations (e.g. Elson Eugen Boles, Rebels, Gamblers and Silk 1860–1890, Ph.D. 1998 SUNY), and recently the publication of an English translation of Nimura’s Ashio Riot of 1907 reflect the continuous “pull” of the subject. Edward Pratt, 2 Japan’s Proto-industrial Elite; The Economic Foundation of the Gōnō, Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1999. William B. Hauser, Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974; David L. Howell, Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Kären Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery 1750–1920, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. This surmise can be linked to the work of Ann Waswo, Japanese Landlords: The Decline of a Rural Elite, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. Brian W. Piatt, “Elegance, Prosperity, Crisis: Three Generations of Tokugawa Village Elites,” Monumenta Nipponica 55:1 (2000): 45–81. Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Ronald P. Toby, “Both a Borrower and a Lender Be: From Village Moneylender to Rural Banker in the Tempō Era,” Monumental Nipponica. 46: 4 (1991): 483–513. In addition, a

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44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61

62

number of the works by Laurel Cornell, Anne Jannetta (cited below), Hayami Akira, Saitō Osamu and others cited in Kurosu Satomi’s review of demographic history also focus on this same region. James McClain, Kanazawa: A Seventeenth Century Japanese Castle Town, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982; Garry P. Leupp, Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Gilbert Rozman, Urban Networks in Ch’ing China and Tokugawa Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974; Gilbert Rozman, “Edo’s importance in a Changing Tokugawa Society,” Journal of Japanese Studies 1:1 (1974): 113–126. James McClain and Wakita Osamu, eds., Osaka: The Merchants’ Capital of Early Modern Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Phillippe Pons. Misere et crime au Japon du XVIIe siecle a nos jours. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. Nam-lin Hur. Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensoji and Edo Society. Cambridge Massachusetts.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000. David Howell, Capitalism From Within; Arne Kalland, Fishing Villages in Tokugawa Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. Vaporis, Breaking Barriers; William W. Kelly, Water Control in Tokugawa Japan: Irrigation Organization in a Japanese River Basin, 1600–1870, Ithaca: Cornell China-Japan Program, 1982; Ann Bowman Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997; Totman, The Green Archipelago. Gail Lee Bernstein, Recreating Japanese Women 1600–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p. 2; Tonomura Hitomi, Ann Walthall, and Wakita Haruko, Women and Class in Japanese History, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1999. Garry P. Leupp, Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan 1603–1868, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 186. “Imagining Working Women in Early Modern Japan,” Tonomura et. al., eds. Women and Class, p. 166. Ann Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Robert J. Smith and Ella Lury Wiswell, The Women of Suye Mura, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. Sumie Jones, ed., Sexuality and Edo Culture 1750–1850, Bloomington: Indiana University, 1995; Garry P. Leupp, Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan 1603–1868, Berkeley; University of California Press, 1995. Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse 1600–1950, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; Selcuk Esenbel, “The Anguish of Civilized Behavior: The Use of Western Cultural Forms in the Everyday Lives of the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks During the Nineteenth Century,” Japan Review 5, (1994): 145–185. Garry P. Leupp, Male Colors, p. 61. The Making of a Japanese Periphery, p. 293. For me, the village land and population registers, although they provided numerical information, also represented the state of social status and power within the Takaino village that provided a better understanding of the political leadership of the 1871 Nakano uprising. See, for example, Klaus Muller, Wirtschaftsund Technikgeschicht Japans. (The history of economy and technology in Japan). Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988; Klaus Muller, Agrarproduktion und Agrarschrifttum im Japan des 17 Jahrhunderts (Agrarian production and Agrarian writings in seventeenth century Japan). Bochum: Hab-Schr., 1976; Ulrich Pauly, “ Ikkō-ikki. Die Ikkō Aufstande u. ihre Entwicklung aus d. Aufstanden d. bundischen Bauern u. Provinzialen d. Japan. Mittelalters.” (“Ikkō ikki. The Ikkō uprising and its development among the association of peasants and provincials of Japan during the middle ages.”) Ph.D. dissertation. Bonn: 1985. Lee Butler, Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467–1680: Resilience and Renewal, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Harvard. East Asian Monographs, 2002.

