Ottomans Imagining Japan

East, Middle East, and Non-Western Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

R. Worringer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137384607
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Today's "clash of civilizations" between the Islamic world and the West are in many ways rooted in 19th-century resistance to Western hegemony. This compellingly argued and carefully researched transnational study details the ways in which Japan served as a model for Ottomans in attaining "non-Western" modernity in a Western-dominated global order.

1

Introduction

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

When representatives of the Ottoman government approached British officials in 1908 to discuss forging an alliance between the two powers following the Habsburg annexation of Ottoman Bosnia-Herzegovina, they did not describe themselves with that all too familiar Western epithet for the Ottoman Empire, the “Sick Man of Europe.” Instead, the former Young Turk political exiles self-assuredly declared themselves to be the “Japan of the Near East” and expected the British to understand the potential merits of a partnership with them.² In identifying themselves this way, Ottoman statesmen invoked their newfound relationship to a particular trope—the modern Japanese nation—and all that it implied in the early twentieth century. In fact, this pan-Asian association with Japan was mainly a fiction generated by the imaginations of a vast number of Ottoman writers who searched for ways to ensure the empire’s survival in the modern era. Nonetheless, it calls for historical inquiry into the reasons behind and the purposes of Ottoman formulations of solidarity with an alien, remote, and non-Muslim Japan.

Japan loomed in Ottoman consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century. The contemporary Japanese nation was an example for Ottomans of how to attain “non-Western” modernity in a global order defined mainly by the West. That is, Japan demonstrated to the Ottoman Empire how to become modern by “Western” standards without losing one’s “Eastern” essence. Previous scholarship on Ottoman identity and modernizing efforts has overlooked the influence of Japan and assumed that the only pattern to aspire toward was Europe, which is too simplistic an analysis given the complexities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. The historical analogy of modern Japan proved to be an attractive alternative that drew an enormous amount of attention in the Empire from the elite and nonelite alike.

The Ottoman endeavor to become modern at the turn of the twentieth century was informed by this discourse on the Japanese nation that addressed issues of technical modernization, social reform, nation-building strategies, and other factors considered to be the determinants of enlightened civilization in this historical moment. Inevitably this discourse also spoke to an Ottoman concern for the Empire’s future place in the world, somewhere between two entities that were simply differentiated as “East” and “West.” Yet this distinction was not so freely negotiated by the Ottomans. Once having had the upper hand in a rivalrous past shared with Christian Europe, they now sought to escape the current status to which they had been relegated—as inferiors to the West—even as they embraced many of Europe’s contemporary intellectual foundations and material attributes. And it is this dilemma that resembles similar struggles to reach modernity in a variety of other “non-Western” societies: the quest of an often diverse cross-section of individuals within those communities to preserve what they considered to be certain essentialistic, indigenous qualities designated as “Eastern spirit,” while absorbing and integrating into their states and societies suitable elements of Western science and technological civilization, a feat Japan was believed to have accomplished.

Just choosing an appropriate description for the particular set of political and intellectual influences exerted upon Ottoman individuals as they grappled with issues of identity and statehood in a changed world proved a more daunting task than expected for what may seem a rather trifling narrative of one empire’s interest in another. Perhaps it is due to the complex forces at work under the surface of what initially appears to be nothing more than a mere passing fascination with an Asian country that accomplished in about fifty years of intense modernization what it took European nations much longer to achieve. Indeed the Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources themselves frequently repeated the above comparison between the pace of European industrialization and the rapidity of Japanese modernization with a very obvious tone of satisfaction. What may not be apparent at the outset, however, is the level of imagining that was conceived of by a range of Ottoman writers, poets, political activists, journalists, and members of the ruling elite in the Empire, as well as non-elite Ottoman subjects, to express their sentient analyses of the emergence of Meiji Japan. Though the overused phrase “Rising Sun” seems perhaps a bit cliché in describing modern Japan’s ascent to global power at the end of the nineteenth century, again the contemporary newspapers, journals, and books circulating in Ottoman lands did not resist using this teleological trope to express their evaluation of what was bound to happen all over Asia if proper steps were taken by those in power, unhindered by European interference: the “rise of the East,” or an “awakening in Asia” that had been put in motion by “the Rising Sun.”³ It was poetic and descriptive all at once for the rebirth of the Orient to commence with Japan, located on that furthest edge of Asia where the sun made its first appearance each day.

