China's Muslims and Japan's Empire

Centering Islam in World War II

Kelly A. Hammond

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469659664
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

In this transnational history of World War II, Kelly A. Hammond places Sino-Muslims at the center of imperial Japan's challenges to Chinese nation-building efforts. Revealing the little-known story of Japan's interest in Islam during its occupation of North China, Hammond shows how imperial Japanese aimed to defeat the Chinese Nationalists in winning the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population. Offering programs that presented themselves as protectors of Islam, the Japanese aimed to provide Muslims with a viable alternative—and, at the same time, to create new Muslim consumer markets that would, the Japanese hoped, act to subvert the existing global capitalist world order and destabilize the Soviets. This history can be told only by reinstating agency to Muslims in China who became active participants in the brokering and political jockeying between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese Empire. Hammond argues that the competition for their loyalty was central to the creation of the ethnoreligious identity of Muslims living on the Chinese mainland. Their wartime experience ultimately helped shape the formation of Sino-Muslims' religious identities within global Islamic networks, as well as their incorporation into the Chinese state, where the conditions of that incorporation remain unstable and contested to this day.

1

FROM MEIJI THROUGH MANCHUKUO

Japan’s Growing Interest in Sino-Muslims

Recognizing Failure: Assessing Japan’s Islamic Policy

By the time World War II broke out in Europe, Japan had a systematic Islamic policy that aimed to integrate Muslims into their empire. These policies started in North China in the 1910s and became more coherent throughout the 1920s, leading up to the establishment of the Japanese client state of Manchukuo in 1932, until the plans were fully realized after war broke out between China and Japan in July 1937.¹ By late January 1938, the Shanghai Times was reporting that a member of the Japanese Diet had raised the issue of outreach to Muslims throughout East Asia in parliament. The article followed a conversation in the Lower House of the Japanese Diet, where the speaker acknowledged that Muslims were geographically dispersed and potentially useful as “an effective bulwark against communism.” In response to the query, Foreign Minister Koki Hirota reportedly replied, “We are giving full consideration to the problem of co-operation with Mohammedans [sic]. Our exchange of ministers with Iran had just that at the back of it. We are also maintaining close contact with Japanese students of Mohammedanism [sic].”²

The acknowledgment by Japanese members of parliament that there were concerted and coordinated efforts to promote outreach to Muslims throughout Asia is important. Equally important is keeping in mind that many of these policies failed, and that there was no straight line or clearly laid out path from the occupation of North China through to the end of the war. Many policies toward Muslims were tried and tested among Sino-Muslim communities and later adapted throughout the empire. But these plans were always contingent and never predetermined. Their successes and failures were dictated by many variables, including access to funds, the international geopolitical situation, and perhaps most important, the necessary buy-in from Muslims themselves.

This never stopped members of the Greater Japan Muslim League from having broad and ambitious goals. The Greater Japan Muslim League’s handbook clearly laid out its objectives in three distinct yet interrelated sections.³ The first stated purpose of the organization was to foster relationships between Muslims from Japan and Muslims around the world, and between Muslims living in the Japanese Empire and non-Muslim Japanese subjects. The handbook stated that this objective could be met by building and providing space for Muslims to meet in cities in Japan, promoting friendly exchanges between Japanese representatives and Muslims, bringing Muslim students to study in Japan, and teaching Japanese to students living in predominantly Muslim regions.⁴

The second purpose of the organization was to further the economic benefits meant to come from these increased interactions. The Greater Japan Muslim League suggested that Japan should increase trade relations and encourage economic exchange with Muslims. The final stated objective of the Greater Japan Muslim League was to promote and sponsor research about Islam and Muslims. This would involve outreach efforts to Japanese subjects who were unfamiliar with Islam, as well as supplying Muslim visitors to the home islands with information and pamphlets about the Japanese Empire to distribute when they returned home.⁵