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63

64 65

Although the Rokumeikan experiment of the late Meiji years has nothing to do with the poor servant girl Okichi’s service, or that of other women of the lower classes who were assigned to take care of Westerners without families, there are some thought-provoking similarities. According to the Attic Letters of Tsuda Ume and Takie Lebra’s study of Meiji aristocratic women, Above the Clouds, Japanese aristocratic ladies were instructed never to refuse the dance proposal of a foreign guest during the Rokumeikan galas, part of the diplomacy of treaty revision in the late nineteenth century—a sacrifice they were encouraged to make as a patriotic duty. This strategy, too, represents the use of the female to “pacify” the foreigner. Yoshiko Furuki, ed., The Attic Letters: Ume Tsuda’s Correspondence to Her American Mother, New York: Weatherhill, 1991; Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 189, for discussion of women and diplomacy. Finally, in my visit to Shimoda a number of years ago, I was surprised to discover a scroll in the museum that depicts Okichi as a Chinese princess sent to the barbarian nomad rulers of the steppes to placate the threatening foe, a story that adds another fascinating twist to the use of women in the world of diplomacy. John Breen, “Nativism Restored,” Monument a Nipponica 55:3 (2000): 438. Brian W. Platt, “Elegance, Prosperity, Crisis: Three Generations of Tokugawa Village Elites,” Monumenta Nipponica 55:1 (2000): 45–82.

317

Bibliography a

The following is a list of published books, articles and chapters by Selçuk Esenbel in order of the oldest first.

BOOKS Even the Gods Rebel: Peasants of Takaino and the 1871 Nakano Uprising in Japan, AAS Monograph and Occasional Paper Series, Number 57 (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 1998). Japon Eğitimi, (Japanese Education, research report for the Ministry of Education in Turkish) Bozkurt Güvenç, Pulat Otkan, Fusun Akarsu No.1185, 1990. The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on the History of Japanese Turkish Relations, ed., with Inaba Chiharu, (Istanbul: Bogazici University Press, 2003). Toruko Gakan (A Pictorial Look at Turkey) by Yamada Torajiro, Turkish translation, forthcoming, Is Bank publications, 2010. Japan and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power, 1868–1945, Forthcoming, 2011.

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS “Japonya’da Toprak Düzeni ve Kapitulasyonlar” (Tözeren surname) (Land Tenure in Japan and the Unequal Treaties) Toplum ve Bilim (Society and Science), 25/26 1984. “Japon Eğitim Modeli ve Doğu Batı Sorunsalı” (Tözeren) (The Japanese Educational Model and the East West Problematic) Toplum ve Bilim 25/26 1984. Tözeren S., Toprak Z. Deringil S. Rabkin Y., Overlooking Asia, Istanbul, 20–21 May 1985 English Editorial, ISIS, Vol. 76 Iss 284, pp. 564–565 (1985). “Turkish Perspectives on Japanese Modernization: A Century of Distant Admiration” in TurkishJapanese Relations: Prospects for Development, Istanbul, SISAV (The Political and Social Studies Foundation), June 5 (5 Haziran), 1986. “Çağdaş Japon Eğitim Tarihine Bir Bakış”, (Tözeren) (A look at the history of Japanese education) Boğaziçi University Research Papers, Bebek, Istanbul, No. SBE/86–01, 1986. “The Study of Local Administration in Early Modern Japan: The case of Nakano tenryo during the Tokugawa Period 1637–1868”, Boğazici University Research Papers, Bebek, Istanbul, No. SBE /88–03, 1988. “Japon Aydınları ve Batı Bilimi” (Japanese intellectuals and western science) Toplum ve Bilim 40 1988. “Japanese Studies in Turkey” International Center for Japanese Studies, Newsletter, Kyoto, 1991.

