Ottomans Imagining Japan: East, Middle East, and Non-Western Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.

• Author: Ichijo, Atsuko
• Position: Book review

Ottomans Imagining Japan: East, Middle East, and Non-Western Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

By Renee Worringer

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 350 pages, $110.00, ISBN: 9781137384591.

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The division of the world into the "West and the "East" continues to exert substantial influence on the way we see, understand, and talk about the world even in the twenty-first century when globalization has certainly pulled different parts of the world closer than ever. Renee Worringer's Ottomans Imagining Japan contextualizes this puzzle in a historical context; that the origin of the binary of the "West" vs. "East" goes back, at least, to the nineteenth century and that there was a lot of flows of ideas between the "West" and "East" and within the "East" itself in the twentieth century, although the speed and intensity of exchange was less then than now.

This is certainly a tour de force. In this impressive transnational history of ideas, Worringer carefully traces how Meiji Japan was seen, understood, and represented by those in the Ottoman Empire. A wide range of sources are culled together: archival sources in Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, and Washington (the US government's analysis of Japan's relationship with Muslims in the Middle East during World War II); Arabic and Ottoman Turkish newspapers and journals; a variety of memoirs, papers, and diaries as well as secondary sources. These diverse sources are then arranged to describe a variety of images of Japan, most of them positive, put forward by Ottomans of different regions, classes, religious faiths, and ethnic communities. The variety of images of Japan was naturally a reflection of different concerns and interests held by various groups in the Ottoman Empire. Some members of the Ottoman elite, for example, tended to present Japan as a model for an oligarchical and centralized government with some provision for civic participation. The Young Turks saw Meiji Japan primarily as a constitutional monarchy. Many Ottoman Turks took the view that one of the sources of Japanese strength was their "racial uniqueness," as they began to emphasis Turkish identity at the expense of other forms of identity found in the Empire. Arab Muslims saw Japanese strength in its reverence for tradition since Japan was seen as being successful in combining Eastern spirit and Western science, and they increasingly saw themselves as the descendent of pious Muslims who should be...