Fukushima Yasumasa and Utsunomiya Tarō on the Edge of the Silk Road: Pan-Asian Visions and the Network of Military Intelligence

CHAPTER 4 Fukushima Yasumasa and Utsunomiya Tarō on the Edge of the Silk Road: Pan-Asian Visions and the Network of Military Intelligence from the Ottoman and Qajar Realms into Central Asia Selçuk Esenbel During the Meiji period, Japanese diplomats were locked in the frustrating debate about “extraterritoriality” in the Japanese and Turkish negotiations for the prospect of signing a treaty of trade and diplomacy—a debate that lingered on for many decades during the nineteenth century, and was not to be resolved until 1924 when, after the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI, the recently established Republic of Turkey abolished the capitulatory treaty system of extraterritoriality and other privileges that were customarily accorded to the Western powers. The discussion of a desirable treaty between Japan and the Ottoman Empire had begun initially in 1880–1881 when the first Japanese Mission to the Middle East of seven members including Captain Furukawa Nobuyoshi of the recently established General Staff of the Imperial Army and a number of Japanese businessmen who hoped to sell tea and sundry items in the Middle East markets. Headed by special envoy Yoshida Masaharu the Mission to the Muslim polities visited the courts of Qajar Iran and Ottoman Turkey that consisted of a long stay of three months during the fall of 1880 in Teheran, the capital of the Persian kingdom, and after an investigation journey through the Caucasus arrived in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, to stay for three weeks in March 1881 before departure to go back home to Japan. The head of the seven member Japanese Mission, minister Yoshida had even caused a protocol crisis by insisting on the “Western” credentials of Meiji Japan to teach a “lesson” to this oriental polity! On September 27, 1880, before the Japanese Mission could make an entrance into the great hall of the Iranian Palace to have an audience with the Qajar ruler, Shah Nasir al-Din (1831–1896), known to his subjects as the “Pivot of the Universe”, the Persian chief of Protocol had politely instructed the Mission about etiquette by gently whispering that they need to take off their shoes according to Persian custom. But, Yoshida, dressed in formal European attire and top hat, stubbornly insisted in the name of “civi- lization” that he would not take off his shoes -even though the custom would © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��8 | doi ��.��63/9789004�743�0_006 88 Esenbel surely be familiar to any Japanese person. The Persian chief of protocol as- tutely solved the problem by allowing Yoshida to keep his shoes on only as a “special favor” in his case. Throughout this embarrassing incident, Yoshida was the epitome of the Meiji establishment’s Europeanization claim which was typical of the Gaimusho attitude toward non-European and Muslim societies. His “cultural war” with Persian tradition hints at the major treaty problem that Meiji Japan faced with the Ottoman and Qajar polities because of their respec- tive incompatibility with the claim of the Japanese empire to gain European status in international law.1 The treaty question hit a deadlock that continued between the Meiji Japanese authorities who, especially after the 1894 Treaty of Ottomans and the Commerce and Navigation with Great Britain that abolished extraterritoriality with the Western powers, and due to Japan’s victory over China in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, gained European power status in China and wanted it reiterated in Istanbul. Treaty revision had continued to be a major crisis in domestic politics since the 1868 Meiji Restoration. The Japanese government and particularly the Gaimushō intended to achieve a treaty revision that would effectively abolish the “unequal treaty” system which the Tokugawa Shogunate had been compelled to accept back in 1858, under the pressure of the strong public opinion that was severely critical of the unequal treaty status of Japan as a compromise on its sovereignty.2 1 Abbas Amanat, Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831–1896 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xiii–xvii for summary of the life of Nasir al-Din Shah and his reforms in Iran. Yoshida Masaharu, Kaikyō tanken Perusha no tabi (The expedition to the Islamic World the Journey to Persia) (Tōkyō: Hakubunkan, 1894), 141 for the shoe crisis; Sugita Hideaki, Nihonjin no chūtō hakken gyakuen kinhō no naka no hikakubunkashi (The Japanese discovery of the Middle East reciprocal comparative cultural history) Tōkyō: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 1995), 135–144 for brief summary of the Yoshida visit; For the English version, Sugita Hideaki, “The First Contact between Japanese and Iranians as Seen through Travel Diaries” in Renee Worringer, The Islamic Middle East and Japan Perceptions, Aspirations, and the Birth of Intra-Asian Modernity (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007), 11–32; Nakaoka Saneki, “The Yoshida Masaharu Mission to Persia and the Ottoman Empire During the Period 1880–1881” Jōchi Daigaku Gaikokugō Gakubu Kiyō, No. 24, (1989): 203–235; Turan Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), abolishing Japanese extraterritoriality and admittance to civilized sovereignty, 8, 66–103, comprehensive Ottoman legal reforms and abolishing extraterritoriality between dates 1856–1923, 104–148; Selçuk Esenbel, “A Fin de Siècle Japanese Romantic in Istanbul: The Life of YamadaTorajirō and his Toruko Gakan,” Bulletin of SOAS, Vol. LIX, Part 2, 1996: 237–52, for discussion of extraterritoriality between Meiji Japan and Ottoman Turkey. 2 Yoshida Masaharu, Kaikyō Tanken Perusha no Tabi (The expedition to the Islamic World: the Journey to Persia) (Tōkyō: Hakubunkan, 1894)..

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