319

BIBILIOGRPHY

“Japonya’da Islahat Düşüncesi ve Ulusal Kimlik Sorunsalı” (Reformist thought in Japan and the national identity question) Toplum ve Bilim 54/55 1991. “The Anguish of Civilization: Western Cultural Forms in the Everyday Lives of the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks During the Nineteenth Century,” Japan Review, 1994, No. 5. “Yamada Torajiro” İstanbul Dergisi (Istanbul Journal), No. 9, 1994. “İslam Dünyasında Japonya İmgesi: Abdürresid İbrahim ve Geç Meiji Dönemi Japonları” I, II (The image of Japan in the World of Islam: Abdürreşid ibrahim and the Late Meiji Japanese) Toplumsal Tarih (Journal of Social History) Temmuz (July) 1995, (August) 1995. “The Meiji elite and Western Culture,” in Ian Neary ed., Leaders and Leadership in Japan (Surrey: Japan Library Curzon Press Ltd, 1996). “A fin de siecle Japanese Romantic in Istanbul: The Life of Yamada Torajiro and his Toruko Gakan,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Volume LIX Part 2, 1996 “Remarks on the Modernization of Japan and Turkey in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” The Introduction of Modern Science and Technology to Turkey and Japan, International Symposium, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 1996. Samil Ünsal, Ferda Gelegen ile (co-authored with Şamil Ünsal and Ferda Gelegen) “Japonya’nın Orta Asya ve Kafkasya ile İlgili Ekonomi Stratejileri” (The Economic Strategies of Japan in Central Asia and the Caucasus), Yeni Türkiye (New Turkey), 16, Temmuz-Ağustos (JulyAugust) 1997, 3, Türk Dünyası Özel Sayısı (Turkish World Special Issue) II. “Medeni Davranışın Aczi-I, II, Batı kültür formlarının 19. yüzyılda Meiji Japonlarının ve Osmanlı Türklerinin gündelik yaşamlarında kullanımı” (The Anguish of Civilized Behavior I and II The everyday use of western cultural forms by the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks during the nineteenth century), Toplumsal Tarih, No. 47 November pp. 6–14, No. 48 December pp. 7–15, 1997. Hakemli Dergi. “Commentary for the General Discussion on Japan in a Comparative Perspective” Japan in a Comparative Perspective, Samuel Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. International Symposium, Nichibunken, 1998. “Seiki matsu isutanburu no nihonjin: Yamada Torajiro no shogai to toruko gakan” (A Japanese in turn of the century Istanbul: Yamada Torajiro’s life and the Toruko gakan) in Ikei Masaru, and Sakamoto Tsutomu, Kindai nihon to toruko sekai (Modern Japan and the Turkish World) (Tokyo: Keisoshobo, 1999). With Murat Demircioglu, Çağdaş Japonya ya Türkiye den Bakışlar (Perspectives on Modern Japan from Turkey) (Istanbul: Simurg Press, 1999). “Japanese Interest in the Ottoman Empire” The Japanese and Europe Images Perceptions, edited by Bert Erdstrom (Surrey: Curzon Press Japan Library, 2000). “Alacakaranlik Diplomasisi Osmanli Japonya Ilişkisi” (Twilight Diplomacy Ottoman Japanese Relations) Tarih ve Toplum (History and Society) February Subat 2002 Volume 37 No. 218: 4–18. “A Comparison of Turkish and Japanese Attitudes Toward Modern National Identity” in Gunter Distelrath and Peter Kleinen, editors, Fundamentalismus versus Wissenschaft? Zur identitat des Orients in ostlichen und westlichen Diskursen (Bonn: Bier’ sche Verlagsanstalt, 2002). “Japan and Islam Policy During the 1930s” in Bert Edstrom editor, Turning Points in Japanese History (Manchester: Japan Library Routledge Curzon, 2002). “Hi no maru to Shingetsu: Sogo yuko no hakken: Nihon Toruko kankei shi e no jo” Wako Exhibition for the Turkey Year in Japan Program November 2003. “Cin Yazisi” (Chinese Writing) Toplumsal Tarih No: 109, January, 2003: 52–54. “The Present State of Japanese Studies in Turkey” Tsushin, Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, Spring, 2003. “The People of Tokugawa Japan” Early Modern Japan An Interdisciplinary Journal, Spring, 2003, 31–53. “Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power 1900–1945”, American Historical Review October 2004 issue, 1140–1170. AHIndex “On the history of Japanese Asianist and Muslim Relations in the Ottoman period During the Russo-Japanese War” Historika-Ottoman History Issue, Elefterotypia, Athens, Greece, May, 2005, pp. 34–39.

