PRE-MODERN CONTACTS BETWEEN JAPAN AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD

The Shingetsu Newsletter tends to focus on current events in Japanese-Islamic relations, but I should make it clear that historical discussions are also quite welcome here. I am a historian myself, and so I need no convincing that an understanding of yesterday can contribute mightily to an understanding of today.

My own research interests tend to begin with the Meiji period and the 1860s, but in this newsletter I would like to make it clear that Japan’s contacts with the Islamic world go back much further. In Shingetsu Newsletter No. 93, Sandra Leavitt offered us a summary of an article by Bushra Anis that suggested that Islam did not arrive in Japan until 1877. In fact, Anis is not well-informed.

According to my own research in the Meiji press, I have found references to Muslims in the Yokohama treaty port as far back as 1870. It seems that many “British” ships in that period were manned by Muslim Malay sailors. Fortunately, some of these sailors got into trouble and landed in the consular courts, thus proving their existence.

In fact, however, we can currently prove indirect contacts between Japan and the Islamic world going back to the 8th century. It is relatively well-known, for example, that some Persian art has been maintained in Nara’s Shosoin Temple since that time. If I’m not mistaken, the leading research on these matters is still a 1975 article by Hajime Kobayashi that appeared in Chuto Tsuho.

Although I can’t recall where I read it, I also know that the first Japanese traveler to Palestine goes back to about the 16th century. He was a Japanese Jesuit priest making a visit to the Holy Land as part of a visit to Rome.

Some exciting new research by Hiromu Nagashima of Nagasaki Prefectural University has shown that Persian merchants based in Southeast Asia visited Japan for trade purposes in the mid-17th century. Nagashima has written several articles about this, of which all but the most recent are listed in the Shingetsu Bibliography.

Also worthy of note is the very impressive research of Hideaki Sugita, who has written a lot of groundbreaking material on early Japanese-Islamic cultural relations that I myself haven’t had time to explore yet. It is perhaps in his work that the earlier research of Hajime Kobayashi has been surpassed.

What provokes this newsletter at this particular time is a message from Hossein Ebneyousef (Shingetsu Member No. 69) who has pointed out to us a recent article published in Aramco World. This article mentions the work of the 9th century Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih, who wrote about a land east of China called “Wakwak.” In the opinion of the famed Dutch scholar Michael Jan De Goeje, this land was Japan. Although doubts can certainly remain about whether this was true or not, the possibility exists that Muslim intellectuals and sailors in the 9th century had some vague knowledge about the existence of Japan. In any case, as we have seen, some Islamic art did make it to Japan around this period.

From the little we know—and we must acknowledge that we will never really understand the full scope of these pre-modern Japanese-Muslim contacts—it seems apparent that most of these relations were conducted indirectly through China, but on occasion there were direct, face-to-face contacts as well in port cities like Nagasaki and along the China coast.

As I said at the outset, I myself do not intend to seriously pursue the topic of pre-modern Japanese-Islamic relations as I am quite busy enough with the modern period after 1860. However, historical discussions of any period are welcome at the Shingetsu Institute, and any of you who wish to bring up points of history are encouraged to jump in and participate.

Link to the Aramco World