Newsletter No. 980
Information-Announcement
April 17, 2008

 

NEW BOOK: TSUTOMU SAKAMOTO ON WARTIME JAPANESE-ISLAMIC RELATIONS

The Shingetsu Institute has just received a copy of a newly published edited volume by Tsutomu Sakamoto (Shingetsu Member No. 97) of Keio University in Tokyo. The book is entirely in Japanese and is titled, Nitchu Senso to Isuraamu—Mammo-Ajia Chiiki ni okeru Toji-Kaiju Seisaku. There doesn’t seem to be an official English name for the book, but this title might be translated as “The Sino-Japanese War and Islam: Policies to Govern and Pacify the Asian Regions of Mongolia and Manchuria.”

This book has been published by Keio University Press, and is a kind of sequel to the 1999 edited volume of Professor Sakamoto and Professor Masaru Ikei that was titled Kindai Nihon to Toruko Sekai (Modern Japan and the Turkish World). Some of the Japanese-language articles in that volume were later published in English in a 2003 edited volume led by Professor Selcuk Esenbel and Chiharu Inaba called The Rising Sun and the Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on the History of Japanese Turkish Relations.

Together with the publication of Cemil Aydin’s book, the recent special issue of the Annals of the Japan Association for Middle East Studies, and our own efforts at SEJJIR, we are now seeing a nice little explosion of published work on pre-1945 Japanese-Islamic relations.

Sakamoto’s new edited volume runs to almost three hundred pages of text and footnotes, consisting of five extended papers.

Tsutomu Sakamoto himself writes the first 82-page chapter on the significance of Abdurresid Ibrahim’s return to Japan and the Japanese “Islam Policy” in Manchuria and northern China-Mongolia.

Kazuhiko Shiraiwa then provides a roughly 50-page essay on the intelligence network that was established by the South Manchurian Railway Company in China, including its connections with the Muslims of China.

A. Merthan Dundar (Shingetsu Member No. 182) of Ankara University is the only foreign contributor. He presents a 40-odd page paper on the 1933 visit to Japan of the Ottoman Prince Abdul Kerim, and the many issues which attended that visit.

Akira Matsunaga of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation contributed a 50-page article on the well-known prewar figure Qurban Ali, his efforts to establish the first Islamic school in Tokyo, and its relationship to Japan’s “Islam Policy.”

Aiko Kurasawa, who is a leading Japanese scholar of Indonesia based at Keio University, provided the final 50-odd page chapter on Japan’s “Islam Policy” during the period of the “Greater East Asian War.”

For those Shingetsu Members who take an interest in this period of the Japanese-Islamic relationship, the appearance of this new book will be a very welcome development. It’s nice to see our field of studies showing signs of greater interest and prosperity.