❚ First published in Shingetsu Electronic Journal of Japanese-Islamic Relations, Vol. 4, September 2008, 16–24. 8 The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War on Ottoman

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INTRODUCTION he declaration of war between Japan and Russia on February 10, 1904, T generated waves of enthusiasm in Turkey as a traditional archrival of Russia, but the eventual impact of the war on the empire proved disastrous. Naturally, news about Russian defeats in Manchuria were a cause for celebration, but the Ottoman government followed a carefully gauged policy of neutrality in this confl agration in order not to antagonize the Tsarist government of the Romanov Empire, a contem- porary autocratic regime like that of Abdulhamid II, the Turkish Sultan. An old world empire which had once been the hegemonic power across the and extending to the Arabian Peninsula, the Ottomans had lost control of the Black Sea region to the Russians in the eighteenth century. In previous decades the Ottoman government had succumbed to disastrous defeat in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878 that had ended Ottoman rule in the and furthered the erosion of Ottoman power in the Balkans. In the following years the empire continued to disintegrate. In 1881 the British occupied Egypt, in 1885 Eastern Rumelia was united with Bulgaria, and in 1898 Crete was placed under international control after fi ghting arose between the Ottoman authorities and Greek rebels.

POPULAR ENTHUSIASM, OFFICIAL NEUTRALITY During the Russo-Japanese War, to be sure, Turkish enthusiasm for Japan was genuine. A contemporary journalist, Ibrahim Halil, wrote in his memoirs, “We started to buy the Daily Asir, published in Selanik (Salonica), which was backing the Japanese as I did. They had asked the Japanese why there were no prayers in their temples for victory in the war; it was reported that they answered that the prayers of the Turks would be enough for them.”1 When Muslim newspapers celebrated Japan’s defeat of Russia as the victory of the downtrodden Eastern peoples over the invincible West, a Turkish nationalist feminist, Halide Edip, like many other women, named her son Togo after the commander of the

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Japanese fl eet, Admiral Heihachirō Togo. The Ottoman embassies followed news on the war in great detail. As a neutral power, the government dispatched Colonel Pertev Bey as an Ottoman military observer to join the international military observers’ group upon the recommendation of General Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, who spent twelve years assisting in reorganizing the Ottoman army in the late nineteenth century. Pertev Bey accompanied General Maresuke Nogi’s Third Army in Manchuria, witnessing the capture of Port Arthur. After the war, he wrote memoirs and books briefl y introducing Japanese history with an analysis of the war that aimed to serve as a guide for Turkish youth, emphasizing the strong role of spiritual preparation in addition to material preparedness that lay behind the Japanese victory.2 In view of the existing public sympathy for the Japanese, the Ottoman government of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1842–1918) followed a studied neutral policy toward Japan and Russia in order to avoid any act that might be interpreted as hostile to the Russians. After the defeat by Russia in 1878, the Sultan chose to practice a cooperative policy despite initial efforts in 1890 to enter direct relations with Meiji Japan as a potential partner against the traditional enemy to the north. Earlier the Sultan had been intent on forming close relations with the rising star of the East. He had sent the imperial frigate Ertuğrul on a goodwill mission to the Meiji Emperor in 1890 to publicize the pan-Islamist message of the Sultan in the Asian colonies of the Western empires. The ill-fated mission had ended in tragedy when the Ertuğrul sank off the coast of Wakayama Prefecture. Most of its offi cers and crew drowned.3 Nonetheless, dogged Japanese insistence on obtaining privileges on a par with those demanded in the treaties of the Great Powers had soured the enthusiasm of Ottoman bureaucrats for the signing of a diplomatic and commercial treaty with Japan. The Turkish press was controlled by the Sultan’s censorship, which banned publication of overtly pro-Japanese editorials and obliged the press to report only on what was taking place on the battlefi elds.4 Torajirō Yamada, who conducted business in Istanbul with his partner Kenjirō Nakamura after the 1890 Ertuğrul tragedy, wrote in a well-known account of his impressions of the Turkish world, especially life in Istanbul, that he was told the founders of the were also from an Asiatic race, and the Turks were proud of the Japanese victory.5 However, the Ottoman archives inform us that the Ottoman government prevented Yamada and Nakamura from collecting the considerable amount of donations given by sympathetic Muslims to aid “victims of natural disasters in Japan.”6

THE STRATEGIC CONTEXT During the war the Ottoman government was caught between the Russians and the British, the latter supporting Japan in line with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902. Turkey faced strong Russian pressure to allow free movement to the Black Sea Fleet on the one hand, and British pressure to ensure that Russian ships stayed north of the Dardanelles on the other. Since the Treaty of Paris of 1856, after the Crimean War, the Black Sea Fleet had been denied exit to the Mediterranean. Although Russia recommenced the fl eet in 1870, it was denied passage through the Bosporus by an agreement between Turkey and Russia signed in 1891 which prohibited the passage of warships carrying armaments or munitions. During the war, Japanese

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