The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on the History of Japanese Turkish Relations (review)

At the diametric extremes of Asia, two states—one ultimately rising and the other falling—took stock of each other from almost exactly the moment it first became possible to sail through the Suez Canal in 1869. Between the two lay vast space and little history, but there was the commonality of a Western other manifested at almost every port en route and in the great interstitial mass of Tsarist Russia. Such a milieu is frequently encapsulated in the most famous stories linking the two. One is the tragedy of the Ertugrul, an Ottoman warship that sank off the Japanese coast in 1890 after its crew had presented a medal to the emperor and been feted in Yokohama. The other is the pan-Asian peregrinations of Abdürreşid İbrahim (1857-1944), who tried to gain Ottoman support for his Tatar peoples against the Russians before throwing in his lot with Japanese Pan-Asianism in the 1930s.

The field has seen occasional articles on brief contacts between Japan and Turkey, and then comparative studies on economic development in the two nations. Thus, the editors of The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent are probably justified in claiming that they present the pioneer volume on the subject of how each nation may have viewed the other in the century that followed the Meiji Restoration. Selçuk Esenbel and Inaba Chiharu also express their desire to get beyond the sinking of the Ertugrul, claiming that the essays gathered here "offer the opportunity of tracing the history of political currents of nationalism, especially Japanese Asianism, and policies of empire-building in Japan" and show how such themes "interconnect with... the history of Pan Turkist, or Pan Islamist currents of the late Ottoman period, as well as the new secular Kemalist Republican agenda of the Turkish Republic" (p.3).

Central to the very comparability of Japan and Turkey in the period under study is the notion of two states that sought broader claims of legitimacy in pan-ethnic rubrics, whether colored by cultural (Asian) or religious (Muslim) overtones, or elided in the vague coverall of the Orient. In the first of the essays, Esenbel presents an overview of the Turco-Japanese relationship spanning the period between 1868 and the stalled treaty negotiations of the 1920s. While Esenbel catalogues the sources with which she is so familiar, her footnotes alert us to a wide range of archival and published works that touch on the issues gathered together in this volume. She might have better explained the "Eastern Question approach" (p.11), which resonates with late nineteenth-century views of what to do with the Ottoman Empire as the so-called "sick man of Europe," or how Sultan Abdülhamid (reigned 1876-1909) could have claimed to be the head of orthodox Islam (p.22), a claim that was by no means universally accepted at his inauguration but that had gained great currency by the time of his death.

In the second essay, Selim Deringil focuses on Ottoman views of a rising Japan in the late nineteenth century when the Turkish Empire was hard pressed by Russia and the forces of fragmentation on its southern borders. Japan thus appeared in the dossiers as an unknown category as much to be exploited as deflected or added to the bottom of a list of imperial worries. Deringil also suggests that the Ertugrul was dispatched to Japan primarily with the aim of flying the Ottoman banner in Asian waters. This ties in with the rising interest in Abdülhamid II found on the Indian Ocean littoral in the 1890s. This interest was especially strong in the East Indies, given that the Dutch were engaged in a protracted conflict, begun in 1873, with the Acehnese, who had sought the protection of the Ottomans by claiming that Aceh was indeed a...