Abstract
The roots of today’s “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and the West are not anchored in the legacy of the Crusades or the early Islamic conquests. Instead, it is a more contemporary story rooted in the nineteenth-century history of resistance to Western global hegemony. In this resistance, the Ottoman Middle East believed it had found an ally and a role model in Meiji Japan. As news spread of Japanese domestic and international achievements, a century-long fascination with Japan was ignited in the region that still manages to flicker now and again in the twenty-first century: most recently, in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq. Japanese troops arrived in Iraq in 2004; shortly thereafter, the Iraqi chairman of the newly opened Iraq Stock Exchange, Ṭālib Ṭabātī’e, was quoted as saying that “if I am permitted to dream, Iraq will develop into the Japan of the Middle East.”1
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Notes
Public Record Office, FO 800/184A and 185A, 13 November 1908 (Grey Papers), quoted by Feroz Ahmed in Marian Kent (ed.), The Great Powers and the End of the Ottoman Empire (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 13.
When Japanese naval officers came ashore from the Kongo and Hiei warships anchored on the Bosphorus in Istanbul in 1891, rumors abounded. They drew crowds when they used the local hamâms, which made extra money for shopkeepers and bath-owners. Ziya Şakir (Soku) Sultan Hamit ve Mikado. (İstanbul: Boğaziçi Yayınları, 1994, 2nd edition), 86.
There is substantial historiography of Orientalist views of Meiji Japan. See Akane Kawakami, Travellers’ Visions: French Literary Encounters with Japan, 1881–2004 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005);
Sir Hugh Cortazzi and Gordon Daniels (eds.), Britain and Japan 1859–1991 (New York: Routledge, 1991);
Olive Checkland, Britain’s Encounter with Meiji Japan, 1868–1912 (London: MacMillan Press, 1989);
Toshio Yokohama, Japan in the Victorian Mind: A Study of Stereotyped Images of a Nation 1850–80 (London: The MacMillan Press, 1987);
C. Holmes and A. H. Ion, “Bushido and the Samurai: Images in British Public Opinion, 1894–1914,” Modern Asian Studies 14:2(1980), 309–329;
Jean-Pierre Lehmann, The Image of Japan: From Feudal Isolation to World Power, 1850–1905 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978).
Mikiso Hane, Modern Japan: A Historical Survey (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 86.
San-eki Nakaoka, “Japanese Research on the Mixed Courts of Egypt in the Earlier Part of the Meiji Period in Connection with the Revision of the 1858 Treaties,” The Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 6 (1988), 11–47 for English translation.
San-eki Nakaoka, “The Yoshida Masaharu Mission to Persia and the Ottoman Empire during the Period 1880–1881,” Collected Papers of Oriental Studies in Celebration of Seventy Years of Age of His Imperial Highness Prince Mikasa. Ed. by the Japan Society for Near Eastern Studies (Shogakukan, 1985), 203–235 for English translations.
An enormous pool of scholarship has emerged on Orientalism, the majority of which is explored in Zachary Lockman’s Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 2nd edition).
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (California: University of California Press, 1993).
Urs Matthias Zachmann, China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1852–1904 (New York: Routledge, 2009), 46.
See essays by Samuel C. Chu, John E. Schrecker, and Ernerst Young in Akira Iriye (ed.), The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interaction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism 1885–1925 (Los Angeles: University of California Center for South & Southeast Asia Studies, 1971), Chapters 5–6, 98–155;
Vĩnh Sính (ed.), Phan Bôi Châu and the Ðông-du Movement (New Haven, CT: Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1988).
Victor A. van Bijlert, “The Icon of Japan in Nationalist Revolutionary Discourse in India, 1890–1910,” in Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb (eds.), Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 23–42;
P. A. Narasimha Murthy India and Japan: Dimensions of Their Relations (India: Lancers Books, 1986);
Keenleyside, T. A., “Nationalist Indian Attitudes Towards Asia: A Troublesome Legacy for Post-Independence Indian Foreign Policy,” Pacific Affairs [Canada] 55:2 (1982), 210–230;
Krása, M., “The Idea of Pan-Asianism and the Nationalist Movement in India,” Archiv Orientální 40:3 (1972), 238–260;
Stephen Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
R. P. Dua, The Impact of the Russo-Japanese (1905) War on Indian Politics (New Delhi: Chand and Co., 1966).
Klaus Kreiser, “Der Japanische Sieg über Russland (1905) und Sein Echo under den Muslimen,” Die Welt des Islams 21:1–4 (1981); Michael Laffan, “Watan and Negeri: Mustafa Kamil’s ‘Rising Sun’ in the Malay World,” Indonesia Circle 69 (1996), 157–175;
Barbara Watson Andaya, “From Rūm to Tokyo: The Search for Anti-Colonial Allies by the Rulers of Riau, 1899–1914,” Indonesia 24 (October 1977), 123–156;
Akira Nagazumi, “An Indonesian’s View of Japan: Wahidin and the Russo-Japanese War,” in F. H. King (ed.), The Development of Japanese Studies in Southeast Asia (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong, 1969), 72–84;
Thijs, J. D., “The Influence on Asia of the Rise of Japan and Her Victory over Russia,” Acta Historiae Neerlandica 2 (1967), 142–162.
Roxane Haag-Higuchi, “A Topos and Its Dissolution: Japan in Some 20th Century Iranian Texts,” Iranian Studies 29:1–2 (Winter-Spring 1996), 71–83;
Anja Pistor-Hatam, “Progress and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Japan: The Far Eastern State as a Model for Modernization,” Iranian Studies 29:1–2 (Winter-Spring 1996), 111–126.
Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 21–25.
Tetsuo Najita and H. D. Harootunian, “Japan’s Revolt against the West,” in Peter Duus (ed.), A Cambridge History of Modern Japan, vol. 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 (1993): 22–49.
To name a few, William Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati’ al-Husri (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971);
Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
Hans Kohn, History of Nationalism in the East (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929);
Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971).
Barbara Heldt, “Japanese in Russian Literature: Transforming Identities,” in Kinya Tsuruta (ed.), The Walls Within: Images of Westerners in Japan and Images of the Japanese Abroad (Selected proceedings, symposium at the Institute for Asian Research, University of British Columbia, May 8–10, 1988), 247.
H. S. Deighton, “The Impact of Egypt on Britain: A Study of Public Opinion,” in P. M. Holt (ed.), Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 231.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 36.
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
For example, James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Donald Quataert, “Ottoman History Writing at a Crossroads,” in Quataert and Sabri Sayarı (eds.), Turkish Studies in the United States (Indiana University: Institute of Turkish Studies, 2003), 15–30.
Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy (eds.), Intellectuals and Articulation of the Nation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 2.
Ibid., 2–3. Their term “quiet politics” from Mark Beissinger, “How Nationalisms Spread: Eastern Europe Adrift the Tides and Cycles of Nationalist Contention,” Social Research 59:1 (1996), 98.
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© 2014 Renée Worringer
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Worringer, R. (2014). Introduction. In: Ottomans Imagining Japan. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384607_1
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