The Japanese islands had not captivated the Muslim imagination in quite this way before. Arab and Persian Islamic geographers of the ninth and tenth centuries first charted exotic lands perched in the Far East beyond China, which they called Wāqwāq (rendered from the Chinese name for Japan, Wo-Kuo).⁴ In Ottoman times the belief that the apocalyptic peoples of biblical and Qur’anic eschatology called the Gog and Magog were to come out of that far clime beyond mainland Asia on the Day of Judgment was still lending a measure of superstition to perceptions of the few Japanese people seen in Ottoman cities.⁵

But it was not until the late nineteenth century that the Islamic Middle East became enthusiastically aware of a nascent Asian power that had existed in isolation for centuries, now called al-Yābān in Arabic or Japonya in Ottoman Turkish. Up until this time, the Ottomans would have had little to glean from Japan other than the fine craftsmanship of Japanese lacquerware and ceramics, most samples of which made it into Topkapı Palace by way of foreign merchants or as gifts to the Sultans from visiting delegations who often were not themselves Japanese. Though the Portuguese and the Dutch had been involved with Japan through trade since premodern times, Europe effectively did not really become obsessed with things Japanese until the Victorian era, when their taste for Japanese cultural goods parodied the distaste they generally harbored toward the Japanese diplomatic and student missions resident in European capitals, whom they regarded as “peculiar Orientals.”⁶

Commodore Perry’s forcible opening of Japan in the 1850s and, following this event, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 were the events that lured the world’s attention toward what would become the Japanese national modernization miracle of subsequent decades. For the Ottomans, 1868 fell in the latter years of the Tanzîmât reforms (1839–1876) and around the time the Islamic modernist Young Ottoman movement was resisting the centralized, top-down nature of these reforms implemented by a powerful Ottoman bureaucratic clique. Activist samurai overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate, assumed administrative control over Japan, and surrounded their newly empowered symbol of Japanese monarchical authority, the youthful Meiji Emperor; they became the famed Meiji oligarchs—the genrō of later decades that carried out dramatic reforms and guided modern Japan into its twentieth-century imperial stature. It was the next generation of Ottoman activists after the Young Ottomans, the Young Turks, who opposed Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909), and who would come to idealize the Meiji statesmen as their role models.

Japanese modernization did not hold any sustained Ottoman attention in the press nor elsewhere until after the first Japanese study missions had already come and gone from Ottoman ports in the 1870s and 1880s. The first visit, initiated by the new Meiji oligarchy as part of their policy to “seek out knowledge throughout the world” as delineated in the Charter Oath of 1868,⁷ must not have impressed the Ottomans tremendously. Fukuchi Gen-ichirō, the interpreter for the 1871–1873 Iwakura Mission to the United States and Europe, was dispatched on a side-trip to the Ottoman Empire. There, he was to investigate the Sublime Porte’s juridical system in cases involving foreigners, as a prelude to the hoped-for revision by the Japanese of their despised Unequal Treaties that had been signed with Western powers by the Tokugawa Shogun in 1858. Through some hobnobbing in Istanbul with a former diplomatic acquaintance, arrangements were made for the Japanese official to examine the Egyptian Consular court system in Cairo. Fukuchi submitted a detailed report to the Japanese Foreign Ministry upon his return in which he recorded his observations and conclusions regarding the Egyptian court system.⁸

In the 1870s, then, Japan was still pupil and not tutor for other non-European nations in international affairs; a change in roles was in the making however. The Yoshida Masaharu Mission of 1880–1881 was dispatched to Persia and the Ottoman Empire ostensibly to investigate the possibility of Japan opening trade relations with the two empires after the Qajar Persian Shah Nasir al-Dîn had made overtures toward the Japanese.⁹ Relations between the Japanese and Persian parties during the visit consisted of pleasantries and expressions of pan-Asian friendship as well as the Shah’s inquisitive queries regarding the details of Japanese modernization. But as Yoshida’s government report reflects, particularly in the last section entitled Seiryaku (Politics), Japan’s true motives for the visit consisted mainly of investigating British and Russian activities in the region, as Japan was beginning to play the game of Great Power politics. The Japanese mission spent considerable time in the physical environs of the Russo-Persian and Russo-Ottoman border areas as they were aware of Russia’s desire for southern expansion and the need to block it; they clearly anticipated war with Russia in the future. They also read British strategy in the Middle East very astutely:

The Russians seem to entice the Persians into undermining the Ottoman Empire from behind. As for Great Britain, to prevent this Russian intention and their cooperation with the Persians, they planned to create a bulwark state between the Ottoman and the Persian territories, which is expected to obstruct both the Ottoman and the Russian thrust into Persia. In brief, Great Britain has assigned the role of a bulwark to the revolting Kurdish people.¹⁰

In time, Japan would use its status as an Eastern model of nationhood and modern statecraft as a way to package itself for other Asians as an alternative to Western imperial powers bent on colonizing all of the non-European continent. But in reality, by the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Japanese too had firmly entered the arena of imperial, colonial competition.

