A Japanese Asianist's View of Islam - J-Stage

A Japanese Asianist’s View of Islam (Usuki)59

Special Feature (Article)／特集（論文）

USUKI Akira

本論文は大川周明の生涯を通して彼のイスラームへの関心の変化を論じる。大川は右翼

A Japanese Asianist’s View of Islam

Ⅰ.IntroductionⅡ.ŌkawaShūmei’sAcademic

CareerinIslamicStudiesandAsianism

Ⅲ.ŌkawaShūmei’sEssayonSufismin1910andHisViewofIslam

Ⅳ.ŌkawaShūmei’sChangingViewofIslamduringWWII

Ⅴ.Ōkawa’sTranslationofal-Qur’ānintoJapanese

Ⅵ.ConcludingRemarks

ある日本人アジア主義者のイスラム観大川周明の場合

臼杵　陽

A Case Study of Ōkawa Shūmei

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のアジア主義者として知られているが、イスラーム研究者でもあった。彼は東京帝大時代スーフィズムに関心をもった。しかし、彼は 1913年、内的志向の精神的イスラームから外的志向の政治的イスラームその関心を転換させた。同時期、「コーランか剣か」を預言者ムハンマドの好戦的表現だと考えていた。しかし、オスマン帝国崩壊後はイスラームに関して大川は沈黙を保った。約20年後の1942年、大川は著名な『回教概論』を刊行した。同書は読者の期待に反して、日本の戦争宣伝を意図するものではなかった。同書は日本的オリエンタリストの観点から理念型的なイスラームとイスラーム帝国絶頂期の理想化されたイスラーム国家の姿を描いたものだったからである。戦後、東京裁判の被告となったが精神疾患のため免責された。大川は松沢病院でクルアーンの翻訳を行なう一方、完全な人格としての預言者ムハンマドへの崇敬を通してイスラームへの関心を取り戻した。晩年の大川は開祖を通してキリスト教、イスラーム、仏教などの諸宗教を理解する境地に達したのである。

I. Introduction

Ōkawa Shūmei (1886-1957) was a famous right wing ideologue and Asianist who advocated the unification of Asian people against European and American colonial rule before and during World War II. In 1932, he was involved with Japanese military officers in an anti-government plot known as the May 15th Incident. His books on Japanese history and Anglo-American aggression in Eastern Asia were widely read during World War II. In fact, it was Ōkawa who helped to popularize the idea of the inevitability of a military clash between East and West, one in which Japan would champion the East and do battle against the United States. After the Pacific war broke out, he published An Introduction to Islam (Kaikyō Gairon) [Ōkawa 1942],(1) a book that gained renown even after World War II. Ōkawa was arrested as a propagandist after the war and tried as a Class A war criminal in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (also known as the Tokyo war crime trial), but he was declared unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity. He was committed to Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo, where he translated al-Qur’ān into Japanese [Ōkawa 1974] and wrote a biography on the Prophet Muhammad [Ōkawa 1962c].(2)

After the Cold War ended, Ōkawa was reevaluated as a scholar of Islamic studies in Japan where he was seen neither as an ultranationalistic political activist nor as an advocator of the confrontation theory between East and West in the prewar

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period. Against the backdrop of post-Cold War debate on the clash of civilizations, as advocated by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, Ōkawa is remembered as a forerunner of the confrontation theory in Japan.

In this article, I will critically discuss Ōkawa’s works on Islam and the Muslim world, viewing him as a scholar and Asianist. I will do this, first, by explaining his academic career related to Islamic studies. I will then critically analyze his first essay on Sufism and discuss his articles on Islam and the Muslim world. After this, I will pay special attention to his changing view of Islam in the period between World War I and World War II in terms of his interpretation of the concept of “the Koran and the Sword.” Finally, I will explain how and why he translated al-Qur’ān into Japanese while he was in the hospital immediately after World War II.

