Newsletter No. 906
Information-Announcement
February 14, 2008

 

ISLAM IN JAPAN: A CAUSE FOR CONCERN?

Today the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) has posted at their website Volume 5 of their journal Asia Policy. This journal stands more-or-less at the crossroads of academia and the American foreign policy community.

Somebody must have messed up and confused me with a potential future American policymaker because last year I was given an invitation to submit a paper for a roundtable on "Islam in Japan." Keiko Sakurai of Waseda University was then invited to join us, and finally an introduction was added by a retired CIA analyst named Emile A. Nakhleh.

The full published roundtable amounts to 44 pages of what I think is an up-to-date picture of the Muslim communities in Japan. Keiko Sakurai's paper presents the best available research on the basic facts about Muslims in Japan, and my own paper tries to interpret the significance of those basic facts. It is for you, the readers, to judge the degree to which we may or may not have succeeded.

Emile A. Nakhleh
Introduction

Keiko Sakurai
Muslims in Contemporary Japan

Michael Penn
Public Faces and Private Spaces: Islam in the Japanese Context

The entire roundtable is available online at the Asia Policy website:

http://www.nbr.org/publications/article.aspx?ID=467