In addition to the handbook, the Greater Japan Muslim League also published an interview in Japanese with a member to answer common questions about the organization.⁶ The interviewee explained that the aims of the Greater Japan Muslim League were different than those of other religious organizations on the home islands because Muslims around the world were oppressed by Western imperialists and Soviet communists, and needed the Greater Japan Muslim League to provide them with technological programs and economic incentives to help them unburden themselves from these oppressive forces.⁷ The interviewer then asked about the promotion of foreign trade (J. gai bōekei) through the organization, and the respondent made it clear that the Greater Japan Muslim League was tasked with entering new markets outside Japan’s current economic bloc (J. burokku), which consisted of Manchukuo, Korea, and Taiwan, and into Muslim spaces, such as those in Africa and India.⁸ According to the interview, the stated mandate of the Greater Japan Muslim League was to study and research the many different races (J. iminzoku) that practiced Islam in order to help Japanese government officials enable trade with these places.⁹

The final section of the interview addressed the costs associated with implementing these types of programs intended for Muslims, such as study abroad and sending Japanese teachers to Islamic spaces to promote Japanese-language learning. The member of the Greater Japan Muslim League responded that the short-term investment would be very small compared to the return in anticipation of the massive increase in economic activity and output that would come from improving relations with Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia.¹⁰ For the Greater Japan Muslim League, these plans all hinged on the participation of Sino-Muslims. By presenting Sino-Muslims as a success story of Japanese benevolence to Muslims around the world, the organization anticipated that similar gestures would help to win over Muslims well beyond Japan’s imperial reach.¹¹ However, these plans were ambitious and aspirational, and often did not work out in the ways members of the Greater Japan Muslim League anticipated. Understanding why and how Sino-Muslims were supposed to play such an integral role in the maintenance of Japan’s Islamic policy and the expansion of its empire is the purpose of this book.

Meiji through Manchukuo: Japan’s Growing Interest in Sino-Muslims

By the mid-1930s, Pan-Asianists, Japanese bureaucrats, and scholars of Islam were embedded in North China, collecting ethnographic and economic data about Sino-Muslim communities that could be used to justify Japanese imperial expansion on the mainland and into new, predominantly Muslim markets. They surveyed Sino-Muslim schools, guilds, and other spaces in order to gauge how the Japanese Empire could promote its support for Islam to Muslims around the world. They also expressed sympathy for the poor living conditions and discrimination faced by Sino-Muslim communities in North China. By tracing the growing attention that a handful of well-educated Japanese academics paid to Sino-Muslims starting in the late Meiji era (1890s) through to the outbreak of war on the Chinese mainland, this chapter provides a sense of the methods and logic behind imperial Japan’s increasingly coherent policies toward Islam, which gradually became more coordinated in the years leading up to the founding of the Japanese client-state, Manchukuo. However, it was only after the establishment of Manchukuo that the aims and goals of Japanese intellectuals interested in Islam became more deeply entwined with the Japanese military’s expansionist visions for empire. Exploring the Japanese Empire’s motivations for becoming involved with Muslims in China makes it clear that both parties hoped to gain something from these interactions.

The history of Japan’s involvement with Muslim populations in China is one small part of the story of conflicting loyalties exacerbated by wartime chaos. It is also an important story that has not yet been told. When we acknowledge the deep connections between the Japanese imperial project and Sino-Muslims, a much more complicated and nuanced story about the place of Muslims in the Chinese national imagination begins to unfold. This leads to two conclusions: first, that the Japanese occupation of large swaths of the Chinese mainland between 1937 and 1945 should not be considered a bounded geographic space, and second, that the occupation should not be thought of as a discrete temporal period within the narrative of the past hundred years of modern Chinese history. The Japanese imperial presence on the mainland starting from the end of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) led to engaged discussions and protracted efforts by the Chinese Nationalists to counter imperial Japan’s appeal to Sino-Muslim populations. All the while, imperial Japan was developing ambitious global aspirations beyond the mainland, and these plans always required the help and influence of Sino-Muslims.

A brief introduction to the history of Islam in China will familiarize readers with the historical circumstances surrounding imperial Japan’s steadily intensifying involvement with Muslims. From there, we will examine the voices of Nationalist-supported Muslims in order to contextualize their concerns and their own reform agendas. Even among Sino-Muslim populations who supported the Nationalists, there was rarely consensus about how to implement reforms or where Sino-Muslims should situate themselves within the emerging Nationalist vision of the Chinese nation-state. Following this, we will analyze the works of Japanese intellectuals and academics who wrote prolifically about Islam in the years leading up to the war, a discussion that will show that Manchukuo’s establishment in 1932 provided the Japanese military with the authority to co-opt intellectuals and their networks, while simultaneously supporting a number of Islamic associations on the home islands and on the mainland. Finally, by examining the integration into the Japanese imperial schematic of minority subjects on the home islands—such as the indigenous Ainu, the burakumin, and Korean subjects living in Japan—we will assess the useful precedents these groups provided Japanese policymakers trying to make sense of non-Japanese communities and how to include them in their visions for empire.

