Abstract
This chapter chronicles Japan’s encounters with Islam, including its historical discoveries and developing knowledge, and particularly, how Islam as a religion and lifestyle fits into the Japanese conceptualization of Asia. It demonstrates that geoculture was the driving dimension to learning about Islam in Japan throughout a long stretch of history, but since the 1970s the geopolitical and geo-economic dimensions have become more influential factors in this learning process. How are the Japanese getting this idea of Islam? How does this idea affect policy? Chapter 2 considers: is the Japanese Self conceptualization within the structure of Asia inclusive of Islam? How does the identity of Self, and perception of Other matter? This chapter informs the readers of how Japan proceeds with its strategy in, and with, Muslim Asia.
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Notes
- 1.
Said does recognize, however, that Orientalism’s “influence has spread to ‘the Orient’ itself: the pages of books and journals in Arabic (and doubtless in Japanese, various Indian dialects, and other Oriental languages) are filled with second-order analyses by Arabs of ‘the Arab mind,’ ‘Islam,’ and other myths” (1979, 322).
- 2.
Note this linguistic structure of applying the suffix “-kyōto” (−教徒), or “believer of ____ teachings” applies for most other major religions, such as: Buddhist, buk-kyōto (仏教徒) (believer of Buddha’s teachings); Jew, yudaya-kyōto (ユダヤ教徒) (believer of Jewish teachings); and Christian, kirisuto-kyōto (キリスト教徒) (believer of Christ’s teachings).
- 3.
Save for island territorial disputes with neighboring states.
- 4.
The root of the term “Hui” was, in fact, likely referencing the modern Uyghur people, who were in earlier times rendered as Hui (Gladney 2003, 453).
- 5.
Following a common trend in the Japanese language, in the postwar era kaikyō has gradually been replaced with the denizen-rooted Isuramu-kyō (イスラム教). The most significant impetus for this linguistic transition was the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran (Sakai 2010, 127).
- 6.
These “settlers” are significant roots for formulating the identity of the modern Hui people in China, although DNA evidence is mostly inconclusive.
- 7.
Lan Yu, for example, was a fourteenth-century Muslim Ming general who was known to be particularly fond of Japanese swords, having 10,000 in his possession (Fan 2016, 94).
- 8.
Interestingly, Sakamoto presents “Allah” as “kami ” (神), the gods (plural) present originally in Shintō (literally, shin-tō is written with the same character, 神道, meaning “the way of the gods”). Protestants in Japan had already assumed kami to mean God in singular, and this was the accepted translation of the Christian God in Japanese (Krämer 2014, 622). To the Japanese, however, kami is a plural term, and thus the Christian “God” and Islamic “Allah” could be accepted by complementing the existing multiplicity of Shintō kami. Sakamoto’s successors, perhaps cognizant of this gap in understanding of singular versus plural, maintained the title “Allah” in subsequent translations of the Quran (Krämer 2014, 622). Comparatively, translations of Christian texts into Japanese today still maintain kami as the singular Christian “God.”
- 9.
Kaiju in Japanese, Huiru in Chinese (回儒).
- 10.
Okakura Kakuzo also wrote that “Islam itself may be described as Confucianism on horseback, sword in hand” (1904, 2).
- 11.
As an Orthodox Christian-state with the Tsar family’s kinship to European royalty, the Russian Empire was considered undoubtedly part of ‘the West’ at the time.
- 12.
Because the Japanese census does not record religious affiliation, estimates are based on the population of foreign nationals by country, divided by the percentage of Muslims in the given country.
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Barber, B.B. (2020). Discovery and Identity. In: Japan's Relations with Muslim Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34280-7_2
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