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“Nichi ro senso to nitto kankei 20 seiki ni okeru nichiro senso no kioku” (The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: The Memory of the Russo-Japanese War in the Twentieth Century) in National Institute for Defense Studies, (NIDS), Senso shi Kenkyu Kokusai Forum Hokoku sho, Nichiro senso to sekai hyakunen no shiten kara, (Heisei 16 nen ku gatsu 29–30 nichi), Tokyo: Boei cho Boei kenkyu jo, Heisei 17 nen 3 gatsu (2005): 169–187. “Comment on the Chinese Coins from Tarsus-Gozlu Kule” in Asli Ozyar, ed., Field Seasons 2001– 2003 of the Tarsus-Gozlukule Interdisciplinary Research Project, Istanbul: Ege Yayinlari, 2005, 173–175. “Reflections on Japanese and Turkish Modernization and Global History”: 5–20, and “A Transnational History of Revolution and Nationalism: Encounters between Japanese Asianists, the Turkish Revolution, and the World of Islam”:37–64. In New Perspectives on Turkey, No. 35, Fall, 2006. Chief Editor of special issue on Japan and Turkey. Hakemli Dergi/AHIndex. “The Legacy of the War and the World of Islam in Japanese Pan-Asian Discourse: Wakabayashi Han’s Kaikyo Sekai to Nihon” in Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05, Volume I Centennial Perspectives, Rotem Kowner, editor, Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental Ltd, 2007. “Japonya Bir Medeniyet Olarak Düsünülebilir mi?” (Can Japan Be Considered as a Civilization?): Avrasya Dosyasi (Eurasian File), ASAM, 2007, Vol. 13: No. 2: 45–70. “The Remembrance of the 1871 Nakano Uprising in Takayama Village as a Contemporary Trauma in Village Life Today”, in The Power of Memory in Modern Japan, editors, Sven Saaler and Wolfgang Schwentker, Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2008: 337–359. “The Pilgrimage as International Relations: Japanese Pilgrims to Mecca Between 1909–1938”, Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community Essays in Honour of Suraiya Faroqhi, Leiden: Brill, 2008: 267–276. “Pan Asianism and its Discontents Review Article”, International Journal of Asian Studies Cambridge University Press, 7, 2010 pp. 81–90. AHIndex. (“The mysterious death of Prince Abdulkerim effendi of the Ottoman dynastic family) “Osmanlı Hanedanı ailesinden Şehzade Abdülkerim Efendi’nin gizemli ölümü”, Toplumsal Tarih, Mart 2010.

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Index a

A Pictorial look at Turkey Yamada Torajirō, 137–41 Abdül Kerim Efendi, Prince, 43–4 Gaimushō account, 46–7 OSS account, 44–5 suicide, 45 Afro-Euro-Asian travel ‘map’, 78 tranationalism geography of nationalism, 78–9 Akashi Motojirō, 121 Akif, Mehmed, 4 Alem-i Islam Japonya’da, Intisari Islamiyet, 96 Alem-i Islam ve Japanya’da Intisari Islamiyet, 7 All Russian Muslim Congress 1905, 94, 121 ‘Altaic brothers’, 10, 12, 30–6, 96–7, 101 Amur River Society, 32, 56, 60, 93 Anglo-Japanese Alliance 1902, 108 Anglo-Ottoman Treaty of Trade 1838, 112, 168 Anglo-Russian Agreement 1907, 151 Arabia Jūdanki, 94 Aramaic language, 76 ‘Asia as One’, 3 Asia in Danger, 6 Asian Batallion, 64 Asian Reawakening Society, 6, 8, 63, 96 Asian Solidarity Society, 88 Asianism fascination with Turkish revolution as a model, 89 transfer of ideas from Muslims and Turks, 88 Asianist internationalism, faliure, 104 Asianists and patriotism, 123

Asya Tehlikede, 56 Ayaz Ishaki, 12 Barakatullah, Mouvli, 6 Basmaci uprising, 11, 100 Beg, Ahmad Fadzli, 92, 95 Besir Fuad, 203 Black Dragons, 4, 60, 93 bowing rules, 182, 183 Boxer Rebellion, 1901, 75 Cavdet, Abdullah, 4 Chang Te-chun, 33 Cherry Blossom Society, 100 Chinese coins, 74–6 Chinese Islam, 65–6 Chinese lunar calender, 264n37 Chinese Muslims, 123 Chinese Nationalist Revolution, 69 ‘citadel against communism’, 12–13 coins in two languages, 75–6 Crown Prince Husain of Yemen, plate 6 Cuxi, Dowager Empress, 75 Dai Nippon kaikyō kōkai, 95, 122 Deer Cry Pavilion, 175 diplomacy differences between Japan and Turkey, 219–21 Dutch East Indies effect of Islam policy, 17 invasion 1942, 16 East Turkestan, 13, 38–9 ‘Eastern Question’, 110, 111 Great Power politics, 108