II. Ōkawa Shūmei’s Academic Career in Islamic Studies and Asianism

Ōkawa Shūmei was born in Sakata, a port city in Yamagata Prefecture located in the Tohoku (Northeast) area of Japan. While he was taught under the old education system at Shōnai junior high school in Tsuruoka city, he studied French at Tsuruoka Catholic Church and Confucian classics under a private teacher as well. At Tokyo Imperial University, he wrote a graduation thesis on Acharya Nāgārjuna (150-250), a Buddhist philosopher credited with founding the Mādhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism. After graduating in 1911, he acted as German translator for the Japanese Army General Staff. At the same time, he participated in Dōkai (The Way Association), which was an indigenous Japanese Christian movement founded by Matsumura Kaiseki (1859-1939) in 1907. In the 1910s and the first half of the 1920s, he contributed many articles to the Dōkai journal, Michi (The Way).

He thereafter published numerous articles on Islam in journals and magazines. Among these were “Nanyo (i.e. Southern See; that is, Asia and Oceania south of China) and Islam” and “Muslims from the viewpoint of Colonial Policy.” In 1920, he was appointed professor of Takushoku University at the request of Goto Shimpei (1857-1929), then principal of Takushoku University. Because of his highly regarded academic articles on Islam, Ōkawa joined the East Asian Economic Bureau (Tōa Keizai Chōsa Kyoku), which was affiliated with the South Manchuria Railway Company, in 1917.

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Ōkawa published his first book on the Asianist cause, Some Issues in Reviving Asia, in 1922 [Ōkawa 1922]. In this book, he advocated liberating Asia and uniting Asians against European colonial rule. The book was a compilation of articles and essays that he had previously published primarily in the Dōkai journal Michi . In it, he dealt with the awakening of Asian countries—such as Tibet, Thailand, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and North Africa, including Libya, the Zionist movement in Palestine and Iraq (although the North African countries are geographically not Asian but Muslim countries under European colonial rule)—against imperialism.(3) He anticipated that Muslims, as a “nation,” would unite to fight against the oppressing White imperialists in the context of liberating oppressed Asians from colonialism after World War I. He also stressed that Soviet Russia could play a significant progressive role against Imperialism.

In 1926, he received a doctorate of Law from Tokyo Imperial University. His doctoral thesis was titled “A Study on the System of Chartered Companies.” His mentor was Yoshino Sakuzō (1878-1933), a professor of the Faculty of Law at Tokyo Imperial University, who was known as a liberal-minded Christian scholar of the theory of politics of the people (Minponshugi).

Yet although Yoshino was his mentor, Ōkawa derived his idea on Asianism from Okakura Kakuzo (Tenshin, 1863-1913) after attending Okakura’s lecture on Western Art History at Tokyo Imperial University. He published his first Japanese history, A History of Japanese Civilization, in 1921. In this book, Ōkawa expressed his personal view on Asianism as follows:

Japan could preserve Asian thought and civilization due to the unbroken succession of Tenno or Imperial family that was unusual in world history, the noble self-reliance of Japanese who were never conquered by foreigners, and the geographical location of Japan that was made possible to inherit our ancestors’ ideas and instinct. Accordingly, our consciousness today is indeed a synthesis of Asian consciousness. Our civilization is the expression of all Asian thought. The significance and value of Japanese civilization consists in this [Ōkawa 1921: 8-9].

Ōkawa interpreted Okakura’s famous slogan “Asia is One” by explaining that, since Japanese culture and history accepted various cultural heritages of all the Asian

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areas, Japan represented Asia as a synthesis. However, Japan could not play a leading political role as a liberating power against Europe in Asia if it was rotten and corrupt in domestic politics in its advocacy of “Asia is One.” According to Ōkawa, Japan should therefore reform itself from within if it wanted to lead Asia. This constituted a call for a Taisho Restoration (Taisho Ishin) followed by a Meiji Restoration. After reformation, he argued that Japan represented the Oneness of Asia perfectly as follows:

Asia is one as a harmonious whole and constructs Eastern civilization against Western civilization when Asia stands opposite Europe. From the beginning, Eastern spirits represented themselves differently from one country to another. However, they are like small waves moving up and down in one Ocean. All civilizations of Asian countries tell us a unified story of Asia. Japan has an honored privilege to represent the Oneness of Asia perfectly as an ideal of “unity-in-complexity” [Ōkawa 1921: 9].

