The [Japanese] government, adorned with great intelligence and ideological firmness in progress, has implemented and promoted European [methods] of commerce and industry in its own country, and has turned the whole of Japan into a factory of progress, thanks to many [educational institutions]; it has attempted to secure and develop Japan's capacity for advancement by using means to serve the needs of the society such as benevolent institutions, railways, and in short, innumerable modes of civilization.
—Malumat, mouthpiece for Yıldız Palace, 18971
“Devlet-i Aliye-yi Osmaniye ve Japonya İmparatorluǧu,” Malumat (24 August 1897): 1.
We should take note of Japan, this nation which has become rivals with the Great Powers in thirty to forty years. One should pay attention to that—that a nation not separating patriotic public spirit and the good of the homeland from its life is surely such that [though] sustaining wounds, setting out against any type of danger that threatens its existence, it certainly preserves its national independence. The Japanese successes of Port Arthur…are a product of this patriotic zeal.
—Şura-yı Ümmet, Ottoman newspaper, Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), 19042
“Hubb ül-Vatan min ül-İman ve Japonya-Rus Seferi,”Şura-yı Ümmet 3, 52 (1 March 1904): 3.
While the despot of Turkey and the despot of Russia tremble and hide…it has come to pass in the Far East among this admirable people that, like the Turks, have been treated…as barbarians…[that] the Japanese tended to develop in all the Far East their material and moral influences, “to make themselves the guardians, otherwise the masters, of the yellow world.”…And that is how one has to see this vast intellectual and moral organization…. They whose civilization, achieved in half a century, has become superior to European civilization which has fallen into decay; they who do not have to reproach massacres, who do not have to gag any mouths out of which a liberal word came, who do not have to exile or suppress patriots…. Indeed, for our part, it is this “yellow” civilization that we wish to see universalized because it is the fruit of a principled, faithful and highly intelligent organization, because it is based on a conception of human destinies that excludes holy icons and false sentimentalities, because, above all, it is the daughter of a constitutional government which Ottoman patriots—all their efforts striving for this goal—will conclude by understanding the absolute necessity for the poor Turkish people that Hamidian terrorism be plunged into the mire.
—Mechveret Supplément Français, French organ of the CUP, 19053
Ahmed Rıza, “Leçons Japonaises,” Mechveret Supplément Français 161 (1 March 1905): 3.
These quotes, from the publications of two very opposed political viewpoints within the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909), share a conception of Meiji Japan as a signifier of how to become modern to survive as a nation at the turn of the 20th century. Hundreds more of these references to Japan can be found in the pages of both the Ottoman Turkish and the Arabic press of the Hamidian and Young Turk eras in which the Ottoman Empire and its shortcomings were often compared with domestic and international Japanese achievements, or Japan was put forth as a pattern to follow in modernizing the Ottoman state and society. I question how and why individuals or groups in the Ottoman Empire were so vigorous in their desire to connect themselves to such an unlikely and alien alternative model for development—that is, that of Japan, a non–Muslim nation remotely tucked away in East Asia and about which little had been known or considered in decades (centuries even) prior to the 20th century. What purposes did it serve to associate Ottoman with Japanese, to refigure the empire, labeled the “Sick Man of Europe” by Western powers, into what a few Young Turks boldly called the “Japan of the Near East” in 1908? How sincere and realistic was the Ottoman embrace of Pan-Asian solidarity? What did it indicate about the Ottoman worldview in the last thirty years of the empire? A deconstruction of this Japanese historical analogy as it appears in the literature yields a clearer understanding of how various sectors of Ottoman society perceived themselves and their empire in the emerging world order, as well as how individuals and groups within the Ottoman Empire viewed their place in the domestic communal arrangement. I argue in the following pages that the Ottoman preoccupation with modern Japan at the turn of the century was a consequence of the self-preservationist desire among several sectors of Ottoman society to seek an alternative to Western-dictated norms of modernization, though the empire ultimately was not able to reject Europe as the underlying standard by which to measure progress.4
Şerif Mardin points out in his “Islam in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey,” Islamic World Report 1, 3 (1996): 17, that the Islamic modernists Namık Kemal and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani encountered this impasse when debating Westernists who claimed that Islam was incompatible with science: “[t]he issue was the consequence of its being indissolubly linked with a sub-text, namely, the superiority of Western civilization as well as the superiority of positive science.”
Sustained history in and with Europe is precisely what prevented many Ottomans from severing themselves from the West; this attachment affected the Ottomans' recognition of their marginality in the late-19th-century world and caused the conjuring up of an Ottoman self-view that incorporated a temporary orientation toward Japan to exteriorize Western imperial and intellectual hegemony.
I must present a very brief overview of modernizing efforts in the empire here as a prelude to comprehending the Ottoman linkage to the Japanese nation as a potential roadmap for navigating into modernity. The process of global restructuring that took place in the early modern period created a massive disruption within the Ottoman Empire, for which there were dramatic social, economic, and political consequences that became visible in later centuries. As a result of the Ottoman Empire's incorporation into the world economic system after the 16th century as part of the periphery, what appeared to be a breakdown of Ottoman Islamic unifying ideology and institutions eventually ensued that had far-reaching socio-political effects for the Ottoman Middle East.5
See Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), on the basic structure of the Ottoman Islamic polity. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974), on the theoretical world-system perspective. Huri İslamoǧlu-İnan, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–24, outlines how Western organizing principles gradually displaced the Ottoman imperial system. Fatma Müge Göçek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), describes Ottoman capitalist development as causing the emergence of a split bourgeoisie class that exacerbated the loss of state control over certain social mechanisms.
Starting in the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire suffered a series of setbacks and military defeats at the hands of European states (I include the Russian Empire in this categorization despite its disputability as “Western” and “European”). Recent Ottoman historiography has re-evaluated this phenomenon, formerly expressed as “decline,” and replaced the teleological term with a more accurate understanding of it as a transformation within the Ottoman Empire.
6 On the formulation of the “paradigm of decline,” see H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1957); Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1961). A clear articulation of Ottoman transformation can be found in Rifa
at Ali Abou El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). In his work on the construction and projection of the Ottoman self-image in the late 19th century (The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 [London: I. B. Taurus, 1998]), Selim Deringil notes the degree to which the empire was still a power to be reckoned with despite its apparent weaknesses at the end of the 19th century.
Nevertheless, there was inarguably a sense within the empire among different groups from this point onward that something had gone dangerously wrong, that the formerly invincible Ottoman state was falling behind the powers of Europe, and that serious action had to be undertaken to insure its survival.
7 Selim Deringil, “Legitimacy Structures in the Ottoman State: The Reign of Abdülhamid II (1876–1909),” International Journal of Middle East Studies 23 (1991): 345.
The immediate problems of the empire were believed to require an overhaul of the Ottoman armed forces to reassert military prowess in the face of foreign challenges, the expansion of the school system to harness science and technology and to indoctrinate educated patriots to serve the Empire, or to establish some Western institutional patterns that would effect a redefinition of the Ottoman subject's place vis-à-vis the state and other citizens. The Ottoman bureaucratic elite of the mid-19th century introduced drastic political measures that they hoped would centralize and streamline the administration, unite disparate elements of the multi-religious, multi-ethnic society, and thus preserve the empire through the Tanzimat reform program. Şerif Mardin pointed out in his pioneering work of forty years ago that the resulting Young Ottoman movement emerged with a similar goal in mind: to save the Ottoman Empire from Western encroachment and internal decay by demanding that the Sublime State institute constitutional government based on Islamic foundations and contemporary science to modernize state and society.
8 See Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), on the Tanzimat and the development of Young Ottoman ideology.
Ideas of parliamentary government, of a shared national consciousness and a duty to one's homeland, and of secular rationalism all contributed to the 19th-century discourse on how to become “modern” in the empire. As Selim Deringil so succinctly put it, sultans, bureaucratic elites, Young Ottoman intelligentsia, and the ulema all “began to look for a new basis for defining what was increasingly coming to be considered an ‘Ottoman citizenry’” because they felt “a new social base was needed if the empire was to survive.”
9 Selim Deringil, “The Invention of Tradition as Public Image in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1808–1908,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 35 (1993): 4.
By the late 19th century, after Abdülhamid II had ascended the throne and subsequently suspended the Ottoman Constitution of 1876, threats to Ottoman sovereignty continued. The further occupation of Ottoman lands by European powers, separatist national movements among those who questioned their ties to an Ottoman Islamic Empire (particularly in the Balkans), financial bankruptcy, and other internal complications allowed Western intervention in domestic affairs. Europe had seemingly rendered the “Sick Man of Europe” incapable of defending itself. The sultan and his governing apparatus produced an ideology and built an infrastructure to shore up the Ottoman Islamic understanding of the empire in seeking to combat internal and external threats.10
See idem, Well-Protected Domains. Caesar E. Farah, “Reassessing Sultan Abdülhamid II's Islamic Policy,” Archivum Ottomanicum 14 (1995–96): 191–92, calls it “an Islamic response” to resist Western Christian imperialism and not “an Islamic objective.”
Although historians dispute the degree to which Abdülhamid II's Islamist campaign was used merely to legitimate a primarily rational, secular modernization agenda,
11 See Deringil, “Invention of Tradition,” 3–29, for his argument in its entirety.
Benjamin Fortna's recent explanation best defines the approach toward modernity for the sultan and other Islamically oriented reformers in the empire at the time: “[i]t was as if by combining Islamic morality with a Western education system…. Ottoman officialdom hoped to have discovered a formula that would allow the empire to vault over its many problems.”
12 Benjamin C. Fortna, “Islamic Morality in Late Ottoman ‘Secular’ Schools,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 32 (2000): 380.
Those opposing the autocracy of Sultan Abdülhamid II and his regime in the later decades of the 19th century, misleadingly lumped together in one monolithic category and labeled the “Young Turks,”13
Berkes, Development of Secularism, 305; M. Şükrü Hanioǧlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4. The term “Young Turk,” as Hasan Kayalı noted in Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 4, is “an unfortunate misnomer, because it implies that the group of liberal constitutionalists called Young Turks consisted exclusively of Turks, or even of Turkish nationalists. The Young Turks, in fact, included in their ranks many Arabs, Albanians, Jews, and in the early stages of the movement, Armenians and Greeks.”
also sought an escape route from the immediate dilemmas with Europe as they looked for an original social foundation for the empire from which to proceed. Young Turk opposition to Abdülhamid II arose in the late 19th century out of the earlier Young Ottoman movement; consequently, an Ottomanist sense of patriotic duty to the homeland, resistance to Western imperialism, and a demand for technological progress based on scientific knowledge prevailed in spite of factionalism within the movement.