323

INDEX

Iranian revolution 1906, 98 Ishaki, Ayaz, 41 Islam acknowledged but not listed as religion in Japan, 10–11 as code for Asianism, 100 ‘citadel against communism’, 17–18 critical and negative perspective by Japan, 111 ‘green belt against communism’, 2 important past civilization, 59 Japan as model for Muslim reform, 7 Japan’s claim to Asia, 2 ‘Islam circle’, 96 Islam policy, 101 Japan strategy, 123 Islam Question Japanese army, 101 Islamic Fraternity, 6, 92 Islamic law abandoned 1926, 169 Iwakura Mission 1871, 113

Edip, Halide, 1 Elias, Norbert, 173–4 Meji Élite, 155–6 self-perception of modern individual, 155–6 Ertuğrul disaster 1890, 110, 116–18, 149 Yamada Torajirō, 132 Esenbel, Selçuk personal memoir, vii-xxviii photograph, frontispiece Fadzli Beg, Ahmad, 6 Federation of Manchurian Muslims, 35 Federation of Muslims of Japan, 34 fez, 184–6, 207 Fukushima Yasumasa, 109–10 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 111, 178 Gaimushō report (1923) on JapaneseOttoman relations, 119–20 geo-political map of Muslim Xinjiang, 80 ‘Great Game’ Yamada Torajirō, 136–7 Greater Japan Islamic League, 15, 81 Hadji Nur Tanaka Ippei, 65, 82–3 Hadji Saleh Suzuki Tsuyomi, 57 haikara, 178 Haji Nur Tanaka Ippei, 65–7 hakama, 158 Hasan Hatano Uho, 6 Hashimoto Kingorō, 100, 102 Hatano Uhō-Yōsaku, 55 Hezbollah guerillas, 17, 57, 84 Historical Society of Tokyo University, 7–8 Hokkaido Colonization Board scandal, 110 ‘100 days Reform’, 75 Ibrahim. Abdürreşid, 5–7, 12, 28, 55, 94–6, 121–3 close relations with world-wide figures, 80–1 later career, 41 work on Islam policy in Japan, 62–70 plates 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 14 Idil Ural Society of Japan, 12, 41 Ienaga Toyokichi, 110 Ilber Ortayli, 168 Imperial Way faction, 12, 46, 100 international relations beyond treaties, 16

Japan agents sent to Islam countries using Islamic identities, 6, 16 appeal for political activists, 92 as ally of Britain, 115–16 Asianist romanticism about Turkey, 118–20 Asianists, 4 attitudes towards modern national identity, 201–16 claim to world power status in Asia, 83–4 comparative perspective, 223–33 contacts with Russian Muslims, 94–5 feudal rule in detail, 249–51 feudalism, 246–7 first contact with Ottoman Empire, 113 impression of Ottoman Empire as part of Islam, 109–12 intelligence gathering missions to the Ottoman Empire, 109–10 interest in the Ottoman Empire, 108–29 ‘Islam circle’, 2, 8 Islam foreign policy, 96 Islam policy as strategy, 123 Islam policy during 1930s, 28–52 Islam studies, 59 Islam-oriented policies, 2

324

INDEX

Islamic affairs experts, 55 Islamic studies experts, 97–8 literacy, 169 Mecca and Median pilgrimages, 70 military attachés as intelligence gatherers, 83 nationalism transformed into Asianism, 66–7 ‘need to leave Asia and enter the West’, 111 Pan-Asianism, 2, 4 posture as a Great Power, 108–109 relations with Islam, beginnings, 5 rise to Great Power status, 91 ‘Saviour of Islam’, 1 seen as saviour of Islam, 120–4 social sciences methodology, 223–5 Tokugawa local administration, 248–9 warning to Muslims of European imperialism, 56 Japan and Turkey modernization and global history, 234–45 Japan Pan-Asianists allies for Muslim agenda, 54 Japanese Asianist ideals Cold War relevance, 48–9 Japanese Asianists, Turkish revolutionaries and Islam, 87–107 Japanese Muslim agents, 41, 54, 67, plate 15 Japanese Muslims, 55–8 importance, 55 Japanese-Turkish common concern to contain Russia, 113, 115, 118, 131 Japanese-Turkish relations into 20th century, 113 Kaikyō, 101 Kaikyō sekai to nihon, 58–60 Kamil, Mustafa, 5 Khilafat movement, 78 kimono 1930s, xviii, plate 1 Kita Ikki, 12, 33, 102 Kokuryūkai, 4, 9, 12, 60–2, 94, 121, 122 Koran translation into Japanese, 56 Kuoming Tang Party, 79 Kurban Ali, 11–12, 12–13, 13, 18, 30–2, 33–4, 47–8, 101–104 links between Pan Turkism, Pan Islam and the Imperial Way, 102 plates 3, 8, 10