Ōkawa can be regarded as a disciple of Okakura in Asianism because he based his discussion of Asianism on Okakura’s work. Okakura wrote, of Japanese privilege, that “It has been, however, the great privilege of Japan to realise this unity-in-complexity with a special clearness. The Indo-Tartaric blood of this race was in itself a heritage, which qualified it to imbibe from the two sources, and so mirror the whole of Asiatic consciousness. The unique blessing of unbroken sovereignty, the proud self-reliance of an unconquered race, and the insular isolation which protected ancestral ideas and instincts at the cost of expansion, made Japan the real repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and culture” [Okakura 1907]. Ōkawa believed that, since Japan accepted Asian civilizations, such as those of China and India, and then assimilated them into Japanese civilization, this meant that Japan represented the Oneness of Asia. He confirmed that “Japan was not an advanced country in any meanings. Japan didn’t develop by itself. Unless we had not imported Chinese civilization and then had not been influenced by Buddhism, we couldn’t imagine how our civilization became. But we surely affirm that Japanese spirit would never have perished even though we were affected by other civilizations” [Ōkawa 1921: 10].

However, Ōkawa’s understanding of Islam is ambiguous in terms of the Japanese assimilation of Asian civilizations. For example, he wrongly suggests that

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Japan accepted West Asian culture in the Nara Period through the Western Regions at the time of the Period of Disunity in China. In fact, it was the ancient Persian culture, not Islamic culture, that Japan accepted at this time [Ōkawa 1921: 59]. In other words, Japan has never accepted Islamic culture at any time in its history.

In 1929, Ōkawa assumed office as president of the East Asian Economic Bureau, which had gained independence from the South Manchuria Railway Company. He was arrested in 1932 for complicity in the May 15th Incident and was jailed in 1935. After his release in 1937, he founded the “Ōkawa school (Ōkawa Juku)” that was attached to the East Asian Economic Bureau in 1938. There he educated junior high school graduates for 2 years to nurture capable activists who could work for Asian causes. After this, in 1939, Ōkawa took up the post of chief editor of the East Asian Economic Bureau’s new journal Shin Ajia (New Asia) . He wrote the foreword in every issue of Shin Ajia from October 1940 to the end of World War II in August 1945.

Following the outbreak of war in the Pacific between Japan and the United States in December 1941, Ōkawa published An Introduction to Islam in August, 1942 [Ōkawa 1942]. He also delivered a series of lecture on the history of the British and American invasions of East Asia over the radio and put together the lectures in A History of Anglo-American Aggression in East Asia (Beiei Tōa Shinryaku shi) in 1941, a book that went straight to the top of the best-seller list [Ōkawa 1962a]. During the Pacific War, he also published some books on Asianism in which he did not touch on Islam except, again, as he had done in An Introduction to Islam.

After World War II, Ōkawa’s books on Islam were ignored for a long time because he was a war criminal and, due to his political belief, ultranationalist. Takeuchi Yoshimi did not ignore him, however. It was Takeuchi who was the first to object to silencing Ōkawa’s works on Islam. Takeuchi worked as a researcher of Islam in China at the Institute for Islamic Area Studies (Kaikyō Ken Kenkyūjo) from April 1940 to December 1944. He met Ōkawa at a joint meeting with the East Asian Economic Bureau when he worked at the Institute. After the war, Takeuchi abandoned Islamic studies and devoted himself to modern Chinese literature, especially the literary works of Lu Xun (1881-1936). Almost a quarter of a century passed before he delivered a lecture titled “Ōkawa Shūmei’s Asian Studies” at the Institute of Developing Economies in 1969. In this lecture, he criticized the fact that Ōkawa’s works on Islam were treated as an academic taboo by saying:

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When we discuss Islamic studies in Japan, we cannot ignore Ōkawa’s works. His book An Introduction to Islam can be regarded as a purely academic work. I am sure that his book is at the highest level in Islamic studies in Japan. His works have nothing to do with Japanese imperialists’ invasion of Asia. As far as I know, no scholars of Asian studies have not mentioned Ōkawa’s works on Islam. … I want to ask the scholars to accept the fact that Ōkawa made a contribution to Islamic studies even though they deny his achievement in academic works [Takeuchi 1969; 1980: 183-184].