14 Hanioǧlu, Young Turks in Opposition, 17. On page 4, he explains that “[t]he CUP was an umbrella organization until 1902 and was overflowing with member groups whose only common agenda was the dethronement of Abdülhamid II.”
To this political opposition, the most obvious cure for the “Sick Man of Europe” was the deposition of an oppressive sultan in favor of a reinstated Ottoman constitutional administration. Locked in a fierce political struggle with Abdülhamid II, the Young Turk movement, in all its ethnic, cultural, and ideological diversity, was also engaged in dialogue—with the sultan, his supporters, and even with one another—centered on properly defining notions of “progress” (
terakki) and “civilization” (
medeniyet), those frequently invoked buzzwords considered the markers of a modern nation. What did these terms mean in Ottoman discourse on modernity? Were they universally understood in the empire?
Intersecting with the tremors of socio-political upheaval in the Ottoman Empire was the so-called rise of modern Japan, marked first by the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and later symbolized by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 and victory over Russia in war in 1905. Contemporary Japan embodied the essence of this new language of modernity for Sultan Abdülhamid II and his statesmen, for some Islamic modernist reformers in the empire, and for secular, Westernizing elites. Japan functioned as a condensed trope upon which these different groups almost arbitrarily at times mapped any arrangement of meanings, associations, or identifications they believed were necessary to bring about “progress” and “civilization.” To discuss becoming modern at century's end inevitably involved questions of identity and nation-building, just as it assumed a program of social and technological modernization. Ottoman officials, political activists, journalists, and other intellectuals almost without exception deployed their own versions of the contemporary Japanese nation as a didactic tool for arguing the merits of a particular reform platform in the pre– and post–1908 revolution eras.
Starting in the late 1880s, and subject to the reach and discretion of the Ottoman censor, discussions of virtually every aspect of Japanese state and society appeared in newspapers, periodicals, books, and popular literature in both the Ottoman Turkish and Arabic languages, as well as in conference proceedings and private Ottoman government communications. It was widely believed that the example of Japan could instruct the Ottoman Empire in its quest for true enlightenment. Japan's history, national culture, heritage, and religion, as well as its political organization, military, and economy, were just a few of the topics examined in these texts, which illustrated what Ottomans writers of different backgrounds proposed to be successful development into a modern nation and state. Japan was perceived to have accomplished these two objectives through a successful integration of Eastern cultural heritage and the appropriate Western material attributes. Whether Japan's achievement of this synthesis was fact or fiction, it provided an alternative and a way out of the epithet “Sick Man of Europe.” Mimicking Japanese strategy could help the Ottoman Empire truly be accepted as a member of the Concert of Europe while promoting the preservation of what were defined to be “Eastern” or “Ottoman” values as a unique component of identity.
Although there was disagreement among Ottoman producers of a discourse on modernity as to what “progress” and “civilization” should consist of, in general Japan represented rational science and technology, patriotism, and a fluid characteristic loosely expressed as “Eastern.” “Easternness” was variously interpreted as a religious, cultural, or racial indicator, depending on the orientation of the individual. As an alternative to Europe for some Ottoman Islamists, Japan was a modernized nation preserving its “Eastern spiritual essence.” For other secular Ottoman elites, it was a distinctly Asian nation modernizing according to a Western European trajectory. For religious constitutionalists promoting the establishment of an Islamic shūrā commensurate with modern times, Japan demonstrated that the Ottoman Empire could also initiate a culture-specific governing apparatus. For the non-religious, Japan's constitutional monarchy proved Asia was capable of Western-style liberal democracy and that the Ottoman parliament must be restored. Ottoman “Easternism” or “Pan-Asianism” was a politically expedient construct that lent itself to the debate over modernity as a recognizable identifier for those seeking to legitimate their ideas about how to reform as they struggled with imperialist domination by Europe.
The interplay between notions of East and West in this discourse on Japan and modernity lays bare historical and intellectual contradictions, underscoring several paradoxes inherent in the Ottoman self-view that must be exposed. First, Japan's modern configuration appeared to have developed out of studying and imitating Western patterns while actually purging “antiquated” Japanese customs. The reality of excessive Westernization during the Meiji period would seem to abrogate the validity of Japan as a “non–Western” model preserving its indigenous traditions. Second, the Ottomans who employed this imagery still operated within a framework of the empire's prior historical association with Christian Europe, just as they simultaneously tried to re-orient away from it by looking east to Japan. Third, some of those 19th-century Ottoman elites who most enthusiastically touted Meiji Japan as a non–Western model of Asian progress were the most European in intellectual outlook. The secular, social Darwinist faction of the Young Turk movement so thoroughly explored by M. Şükrü Hanioǧlu in his work (this faction authored the latter two epigraphs) figures the most prominently in this category.
The definitive political utility of the Japanese example contrasts the obscure nature of motives behind Ottoman–Japanese interactions and the mistrust that surfaced at times between the two parties. The lack of a shared past or commonality between them in earlier centuries did not dissuade optimistic journalists from promoting a new identification with the Japanese in the pages of their press, the 19th-century forum for instructing the public in ideology. Ottoman and Arabic papers fueled interest in Japanese-related events with lively exhortations of praise for “Eastern” achievements. Correspondents reported on diplomatic attempts taking place or rumored to be occurring between the Sublime Porte and the Japanese state, and on unofficial visits of Japanese political figures, to inspire Pan-Asian brotherhood.15
See Renée Worringer, “Comparing Perceptions: Japan as Archetype for Ottoman Modernity, 1876–1918,” (Ph.D. University of Chicago, diss., 2001), for specific citations from the Arabic and Ottoman Turkish press concerning these rumors and reports.
The Japanese state did court the Ottoman Empire energetically in the late 19th century with gifts, visits, and proposals for treaties.
16 See San-eki Nakaoka, “Japanese Research on the Mixed Courts of Egypt in the Earlier Part of the Meiji Period in Connection with the Revision of the 1858 Treaties,” Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 6 (1988): 11–47; and idem, “The Yoshida Masaharu Mission to Persia and the Ottoman Empire during the Period 1880–1881,” Collected Papers of Oriental Studies in Celebration of Seventy Years of Age of His Imperial Highness Prince Mikasa (Shogakukan, 1985), 203–35. For a more recent assessment, see Selçuk Esenbel, “Japanese Interest in the Ottoman Empire,” in The Japanese and Europe: Images and Perceptions, ed. Bert Edstrom (Surrey: Curzon Press, Japan Library, 2000): 95–124.
Abdülhamid II, his statesmen, and later CUP officials responded with similar missions and promises of friendship.
17 The sultan's plan was to “establish a personal and strong friendship (dostluk) with the Mikado from afar, but in order not to upset the Russian Czardom, to not currently enter into a political alliance with Japan. But if required, at the precise moment when it seems necessary, to suddenly transform that friendship into the form of an immediate treaty”: Ziya Şakir (Soku), Sultan Hamit ve Mikado, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Boǧazıcı Yayınları, 1994), 30, quoting a former Ottoman ambassador to Paris.
A series of negotiations took place between Japanese and Ottoman statesmen in Istanbul and in European capitals where ambassadors were stationed; gifts were exchanged between imperial sovereigns; and visits by dignitaries were carried out in a feigned effort to build a political and commercial alliance.
18 For a clearer picture of the direct relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Japan, one must draw from a variety of sources in Ottoman and modern Turkish, English, and Japanese. I have relied primarily on the Ottoman prime ministry archives that document the negotiation process from the Ottoman state's point of view. The list of individual documents is very long, but the interested reader should look at Osmanlı Başbakanlık Arşivi (hereafter, BBA), HR.HMŞ.İŞO 48/3, 26 October 1915, doc. 36527, Sublime Porte Foreign Office Legal Consultation Bureau, for an Ottoman summary of negotiations. There is no shortage of literature on the ill-fated Ottoman frigate Ertuǧrul and its dispatch to Japan by Sultan Abdülhamid II, but the most comprehensive and accurate history of its disastrous voyage is currently being written by Michael Penn. In the meantime one must use the following studies: Süleyman Nutki, Ertuǧrul Fırkateynı Faciası (Istanbul: Matbaa-ı Bahriye, 1911); Türk-Nippon Dostluǧun Sonrasız Hatırası: Ertuǧrul (Tokyo: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Tokyo Büyük Elçiliǧi, 1937); Tadahisa Takahashi, “Türk–Japon Münasebetlerine Kısa bir Bakış (1871–1945),” Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Vakfı Dergisi 18 (June 1982): 124–48; Hee-Soo Lee, İslam ve Türk Kültürünün Uzak Doǧuya Yayılması (Ankara, 1988); Umut Arık, A Century of Turkish–Japanese Relations: Towards a Special Partnership (Istanbul: Turkish–Japanese Business Council [DEIK], 1989); Arif Hikmet Fevzi and Hasane İlgaz, Ertuǧrul Fırkateynı: Yüzüncü Yıl Armaǧanı (Istanbul: Türkiye Şehitlikleri İmar Vakfı, 1990); Kaori Komatsu, Ertuǧrul Facıası: Bir Dostluǧun Doǧusu (Ankara: Turhan Kitabevi, 1992); Erol Mütercimler, Ertuǧrul Facıası ve 21:Yüzyıla Doǧru Türk–Japon İlişkisi (Istanbul: Anahtar Kitaplar, 1993); Selçuk Esenbel, “A Japanese in Istanbul: Yamada Torajiro,” Bi-Annual Istanbul (1994–95): 30–35; idem, “A Fin de Siècle Japanese Romantic in Istanbul: The Life of Yamada Torajiro and his Toruko Gakan,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 59 (1996): 237–52.
Yet neither side yielded in attempting to dictate the most advantageous terms for itself in any bilateral alliance. Concern for preserving Ottoman state control over society determined diplomatic outcomes: the Ottoman state refused to grant Japan capitulatory privileges to protect the empire's political and economic integrity. For the Japanese, it was of paramount importance to project strong, “civilized” nationhood abroad, both to the West and to Asia, by demanding the very preferential treatment already accorded European powers in Ottoman dominions.
19 Japan demanded “favored-nation” status. Said Pasha, Hatıratım (Istanbul: Sabah Matbaası, 1912), 1:36–37. See also BBA İrade Hariciye 17599, March 1881; BBA İrade Hariciye 17594, March 1881; and BBA YA.RES. 10/24, March 1881.
