Modern Japanese Images of Turks and Turkey

Modern Japanese Images of Turks and Turkey Nobuo Misawa (Toyo University, Japan) The image of Turks and Turkey in Modern Japan had been heavily influenced by the image of European and American sources described in this paper. For example, even after 1924, the Japanese merchants and officers of various ministries continued to adopt the divisions of European Turkey and Asiatic Turkey. We can find examples in the bulletin of the Japanese Commercial Museum in Istanbul, published in 1928- 37. The Museum still calculated and sent the statistics of imports and exports about Turkey, not as a single country but divided into two divisions, European Turkey and Asiatic Turkey, even after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey! It was only after the Japanese defeat in WWII in 1945, that Japan adopted a single name and area concept of Turkey. In addition, the Ministry of Education ordered the government’s official textbook writers to describe the name of the country as the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922) and the Republic of Turkey (1923- ). In these circumstances, private publications had begun to follow the government’s official textbooks, while some of them still used the outdated name, “Ottoman Turkey”, which neither the Europeans nor the Americans were no longer using.