More than 40 years have passed since Takeuchi lectured on Ōkawa. After the end of the Cold War between the US and the USSR in the 1990s, Ōkawa’s theory on confrontation between East and West combined with Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations in Japan became the center of attention. Ōkawa’s works have thus been reassessed and reappraised in recent years.(4) However, a reassessment of Ōkawa as a scholar of Islamic studies has lagged because there is still a tendency among researchers not to accept Ōkawa as an Islamic scholar due to his past political career [Misawa 2003: 73-83; Aydin 2006: 137-162]. The reinstatement of Ōkawa as an Islamic scholar started when Izutsu Toshihiko (1914-1993) was interviewed by a famous popular novelist, Shiba Ryotaro (1923-1996), in the magazine Chūō Kōron. Izutsu was professor at the Institute of Cultural and Linguistic studies, Keio University in Tokyo, McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in Tehran before he returned to Japan in 1979. Prior to World War II, he had worked at the library of the East Asian Economic Bureau when Ōkawa was the bureau president. Izutsu, just before he passed away in 1993, reflected on Ōkawa as follows.

The reason why I got interested in Ōkawa was that he was really interested in Islam on his own initiative. When I got to know him, he told me that it was very urgent to organize Islamic studies in Japan and that he did his best to promote Islamic studies in order to provide us with every convenience at his disposal [Izutsu 1993: 379].

Izutsu’s remarks suggest that Ōkawa was not only a researcher but also a manger of Islamic studies in Japan. It should be noted that Izutsu, at 27 years of age,

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published A History of Arabic Thoughts: Islamic Theology and Islamic Philosophy in 1941 [Izutsu 1941]; this was before Ōkawa published his An Introduction to Islam in 1942.

Izutsu, after he returned home from Iran in 1979, published an article on the “Two faces of Islam” [Izutsu 1980]. According to this article, one face of Islam turns outward; this is the face of the Umma or the Muslim community. It attaches great importance to the outer life of a Muslim community ruled by Islamic law (Sharī‘a). The other face of Islam, which turns inward, is Sufi or Shi’ite Islam; and it is this face that attaches great importance to the spiritual inner life of individuals.

Ōkawa was also interested in the two faces of Islam at various stages in his life. At first, he was interested in the inward face of Islam, of Sufism, when he was a university student. However, his interest turned toward the outward face of Islam in 1913 after he read a book on colonial India. His interest returned to the inward, spiritual Islam during the war crime trial where he was declared insane after the defeat of Japan in 1945.

III. Ōkawa Shūmei’s Essay on Sufism in 1910 and His View of Islam

Ōkawa, when a student at Tokyo Imperial University in May 1910, published in Dōkai’s journal Michi his first essay on Islam [Shirakawa 1910]. The article, titled “Mystical Mohammedanism (Shinpiteki Mahometto-kyo),” was published under a pseudonym, Shirakawa Ryutaro. Knowing this, we can see that Takeuchi gave us incorrect information on the beginning of Ōkawa’s studies on Islam when he wrote: “We may assume that Ōkawa’s first real research on the Islamic religion was undertaken after he entered the SMRR (the South Manchuria Railway Company). Gradually, his interest deepened. He completed his famous work Kaikyo Gairon (An Introduction to Islam) in 1942” [Takeuchi 1969: 373]. We know that this is incorrect because Ōkawa had already started his studies on Islam in 1910 when he was a university student.