Kuroda Kiyotaka, 110 Kut Al Amara, Battle of, 64 Lattimore, Owen, 42 literacy Japan, 169 Ottoman Empire, 170 Loti, Pierre, 177 Lytton Report, 61 Ma Zhongyin, 39 Manchuria, 35 haven for Muslim Tatar émigrés, 29 Manchurian invasion 1931, 53–4, 102 foreign Muslim relations, 53–4 Islam policy, 48 maps in our mind, 73–86 Matsuoka Yōsuke, 61, 81, 102 Islam policy, 48 Kurban Ali, 36–8 press conference 1932, 36–8, 47 pro-Islam stance of Japan, 37 Mecca and Median pilgrimages, 54–8, 83 alternative form of international relations, 67–8, 69 financial sources, 67–8 Mecelle Islamic civil code, 171–2 Meiji Civil Code 1895, 167 Meiji civilising process modern individual, 161–2 Meiji Japan dress and hairstyle, 174–8 etiquette, 181–4 etiquette and ethics, 159–60 historical background to westernization, 166–71 Home, 179–81 Meiji Japan and Ottoman Turkey eclectic patterns, 193–6 Meji Élite Elias, Norbert, 155–6 Western Culture, 154–62 modern individual Meiji civilising process, 161–2 modern science and technology differences between Japan and Turkey, 218–21 modernity as solution to the ‘Crisis of Islam’, 88 modernity and tradition, 171–2 modernity as Islam, 97–100

325

INDEX

modernization history in Japan and Turkey, 217–22 Mohamettoron, 111, 116 most favoured nation treaty clauses, 114, 116 Muslim activists moves to Japan, 40–2 ‘Muslim Oath’, 8, 63, 66, plate 2 Muslim rebellion, Xinjiang map, plate 13 Muslims common thinking with Jewish Zionists, 92 Muslims, world map, 80, plate 11 Mustafa Kamil, 150–1 Naito Chishū, 116 Nakamura Kenjirō, 130 Nakano Tenryō administration 1637–1868, 251–3 agreement with gunchūdai of Nakano town, 259–60 daikan visit and tax collection, 256–7 location, 251 overview, 257–9 Takainno village headman elections regulations, 259 tax revenue 1838–52, 260 uprising 1777, 254–6 village influences, 253–4 nationalism background to transnationalism, 89–90, 93 ‘world tour’ parallels, 92–3 News on New Japan, 103 Nishihara Masao, 11, 29–30 Okakura Tenshin, 3 Ōkawa Shūmei, 1, 13–14, 35, 54, 55, 59, 81–2, 98–9 influence on Japanese government’s Islam policy, 14 post-World War II hallucinations, 87 ‘Omar’ Yamaoka, 6–7, 16, 56, 123–4 Opium War 1838–42, 76 Osman Pasha, 117 Ottoman Empire first contacts with Japan, 113 historical background to westernization, 167–71 Japanese interest, 108–29

literacy, 170 ultimate loser following RussoJapanese War 1904–05, 151 Ottoman Turkey dress and headgear, 184–8 etiquette, 191–3 Home, 188–91 Russo-Japanese War 1904–05, 148–53 Ottoman Turkey and Meiji Japan eclectic patterns, 193–6 Pan Asianism encounters with Pan Islamism and Pan Turkism, 93–7 multiple meanings, 88 romantic vision, 97 Pan Asianist activists, 61 Pan Asianist and Muslim platform military orientation, 9–10 Pan Islam and Pan-Asianism, 56 Pan Islamism ideals within modernity, 95 Pan-Asianism, 7 Pan Islamists, 4 Pasha, Enver, 11, 64, 100 Pasha, Tevfik, 39, 42 Prasenjit Duara, 3 Rokumeikan, 175 Russia containing expansion to the south, 109 Russo-Japanese War 1904–05, 5, 118 Muslim celebrations, 53 Ottoman government difficulties, 149–50 Ottoman Turkey, 148–53 popular Turkish enthusiasm, official neutrality, 148–9 portrayal as Asianist victory against the West, 68–9 Yamada Torajirō, 134–5 Said, Edward, 14, 18, 205 ‘sailor’s Silk Road’, 73, 77 Sait Pasha, 114–15 Shimano Saburō, 32–3, 34, 40, 103 Shinto and Islam comparisons, 6 Shiratori Kurakichi, 31, 96 Siberian Peoples Association, 32 Silk Road transfer of literacy, 76