Both sides seem to have lost interest in the prospect of an official treaty by 1910, when Japan became involved in more pressing colonial enterprises in Asia, and the Ottoman administration, soon to be entrenched in the Balkan wars, was more interested in Japanese military strategies and how to integrate military personnel into the governing apparatus.
20 See Worringer, “Comparing Perceptions,” for Ottoman treatises on Japan's military.
No agreement was reached between the two governments despite the hopeful sentiments of those who wrote fervently about the possibilities for Ottoman–Japanese cooperation.
21 The few Japanese nationals in Ottoman territory were sent home at the start of World War I, when Japan declared itself on the side of the allied powers. Diplomatic relations were officially established with the Turkish Republic in 1924, years after the empire had collapsed.
Issues of state and political realities decidedly constrained Pan–Asianism and attitudes toward Meiji Japan among the Ottoman sultan and officials. At times, the risk of Japanese encroachment was real.22
The Ottoman report mentioned earlier (BBA HR.HM
.İ
O 48/3) expressed Ottoman skepticism toward Japanese political motives in noting that Japan had obtained capitulatory privileges in Siam through the use of gunboat diplomacy after first establishing an ambassador in Bangkok. To prevent the same threat to Ottoman sovereignty, Ottoman officials sought to conclude a treaty that would not grant Japan any special status or treatment.
At other times, the fears of Abdülhamid II affected the discourse. The sultan was anxious about the likelihood of Japan's emperor converting to Islam and the possibility of the Islamic world's focus shifting East toward the Mikado as a stronger and more legitimate caliph of Muslims than himself, a rumor that was whispered in and outside the empire by hopeful Muslims and by the Japanese themselves.
23 See “Da
awat al-Yaban Ila al-Islam,” al-Manar, 13 November 1905, 709; “al-Islam wa al-Yaban,” al-
Alam al-Islami, 6 July 1906, 1–2; ibid., 13 July 1906, 2; “Japonya'da İslamiyet,” Balkan 29 (2 September 1906): 1. The Islamist press outside Istanbul took a strong interest in the 1906 Conference of Religions hosted by Japan and speculated on the possibility that Japan would select Islam as its “official religion.” Mehmed Ubeydullah's “Japonya'da Islam,” Doǧru Söz 8 (27 June 1906): 1–2, was a particularly threatening discussion of the implications for Abdülhamid II's regime should this happen.
He expected through press censorship to discourage support for this line of thinking by effectively squelching “dangerous” discussions of Japan and the emperor in Ottoman lands, although he could never completely silence such voices.
Enthusiasm for Japan among the general Ottoman population, however, knew few limits, as it was often generated by the imaginations of the writers themselves, by the preconceptions of the reading audience, or by the goals of influential Ottoman or Japanese citizens shaping the discourse for civic, international consumption. Both countries shared Russia as an enemy; Japan's colonial aspirations in Asia largely shaped its dealings with the Sublime Porte. Japanese self-portrayal to the Ottomans, however, was as Eastern brothers with only the most honorable of intentions in mind. Ottoman journalists conveyed these sentiments as they interacted with Japanese nationals venturing to Ottoman lands to establish a friendly understanding between peoples.24
The political activist and Tatar Muslim exile from Russia Abdürreşid İbrahim escorted at least one Japanese operative and supposed convert to Islam, “Brother Ömer” Yamaoka, throughout the empire in 1910 while he was ostensibly making the pilgrimage to Mecca: see Kojiro Nakamura, “Early Japanese Pilgrims to Mecca,” Report of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan 12 (1986): 47–57. Yamaoka and İbrahim stopped in many urban centers to speak in CUP clubhouses on the expansion of the Islamic faith in Asia (including Japan) and to promote Pan-Asian solidarity: see “al-Yaban wa al-Islam,” al-Muqtabas (al-Ummah), 18 February 1910, 1; and “Japonyalı Hacı Ömer Yamaoka Efendi,” Sırat-ı Mustakim 4, 81 (1910): 53–56. İbrahim, a prolific writer, edited and wrote extensively in several journals of his experiences in Japan. His travel memoirs, The Islamic World and the Spread of Islam in Japan (Alem-i İslam ve Japonya'da İntişar-ı İslamiyet), 2 vols. (Istanbul: Ahmed Saki Bey Matbaası, 1328/1910–11), vividly depict his journey through Asia. See also the modern Turkish translation: Mehmet Paksu, ed., 20. Asrın Başlarında İslam Dünyası ve Japonya'da İslamiyet, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Yeni Asya Yayınları, 1987). He also published political pamphlets, including a translation of a text by a Japanese convert to Islam, Hatano, called Asia in Danger (Asya Tehlikede) (İstanbul: Sebilürreşat, 1912). For more information on İbrahim's life and writings, see Hisao Komatsu and Kaori Komatsu (trans.), Japonya: Bir Tatar Müslümanın seyrettiǧi Meiji devrinde Japonya [Esas Eser: Abdürreşid İbrahim, Alem-i İslam ve Japonya'da İntişar-ı İslamiyet] (Tokyo: Daisan Shokan, 1991); Nadir Özbek, “Abdürreşid İbrahim (1857–1944): The Life and Thought of a Muslim Activist” (M.A. thesis, Boǧazıcı University, 1994); Nadir Özbek, İsmail Türkoǧlu, Selçuk Esenbel, and Hayrettin Kaya, “Özel Dosya: Abdürreşid İbrahim (1),” Toplumsal Tarih 4, 19 (1995): 6–28; Selcuk Esenbel, Nadir Özbek, İsmail Türkoǧlu, François Georgeon, and Ahmet Uçar, “Özel Dosya: Abdürreşid İbrahim (2),” Toplumsal Tarih 4, 20 (1995): 6–23. See also “Japonya'da ‘Daito’ Mecellesi ve ‘Asya Gi Kai’ Cemiyetinin Beyannamesi” (The ‘Greater Asia’ Journal in Japan and the Asia Defense Force Society's Mission Statement), Sırat-ı Mustakim 6, 133 (1911): 42–44.
In the international environment of the late 19th century, the image of modern Japan served as a means for the disenfranchised of the world to make a case for increased political participation or cultural recognition. This discourse often included a protest against the ascendancy of those exercising power or force. Japanese successes represented inherent potential to reform supposedly backward socio-political structures and to initiate the process of modernizing state and nation. In so doing, Japan had been able to enter the ranks of the “civilized powers” (meaning European states) supposedly as an equal. According to this paradigm, the alienated sector in the global order was the all-encompassing “East”—that ambiguous collection of peoples determined to be lower in the racial scheme according to certain “scientific” rationalist theories of the time. For them, the rise of Japan justified demands for independence and self-determination, inspiring faith in their own ability, if given the opportunity, to become “modern” and “civilized” as defined by the prevailing Western modes of thought.25
Egypt is a clear case of the global pattern reproduced in a local context because the ascendant power to be resisted was a Western occupier who did not identify readily with the non–European Japanese, although the 1902 Anglo-Japanese alliance linked the countries politically. The Egyptian nationalist press thriving in Cairo used the Japan ideal to demand the evacuation of British occupying forces and to follow what was defined as a natural path toward independent Egyptian nationhood, the bases of which were universal education, constitutional government, and a national identity grounded in local Egyptian heritage. Mustafa Kamil's Watani Party and al-Liwa
newspaper, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid's Ummah Party and mouthpiece al-Garida, and others differed on the means to achieve nation-state status but agreed that Japan was the model to emulate. See Worringer, “Comparing Perceptions,” chap. 7, for Muslim and Christian perspectives on Japan as a pattern for Egyptian nationhood.
Japan's prominence allowed the East to claim cultural and moral superiority at times to undermine European political or intellectual domination, as the third epigraph at the beginning of this paper illustrates.
The Ottoman domestic sphere(s) replicated this pattern in which an excluded group used the Japanese example as an ideological instrument to articulate demands for change or to reverse an existing power relationship. But the local Ottoman context differed from the international arena in that, when the sector of society believing itself to be under-represented in some way employed Japanese images in its arguments, the “dominant” other also typically referred back to Japan. Thus, the Japan metaphor functioned as a defense mechanism for the authority against the critical subordinate voice. This phenomenon arose, for example, in the political contest that ensued between the Young Turks excluded from power and Sultan Abdülhamid II. A segment of the Young Turks, idealizing those samurai patriots who had sparked the Meiji Restoration in 1868, insisted on a similar rebellion within Ottoman lands.26
See Ahmed Rıza, “Turquie et Japon,” Mechveret Supplément Français 149 (15 March 1904): 1–3. He encouraged his readers to look to the Far East as an example of patriotism, imploring them to revolt against the “treachery and depravity” inflicted on the empire by “this cursed regime.”
It was a threatening symbol: the Meiji revolution replaced a tyrannical shogun with an enlightened Japanese monarch, the emperor, who subsequently surrounded himself with an able class of samurai–statesmen elites. Japan then reinvented itself before the world. The implications were unquestionably clear for Sultan Abdülhamid II and for Asians everywhere. To deflect their vehement attacks, the sultan compared the shortcomings of his empire to the idyllic conditions leading to successful modernization of the Japanese island nation.
27 Sultan Abdülhamid II issued this indictment concerning the misfortunes of the empire: “[t]he principal factor which pushes our state into a catastrophe is the intriguing of the great powers…. We could have repeated the much-praised progress of the Japanese, if we, too, were allowed peace for only ten years, at least. They are fortunate people compared to us, for they are at a distance from the claws of the Europeans and live in security. Unfortunately, our tent is pitched at the crossroads of the European hyenas”: Ali Vehbi Bey, Sultan Abdülhamid, Siyasi Hatıratım, (Istanbul, 1974), 99, translation from Engin Akarlı, “The Problems of External Pressures, Power Struggles, and Budgetary Deficits in Ottoman Politics under Abdülhamid II (1876–1909): Origins and Solutions” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., 1976), 75. Alternatively, the sultan's multinational subjects, not Europe, were to blame for Ottoman administrative mismanagement: “I do not know how appropriate it is to compare Ottoman lands to Japan, to expect success from this Sultan similar to that of that Emperor! Japan is a country of islands, tucked away on one side of the Pacific Ocean; it is a great society, ethnically integrated, uni-religious, uni-national. If there is any region in the world that it does not resemble, it is our wretched country. How could I have reconciled the Kurd and the Armenian, the Greek and the Turk, the Arab and the Bulgar?…. Never at any time did [the] Mikado come up against such obstacles and never did Japan confront such difficulties.” İsmet Bozdaǧ, Abdülhamid'in Hatıra Defteri: Belgeler ve Resimlerle (Istanbul: Kervan Yayınları, 1975), 116–17. I also consulted Akarlı's translation of this 1917 comment.
In the aftermath of the 1908 revolution and Abdülhamid II's removal from power in 1909, there was a subtle yet noticeable shift in the self-perception of the Young Turks who became the backbone of the CUP regime. Instead of assuming the post as custodians of a Sick Man of Europe, the Unionists, their self-confidence restored, began to see themselves as the Meiji oligarchs of the Ottoman state: as leaders who, through their elite class and educational backgrounds, would choose policies and reform initiatives corresponding to those of Japan to guide their Ottoman nation into the modern world.28
“My eyes look around at the systems that have been favored by the nations who have accepted a constitutional administration and have adapted all national endeavors, in short, the military, education, commerce, and industry, to conform to the requirements of modern-day civilization, and far in front I see Japan…. Here we have a beautiful example”: Hüseyin Cahit, “Islahat Nereden Başlamalı?” Tanin, 14 August 1908, 1.
The Ottoman military officer Pertev Bey confidently asserted, “[W]e will arise shortly…with the same brilliance as did the Rising Sun in the Far East a few years before. In any case, let us not forget that a nation always arises from its own strength!”
29 Pertev Bey (Demirhan), Rus-Japon Harbinden Alınan Maddi ve Manevi Dersler ve Japonların Esbab-ı Muzafferiyeti: Bir Milletin Tali'i Kendi Kuvvetindedir! (Material and Moral Lessons Taken from the Russo-Japanese War and the Reasons for Japan's Victory: A Nation's Good Fortune Is in Its Own Power!) (Istanbul: Kana'at Kütüphane ve Matbaası, 1911), 140.
What made this possible? Hüseyin Cahit explained in the
Tanin article, “The Example of Japan,” that the Unionists obtained the necessary precondition leading to true Ottoman modernity—a constitutional system to replace tyranny—and it legitimated their hegemony.
30 Hüseyin Cahit, “Japonya'nın Misali,” Tanin, 1 September 1911, 1.
Escaping from an inferior, self-conscious status, they viewed themselves and their empire positively after 1908 as the “Japan of the Near East,” with all that the Japanese trope implied.
31 The master of ceremonies at a CUP-sponsored conference in Istanbul “sur la Renaissance du Japon” summed it up in 1911: “[w]e represented up to the revolution of July 1908 the most distressing spectacle that history has ever recorded. Alone, the powerful voice of a handful of patriots came to awaken us out of our lethargy…. Since the [CUP] has restored our human dignity, an immense longing escapes all chests toward the conquest of right, liberty, and the dignity of mind…. Thanks to the laudable initiative and the impulse of citizens finally conscious of their duties…to strive toward a similar goal, to reach the same ideal: elevate the homeland, heal its injuries, make war on ignorance, give citizens full possession of their judgment, the full exercise of their faculties, assure forever the freedom of thought and the liberty to write; broaden, in a word, the intellectual and moral level of people and thus prepare our dear Turkey a right revenge, that is to say, open for it a greater, more fertile, and more glorious future”: M. Salih Gourdji's postscript in Comte Lèon Ostrorog, Conférence sur la Renaissance du Japon (Istanbul: Ahmed Ihsan, 1911), 86–91.
One diplomat recounted the commanding new meaning injected into the Ottoman self-view during an exchange with CUP officials Ahmed Rıza and Dr. Nazım (who in 1908 approached the British to establish a treaty after Austria's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina). They cited the Anglo-Japanese alliance as precedent; the British refused, as Sir Edward Grey recalled: “[o]ur habit was to keep our hands free, though we made ententes and friendships. It was true that we had an alliance with Japan, but it was limited to certain distant questions in the Far East. They replied that Turkey was the Japan of the Near East.”
32 Sir Edward Grey to Lowther, private correspondence, London, FO 800/184A and 185A, 13 November 1908 (Grey Papers), as quoted by Feroz Ahmed in Marian Kent, ed., The Great Powers and the End of the Ottoman Empire (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 13. At the time, Rıza was an elected deputy for Istanbul and president of the chamber; Nazım was secretary-general of the CUP.
Previously, Japan had corresponded to the abstract Ottoman hope to acquire “modern civilization.” It was now representative of a specific Young Turk Unionist vision—that of a modern, secular, and capitalist state whose institutions and policies could be upheld by law and by force.33
Ahmed describes Young Turk intentions as “converting the Empire from the status of a semi-colony controlled and exploited by the European Powers, to a sovereign capitalist state, exploiting its own imperial resources for its own benefit”: Kent, Great Powers, 12.
“Japan of the Near East” meant an independent, militarily strong, and economically viable Ottoman polity governed by an elite determined to realize their Unionist ideology.
34 In 1914, the implication shifted to military capability. In “Orient for the Orientals,” Tercüman-ı Hakikat described “Japan of the Near East” as the same Ottoman exertion of strength in the Middle East during wartime that the Japanese had shown in seizing the opportunity to consolidate their position in East Asia: as quoted by Ahmed in Kent, Great Powers, 16–17.
Administrative reforms noted to have been practiced successfully in Japan, such as staffing embassy positions with military personnel, were considered for the Ottoman Foreign Ministry.
35 BBA HR.MTV 23/36, 4 September 1909, and Miguel to Bethmann Hollweg, 11 April 1910, Auswärtiges Amt, Imperial German Foreign Ministry Papers, Türkei 162, vol. 7, no. 124, U.S. National Archives, T139, roll 395: “Confidential. It was brought to my knowledge confidentially that, according to the Grand Vezir, the Turkish government intended to employ in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs a much larger number of General Staff Officers with language capability at the embassies and consulates. The officers shall temporarily leave the army and will wear civilian dress. Japan has had very good experiences with this practice. The plan, already considered in Kamil Pasha's time has been taken up again now. After discussions between the War Minister and Finance Minister, the following decision has been reached: ‘The War Ministry will name capable and suitable officers for the [diplomatic] missions. If there is a vacant position in an embassy or consulate, either an officer is nominated for this position, or as it happens in Japan, the vacant position is left unfilled until the appropriate military personnel can be selected to do so in accordance with the execution of this policy.’ The Grand Vezir has requested an official memorandum on this from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
Compensatory salaries for foreign advisers in Japan were examined as a standard for Europeans serving in a similar capacity in Ottoman lands.
36 BBA MV 169/3, 16 September 1912.
Others suggested that Japan play a more direct advisory role in modernizing certain Ottoman institutions, such as the navy.
37 “Siyasi Fikirler,” Yeni Gazete, 8 September 1908; Abdullah Cevdet, “Bir Mektub-u Hakikatbeyan,” Yeni Tasvir-i Efkar 257 (16 February 1910): 1, in M. Şükrü Hanioǧlu, Bir Siyasal Düsünür Olarak: Doktor Cevdet ve Dönemi (Istanbul, 1981), 190. See also “al-Dawla al-
Uliyya wa al-Yaban,” al-Liwa
, 15 September 1904, 1; and “Tariq min al-Warad” al-Liwa
, 17 September 1904, 1.
The Unionist government embarked on a program of centralization designed to recapture past grandeur without losing sight of (Ottoman Turkish) character, as
Tanin self-assuredly indicated the Japanese had done.
38 Hüseyin Cahit, “Japonya'nın Misali,” 1.
The CUP assumed the mantle of Ottoman “progress” and “civilization” through association with modern Japan. In so doing, it would soon find itself in yet another competition, this time with those whom the Unionists had excluded from power who would in turn deploy the Japan metaphor as a political critique of CUP methods and ideology.
OTTOMAN SCIENCE, MORALITY, AND IDENTITY
The pursuit of modernity engaged the Ottoman ruling class and its elite citizenry in matters of state, including the socio-political foundations of the realm, modernization and reform schemes, and issues of identity. As Selim Deringil and Fortna have argued, the late-19th-century Hamidian state undertook a campaign of Ottoman Islamic ideological retrenchment aimed at regenerating the empire, an endeavor carried out through imperial ritual as well as through reform of the state educational system to incorporate Islamic morality and Western science.39
See Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, and Fortna, “Islamic Morality.” Both point out the Ottoman state view of foreign missionary schools in the empire as threatening to Ottoman solidarity.
Sultan Abdülhamid II was clearly influenced by Japan in this regard: despite angst over the Japanese emperor's increasingly elevated status in Asia, the sultan and some of his palace officials believed that the Japanese had conducted the proper assimilation of Western knowledge with native culture so that their resulting compulsory, universal educational program created a people grounded in their ancestral-religious heritage who loyally served the Japanese emperor and homeland to preserve sovereignty. The sultan's interest is reflected in the existence of translated manuscripts on Japan in his private library, the most significant of which was a French book by a Japanese reporter named Hitomi. This manuscript,
Japonya Ahlak ve Mü'essesatına Dair Nümune (The Example of Japan's Morality and Institutions), explained Japanese institutions and cultural attributes as well as Japanese “virtues”—everything from Japan's history, government administration, the role of the emperor, party politics, religious sects, arts, and architecture, to marriage, women, raising children, funerary practices, cleanliness, food, clothing, and recreation.
40 I. Hitomi, Dai-Nippon le Japon: essai sur les moeurs et les institutions (Paris: Libr. de la Société du Recueil général des lois et des arrêts, 1900). Translation by Rıza, ms. 6166, sultan's private collection, Istanbul University Manuscript Library, 1901. The final pages of the manuscript were devoted to statistics on Japanese naval and army forces in 1897 and on Japan's schools in 1896.
In light of Fortna's research on Ottoman texts used for moral instruction in Hamidian schools, the Ottoman counterpart to the Japanese assimilative process was to be the fusion of Ottoman Islamic ethical foundations with principles of rational science in a way that could be put into practice to serve the empire, just as Japan's indigenous traditions were assumed to be the foundations of its modern nationhood and new-found status in the world. According to Hamidian state ideology, science was not at odds with any Eastern morality, whether defined as “Japanese” or “Islamic.”
41 For example, the military officer Ali Fu'ad wrote in “Aksa-yı Şark Harbinden Alınan Dersler,” Asker 1324 (1908–09): 168, that the Japanese “resemble Ottomans with regard to their untempered characteristics, virtues, and warlike inclinations.”
As the first epigraph shows, the sultan and his palace officials appealed to the Ottoman public in the newspaper Malumat to acquire modern science using the idealized example of Japan. The empire was to accomplish this while preserving its Muslim character, the bulwark against Western cultural and territorial imperialism. The sanctity of Ottoman lands and people would thus be protected without drastically altering traditional Ottoman Islamic political structures, particularly the position of the sultan. Islamic morality in effect was to buttress Ottoman patriotism.42
The Ottoman army officer Pertev Bey (Demirhan) compared the Japanese samurai code of honor, the Confucian-based Bushidō, to the Ottoman soldier's gaza in the name of Islam, noting that Japanese ritual suicide (harakiri) to serve a master and Muslim martyrdom (şehadat) for a cause defined Japanese and Ottoman morality, respectively. The modern expressions of these actions were in service to the nation. See his Rus-Japon Harbinden, 100–101.
tended to focus on Japan's technological achievements (mainly in the armed forces), its relations with Western powers as an equal, and the Ottoman Empire's need to establish a firm political-economic alliance with the Japanese. Rarely, however, did an author neglect to remark about how Japan had maintained its “unique” culture throughout its exchanges with the West.
43 See, for example, Japonyalıların Ta'lim ve Terbiyesi,” Malumat, 12 July 1900, 3.
Japan's perceived ability to defend its sovereignty as well as its culture in the overwhelming presence of Western attributes dominating concepts of modernization and progress meant that Japan had acquired the respect of the European Concert and was now a player in the international arena. The Ottoman sultan and palace aspired to achieve the same results using a similar strategy.
The Young Turks' search for unifying ideology for the empire prior to 1908 diverged from the conception proposed by the contemporary Ottoman ruling class in that this opposition movement sought a more radical modification of the Ottoman society and state. The Young Turks possessed a notion of modernity that incorporated the application of Western science and technology to save the empire.44
See Hanioǧlu, Young Turks in Opposition, 7–23, on the Young Turks' ideological roots.
But they insisted on drastic reform of the Ottoman political arrangement that hinged on the overthrow of an autocratic sultan and the reinstatement of the constitution to mark the empire's entry into a modern phase. The victory of Japan over Russia in 1905 served as a major impetus to this political assertion, for it was perceived not just as a defeat of the “West” by the “East,” but also as the first victory of constitutionalism and rule by law over the random excesses of absolutism. In addition, Japanese success in the war symbolized the power of a modernized, independent, and fiercely patriotic nation-state over antiquated, multinational, multi-ethnic empires. In this case, the victor had previously conducted a “bloodless” revolution—the Meiji Restoration—and subsequently embarked on a vigorous program of modernization to create a more advanced and democratic state and society, in stark contrast to the tyrannical Russian czar and his backward empire. To those who opposed the despotic controls of the sultan over the Ottoman realm, the message conveyed by the Japanese narrative of progress was unmistakable.
45 Abdülhamid II was aware of it, too. “I have heard on good authority that when the Sultan's officers congratulated him on the defeat of his old enemy Russia, he replied that he did not by any means consider the result of the war a matter of congratulation, because he and the Czar were the only autocratic monarchs in Europe, and the defeat of the Czar meant a blow to the principle of autocracy”: Sir Charles Eliot, Turkey in Europe (London: Edward Arnold, 1908), 426.
Persevering and self-sacrificing, the Japanese promulgated a constitution, revised unfair treaties and signed new ones with Europe. They developed local industries and became an economic power. Some of the more prominent members of the Young Turk movement in the Balkans, Cairo, Paris, and Geneva, such as Ahmed Rıza (author of the third epigraph), preached about modern Japan in the press to illustrate Ottoman aptitude for the same. The textual peculiarities of Young Turk literary representations reflected a political confrontation with the sultan; a desire to be considered equals by an imperialistic Europe, despite implicit acceptance of racial theories (to be explained shortly); and a tinge of Turkish nationalist undertone based on this ethnic understanding. Mincing no words, the Young Turk opposition paper
Şura-yı Ümmet beseeched Ottomans to act:
Turks and all Ottomans, do not forget that the enemy of your life, the enemy of your future is that calamitous evil that destroys the homes of your patrie, your land, putting confidence in this deceptive duplicity and intrigue more so than in force of arms. Because like the Japanese, forced to take up arms when necessary, if we do not learn what it is to “taste of the homeland,” we must know well that we will be condemned afterwards to be servants, captives, or slaves. It is by our cry of “homeland” every day that makes [patriotic] affection everlasting in our hearts, preventing this captivity…. Knowing well that the enemy that pretends to be one of us, that gnaws at the homeland, is inside, in the palace, more than it is abroad, let us cooperate and strive together just for the sake of our country, like the Japanese.46
“Hubb ül-Vatan min ül-İman ve Japonya-Rus Seferi,” Şura-yı Ümmet 3 (1 March 1904): 3.
Young Turk ideology challenged Western hegemony and involved the removal of the sultan as the political object around which to elicit loyalty and service in the name of the empire, because he stood in the way of progress. The Eastern, modern, rational-scientific, constitutional polity that a faction of the Young Turks envisioned, and that Japan symbolized, was itself to replace the Ottoman sultan as unifying object. For them, patriotic political activism determined Ottoman morality in this moment.
For the Young Turks who gravitated toward European Enlightenment-era intellectualism, scientific materialism and Comptean positivism shaped this conception of nation and civilization.47
Hanioǧlu, Young Turks in Opposition, 32, describes their philosophy as “originally ‘scientific,’ materialist, Social Darwinist, elitist, and vehemently anti-religious; it did not favor representative government.” See also Hanioǧlu's more recent Preparation for a Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
They tacitly accepted theories of racial-cultural hierarchy espoused by such figures as the sociologist Gustave Le Bon, according to whose “rational,” “scientific” corollary Turks, Japanese, and Africans were considered incomplete or inferior to Indo-European races.
48 “The human races may be divided into four groups: 1) the primitive races; 2) the inferior races; 3) the average races; 4) the superior races…. Among the average races, we shall place the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mongolians, and the Semitic peoples…. Only the Indo-European peoples can be classed among the superior races…. It is to them that is due the high level reached by civilisation at the present day”: Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples, repr. ed. (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1924), 26–27.
Social Darwinian evolutionary assumptions of natural selection in which the strongest nations survived while the weakest were swallowed up and colonized also influenced this group of Young Turks. Their application of Le Bon's elitism and Herbert Spencer's differentiation of species to social classes and (racial) nations translated into a call for linear progression toward a secular, capitalist Ottoman state led by themselves, the educated elite.
49 The Young Turks extracted a class argument from Le Bon's writings in which elite members of society made decisions for the ignorant masses. Parliament was a dangerous prospect, as it delivered power to the uneducated.
Considering themselves enlightened by Western civilization, they sought inclusion into the European fold, although they recognized Europe's resistance to their racial and intellectual equality.
In the hopeful atmosphere immediately following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, the dialogue on Ottoman progress and civilization expanded because of the flourishing press in the empire. Niyazi Berkes's categorization of these approaches to Ottoman modernization as Westernist, Islamist, and Turkist is now considered too simplistic to address the complexities of late Ottoman thought and the tremendous overlap of these ideologies.50
Berkes, Development of Secularism 337–46. He identified Islamists as: (1) Cemiyeti İlmiye-i İslamiye, who published Beyanül-Hak, including Mustafa Sabri (Şeyhül-İslam c.1918–23); (2) the Muhammaden Union's Derviş Vahdeti (who published Volkan) and Bediüzzaman Said Nursi; and (3) the Islamic modernists whose ideas were expressed in Sırat-ı Mustakim (Sebilürreşat), including Mehmed Akıf (Ersoy) and Musa Kazım. Turkists were those who published articles in journals such as Genç Kalemler, including Ziya Gökalp and Turkic exiles from Russia. Berkes points out on page 345 that “[t]he pan-Turkists [emigrants from Russia] could be Westernists or even Islamists. On the understanding of nationality particularly, there was a substantial difference between the pan-Turkists and Gokalp's Turkism. For the first, nationality meant race; for the second, it meant culture.”
Nevertheless, if we examine the literature produced by the Young Turks who prevailed in the CUP after 1909, we see that secularist (Westernist) and Turkist ideology dominated their thinking. As Hanioǧlu has so conclusively shown, the CUP used Islamic rhetoric as a tool to make their modernization program more palatable to the Ottoman masses while diminishing the role of religion in society through secularizing policies.
51 Islam was useful for mobilizing the populace against a despotic Sultan Abdülhamid II or an imperialist West: see Hanioǧlu, Preparation for a Revolution, 289–311 (esp. 308), for thorough analysis of the Young Turks' political ideas. He shows the difference between propaganda produced for public consumption and the real ideological positions of members in the movement.
These discreetly anti-religious Unionists often oscillated between expressing Ottomanist sentiments they felt would elicit broader support in the empire and their more sincere Turkist or even exclusionary Turkish nationalist vision of an enduring Ottoman state.
52 Ibid., 295–302. See Hanioǧlu's earlier article, “The Young Turks and the Arabs before the Revolution of 1908,” in The Origins of Arab Nationalism, ed. Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 31–49, for several CUP members' private views of the Arabs prior to 1908.
Drawing from Le Bon and Spencer, and encouraged by Turkic Muslim exiles from Russia, they emphasized a heavily racial understanding of national identity even more strongly through journalistic exposition on the “Japanese race” that permeated their attitudes toward the distribution of power.
53 Some Young Turks emphasized the challenge of the “yellow race” to Europeans before 1908; mention of a distinctly Turkish race in comparison to the Japanese race became more frequent after 1910. See the CUP-sponsored Conférence sur la Renaissance du Japon (1911), cited earlier; Kaya Alp, ed., “Japonya İmparatorluǧu: Yeni Hayat,” Genç Kalemler 2 (2 July 1911): 93–95; ibid., 2 (9 August 1911): 123–24; ibid, 2 (23 August 1911): 143; C. Tahsin, “Japon Sanaati Avrupa
ya İstila Edecek Mi?” Resimli Kitap 39 (April 1912): 216.
To prominent CUP members, the Ottoman polity was to be governed by a Turkish elite class who would make decisions of state to ensure the empire's continued existence. This group had the most success in exploiting the analogy of Meiji Japan for domestic use; in their publications they appropriated Japanese images of good leadership and practical governance to claim complete possession of “progress” and “civilization” for themselves.
The CUP disrupted the former Ottoman political order with their version of a constitutional regime that was similar in its authoritarianism to pre–1908 rule. Many Young Turks who had previously embraced a doctrine of Ottomanism, whether Turk, Kurd, Arab, Armenian, or Greek, quickly became disillusioned with the centralizing policies of the Unionist regime. Turkish nationalist claims to the administration among some CUP members caused further alienation, as they were contrary to the inclusiveness of an Ottomanist identity. After 1909, the response of some of the disfranchised to this CUP monopoly on power and policy-making was renewed opposition, whether among former activists now in rival political parties, the provincial Arab middle class, or others. Some Ottoman Islamist journals issued a direct challenge to the CUP's authority to determine Ottoman modernity; others more subtly suggested another approach. For some Islamists opposing Unionist power, Meiji Japan represented a form of “progress” and “civilization” shaped more profoundly by religious-cultural heritage than any racial distinction.54
Berkes, Development of Secularism, 361: “The Japanese case of borrowing European sciences and techniques was the Islamists' favorite example. All believed that the Japanese knew what to imitate and borrow and what to reject and retain. The view that Japanese Buddhism was almost identical with the ‘real’ Islam was even echoed in a myth current among the people.” Berkes cites Halil Halit's article “Avrupa Talebe İzami Hakkında,” Sırat-ı Mustakim 89 (1910).
To parallel Japanese success, Islamists insisted on Ottoman adherence to the foundations of the Islamic religion (including the
Şeriat) and respect for the diversity of the Ottoman Muslim
ümmet in any modernization of the empire.
Beyanül-Hak, the conservative organ of the Scientific Islamic Association, did not seem at all interested in Japan; Derviş Vahdeti's newspaper Volkan (of his Muhammadan Union or İttihad-ı Muhammadi Cemiyeti) frequently mentioned Japan, demanding that the CUP administration and Ottoman modernity be made subordinate to indigenous Islamic principles.55
Vahdeti's version of Ottoman modernity combined patriotic love of homeland with strong faith in Islam. In “Öte, beri,” Volkan 1 (17 April 1909): 2, he writes, “Come heroes! Let us unite. Let us assume the strength of character of early Islam, let us be a noble people like the Japanese.”
His satisfaction with Japan's victory over Russia related more directly to his concern for the protection of Muslims in the Balkans against Russian imperialism than to any genuine Pan-Asian affection, however.
56 “Sıyasiyat-ı Hazıramız,” Volkan 1 (23 February 1909): 4; “Süzüle Süzüle Bakalım Ne Olacak?” Volkan 1 (28 February 1909): 5; and “Yağma Yok,” Volkan 1 (26 March 1909): 1.
It would seem that the CUP had so thoroughly appropriated Japan as the symbol of its state vision after 1909 that Vahdeti's choice to discuss Japan negatively on occasion was as a quiet critique of the Unionists' policies.
57 See his “Şeyhül-İslam Hazretlerine,” Volkan 1 (19 February 1909): 1.
At other times, Japan was the standard the CUP administration was not living up to.
58 See “Şura-yı Ümmet,” Volkan 1 (13 February 1909): 2.
Vahdeti engaged in the dialogue over the meaning of “progress” and “civilization” with his secular political superiors and was eventually executed for his views; Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, his Kurdish Sufi colleague who fared better despite mistrust of him by the Unionists, often talked of the lofty achievements of the Japanese, even mentioning in a speech shortly after the revolution that “the Ottomans should imitate the Japanese taking from Western civilization what will assist them in progress, while preserving their own national customs.”
59 Quoted from Şükran Vahide, Bediüzzaman Said Nursi: The Author of the Risale-i Nur (Istanbul: Sözler Publications, 1992), 58. See also Şerif Mardin, Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), 85–86.
Only a few Islamic modernists in the second constitutional period were able to continually deploy Japanese images to argue their views, the reasons being that they more readily accommodated the Unionists in power and less frequently offended their censors. Some of these Islamic modernists contributed to Sırat-ı Mustakim (Sebilürreşat), a periodical that regularly printed articles about Japan and that actually had correspondents in Tokyo, including the Tatar Abdürresid İbrahim. The prospect of Japanese conversion to Islam and the possibilities for Pan-Asian, Pan-Islamic solidarity to oppose Western imperialism that would result from this occurrence figured prominently in the pages of Sırat-ı Mustakim, in large part because this myth was propagated by İbrahim himself, by Japanese political operatives and members of the Black Dragon Society, by a few sincere Japanese converts, and by other Muslim expatriate activists such as the Indian Muhammad Barakatullah.
Sırat-ı Mustakim did not openly confront CUP policies; instead, it focused on two significant issues: assimilation and education. First, the Ottomans needed to re-evaluate their modernization strategy to properly adapt Western science to Islam the way Japan had acquired Western civilization without losing its Eastern essence. Mehmed Akif's 1912 poem reiterated the view that Japan had rejected the superficialities of Western civilization while borrowing science and technology, a feat that Muslims had not been able to accomplish.
60 Berkes, Development of Secularism, 342–43, cites “Sermon from the Süleymaniye Pulpit,” from Mehmed Akif Ersoy, Asım, vol. 4, of collected poems Safahat written in 1919 (Istanbul, n.d). Supposedly, the reciter of the poem, Abdürreşid İbrahim, was to have hurried from India back to Turkey upon news of the reinstatement of the constitution, only to find Ottoman politicians squabbling over the place of Islam in society. See also a translation, “The Secret of Progress,” in Fahir İz and Nermin Menemencioğlu, ed., The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1978), 177.
Said Halim Paşa, Mehmed Ali's grandson and the Ottoman grand vizier from 1913 to 1916, argued that religion was never an obstacle to progress, whether Christianity in Europe, Buddhism in Japan, or Islam in Muslim civilization.
61 Muhammad (Said Halim), İnhitat-ı İslam Hakkında Bir Tecrübe-i Kalemiye (Istanbul, 1918), 10, as quoted in Berkes, Development of Secularism, 349.
Musa Kazım, an
ālim who became Şeyhül-İslam, also suggested that, “by taking the Japanese as our model, to acquire [industry, techniques, and sciences] from Europe with the utmost speed while avoiding imitation of European customs, morals, and mode of living” would lead to a rejuvenated empire.
62 Musa Kazım, Sırat-ı Mustakim, vol. 7, 1908, as quoted in Berkes, Development of Secularism, 360.
Second, Ottoman education was to be based on this proper assimilation of Eastern values and Western science. Islamic modernists lobbied for compulsory “national education” like that in Japan, which they defined as a mixture of received, inculcated indigenous Japanese tradition, a cult of sacrifice for the emperor, and Western technical and administrative methods to produce a modern society of patriotic citizens.
63 Edhem Nejat, “Japonya'da Mektepler,” Sırat-ı Mustakim 6 (April 1327/1911): 107: “[w]hen the Japanese started to take a step toward progress, they paid attention firstly to schools and to national education…. Japan's schools give serious consideration to ethics and national morality more than anything else. In the schools, national education, adopted as a basis and mixed with the preferred practices of the West, is given with extraordinary regard to children who will take the future into their hands.”
The aim of Japanese educators was to exert great efforts to bring forth “a national spirit, a national idea,” a task that required committed teachers as well as fiscal support from the government (which it got).
64 Ahmed Münir, “Darül-Fünunun Otuzuncu Sene-yi Devriye Merasimi,” Sebilürreşat 11 (November 1329/1913): 219–20, on the anniversary celebration of Waseda University, where he attended school. Münir was the son of Abdürreşid İbrahim whose education was paid for by the Japanese Black Dragon Society (Kokuryukai).
Japan, in “manifesting for us, its Eastern comrades, primary schools and compulsory education, it will urge us to think [to do the same],” said one Ottoman writer.
65 Nejat, “Japonya'da Mektepler,” 107.
Religiously minded and secular Ottoman elites presumed that the empire would be liberated from any contradiction between the preservation of indigenous culture (however differently they defined it) and the implementation of Western modernizing practices with their wise guidance.66
They would follow Japan, which “endeavored to imitate European civilization and its administrative procedures, but according to their national character” (emphasis added): Ebüzziya Tevfik, “Japon,” Mecmua-yi Ebüzziya, vol. 6, October–November 1881, 181; emphasis added.
Islamic modernists contributing to
Sırat-ı Mustakim believed that a nation's essential religious character did not have to be lost when it absorbed Western principles and would assist in the filtering out of harmful European influences. This group and its ideology became politically subordinate in the second constitutional period to radical Young Turk secularists such as Abdullah Cevdet, who subscribed to socio-evolutionary determinants of culture above and beyond religion. Respecting the Meiji oligarchy's choice to discard Japanese tradition, he and his cohorts hoped that Ottoman society would be able similarly to shed superstitious (Islamic) belief as the empire modernized.
Provincial Arabs with Islamist or secularist orientations toward the prospect of modernity shared a common concern with the Islamists mentioned earlier. Arab journalists and activists in Syria and Lebanon, many of whom initially supported the CUP, were optimistic about the prospect of a parliamentary future. But they perceived certain Ottoman judicial and educational policies as discriminating along ethnic lines. They felt that this demonstrated not only the CUP's disregard for Islamic civilization as an Arab legacy and what should be the special place of the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire as descendants of Islam's pious ancestors (al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ), but also the CUP's misrepresentation of the egalitarian constitutional principles for which the revolution was believed to have been originally intended.67
See Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks, on “Turkification” policies and the circumstances surrounding relations between the provincial Arab population and the CUP regime.
Japanese images soon resonated in the burgeoning Arabic press as subtle criticisms of Ottoman CUP rule.
68 A more thorough exploration of Japanese images in the Arabic political press of the provinces after the 1908 revolution will appear in my article, “Japan's Progress Reified: Modernity and Arab Dissent in the Ottoman Empire,” Princeton Papers Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (forthcoming).
As a fundamental component of modern nationhood, Arab writers compared Japanese deference toward ancestral traditions to the Ottomans' need to respect their Arabo-Islamic cultural heritage; Arab Muslims and Christians defined Arab identity as primarily a function of this culture and not of racial ethnicity at this time. Viewing Unionist governing strategies as an assault on Ottomanist and Arabist “national” affiliations, they proceeded to elucidate how Japan had succeeded in acquiring modern civilization, whereas the Ottoman Empire in the hands of the CUP had failed. These critiques continued to appear in the Arabic press as late as 1916, as was illustrated by the Arab Christian periodical
al-Muqtataf in its defense of the Arab Revolt during World War I:
When the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress undertook the reinstatement of parliament without bloodshed, it appeared that we obtained what we had hoped for and that a state had arisen in the Near East like Japan in the Far East. This belief remained firmly affixed to our souls to the point of blotting out the deeds of this Committee, being in a perpetual state of egoism and arrogance, [believing] it did not commit any reprehensible acts…. The Arabs now arose and their objective is to restore the glory of their ancestors and construct a mighty Arab state; we see that we are reinstituting some of what we mentioned previously about Japan for the purpose of guiding them in the means of establishing this state and reclaiming that glory.69
“Kayf Qamat al-Yaban,” al-Muqtataf 49 (October 1916): 369. The closing remarks justify a national mission: “[t]he Turks disappointed our faith in them although we considered them nearer than the Japanese to progressing along the lines of a constitutional state, so will the Arabs cultivate [it] more than them if complete independence is achieved? That is to say, can a mighty constitutional Arab state arise in the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, and Iraq, and does this state include the lands of Egypt? The glory of the Arabs must be reclaimed by it; without that, there will be political and social obstacles and we will not be empowered to surmount them.”
The cycle of the alienated versus those commanding political power, reflected through deployment of a Japanese trope to demand recognition, had come full circle.
THE INTERNATIONAL ARENA: REVERSING THE HIERARCHY OF NATIONS
The Japanese nation provided a pattern for cultural, social, and political advancement to many Ottoman elites who applied this prospect to the relationships between political authority and subordinate, and between colonizer and colonized.70
Interest in the societal position of the woman and her relationship to the nation's welfare was flourishing worldwide when some writers propagated the idea of a “superior” Japanese morality embodied in the female gender. Articles appeared in Ottoman (Turkish and Arabic) and Egyptian journals and newspapers portraying the Japanese woman as patriot and educator of the next generation of Japanese citizens, suggesting a possible course of action for women in Islamic society. Ironically, the very discourse used to support the claims of a subordinate group (the East, Young Turk exiles, Ottoman Arabs, or Egyptians) against control by a dominant one (Europe, Sultan Abdülhamid II, the Unionist regime, or the British) ultimately legitimated the continued existence of an overarching patriarchy that would maintain the woman's status as manager of the household and teacher of children. Claiming these tasks to be her patriotic duties to the nation, the woman's societal role was thus defined as outside of the public, political sphere. Elites' use of Japanese images in these discussions retained the subordination of women within the larger Ottoman or Egyptian social frameworks even as they argued to liberate them from underprivileged status by lifting the “veil of ignorance.” See Renée Worringer, “Japan as Archetype: Arab Nationalist Considerations as Reflected in the Press, 1887–1920,” paper presented at the Middle Eastern Studies Association, 1995. This gender-related phenomenon deserves further study.
In addition to suggesting modernizing state structures and societal mechanisms to create a patriotic, educated citizenry, Ottoman representations of the Japanese were intimately connected to finding a place for the empire in the modern world somewhere between Europe and Asia. Pan-Asian solidarity was a timely response constructed to answer the temporal Western challenge on the ground. Japan had seemingly reversed the predominant racial-cultural hierarchy that placed Europeans above non–Europeans in the global order. In the 19th century, an overarching relational view, both spatial and temporal, polarized the world into two spheres of fictive totality that we have inaccurately come to call “West” and “East” (or “the West” and “the Rest”).
71 See Harry Harootunian, History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), on the false classification of societies as if “East” and “West” contained complete uniformities of nations. Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), suggests how historians might proceed to revise the resultant assumptions of linear development.
It was a relationship between Self and Other, Occident and Orient, civilized and backward, as Edward Said has described.
72 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). Sadiq Jalal al-
Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin 8 (1981): 366–67, expanded on Said's work to describe a “persistent belief that there is a radical ontological difference between the natures of the Orient and the Occident—that is, between the essential natures of Eastern and Western societies, cultures, and peoples involving…emanations from a certain enduring Oriental (or Islamic) cultural, psychic, or racial essence, as the case may be, bearing identifiable fundamental and unchanging attributes.” He called it a-historical, anti-human, anti-historical ontological Orientalism.
The Ottoman writers mentioned earlier acknowledged these non-neutral, binary categories, with their attached 19th-century implications, including Middle Easterners' lower status on the evolutionary ladder. But to them it was a current, alterable, and even reversible power arrangement. At a critical historical moment at century's end, Japan had burst on the scene out of what was called the Far East (East Asia's assumed spatial dynamic with Europe) to supply the Ottomans with a detour around their present place as inferiors to Europeans in race, civilization, and progress as these were defined by Western scientific materialism and social Darwinian thought. The resulting discourse in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic (as well as in other Asian vernaculars
73 See Roxane Haag-Higuchi, “A Topos and Its Dissolution: Japan in Some 20th Century Iranian Texts,” Iranian Studies 29 (1996): 71–83; Anja Pistor-Hatam, “Progress and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Japan: The Far Eastern State as a Model for Modernization,” Iranian Studies 29 (1996): 111–26; R. P. Dua, The Impact of the Russo-Japanese (1905) War on Indian Politics (New Delhi: S. Chand, 1966); M. Krása, “The Idea of Pan-Asianism and the Nationalist Movement in India,” Archiv Orientální 40 (1972): 238–60; T. A. Keenleyside, “Nationalist Indian Attitudes Towards Asia: A Troublesome Legacy for Post-Independence Indian Foreign Policy,” Pacific Affairs 55 (1982): 210–30; Michael Laffan, “Watan and Negeri: Mustafa Kamil's ‘Rising Sun’ in the Malay World,” Indonesia Circle 69 (1996): 157–75; Akira Iriye, ed., The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980); David Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism (Berkeley: Center for South Asian Studies, 1971).
) can be described only as a Pan-Asian affinity among Ottoman thinkers from diverse backgrounds who embraced a new-found association with other Asians, and especially with the Japanese, as the “Easterners” who had successfully breached the Concert of Europe—who had modernized and reformed while seemingly preserving native Japanese heritage. Victory in the Russo-Japanese War took on symbolic proportions in the writings of vocal journalists, as a reversal of the racial-civilizational pecking order appeared to be at hand:
[s]ome Europeans and some Ottomans who imitate whatever they see without understanding, consider us a race in the lower part of the racial hierarchy. Let us say it in plain Turkish: they regard the Turks as second class human beings. Japanese people, being of the stock of the yellow race, are annihilating the slander against nature with the progress in their country and with their cannons and rifles in Manchuria.74
“Me'yus Olmalı Mıyız (?)” Şura-yı Ümmet 62 (24 October 1904): 1, as quoted in Hanioǧlu, Young Turks in Opposition, 210.
Japanese civilization, the best assimilation of Eastern spirit with Western material values, moved beyond that of Europe to become the superior form. As the Young Turk exile and activist in Paris Ahmed Rıza pointed out in 1905 in his French supplement to the CUP political journal
Meşveret,
There are multiple well-merited lessons that the war permitted the Japanese to give to the “superior races.”… One cannot doubt the preeminence of the social and political institutions of Japan, a so-called inferior race by most of those peoples upon whom the patent of superiority is conferred. The splendid victory of the Japanese has proved the Christian world arrogant; that it is not indispensable for a people to embrace Christianity in order to acquire morality, civilization, and an aptitude for progress…. Likewise events of the Far East have put forth evidence of the uselessness of interventions, frequent if pernicious, of Europe for reforming a people. On the contrary, the more isolated and preserved from contact with European invaders and plunderers a people is, the better is the measure of [its] evolution toward a rational renovation.75
Ahmed Rıza, “La le
on d'une guerre,” Mechveret Supplément Français 169 (1 November 1905): 2.
Set against the prospect of Western imperialism, the ethnic, religious, linguistic, and class distinctions among members of Ottoman society causing variation in how certain characteristics were mapped onto the image of Japan get subsumed under the rubric of a broader identification with one another as fellow Asians connected to a larger “East.” In other words, however Ottoman citizens may have differed with one another on other levels, their interpretation of and association with the Japanese model bridged horizontal and vertical societal groupings so that they could be said to have conjured a shared identity as “Asians,” in contradistinction to “Europeans,” in this historical moment.
76 The exceptions to this Pan-Eastern identification are the Balkan Christians, who, identifying themselves more strongly as Europeans, sympathized with Slavic, Orthodox Russia during the war.
The list of examples is impressive in its diversity and scope: the secular, anti-religious Young Turk exile and writer Abdullah Cevdet frequently wrote in awe of the Japanese “high civilizing mission in Asia,” so that Japan was the carrier “of the sword, for the oppressors, for the insolent invaders; the torch for the oppressed, for those that shine unto themselves.”
77 “Le Japon porteur de flambeau,” İctihad 5 (April 1905): 77. Abdullah Cevdet regularly printed articles about Japan in İ
tihad.
Ottoman Ministry of War official and Sufi Aşçı Dede İbrahim Halil was “excited by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905” to the point that “he felt called to pray for the Japanese, and even came to believe he was their ‘spiritual commander.’”
78 Aşçı Dede İbrahim Halil, Risale-i Tercüme-i Ahval-i Aşçı Dede-i Nakşi-Mevlevi, Tercüme-i Hali III, Istanbul University Library, 852 foll., mss. TY80 (3511–12), 348, 360. From Carter Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 184.
The Young Turk paper
Balkan reiterated “the Turks' affection and good will toward the Japanese”
79 “Japonlarla Türkler,” Balkan 30 (4 September 1906): 2. The article is translated from the Russian paper Videmst and reprinted from Vakit.
; while in Cairo, the Syrian Christian émigré Jurji Zaydan wrote in
al-Hilal of Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi as a role model for Easterners, “with his desire to acquire principles of modern civilization, to emulate advanced [peoples'] refinement, and to attract his fellow countrymen to its acquisition.”
80 “Al-Imbaraturani al-Mutaharibani,” al-Hilal, 1 March 1904, 334.
A writer for the Francophile Cairo daily newspaper
al-Ahram, owned by the Christian Taqla brothers, pointed out how Japan had advanced “until in a short time it hit the apex of civilization, refinement, prosperity, might, glory and political power. It seems to me that now it has become a missionary to nations of the East and a preacher to us.”
81Ata Husni, “al-Nahda al-Sharqiyya,” al-Ahram, 5 October 1904, 1.
Faris Nimr and Ya
qub Sarruf, the Christian editors of the Arabic scientific monthly in Cairo al-Muqtataf, echoed this reverence for Japan regularly in articles between 1886 and 1912, sharing their opinions of Japan with Egyptian and Syrian Muslim journalists generally while participating in heated debates with them over other issues in the pages of their respective presses. A Syrian Arab political activist elected to the Ottoman Parliament in 1911, Shukri al-
Asali also confessed his solidarity with the East in a manner that included not just Asia, but also Africa.
82 Shukri al-
Asali, “Nazra fi al-Sharq,” al-Muqtabas, 25 July 1910.
Popular poetry eulogizing Japan and its defeat of Russia by the noted poet Hafiz Ibrahim (and others) was memorized and recited in public by schoolchildren and adults.
83 See Hideaki Sugita, “Japan and the Japanese as Depicted in Modern Arabic Literature,” Studies of Comparative Culture 27 (1989): 21–40; and Worringer, “Comparing Perceptions,” for more information about Japan's image in popular literature.
Political exile or member of Ottoman governing circles, Christian or Muslim, Turk, Syrian Arab, or Egyptian, secularist or Islamic modernist—all concurred in their affinity for and solidarity with Japan.
The attachment to a Japan model was not without complication, however. The European-oriented Ottoman elites who eventually dominated the CUP considered themselves to be the most suitable individuals to lead the empire into a modernity defined primarily by Western concepts. They were the most keenly aware of Europe's condescension, and they most openly acknowledged their current “lesser” status in the world order. This very recognition caused them to have “turned Eastward” in their expressions of hope for the Ottoman future. But they had no intention of remaining in the ranks of what they viewed as a backward “East.” Their ultimate goal was to stop the empire's pending dissolution, rewriting what looked to be the gloomy future before them, to “reenter the West” as equals after having modernized to the appropriate degree following the Japanese blueprint.
These Ottomans, connecting themselves to heroic Japan as an escape route from their own ominous future, were obligated to engage in a process of disavowal: they attempted to momentarily turn their back on their own history, that history deeply implicated within Europe since the 15th century and containing the present circumstances, to face the “East,” the non–West in which Japan resided and that previously had not been known or contemplated.84
This is reminiscent of Chinese nationalists who found themselves spatially shifted to a “periphery” in the late 19th century after discovering that their notion of China's primacy in the world as the Middle Kingdom had been destabilized, the political-economic center having now become Europe. See Rebecca Karl, Secret Sharers: Chinese Nationalism and the Non-Western World at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, Durham, N.C., 1995), and idem “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 1096–1118. China found this a crowded periphery, misnamed “Asia” (non–Asians were to be found there, as well). In this space Chinese nationalists came to a new understanding of themselves and the modern world in association with others of the “non–West.” China chose to stay in the non–Western sphere.
But the Ottomans were inheritors of more than a millennium of history between Islamic civilization and Christendom, which made their link to Europe more complex. Both entities had engaged in a symbiosis for centuries that defined the connection between, as well as the distinct spatial-cultural spheres for, the Ottoman Empire and Europe in the modern era. Each side had endured tensions and rivalries, conflicts and competitions that were integral to forming a sense of Self as determined by its Other. This was not a recent phenomenon. Unlike a newly discovered peripheral space, it was not a historical anomaly for the Ottoman Empire to have located itself abstractly on Europe's “exterior”—it had already been an “outsider” there as much as Christian Europe had been “outside” the Ottoman Islamic sphere. It was a binary with historical roots. Given the changed power balance between the Ottoman Empire and Europe from the 17th century onward, Ottoman failures against European challenges set in motion the desire to repress or displace this history in favor of one that would give the empire a second chance to reclaim the triumphs of its Ottoman Islamic past. At this moment in the 19th century, the Ottomans were forced ideologically to deny their own place in and history with Europe in favor of a more appealing popular fiction labeled “Pan-Asianism.” In spatial terms, they attempted to migrate farther from Europe to escape the present reality, plunging themselves deeper into the expanse of the “Other,” now denoted as “East” by Europe and the non–Western world alike. Japan represented the best innovations born of this amorphous collective.
A choice was made here—a “glance East,” as it was literally expressed in Ottoman and Arabic sources—to recognize and inhabit (if only temporarily) a new space in which the Japanese currently resided or one in which it used to reside until it departed to join Europe.85
See Stefan Tanaka, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), for Japan's late-19th-century reformulation of Asia as Toyoshi, a new configuration in which Japan was separated from a now-backward China, or Shina. The journalist and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi coined phrases describing Japan as having “left Asia” to “enter the West.”
What is extraordinary is not just that the Westernizing Ottoman elites realigned themselves away from a familiar Europe and toward a distant and foreign “Orient,” but the degree to which they attached to this “East” outside “West,” and how far they would extend that relationship—to the point of embracing very alien Japan. For Islamists who did so, the dilemma of Japan's non–Muslim character was resolved through the propagation of the far-fetched dream that the Japanese emperor and people were about to convert to Islam any minute, causing Pan-Eastern, Pan-Asian affinity to converge with Pan-Islamism and thus complete a fantasy of evolution into the ultimate “East.” Nevertheless, the Ottomans' protracted history with Europe was precisely what forbade them from entirely submerging themselves into the “East” and remaining there indefinitely. Ottoman historical reciprocity with Christendom, and thus the Ottoman attraction to Western social thought, ultimately did not allow them to sever themselves completely from Europe. Instead, this reciprocity obligated the Ottomans to discover and implement a modernity that, while having appeared out of an “Eastern” space, would be functional within that of the “Western” one. In this, Japan would operate as their tutor and mediator for involvement with Europe, for it had survived, modernized, and accomplished the most visible signs of acceptance as a Great Power. The Ottoman Empire was merely to follow in Japan's footsteps to eventually exit from Asia after having redeemed its past.
The Ottomans who idealized Japan implicitly accepted the notion of an ontologically divided world of Orient and Occident. They tried to engineer an inversion of power between the two while remaining committed to certain Western definitions of “progress” and “civilization.” But their faith in 19th-century Western science resulted in the Ottoman Empire's remaining a shadow of the European original because the underlying principle of inequity in the binary structure ended up recuperated. Western-oriented elites assumed that Japan had become a modern, independent, secular, capitalist nation-state through a process of self-preserving social Darwinian selectivity that allowed Japan to carefully extract and absorb Western science and technology. They would replicate this process. The lingering problematic for them was Europe's declaration of superiority based on having determined modern civilization first, thus claiming modernity as a Western cultural possession. The Islamist counter-claim demanded that true modernization could be accomplished only by avoiding the adoption of harmful European cultural byproducts. Japan's fundamental “Eastern” ethics and morality were presumed to have been preserved as it modernized, rendering the Ottoman potential to do the same vis-à-vis Islam a viable possibility. For both secular Westernizers and Islamists, Japan had altered the fortunes of all of Asia by repositioning the “East” in a superior place within the hierarchy.
86 Al-
Azm, “Orientalism,” 368–69, characterizes this as ontological Orientalism in reverse in that “the Orientalist essentialistic ontology has been reversed to favour one specific people of the Orient…proving the ontological superiority of the Oriental mind over the Occidental one.” Partha Chatterjee describes the attempt as deeply contradictory: “[i]t is imitative in that it accepts the value of the standards set by the alien culture. But it also involves rejection…of the alien intruder and dominator who is nevertheless to be imitated…and rejection of ancestral ways which are seen as obstacles to progress and yet also cherished as marks of identity”: see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 2.
The Lebanese journal
al-
Irfan passionately expressed this reordering of Oriental and Occidental categories in 1910, using the oft-repeated metaphor of the rising and setting sun to favor the East:
Westerners, their sun inclined to set due to natural law, and Easterners enjoying a perpetual radiance in their pure lands…. Easterners have a deep-rooted past. Civilization developed and reaped the fruits of its harvest in their lands and in the East today remains this civilization and progress—what Westerners reached in comparison with it is confusing and baffling, yet most of it had been achieved more than a thousand years ago! And these priceless vestiges are sufficient alone to indicate the complete predisposition of Easterners for progress.87
Muhammad
Ali, “Mustaqbal al-Sharq,” al-
Irfan, 5 October 1910, 401.
Japan had already proved it. The Ottomans would, they believed, in a short time demonstrate the same capacity, earning the empire a secure, respected, and sovereign place in the global hierarchy.
To answer the questions posed at the beginning of this paper, the Ottoman sultan, Ottoman statesmen, political activists, journalists, and nationalists (and at times the average citizen) found it indispensable to repress current historical circumstances regarding Europe to create a second chance—a chance to repackage themselves based on a Japanese model of modernity that incorporated “Western” knowledge while preserving that ambiguous quality known as “Eastern essence.” The Japanese trope was intended to mediate Ottoman involvement with the West to insure an eventual and successful (re-)entry into this space. Japan's believed retention of the true self and its survival as an Asian nation showed that it had not sacrificed any unique ancestral rites and culture as it absorbed the latest in technology and governing institutions. The Ottoman attempt at a similar transformation was thus rendered possible. As a reflection of that process, Ottomans caught up in the collapse of the empire's former structures were attempting to retain the practical aspects of Ottoman Islamic administrative procedures and received Muslim societal norms while reforming the Ottoman nation in its variously conceived forms according to Western knowledge.
The historical analogy of Japan set a standard for “Eastern” modernity, yet the analogy itself was often determined by political expediency or by those with a specific agenda. Japan was refigured whenever necessary to conform to an assortment of ideological criteria concerning modernization by Ottoman observers whose religious, racial, educational, and socio-economic backgrounds varied, as did their relationships to both Europe and to the Ottoman governing center. Regardless of these differences, however, they shared a perception of Japan as equivalent to some irreducible definition of modernity—that of being “Eastern,” patriotic, and technologically advanced—that transgressed Ottoman vertical (class) distinctions as well as the horizontal (regional, ethno-linguistic, religious) ones. The relative singularity of this Japanese representation indicated that a larger, Pan-Asian “Easternism” influenced the thought of peoples within the borders of the empire at the turn of the century above and beyond previous forms of identification that had dictated relationships in and outside it for centuries. It was a way in which to operate, to identify, and to cope in a new world perceived as irreconcilably divided between “East” and “West,” between traditional and modern, between backward and enlightened.
At the same time, different communities in the Ottoman Empire and their ambitions for a national future really could be said to have been “imagined” in particularistic ways. In seeking a new ideology to unite the empire, members of Ottoman society looked to the “East,” to the nation of modern Japan, to better define themselves. Inevitably, they also clarified their internal differences in the process. Ottomanism retained inclusive sentiments toward citizens of the polity; the post–1908 CUP notion of empire necessitated more exclusive connotations of community. The Young Turk Unionists laid claim to an understanding of “progress” and “civilization” through their usurpation of the modern Japanese metaphor, which they defined as the constitutional, secular, scientific, capitalist, and racially unified “Eastern” nation. They, as Ottoman elites, assumed that they were the most capable of initiating the move toward modernity, captured so eloquently in the motif of the “Sick Man of Europe” becoming the “Japan of the Near East.”
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