Tozsuz Evrak: Japan and the Japanese

Chris Gratien, Georgetown University

For all the talk about the difference between East and West that emerged in the nineteenth century, which mainly centered on the place of the Muslim world on the European stage, it would seem that the Ottomans possessed infinitely more information about their neighbors on the other side of the Bosphorus than they had about regions much further east such as Japan and China. As Sam has already shown in a previous article, the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) created new awareness about Japan and inspired interest in this Eastern rival to the Ottomans' Russian nemesis. Ottoman-Japanese relations had begun only two decades prior. In 1887, Japan sent a goodwill mission to the Ottoman capital and in 1890 the gesture was reciprocated, leading to the Ertuğul Incident in which the Ottoman ship sent to Japan encountered a storm and sunk when departing from the island. The majority of the crew including its captain Ali Osman Pasha drowned, but the Japanese navy was able to save dozens from drowning, an act much appreciated by the Ottomans and still commemorated in contemporary conversations about Turkish-Japanese relations and friendship. Yet, with few Ottoman subjects residing in Japan, more detailed knowledge about the place and people was mostly obtained through European sources. A presumably translated archival document (click to view) dating to approximately the time of the Russo-Japanese war signed by George B. Williams contains a page and a half of basic anthropological information about Japan, its culture, and politics. If this fairly uncommon document concerning Japan at the Ottoman archives is any indication, Ottoman knowledge about their Meiji counterparts could scarcely have been more than US knowledge about Afghanistan circa 2001.

The document presented here is a publication about Japan in Ottoman dating from precisely the same period (1320/1903) entitled Japonya ve Japonyalılar (Japan and the Japanese). It is admittedly hard to ascertain what the sources for the book may have been. The author is Avanzade Mehmed Süleyman, but he is listed as "translator (mütercim)," indicating that the publication is translated from another source but not indicating what that book might be. The source should be English, since place names mentioned such as the Yellow River are adapted directly from an English spelling (its Chinese name is Huang He). There are in fact several publications by the name Japan and the Japanese in English beginning from the 1850s (here are some: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 ). However, none of these match up neatly with the contents of the book, at least parts of which seem to have been written very close to the Russo-Japanese war, mentioning dates as late as 1902. Avanzade Mehmed Süleyman was an avid follower of the Russo-Japanese war whose journal entitled Musavver Terakki apparently wrote some pieces that upset the Russian government, causing the author to be sent from the capital to Jerusalem, from where he subsequently fled to Cairo. Like many exiled journalists and intellectuals, the 1908 constitutional reform allowed for his return to Istanbul. It is possible that the book was not an exact translation of a particular source but rather a summary of pertinent details drawn directly from one or a number of English-language sources on Japan. This is my assumption, but if any of our readers could point us in the direction of a possible original source for the translation it would be greatly appreciated. Some of the illustrations bear a signature in Ottoman of someone named Ütücüyan, suggesting at least some input from the Ottoman side. However, in this instance it is also unclear to what extent he produced the images and to what extent he merely reproduced them (the anthropometric image of a Japanese villager at the end seems unlikely to be Ütücüyan's work).

The contents of the Japonya ve Japonyalılar are pretty standard fare for fin de siecle colonialish civilizational writing. The first chapter of the book begins with a description of the Korean Peninsula and the Ainu people (who are described as among the poorest on the planet), subsequently jumping back and forth between cultural, geographical, and economic information about Japan, Korea, Manchuria and China. We offer a complete PDF (click here) as well as some select images taken from Japonya ve Japonyalılar. If anyone could offer additional information about the source material for this book it would be greatly appreciated.

Interestingly, a section of images from another book apparently about China was wedged in the copy of Japonya ve Japonyalılar that I bought from a bookseller for the price of a tam porsyon of çiğ köfte. It's hard to say which is the better bargain.