Ōkawa’s essay on “Mystical Mohammedanism” was not original but was taken entirely from Friedrich Max Müller’s lecture on Sufism. Although it can be regarded as an abridged Japanese translation of Müller’s lecture, Ōkawa only touched on Müller’s name at the end of the essay without crediting Müller as its source. There is

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no question that Müller was its source as Ōkawa’s conclusion is the same as that of Müller. The following is from Max Müller’s original text:

Sufiism (sic.), short of its extravagances, may almost be called Christian; nor do I doubt that it owed its deepest impulses to Christianity, more particularly to that spiritual Christianity which was founded on Platonist and Neo-Platonist philosophy. We saw that the Sufis themselves do not deny this: on the contrary, they appeal to Jesus or Isa as their highest authority, they constantly use the language of the New Testament, and refer to the legends of the Old. If Christianity and Mohammedanism are ever to join hands in carrying out the high objects at which they are both aiming, Sufism would be the common ground on which they could best meet each other, understand each other, and help each other [Müller 1893: 359-360].

Why did Ōkawa focus academic attention on Max Müller’s lecture? Perhaps because Ōkawa attended the Sanskrit class of Takakusu Junjiro (1866-1945), an internationally known Buddhist scholar in Tokyo Imperial University who had studied Sanskrit under Max Müller at Oxford University in the 1890s. In his memoirs, Ōkawa expressed kind gratitude to Takakusu for guiding him to ancient Indian philosophy and recalled that he had read Müller’s A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature So Far As It Illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans and Müller’s English translation of Upanishads when he studied Sanskrit under Professor Takakusu.

In his essay on Sufism, Ōkawa consciously traced or followed Müller’s text: He first addressed the origin of Sufism by writing: “As the principal literature of Sufiism is composed in Persian, it was supposed by Sylvestre de Sacy and others that these ideas of the union of the soul with God had reached Persia from India, and spread from thence to other Mohammedan countries.” Then he continued on to the abstract of Sufi doctrine, Rabia as the earliest Sufi, and connected Sufism with early Christianity. He touched on prominent Sufi (Abu Said Abul Cheir, who was the founder of Sufism), Fakir (Abu Yasid), and Darwish (Junaid) philosophers. He also discussed the Mesnevi, an extensive poem written in Persian by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, the celebrated Persian Sufi saint and poet. Finally, Ōkawa addressed topics such as the poetical language of Sufism, the morality of Sufism, and so on.

Three years later, in the summer of 1913, Ōkawa suddenly changed his view

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on Islam after he chanced on a copy of Sir Henry Cotton’s New India or Indian in transition (published in 1886 and revised in 1905), which dealt with the miserable situation in India under British colonial rule. In the preface to his famous book Some Issues in Awakening Asia in 1922, Ōkawa explained his change of mind as follows:

It was in the summer of the 2nd year of the Taisho era (sic. in 1913). One evening I went for a walk in Kanda, a book-town, and happened to meet with Cotton’s book which was on display in the window of a bookshop. I didn’t know who he was and what he did. I didn’t know that this book was a masterpiece, either. Since I was fascinated with the title of the book New India, I bought and read it. Then I was much impressed that India was too miserable to be described as it was.

I had had no ideas about the contemporary India before I did read this book. Having respected the dignity of ancient Indian thoughts and yearned for mountains covered with snow that I had never seen, I pictured India to myself just as Brahman’s exercise place and Buddha’s holy land [Ōkawa 1922: 4].

Ōkawa realized that the real India differed completely from the India that he imagined. As for his interest in Islam, he explained this as follows:

It was in those days (in 1913) that I was much fascinated with the faith of Mahomet who addresses “the Koran or the Sword” head-on and has no separation between religion and politics [Ōkawa 1922: 6].

Ōkawa’s understanding of Islam in 1913 was far from that in 1910 when he wrote his essay on Sufism. He performed an about-face in his interest in Islam from the inner spiritual face of Islam, that is, of Sufism, to the outer Umma’s face of Islam, that is, of the “Jihadist-like” offensive side of Islam (according to Ōkawa’s understanding at the time). He began to emphasize the fighting spirit of the Prophet Muhammad in his article in 1915:

The surprisingly rapid expansion of Islam in its early years is an impressive phase in world religious history. Some argue that it was due to mission work by force of arms, and others discuss that it was due to a simple and easy

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teaching of Islam or that Mahomet stole lofty doctrines from other religions in order to adorn his religion. Nevertheless, we should not forget the fact that the root cause of the rapid spread of Islam and the most distinctive feature of Islam was the power lurking inside the founder Mahomet’s character and his strong personality. The true greatness of Islam lies neither in a moral code nor simple doctrines. The most precious character of Mahomet is his powerful fighting spirit to defeat all those who disobey the will of God. Islam advanced unopposed and gained a great victory because Muslims had enthusiastic fighting sprits [Ōkawa 1915b: 30-31].