326

INDEX

Sino-Japanese War 1895, 5, 74–5 South Manchurian Railway, 10 South Manchurian Railway Research, Organization, 100 Stefan Tanaka, 124 suicides, 203–204 Sultan Abdülhamid II, 130 modernism, 122 Sultan Abdulhamid II, 168 Sumatra Acheh, rebels, 84 Sun Yat-Sen, 91, 93 Sunni Hanefi sect, 171–2 Takayama village uprising 1871 history and living memory, 272–3 matrix of memory, 273–4 memory in writing, 279–84 overview, 266–7 punishment, 267–72 remembrance, 274–9 Takie Sugiyama Lebra, 164 tenchi, 101 Tevfik Pasha, plate 12 Tokugawa Japan early modern social and economic history, 285–8 sexuality and gender, 301–303 fishing and foresty, 299–301 limits of modernity, 297–9 peasant village and agrarian origins, 288–90 rebellion and conflict, 90–7, 290–7 summary, 304–309 urban life, 299–301 Tokugawa kimono, 176 Tokugawa kinono modification, 157 Tokyo temporary haven for diaspora Muslim, 82 Tokyo Mohammedan Press, 34 use of Arabic script, 103, plate 10 Tokyo Mohammedan School, 103, plate 9 Tokyo Mosque, 15–16, 33, 95, 103, plates 4, 6 Topkapi Sarai Yamada Torajirō, 130, 142–4 Toyama Mitsuru, plate 8 Tōa Dōbunkai, 4, 8 transnationalism visition of nationalism, 88, 89–90 transnationality, 3, 104

treaty negotiation problem, 112–15 Treaty of Amity and Commerce 1858, 112 Treaty of Nanking 1842, 112–13 Treaty of Paris 1856, 114, 115, 136 Tsuda Ume, 157, 175–7 Turkey Arabic script, 34 attitudes towards modern national identity, 201–16 sole Islamic world power, 5 special role in Japanese rapprochement with Islam, 102 Turkey and Japan modernization and global history, 234–45 Turkic Uighur rebellion 1931, 13 Turkish revolution 1923, 98 Turkisten Zaviye, 77–8 Uchida Ryōhei, 69–70 ‘unequal treaties’, 5, 91–2 Wa and Yō, 154, 177, 178, 194 cultural eclectisim, 159 dress, 157 Wakabayahsi Han, 54, 55, 58–60 stresses importance of Islam policy for Japan, 60–2 ‘Western at work, Japanese at home’, 154 clothes and grooming, 156–8 Western culture everyday lives of Meiji Japanese, 163–200 everyday lives of Ottoman Turks, 163–200 home interior, 158 internalization of westernization by Japanese aristocracy, 164–5 internalization of westernization by Ottoman elite, 164–5 Western manners as high protocol, 160 as political instrument of power, 160 westernization and modernization, 165–6 world 1900–45 dominatiom by the Western powers, 90–3 World of Islam and Japan, The, 54, 55 Xingjiang Chinese Turkestan, 80 Xinjiang, 39–41

327

INDEX

Yakub Beg rebellion 1864, 75 Yamada Torajirō, 118–19, 124, 130–47 A Pictorial look at Turkey, 137–41 Ertugrul disaster 1890, 132 ‘Great Game’, 136–7 life in Istanbul, 134–5 Ottoman-Japanese relations, 132–4 Russo-Japanese War 1905, 134–5 state ceremonies, 141–4 tea ceremony, 134, 135 Topkapi Sarai, 130, 142–4 Young Turk Revolution, 1908, 139

Yamada Torjiro, plates 16, 17 Yamaoka Kotarō, 94 Yani Yapon Muhbiri, 34 Yoshida Masaharu, 109 Yoshida mission 1880, 109 postwar criticism within Japan, 112 Young Turk revolution 1908, 118–19, 168 Yamada Torajirō, 139 Young Turks ‘Japan of the Near East’ cachet, 151 Yukio Mishima, 161, 204

328