Encounters Between Japanese Asianists, the Turkish Revolution, and the World of Islam

❚ 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

he leading intellectual and ideologue of the Japanese Asianist agenda of Japanese Timperialism 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 confi nement. 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 fi lls him with courage, enthusiasm, and con- tentment [...] 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 confl ict 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 typifi es 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.

87 JAPAN, TURKEY AND THE WORLD OF ISLAM

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 confi gurations 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 thought- provoking 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 alterna- tive 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 addi- tion 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 infl uential 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 fi rst to form close relations with Japan already on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 that made Japan the fi rst 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,