After 1913, Ōkawa published a series of articles on Islam under the title “Mahomet and his Religion.” This series was written to educate and enlighten the readers of Dōkai’s journal Michi and was part of a series of “Lecture on Religion” [Ōkawa 1913a: 38-42; 1913b: 39-45; 1913c: 23-31; 1913d: 37-42]. Within this series, he published individual articles such as “Muslims’ anti-Christian Spirit” [Ōkawa 1915a: 76-78], “Islam and its Founder” [Ōkawa 15b: 18-31], and “What is Islam?” [Ōkawa 1916: 42-54]. The article “What is Islam?” was in fact an abridged version of An Introduction to Islam, which he published in 1942. He briefly explained in this article the meaning of Islam, its current circumstances, Sunni and Shi’ite, Islamic jurisprudence, al-Qur’ān, Allah and the Prophet Muhammad, and five pillars of Islam: (1) the Islamic creed (shahāda), (2) daily prayers (salāh), (3) almsgiving (zakāt), (4) fasting during Ramadan (sawm), and (5) the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) at least once in a lifetime. At the same time, he translated parts of Hadith into Japanese and published these translations from January to November 1914.

It is worth mentioning that as an ardent Asianist, Ōkawa’s attitude was severely anti-Western or anti-Christian in his defense of Islam. In 1913, he praised Muslims in China when he compared them with Confucians and Buddhists as follows:

In the spiritual world of China, only Islam gives religious vitalities to 23 million followers. While China has about 50 billion population, the number of Muslims is 23 million, one twentieth of the population. Nevertheless, even if the number of Confucians and Buddhists is statistically larger than Muslims, most of them are nominal followers, while Muslims are sympathetic with the founder’s spirit and observe religious laws. This population of 23 million

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Muslims can therefore be considered as the most powerful religious community in contemporary China [Ōkawa Shūmei Kankei Monjo Kankōkai 1998: 121].

This high praise of Muslims in China reflected Ōkawa’s hostility to Western Christian missionaries, who, in his view, held overbearing attitudes towards the Chinese and had imperialistic evil intentions. He learned a lesson from senior Japanese Christians, such as Uchimura Kanzo or Matsumura Kaiseki, who repelled arrogant foreign missionaries who were forcing foreign values outside of Christianity on Japanese Christians. Ōkawa regarded “White missionaries” as aggressors in this context.

The fragile structure of Chinese government and defectiveness of Chinese laws persuaded White missionaries to follow the wrong path. Perhaps they were pious and devout in front of God. But they were insolent and rude to ordinary Chinese people. They interfered in Chinese secular authority shielding themselves behind their own home authorities. White Christian missionaries appeared in Chinese people’s eyes as blunt invaders who should be expelled, not as philanthropist envoys of noble character [Ōkawa Shūmei Kankei Monjo Kankōkai 1998: 121].

IV. Ōkawa Shūmei’s Changing View of Islam during WWII

Ōkawa abruptly stopped writing articles on Islam following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, although, as mentioned earlier, he published several articles on Islam during and after World War I to educate and enlighten people. Perhaps the harsh realities of the collapsed Ottoman Empire fell short of his expectation for Islam. He idealized Prophet Muhammad and the highest stage of development in Islam as the perfect model of should-be Islam. After an almost 20-year interval, during which he was involved in political activities as a right wing thinker, Ōkawa, in August 1942, at last published An Introduction to Islam after the outbreak of the Pacific War.