Japan’s self-image had been transposed after the renegotiation of the Unequal Treaties with Western powers in 1894 and Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. The threat of Western occupation and colonization had plagued the Japanese for decades after Commodore Perry first forcibly opened the country in the 1850s. But by the late 1890s, Meiji officials were exuding an attitude of Great Power confidence and imperial entitlement commensurate with a nation that was now “leaving Asia” to “enter the West,” in the famous locution of Japanese intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi.¹¹ Japan had remained independent, promulgated a constitution, and rapidly modernized the country. Its military, retrained and retooled, proved itself a worthy opponent against much larger foes, allowing Japan to acquire its own colonial possessions (Liaotung Peninsula and Formosa [Taiwan] from China, 1895). With these achievements, the Meiji ruling oligarchy increasingly began to situate Japan at the apex of non-Western peoples, and to actively promote its stature in the world. Meiji Japan assumed the mantle of a superior whose “benevolent” civilizing mission in the East consisted of both delivering modernity to the “less advanced” races, and rescuing Asians from colonization by direct military challenges to the imperialistic West. Success against Russia in 1905 confirmed to Japan and others its abilities in the latter regard,¹² and set the global stage for later confrontation with the West in the Pacific War of the mid-twentieth century. With Japan’s annexation of the Korean Peninsula in 1910, Koreans appeared quite alone in the world in their national resistance to what many Western and non-Western observers alike understood to be Japan’s active participation in the protection and modernization of a backward Asian country.¹³

Modernity at Empire’s End: The Ottoman Struggle with “East” and “West”

Japan emerged as an objectification of Eastern modernity in Ottoman discourse only after the empire had suffered a convergence of political, economic, and social crises that included European imperialist pressures from the outside and separatist national movements threatening the stability of the polity from within. Earlier in the nineteenth century, new ideologies had begun to swirl in the minds of Ottoman thinkers concerned about the Empire’s survival: the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution had left an indelible imprint on the Ottoman intellectual educated either in Europe or domestically in one of the many modern schools established as part of the Westernizing reforms of the Tanzîmât and after. Rational science, secularism, a patriotic sense of a national homeland, and participation in government through the parliamentary process became the mantras of Ottoman opposition to autocratic rule. As the model liberal democracies of Britain and France persisted in their seizure of Ottoman provinces in North Africa in the 1880s, however, Ottoman disillusionment with Western imperialism pushed intellectuals in the Empire to look in a new direction for a national pattern to emulate, which could still allow them to remain true to these ideals. As the contemporary nineteenth-century sources often reiterated, it was an almost natural inclination for Ottoman reformers to “glance East,” toward Japan,¹⁴ though the current historiography on modernization in the Middle East still frequently omits this fact.¹⁵

At this critical juncture, the demarcation we know today as East and West was being redefined once and for all on both sides of the divide. In large part the terms of the debate were determined by Europe, which then had the ability to dictate the power relations imbedded within this binary. More than merely an idea of division, this boundary was a historical trajectory whose point of origin scholars often debate—whether one takes as its defining moment the ancient Greco-Persian rift, the Latin-Orthodox Christian schism, the appearance of the Prophet Muhammad preaching the rectified Abrahamic faith of Islam and the subsequent Arab conquests, the medieval violence of the Crusades, the Ottoman ghazi state on Europe’s frontiers with its very real ability to carry out threats of military invasion and political hegemony, or the arrival of Napoleon on the shores of Egypt armed with scholars as well as guns to take possession of the Orient.¹⁶

However it was conceived of in earlier times, as a demarcation between Occident and Orient, Christendom and Islamicate civilization, or in its latter stages between an emerging imperial Europe and an increasingly colonized Islamic world, this relationship was firmly theorized by Europe in the nineteenth century within the context of the global economy and Great Power politics, Social Darwinism, and racial assumptions: in short, in axiomatic forms also intellectually accessible to the very Easterners Europe had categorized. At this point, with the power balance having shifted in favor of Europe and rationalized into the consciousness of both Europeans and Asia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Introduction
• Part I   Seeking out “Modern” within the International Arena
• Part II   Defining “Modern” in the Ottoman Microcosm
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index