The Growth and Development of Islamic Studies in Japan

Examining the growth of Islamic studies and popular interest in Islam on the home islands through the lens of Japanese imperial expansion in China provides a starting point for understanding broader policies with respect to Islam. Initially, the study of Islamic history and Islamic theology were niche academic interests for a small number of Japanese intellectuals. However, their expertise was co-opted and used for larger imperial ambitions by bureaucrats and militarists.¹² Many of the academics who had studied Muslims in North China were deeply empathetic toward the low status and poverty that they witnessed among these communities, and they saw the developmentalist agendas to be implemented with the help of Japanese bureaucrats as beneficial for Sino-Muslims and other minorities living in China’s vast borderlands.

The would-be Axis powers self-identified as “have-nots” because “they lacked the ideal balance of natural resources, markets and capital to minimize economic instability and provide economic self-sufficiency.”¹³ Japanese technocrats imagined themselves as fighting “a war on two fronts,” one against the domination of the global capitalist world system and another against the threat of worldwide socialist revolution.¹⁴ One tactic in this war was to appeal to Muslims living throughout the colonized world and the Soviet Union with the help of Sino-Muslims. In their plans for Manchukuo and the “state-directed economy” that accompanied their visions, bureaucrats relied heavily on the social science and anthropological research conducted by specialists. The social and cultural policies they promoted, meant to control people and legitimize imperial rule, were also integral to the economic planning for a separate economic bloc in East Asia. In Manchukuo, the men and women Janis Mimura calls “techno-fascists” honed their planning and development skills to “realize a productive, hierarchical, organic, national community based on the cultural and geographic notions of Japanese ethnic superiority.”¹⁵ Population surveys and economic data about non-Han populations were gathered and analyzed, and the people living in Manchukuo were ordered and categorized. These data resulted in the publication of hundreds of books, journal articles, pamphlets, and dossiers about Sino-Muslims written and compiled by Japanese scholars of Islam starting in the 1920s. The data also enabled an assessment of the social and cultural landscape of the region and the economic utility of Sino-Muslims in their long-term plans for imperial expansion.

Beyond data collection, Japanese imperialists made important outreach efforts to Muslims on the mainland. Early on, Japanese bureaucrats realized the potential of Sino-Muslims to help Japan destabilize the Chinese Nationalists’ nation-building projects. At the same time, Sino-Muslims could help the Japanese Empire create connections to Muslims throughout the colonized world. In a secret report detailing the success of Japanese “penetration” into Sino-Muslim communities, the Nationalists’ U.S. allies observed that this had become a “situation custom-made for Japanese infiltration tactics.”¹⁶ Manchukuo had become the “base from which Japanese activities among Muslims in other parts of China were directed, and also the testing grounds for organizing techniques later applied on a much larger scale in Occupied China.”¹⁷

As the Japanese government and military exerted more influence in areas with Muslim populations on the Chinese mainland, they focused on recruiting those who had been to Mecca, since they were generally venerated in their communities and able to exert greater influence among their coreligionists. Once again, these efforts did not go unnoticed by the Chinese Nationalists or the United States. In 1928, U.S. sinologist Lyman Hoover claimed that a “Japanese Muslim” appeared in Beijing seeking out the leaders of the important mosq...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures, Tables, and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Romanization
• A Brief Note on Sources
• Introduction. Centering Islam in Japan’s Quest for Empire
• 1. From Meiji through Manchukuo: Japan’s Growing Interest in Sino-Muslims
• 2. Sitting on a Bamboo Fence: Sino-Muslims between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese Empire
• 3. Sino-Muslims beyond Occupied China
• 4. Deploying Islam: Sino-Muslims and Japan’s Aspirational Empire
• 5. Fascist Entanglements: Islamic Spaces and Overlapping Interests
• Conclusion. Sino-Muslims, Fascist Legacies, and the Cold War in East Asia
• Glossary
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks