Japanese Knowledge about Islam and the Qur'ān up to the 1930s

Historical Japanese contacts with Muslims or Islamic countries prior to the twentieth century were sparse, to say the least. Despite possible earlier contacts with Muslims in China, Islam was not consciously described in Japanese sources until Arai Hakuseki's Seiyō kibun 西洋紀聞 (Tidings from the West) of 1715, and knowledge about Islam remained sketchy until the middle of the nineteenth century (Komura 1988, 32–35). Even after that, interest in Islam only slowly gained pace. The first biography of Muhammad was translated in 1876—albeit the antiquated and polemic Life of Mohamet by Humphrey Prideaux, written in 1697. The first original biographies of Muhammad in Japanese were penned in 1899 and 1905; they were followed by the first academic articles on the Qur'ān after 1905 and the first monograph exclusively devoted to Islam in 1918. The 1899 biography of Muhammad was authored by Sakamoto Ken'ichi 坂本健一, who was also the first Japanese to translate the Qur'ān in 1920 (Sakamoto 1920). He did not, however, translate from the Arabic original, but rather from existing European translations. Not only did Sakamoto not read Arabic, he was also no expert in the Arab world. Instead, he had published several works on European history of note and was particularly well known for his 2,500-page World History (Sekai shi 世界史), published from 1903 to 1905. His primary motive may have been to introduce Muhammad as a figure of world history to the Japanese public. In his 1899 biography, Sakamoto literally called Muhammad a hero who carried the Qur'ān in his left hand and a sword in his right hand. This kind of image of Muhammad was first introduced in Japan through Thomas Carlyle's 1841 Hero Worship, which was translated into Japanese no fewer than three times in the course of the 1890s.

Sakamoto's Qur'ān translation appeared as volumes 14 and 15 of a series entitled “Complete Collection of Holy Scriptures of the World” (Sekai seiten zenshū 世界聖典全集), a series that also included the foundational texts of other Asian and European religions. Clearly, the aim of the series was to provide the educated Japanese middle class with knowledge about the (religious) world. This attitude is reflected to some degree in the choices Sakamoto made for the actual translation. It seems that he was careful to avoid resorting to a vocabulary that would have been tainted by clear association with preexisting Japanese religions. He preferred secular terms for theologically rich concepts, such as tokusha 特赦 (“amnesty”) for faḍl (“grace”) or jōtei 上帝 (“Emperor”) for rabb (“Lord”).Footnote ³ Unlike the majority of his successors, Sakamoto also universalized Allāh by translating it as kami 神, which had by Sakamoto's times become the standard term for the Christian God among Japanese Protestants, but also referred to Shintō deities.Footnote ⁴

Shintōist Appropriations of Islam

A second edition of the Sakamoto translation was published in 1929–30, at the beginning of the increase in interest in Islam described above. While this blossoming interest in Islam was made possible by powerful political and economic interest groups, its main carriers were Japanese who had been active for the cause of Islam since much earlier. Three of these key figures were Yamaoka Mitsutarō, Tanaka Ippei, and Ariga Amado, all of whom had more than just a political or strategic interest in Islam.

Yamaoka Mitsutarō 山岡光太郎 (1880–1959) is known as the first Japanese hajji, having completed his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1909. Yamaoka, about whose early life little is known, came into contact with Islam as a member of the pan-Asianist political association Kokuryūkai 黒龍会, which was founded in 1901 and went on to become the most influential Japanese organization advocating a “Greater Asianism” against the “threat of the White people.” As part of its wide-ranging activities, the Kokuryūkai arranged an extended visit to Japan by the Russian Tatar Abdürreşid İbrahim (1853–1944) in 1908–9, and it was İbrahim who convinced Yamaoka to adopt the Islamic faith. İbrahim was both a cleric (he became first imam of the new Tokyo mosque in 1938) and a political activist, who continued to maintain close ties to military and secret service circles in Japan until his death in 1944. Parallel to his diplomatic and political endeavors, he believed in the advisability and feasibility of the Islamic conversion of Japan, and he took it upon himself to individually convert Japanese.Footnote ⁵

Yamaoka would remain a close ally of İbrahim and work for the pan-Asian cause in China, the country with a sizable Muslim population that was politically most important to Japan. As is typical for much of Islam-oriented Japanese pan-Asianism, however, Yamaoka was not content with mere political maneuvering but also had a religious vision of Muslim-Japanese cooperation, a vision which he formulated shortly after his hajj in the preface to his travel book A Mirror of the World's Mysteries: A Record of Crossing Arabia (Sekai no shinpikyō: Arabiya jūdanki 世界乃神秘鏡アラビヤ縦断記, 1912):

Yamaoka's views on the proximity of Shintō and Islam were shared by his close friend Tanaka Ippei 田中逸平 (1882–1934), who would, however, also develop his own view of the place of Islam in Japan's religious landscape.Footnote ⁶ Tanaka was a member of the first graduating class at Taiwan kyōkai gakkō 台湾協会学校, better known by its later name Colonial University (Takushoku Daigaku 拓殖大学), in 1903. Thus prepared for life on the continent, he spent the next twenty years in China, where he became acquainted with Islam, eventually converting in 1924. Throughout the 1920s, until his early death in 1934, Tanaka combined the life of a pan-Asian political activist, working on the ground in China, with that of a scholar, teaching and lecturing at academies in Tokyo and throughout Japan.

Having witnessed in China syncretism between Confucianism and Islam, Tanaka became convinced that Shintō would be an even better ground to form a synthesis with Islam, a view he advocated forcefully even before his conversion to Islam in his 1920 essay “The Future of the Problem of Islam in China and the Shintō of Our Imperial Nation” (Shina Kaikyō mondai no shōrai to kōkoku Shintō 支那回教問題の将来と皇国神道):

Different from Yamaoka, Tanaka identified Allah with the Shintō deity Amenominakanushi later in 1925 (Mori Reference Kenkyūkai2009, 107). Tanaka was surely aware of the precedents of Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) and Ōkuni Takamasa (1793–1871), the prominent nineteenth-century nativist scholars, who had both postulated Amenominakanushi as a monotheistic deity, drawing on the knowledge of Christianity available to them (Breen Reference Breen, McMullen and Kornicki1996; Devine Reference Devine1981). Amenominakanushi lends itself to this kind of portrayal, as it is mentioned as the first “solitary” deity in the Kojiki 古事記, Japan's oldest book of myths, has no gender, and immediately hides itself, not to be mentioned again. More broadly, Tanaka was convinced that Islam, as he understood it, was compatible with “the Japanese spirit,” and it was here that he was able to link his religious mission with his political vision, as he articulated it in his 1925 essay series “Islam and Greater Asianism” (Isureamu to dai Ajia shugi イスレアムと大亜細亜主義):

Towards the end of his life, Tanaka broadened the scope of his religious synthesis even further. In 1931, he founded the Five One Association (Go-Ichi-Kai 五一会) with the declared aim to promote the unity of the Great Way (daidō 大道) consisting of Shintō, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. He called upon a shared consciousness of victimization by the West, but at the same time stressed what he considered the strength of Eastern religiosity vis-à-vis the modern West, namely its anti-materialism. This he found ideally embodied in Islam. The traditional Japanese spirit could be strengthened by adopting Islam; the Japanese culture of religious syncretism meant that there were no serious obstacles to adopting that creed (Tsubouchi 2001, 15, 20–22).

These obstacles were felt much more keenly by Ariga Amado 有賀阿馬土, another Japanese Muslim, who was also to be the co-translator and main force behind the second translation of the Qur'ān into Japanese (Takahashi and Ariga 1938). This translation, co-authored with Takahashi Gorō 高橋五郎, was published in 1938, arguably a peak year of Islam-related activities in Japan, marked by the opening of the Tokyo mosque, the start of the Foreign Ministry journal Situation of Islam, and the founding of the East Asia Research Institute within the Cabinet Planning Board.

This heightened interest of the government, already referred to above, was transparently motivated by geopolitical concerns, which became more acute as the war in East Asia expanded. It was basically an expression of political preparations for integrating Muslims into the “Greater Japanese Empire.” Both major military strategies proposed during the 1930s, that of the army, aiming at the continent, and that of the navy, aimed at Southeast Asia, went hand in hand with the expectation of encountering numerous Muslims in the areas to be conquered: either in northwestern China (today's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China) or in the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia), on the Malay Peninsula, and in parts of British India. These expectations kicked off research generously sponsored by the Japanese government and also political overtures to Islamic countries, the most transparent one being the attempt to include Islam in the 1940 Religious Corporations Law (Shūkyō Dantai Hō 宗教団体法) as one of Japan's officially recognized religions next to Sect Shintō, Buddhism, and Christianity. Although Islam was eventually left out of the law, the debate about it in the Imperial Diet shows what steps the government was willing to take to make a purely diplomatic point.Footnote ⁷ Islam was in fact included as an equal partner, next to the three established religions, in the Religious Alliance for the Development of Asia (Kōa Shūkyō Dōmei 興亜宗教同盟), founded in 1942 in order to whip up support for the government's war efforts among members of the large religious organizations (Hara 1997, 283–84).

It was in the midst of this heightened official interest in Islam that Takahashi Gorō and Ariga Amado published their translation of the Qur'ān, entitled The Holy Koran: The Scripture of Islam (Sei Kōrankyō: Isuramu kyōten 聖香蘭経:イスラム教典). As the title implies, this translation was quite different from the one authored by Sakamoto eighteen years earlier, in that it was directed toward believers. It is thus surprising that the man whose name is given as the first of the two translators was actually a prominent Christian. Takahashi Gorō (1856–1935) had been baptized in 1876 and had participated in the first interdenominational translation of the New Testament, realized between 1874 and 1879 under the auspices of the American Bible Society. Takahashi was also involved in the first Catholic translation of the four gospels, undertaken from 1895 to 1897 (Schneider Reference Schneider and Mullins2003, 210, 217).

Takahashi was a prolific translator working with various European languages, producing Japanese versions of the works of Goethe, Francis Bacon, Thomas Carlyle, and Montaigne. He was also known as a vocal Christian essayist, taking sides in the debate on education and religion instigated by Inoue Tetsujirō 井上哲次郎 in 1893 (Thelle Reference Thelle1987, 127, 130–31). How did the prominent Christian Takahashi become involved in an effort to translate the Qur'ān? He had taken on a contract job, initiated by the person given as his co-translator in the eventual publication, Ariga Amado, who remarked in an essay in 1933:

Ariga Amado (1868–1946) was born Ariga Bunhachirō 有賀文八郎 and took on the first name Amado—a Japanized reading of “Ahmad”—when he converted to Islam.Footnote ⁸ Like his co-translator, Ariga had become a Christian in early life, at about the age of twenty, when he was an elementary school teacher. At age twenty-five, however, he quit that job to become a foreign trade representative of a Japanese company in Mumbai, where he encountered Islam. He converted sometime before 1928 when he withdrew from business at the age of sixty and decided to devote the rest of his life to doing missionary work for Islam in Japan. He played an active role in the construction of the three mosques in Nagoya, Kōbe, and Tokyo and also published several pamphlets to further Japanese understanding of Islam, bearing the publication costs out of his own pocket.

As with Yamaoka and Tanaka, Ariga advocated a type of nationalism that was informed by a pan-Asianism that included a sense of religious mission. In 1933, he spelled out a plan detailing how Japan could conquer the world with the help of Islam, a plan that also provided a logical place for a Japanese translation of the Qur'ān. Islam, argued Tanaka, was clearly the best religion for Japan:

The Buddhist principle of nonviolence, continued Ariga, did not match the Japanese national character, nor did the Christian principle of love: “Only our Islam naturally matches the spirit of our nation as it has existed since its foundation because it is a religion that does not yield in battle and does not fear death” (22). Ariga proposed spreading Islam in Japan, necessitating an appropriate Qur'ān translation, and founding an organization of Japanese Muslims, destined to lead the world's Muslim population: “90 percent of these 700 million Muslims are members of the yellow race, and most of them suffer from oppression by the Europeans. . . . In this way, Japan can become the leader of the yellow race, and our Imperial Household the object of veneration of the whole yellow race.” In the coming world war of the yellow against the white race, the former would prevail, upon which “the world will be united under the leadership of our Imperial Household” (22–23).

What is curiously missing in Ariga's diatribe against Buddhist icon worship and ridicule of Christian ethics is a mention of Shintō. Ariga's strategy of accommodation was two-pronged. On the one hand, he downplayed the religious dimension of Shintō by defining it as an essentially areligious cult of venerating the Imperial Household and national heroes, a strategy that was consistent with the fundamental logic of State Shintō. On the other hand, he, like Tanaka before him, identified Allah with Amenominakanushi (24, 29).

Not much of this syncretic effort is visible in the 1938 Qur'ān translation, possibly due to the fact that Shintō simply offers little systematic theology or vocabulary that Ariga could have drawn upon. One curious characteristic of the translation, which is based on earlier European translations, is its choice of ōkami 大神 (“Great God”) for Allāh. Not exactly a very common term in Japanese, ōkami may refer to particularly important Shintō deities, such as the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami 天照大神, whose title of honor bears the same characters. In all likelihood, Ariga was thinking of Amenominakanushi when choosing ōkami to render Allāh, as seems clear from the following argument in a 1938 essay of his: “In our country's Shintō we believe in the Great God Amenominakanushi; this deity is identical to the only God in which we [Muslims] believe. For this reason I think that those people who believe in Amenominakanushi are by nature identical to us believers” (quoted in Rezrazi Reference Rezrazi1997, 110).

While Shintōist readings of Islam and the Qur'ān were thus seriously considered by some prior to 1945, they were certainly not mainstream. Instead, appropriations of Islam colored by a Buddhist understanding of religion were to become more significant in the Japanese cultural context. This is exemplified both before 1945 by Ōkawa Shūmei and after 1945 by Izutsu Toshihiko, to both of whom I will turn in the following two sections.

Ōkawa Shūmei: A Buddhist Appropriation of Islam in the Pan-Asian Context

Ōkawa Shūmei 大川周明 (1886–1957) was without doubt the most influential pan-Asianist thinker and activist in 1930s and wartime Japan. Ōkawa's rise to prominence coincided with a shift in the importance of pan-Asianism, which gradually became official government doctrine and found its fulfillment in the era of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, a euphemism intended to document the communality of interests of all Asians. For Ōkawa, the establishment of the Co-Prosperity Sphere was an incentive to renew a long-standing interest in Islam. As he wrote in the preface to his 1942 Outline of Islam (Kaikyō gairon 回教概論): “Lately it has come about that a great number of Muslims have become part of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, so that knowledge of Islam has become a must for our people” (Ōkawa Shūmei 1942, 13). Although Ōkawa had a marked interest in Islam, his portfolio was in fact much broader.

Ōkawa studied Indian philosophy and religious studies under Anesaki Masaharu, the pioneer of the discipline of religious studies in Japan. Obtaining his degree from the University of Tokyo in 1911 with a thesis on Nāgārjuna, he took up a professorship at Takushoku University, the same school from which Tanaka Ippei had graduated two decades earlier, in 1920. The main base for his manifold activities, however, was the Institute for the Investigation of the Economy of East Asia (Tōa Keizai Chōsa Kyoku 東亜経済調査局; self-designated in English at that time as the East-Asiatic Commercial Intelligence Institute at Tokyo); he became the head of the Institute in 1921. It had been founded as a Tokyo branch of the research division of the South Manchurian Railway Company in 1908, but became independent under Ōkawa's leadership in 1929. The Institute was a veritable think tank under Ōkawa, and most of the figures featuring in the history of Japanese relations with Islam in the 1930s were at one time or another affiliated either with the Institute itself or with the elite academy Zuikōryō 瑞光寮 that Ōkawa founded in 1938 for the training of young Asianists and that was funded by the Army, the Foreign Ministry, and the South Manchurian Railway Company (Tazawa 1998, 131).

Despite his academic background, Ōkawa was less a theoretician than a practical man who did not shy away from involving himself in politics. In fact, he was involved in several coup d'état attempts at the beginning of the 1930s and eventually indicted as a participant in the failed revolt of young officers on May 15, 1932, which led to the death of the prime minister. Sentenced to five years in prison (of which he served only a fraction), Ōkawa remained politically active throughout the 1930s and advanced to become one of the most popular authors of chauvinistic nonfiction books of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Ōkawa's prominence as a leading ultranationalist ensured that he was singled out as the only civilian to face the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946. He was, however, judged not fit to stand trial due to a certified mental illness and moved to a Tokyo facility for the mentally ill. It was while recuperating here that he penned his translation of the Qur'ān, the third complete translation into Japanese (Ōkawa Shūmei 1950).

Ōkawa's interest in Islam, however, was older than his postwar occupation with its holy book or his wartime introduction of its basic tenets to the Japanese people. In his 1951 autobiography, he recounted how he was confronted with the reality of the colonization of Asia in 1913, and how religion seemed to him to offer a way to counter the West's influence in Asia:

Ōkawa's actual engagement with Islam predates this encounter, as he had already published a number of short essays on Islam while he was still enrolled as a student at Tokyo University. As Ōkawa himself intimates, however, his interest in Islam was less of an academic nature. His early Islam-related publications appeared not in academic journals but in the journal of the Nihon kyōkai 日本教会 (later Dōkai 道会), a small syncretic religious association founded by a former Protestant preacher in 1907. Nevertheless, the mainstream opinion among writers on Ōkawa today seems to deny that he had a genuinely religious interest in Islam. This is true not only for recent English-language scholarship, such as Selçuk Esenbel (Reference Esenbel, Saaler and Szpilman2011, 200–201) and Christopher W. Szpilman (Reference Szpilman, Saaler and Szpilman2011, 69–72), but also for Japanese Islamic studies scholars, such as Shimamoto Takamitsu, who holds that while Ōkawa revered Muhammad as a great historical sage, he never went beyond a rational approach to Islam (Shimamoto 2008, 5; see also Sekioka 2007, 44). It is true that Ōkawa himself equated the Qur'ān with Muhammad in the preface to his translation, further clarifying: “The reason for the Koran's greatness is that it faithfully mirrors the character and life of one of the greatest men who have ever breathed on earth” (Ōkawa Shūmei 1950, 2).

At the same time, the unity of Asia was for Ōkawa not merely a political endeavor but had a clearly spiritual dimension, certainly visible in his Qur'ān translation, in which Ōkawa attempted to achieve a curious fusion between West and East Asia.Footnote ¹⁰ Already in the first sura, “The Opening,” where Allāh is characterized as the “Lord of the Worlds,” Ōkawa renders the plural ālamīn as sangai 三界 (“the three worlds”) (see Ōkawa Reiko 2004, 219). While the original refers to the myriad worlds that are made up of parts of the creation over the generations, all of which are subject to Allāh, Ōkawa's term of choice is common in Buddhism (Skt. trailokya) to refer to the entirety of the three realms of saṃsāra, the cycle of birth and death that all beings undergo. The main concern of the category sangai is with karmic improvement, as the three realms (subdivided into further hells, heavens, etc.) are thought to be associated with different stages of enlightenment.

Other terminological choices by Ōkawa seem to reflect the same intention of a Buddhist-inspired reading of the Qur'ān. Thus, Ōkawa translates raḥīm (“merciful”), one of the central attributes of Allāh in the Qur'ān, not with jihi 慈悲 (“mercy”), as the majority of other translators do, but with daiji 大慈 (“great mercy”), a rather rare Buddhist term for a kind of mercy without distinction, thought to be available only to those having achieved Buddhahood. Both ṣadaqat (“alms”) and zakāt (“poor-due”, i.e., obligatory alms) are given as kisha 喜捨 (“joyful relinquishment”), again a term with exclusively Buddhist connotations, and, perhaps most conspicuously, aflaḥa (“to succeed”), a frequent promise to the upright believer in the Qur'ān, is rendered by the rather elaborate phrase hongan seishū 本願成就 (“fulfillment of a bodhisattva's past vows”).

With explicit reference to his Qur'ān translation, the significance of religion for Ōkawa has been judged by some of his contemporaries in a rather different light than in the assessments prevalent today. Maejima Shinji 前嶋信次 (1903–83) and Naitō Chishū 内藤智秀 (1886–1984), both lecturers at Ōkawa's Zuikōryō before 1945 and professors for Islamic studies at Keiō University after the war, respectively attested that Ōkawa wrote his translation “with the same passion and the same religious earnestness as Muhammad once wielded,” and that his work “has great similarity to Luther's first translation of the holy scripture of Christianity into German” (both quoted in Usuki 2010, 127–28). While one motive for these judgments was certainly to deny Ōkawa the status of a serious scholar of Islam, they were at the same time an endorsement of his achievements in the religious field. Attempts to reduce Ōkawa's motives to the political arena overlook how intimately interwoven for him the political was with the religious. Ōkawa's stance has been convincingly summarized by postwar intellectual Hashikawa Bunzō as follows: “Ōkawa had less interest in Islam as an isolated religion, but it was rather his burning desire for a world in which religion and politics are one that led him to Islam” (quoted in Usuki 2008, 144). As Middle East scholar Usuki Akira has pointed out, a high estimation of the close identification of religion and politics was characteristic of the early Ōkawa in the 1920s, and informed by his understanding of the Osman sultanate-caliphate. After the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, however, Ōkawa came to admire Kemal Atatürk's successful efforts at nation-building, the strong secularist overtones of which led Ōkawa to reevaluate the role of Islam vis-à-vis politics. One expression of this new attitude was, according to Usuki, the rather scholarly and apolitical stance of his 1942 Outline of Islam (Usuki 2010, 144, 194, 272–73).

Yet at the same time, Ōkawa still in 1942 referred to Muslims as “a nation” (kokumin 国民) and to the Umma, the spiritual community of Muslims, as “their national territory” (karera no kokudo 彼等の国土) (Ōkawa Shūmei 1942, 1, 8), thus articulating his view of the conflation of politics and religion in Islam. More importantly, within the context of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, Ōkawa's Outline of Islam entailed an appeal not only to treat “the Muslim world” as a geopolitical entity, but also to take Islam seriously as a religion, as a form of spirituality that offered points of connection to the practices more prevalent in Japan. His attempt at a Buddhist rendering of the Qur'ān was his postwar expression of this notion.

Ōkawa's Qur'ān translation was but one sign that an interest in Islam colored by pan-Asianism did not immediately vanish with the end of World War II. Although the wartime official interest in Islam had of course made it much more visible in Japan, for people like Tanaka Ippei or Ariga Amado, mentioned above, or like Mita Ryōichi, to be treated below, who had actually lived in Muslim countries Islam was a lived reality not easily extinguished from their lives, and as such it was able to survive the war. Ōkawa Shūmei, although in one sense the typical theoretician who never left his research bureau in Tokyo, played his part in making possible many of the encounters on the ground through his wide-ranging sponsorship of Japanese Islam-related activities until 1945, and it was indeed partly through Ōkawa's activities that the most eminent Japanese translator of the Qur'ān was able to find an academic foothold in his early career.

Izutsu Toshihiko: A Buddhist Philosophical Reading of the Qur'ān

Another Keiō professor, erstwhile researcher at Ōkawa's Institute for the Investigation of the Economy of East Asia, and lecturer at his Zuikōryō was to publish the fourth complete translation of the Qur'ān into Japanese just seven years after Ōkawa. Not only was Izutsu Toshihiko 井筒俊彦 (1914–93) the foremost Japanese authority on Islam of his generation, but the enormous breadth of his scholarship allowed him to author specialized books on entirely unrelated subjects, such as modern Russian literature, Daoism, and Zen Buddhism. He laid the foundation for his career during the 1930s, when he studied Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Russian along with a few other European languages. His Arabic was in fact self-taught, although he also took private lessons with the Tatar imam and political activist Abdürreşid İbrahim (discussed above) in 1937 (Wakamatsu 2011, 72).

Although Izutsu was employed by Keiō University immediately after his graduation from there in 1937, he had a close working relationship with Ōkawa Shūmei, like many other postwar scholars of Islamic studies. Besides Izutsu and Maejima Shinji, Ōkawa had also successfully enlisted the services of the first two university teachers who started regular classes on Islam at their universities in 1939, Naitō Chishū (at the state-run Tokyo University of Arts and Sciences) and Ōkubo Kōji 大久保幸次 (1888–1949) (at the private Waseda University). Ōkubo was also notable for having co-founded the first, small and short-lived, Japanese research institute on Islam in 1932 (Isuramu bunka kenkyū-jo イスラム文化研究所); heading the first substantial research institute on Islam in 1938 (Kaikyō-ken kenkyū-jo 回教圏研究所); and beginning the first translation of the Qur'ān into Japanese from Arabic in 1941, which was, however, to remain unfinished due to Ōkubo's untimely death in 1949 (Ōkawa Reiko 2004, 208–11).

Instead, it was Izutsu who in 1950 reached an agreement with Japan's most renowned publisher, Iwanami, to produce the first complete Japanese translation of the Qur'ān from the Arabic original. His finished work, published in 1957 and 1958 (Izutsu [1957–58] 1964), was marked by a stylistic novelty: it was the first Japanese Qur'ān to be written in colloquial Japanese (kōgo 口語) instead of the more formal literary Japanese (bungo 文語), previously considered de rigeur for sacred texts.Footnote ¹¹ His terminological choices also reflect a similar conscious attempt at a more neutral or less divinely charged language. Thus, Izutsu elected to translate tauba (“repentance”) as kaishun 改悛 (“contrition”), a word culled from decidedly secular contexts, such as criminal law,Footnote ¹² and aflaḥa (“to succeed”) as eitatsu 栄達 (“worldly success”), a term associated with career advancement.

This tendency towards religious indifference is particularly surprising in light of Izutsu's 1980 claim: “I have never had an interest in objective research on the thought of people to whom I do not have a subjective, existential relationship” (Izutsu 1992, 336). Indeed, since the late 1960s, and particularly during the 1980s, Izutsu not only published specialized studies of Islam-related topics, but also worked on his original large-scale synthesis of religious traditions to which he referred using the umbrella term “Oriental Philosophy” (Tōyō tetsugaku 東洋哲学). In his late philosophy, Izutsu essentially combined Buddhist consciousness philosophy with semantic theory, formulating a three-layered description of consciousness based on the Buddhist Yogācāra tradition. In its East Asian variant, known as Yuishiki 唯識 (“Consciousness Only”) in Japan, the deepest layer of consciousness, “store-house consciousness” (Skt. ālaya), is understood to be the location at which being comes into life and dies. Izutsu reinterpreted this idealistic philosophy semantically, grasping the store-house consciousness as the place where latent meaning based upon human experience comes into being and disappears again; in this model, human languages are nothing but the uppermost, superficial layer of meaning of this deeper structure, and things thus exist not by themselves or before us, but only as the result of the production of meaning in our consciousness (Makino Reference Jalāl al-Din Āshtiyāni1998, 255–57).

The role of Islam in Izutsu's scheme of “Oriental Philosophy” is not entirely clear. On the one hand, Izutsu hardly mentioned Islam in his Eranos Lectures, which he held upon invitation to the annual discussion groups in Ascona, Switzerland, between 1969 and 1982, and where he first sketched his ambitious plan of a philosophical synthesis. Instead, the bulk of his presentations there were devoted to East Asian traditions, especially Mahāyāna Buddhism, and more specifically Zen Buddhism, with Islam only serving the marginal function of providing parallels to the main points he drew from Buddhism. Indeed, a recent introduction to a collection of the papers Izutsu gave at the Eranos meetings does not even mention Islam (Sawai Reference Sawai and Izutsu2008). On the other hand, Islamic studies scholar Ikeuchi Satoshi 池内恵 has pointed out continuities between Izutsu's emphasis on Sufism in his studies of Islam and the way he highlighted mystical elements in his later “Oriental Philosophy”—both, claims Ikeuchi, ultimately rest upon Izutsu's upbringing in a home where he was trained in a special meditation technique loosely based upon Zen Buddhism (Ikeuchi 2007, 114). Ikeuchi criticizes the fact that Izutsu's “history of ideas propositions stemming from the unshaken premises based upon his own experience of the essential intuition towards ‘nothingness’ and its verbalization” led him to “find evidence for the affinity of Islam and Japanese thought from a Buddhist perspective.” Ikeuchi concludes that it was only this—problematic—identification of Islam and Buddhism that made Izutsu so popular as an interpreter of Islam in Japan, where earlier authors had prepared the scene through similar identifications of Islam with Shintō (Ikeuchi 2009, 179).

Although Ikeuchi highlights the continuities between Izutsu's childhood experiences; his years as a college student; his studies of Islam, which were skewed towards Sufism; and his later philosophy, it is doubtful whether Izutsu in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he was working on the first and then the revised edition of his Qur'ān translation, was already preoccupied with these concerns. His terminological choices in producing this translation seem to speak against this suggestion, as does his declaration in 1964 that he wanted to “approach the Koran as the record of Muhammad, an extraordinarily great human being having lived in this world, from the aspect of his humanity” (quoted in Morimoto 1977, 25), thus suggesting a continuity of motives with Sakamoto and Ōkawa.

Mita Ryōichi: A Japanese Muslim's Translation

A second translation from Arabic into Japanese appeared in 1970, co-authored by Ban Kōsai and Ikeda Osamu, with an introduction by Fujimoto Katsuji (Fujimoto, Ban, and Ikeda 1970). This was a popular version, presenting the Qur'ān less as a religious text but rather as an item of general education, and accordingly it appeared in a series entitled “Great Books of the World” (Sekai no meicho 世界の名著) put out by one of Japan's largest publishers, Chūō Kōron. Predating this translation, however, another one had been underway. Although it was only published in 1972, the decision to produce what was to become the sixth translation had been reached much earlier out of dissatisfaction with Izutsu's translation. What prompted Mita Ryōichi 三田了一 (1892–1983) to embark on yet another Japanese rendering of the Qur'ān (Mita [1972] 1982) was not discontent with a philological lack of precision in Izutsu's work, but rather its inappropriateness as the translation of the holy scripture of a lived religion.

Like other translators before him, Mita was socialized in the milieu of prewar Pan-Asianism, and like Tanaka Ippei or Ariga Amado, he actually lived the pan-Asianism that was preached by people like Ōkawa Shūmei.Footnote ¹³ Mita moved to China at the age of twenty-four and spent almost thirty years there, where his interest in Islam was kindled from early on, although he was not to convert until 1941. Returning to Japan in 1921, Mita met Yamaoka Mitsutarō (discussed above), but quickly returned to China early in the following year, where he took up employment with the South Manchurian Railway Company and later the North China Railway. After being employed for propaganda work in Tianjin after 1937, he became the main Japanese consultant for Islam-related questions in Beijing between 1941 and 1945. Throughout this time, Mita was also in close contact with Ōkawa Shūmei; even before becoming an employee at the South Manchurian Railway Company, Mita had published an article on Chinese Islam in Tōa keizai kenkyū, the journal of the institute affiliated with the South Manchurian Railway Company whose head Ōkawa was to become one year later.

Mita's activities on the continent can without hesitation be summarized as those of a spy. In 1924, he investigated the factory of an English food export company in Harbin together with a Russian and submitted his detailed report to his employer, the South Manchurian Railway Company (Mita 1924). In 1940, he published a book entitled The Erection of the New Order and Propaganda Work (Shin-chitsujo kensetsu to senbu kōsaku 新秩序建設と宣撫工作), in which he laid out how appropriate propaganda enlightening the Chinese about “the true spirit of our Imperial Army” would be necessary in North China in order to complement the military's efforts there (Mita 1940, 501). At about the same time, he produced a secret 500-page report, likely in his function as the resident Islam expert in Beijing, with the title The Situation of Islam in North China (Kita Shina Kaikyō jijō 北支那回教事情), in which he portrayed Chinese Muslims as disaffected with being ruled by the Han Chinese majority and thus ripe victims for Japanese propaganda work (Mita, n.d., 7).Footnote ¹⁴

Having returned to Japan after the end of World War II, Mita decided to devote his life wholly to Islam in 1952. He joined the newly founded Association of Japanese Muslims (Nihon Musurimu kyōkai 日本ムスリム協会), of which he became the head in 1960. He stepped down from that position in 1962 to be able to commit himself entirely to working on a new translation of the Qur'ān, moving to Pakistan to learn from local experts. The Islamic World League soon invited him to Saudi Arabia, where he spent three years studying the Qur'ān in more depth. It was only after returning to Japan in 1965 that Mita began the actual work of translation.

In choosing terms of translation, Mita took pains to avoid associations with established religions, especially Buddhism. Instead, he favored simple terms, such as megumi 恵み (“blessedness”) for faḍl or hodokoshi 施し (“charity”) for ṣadaqat, from a linguistic register so far largely untouched by the high religious language associated with sacred scriptures. Yet at the same time, in many instances Mita did rely on religious terminological precedents, namely Christian ones, apparently feeling that any alternative would sound too artificial. He thus chose shu 主 for rabb, shinja 信者 for mū'min (“believer”), and, as a sometime alternative to megumi, onkei 恩恵 (“blessing”) for faḍl. Surprisingly, the Christian precedent seems to have been inescapable even for a consciously Muslim translator, who literally spent years to carefully choose his words. Surely, this persistence of Christianity begs explanation.

Religious Pan-Asianism and the Inevitability of Christian Interferences

The Japanese reception of Islam, as expressed in the translations of the Qur'ān, was part of the long and convoluted process of finding a cultural identity in modern Japan. Crucially, this process found expression in discourses of selfing and othering, and Islam was attractive in such discourses because it provided an alternative to European modernity as a point of reference. Viewed from Japan, Islam, with its long shared history with Europe and its common roots with Christianity, bore unmistakably “Western” features, first and foremost its monotheism, but also, as Ōkawa Shūmei (1942, 5) has argued, due to its common ancestry in the Hellenistic cultural sphere. At the same time, Islam was in the twentieth century viewed as an anti-Western force, offering an alternative societal model to capitalist and secularist Euro-America, which had increasingly come to be negatively viewed as a “materialistic civilization” by the 1920s. This was the main reason why Islam was eagerly taken up by Japanese pan-Asianists in the first half of the twentieth century, but it also explains why the interest in Islam did not abate after 1945, as it was not simply a tactic orchestrated by the wartime government. That interest in Islam endured the demise of the government-sponsored Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere clearly indicates that Islam was more than a political expedient for at least some Japanese.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, the authors of three of the four postwar translations had been socialized in pan-Asianist contexts and shared the urgent concern to provide Japan with a cultural alternative to Western-style modernity, one that would also provide for a different place for religion within modern society.

As other recent studies have shown (e.g., Azegami 2009), forces critical of modern Japan's secularist orientation did exist in prewar Japan, although they have rarely been the focus of scholarship. The religious dimension of culture was also at the heart of the anti-Western reaction occurring via the medium of Islam and the Qur'ān. This was most certainly the case with Ariga, Ōkawa, and Mita, but also with Izutsu, whose “Oriental Philosophy” was an attempt at synthesizing specifically Eastern traditions of thought with a decidedly religious flavor. Ironically, no matter how much these attempts at cultural innovation were anti-Western and anti-Christian, they could not escape from the long shadow Western culture and Christianity had already cast over modern Japan. The terminology available to the translators in rendering Islamic concepts into Japanese in many cases reflected the legacy of the Japanese Bible translations, which predated the Qur'ān translations by several decades and had already contributed to shaping the Japanese language (see Ebisawa 1989; Suzuki 2006).

Accordingly, all or most of the translators saw either no necessity or no realistic possibility to find different terms for rendering raḥma or faḍl than jihi, onkei, or onchō 恩寵, which had already been established in Christian contexts to translate οἰκτιρμός und χάρις even before Sakamoto's first Qur'ān translation.Footnote ¹⁶ This tendency to follow the Christian precedent arguably extends not only to calques (or loanblends, i.e., words newly formed in the Meiji period), but also to loanshifts (change of meaning in preexisting words). While most of the words used for “God” or “Lord,” such as kami or shu, obviously predate the introduction of Christianity, they were clearly subject to a Christian inflection since the middle of the nineteenth century. As Christianity's monotheism, the most important point of convergence of Islam and Christianity from the Japanese point of view, is reflected in these terms, it is not unreasonable to interpret their use in the Qur'ān translations as a borrowing from Christian terminology, as it had been established principally through translations of the Bible. Christian interferences are also obvious biographically: Takahashi was a professed Christian, and, like him, Ariga and Ōkawa had a Christian background in their youths. Sakamoto, through his translations of European literature, and Izutsu, through his study of ancient and medieval Western culture, were steeped in Christian culture.Footnote ¹⁷ Furthermore, the case of Ōkawa shows how Japanese appropriations of Islam more broadly could not escape Western frames of reference: as Usuki Akira has shown, Ōkawa relied heavily on European and North American scholarship throughout his writings on Islam (Usuki 2010, 150–51), just as Izutsu did, of course, in his scholarly works on Islam. If Izutsu can be said to have come up with a genuinely new synthesis of “Oriental Philosophy,” then this occurred at a stage at which Islam had become much less important for him and is a product rather of his engagement with East Asian traditions of thought.

Previous scholarship has highlighted the general role of the West as the “unforgettable other” (Mitani Reference Hardacre1997) of modern Japan, just as it has pointed out the irony that attempts at “resistance to modernity in Japan [constituted] one of the principal conditions of what it meant to become modern” (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2001, xxxi), and, more specifically within the context of pan-Asianism, that “a [modern Western] standard of civilization” persisted “in the anti-Western critiques of Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals” (Aydin Reference Aydin2007, 192). The history of the Japanese reception of Islam shows that this same kind of structure is also applicable to religion, where Christianity was the unavoidable point of reference. The same logic can be seen at work in those Japanese theories of Judaism that display an explicitly religious interest (in contrast to the predominant practice of using “Jew” as a code for certain, usually undesirable, traits): be it Uchimura Kanzō 内村鑑三 (1861–1930), Nakada Jūji 中田重治 (1870–1939), or Yamamoto Shichihei 山本七平 (1921–91), all important Japanese authors of texts on Judaism as a religion were Christians and introduced Judaism from a Christian perspective and for Christian purposes (Goodman and Miyazawa Reference Goodman and Miyazawa2000, 37–75, 159–60, 179–81; Kubota Reference Antoni2002; Rots Reference Rots2010).Footnote ¹⁸ Discourses of the self that made use of an other that differed from the Christian West, among them the appropriations of Islam in the context of pan-Asianism broadly defined, were numerous in modern Japan. Yet they were inadvertently faced with the legacy of the West and Christianity that could not simply be left behind, but that more often than not defined the terms of their expression.