Ōkawa briefly explained why he published this book on Islam at the onset of

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war, but his explanation was too short. It did not allow us to understand his political incentive and real motive as an Asianist and propagandist. He only touched on the reason why he published the book in his preface as follows:

Since we have many Muslims under the umbrella of the Greater East Asian Sphere of Co-Prosperity nowadays, it is necessary for our people to enlarge our stock of knowledge on Islam. It is the highest of honor that my book could be of some use to that end [Ōkawa 1942: 13].

It is surprising that, in this book, he avoided mentioning Islam in the context of a pan-Asianist strategy. Most of his readers expected Ōkawa to place Asian Muslims in his strategic view of the New East Asian Order, but he disappointed their expectations through a nonpolitical attitude to Islam and modest description of Islam and its history. Regarding this, Takeuchi pointed out that:

Ōkawa’s masterpiece about Islamic studies is An Introduction to Islam. When I read the book just after its publication in 1942, I was surprised to know that the basic information on Islam is well written to a point. Beginning with the climate of Arabia, he sketched a biography of Mahomet, the Koran and Hadith, Muslim beliefs and rituals, history of Sunni and Shi’ite Islam and finally concluded it with Islamic jurisprudence. During the war, publishing books on Islam was in fashion, therefore many publications on this topic were brought out. But there were no other books that could match his book. I greatly admired him as a brilliant scholar because he had an excellent ability to write such an appropriate introduction to Islam [Takeuchi 1969: 180-181].

Takeuchi’s admiration of Ōkawa was not unusual, even among Islamic scholars and researchers. It was an admiration shared by other contemporaries. One book review tells us that “this book was a laborious work that improved the quality of Islamic studies and was way ahead of other works in the past. We admit that this is a typical model of future Islamic studies and should be ranked as the starting point of a fresh start in Islamic studies” [Kaykyo Ken 1943: 61-63].

The book An Introduction to Islam consists of the following eight chapters: Preface and chapter 1 “Introduction”; chapter 2 “Arabia and Arabs”; chapter 3

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“Mahomet”; chapter 4 “Al-Qur’an and Hadith”; chapter 5 “Beliefs in Islam”; chapter 6 “Rituals in Islam”; chapter 7 “Development of Muslim Sects”; and chapter 8 “Development of Islamic Jurisprudence.” The chapters were written independently of one another and on separate occasions and were later compiled into one book. Ōkawa’s writing style in each chapter thus differs a little, and some chapters—such as those on Arabia, Mahomet, and Jurisprudence—have notes while the others have no notes.

It is worth pointing out that Ōkawa follows the European tradition of Orientalists or Islamic studies in basing his description of the European legacy of Islamology from the latter half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. In the true sense of the word, he can be considered a prominent Japanese Orientalist. Notwithstanding this, what is interesting in his Islamic studies is that, without explanation, Ōkawa omitted a chapter on Sufism, although European standard textbooks on Islam at the time always contained chapters on Islamic mysticism. This fact remains a mystery when addressing Ōkawa’s Islamic studies because his first published essay, although it was an abridged translation of a Max Müller lecture, was on Sufism.

In addition to ignoring Sufism in his book on Islam, Ōkawa also changed his view of Jihad – a view on which he had built his hopes at the beginning of the 1920s. In 1942, he explained “the Koran or the Sword” as follows:

As Christian historians trembled with fear at the sight of Arab’s swift conquer of West Asia and the mass conversion of inhabitants, they extended a mistaken idea that the expansion of Islam was made possible by Muslim fighters who cried “the Koran or the Sword.” Since then it has been widely believed that the religion of Muhammad was spread mainly by the sword. The idea disseminated in the world was obviously false [Ōkawa 1942: 3].

It is important to point out that he was newly fascinated with the faith of the Prophet Muhammad when, in 1913, he directly addressed “the Koran or the Sword” and offered no separation between the religion and the politics of the faith. By 1942, he was denying the concept of “the Koran and the Sword.”

It should be noted that Ōkawa faithfully based the articles and books he wrote during and after World War I on European Orientalists’ studies. He had a real talent

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for foreign languages such as English, German, French, classical Chinese, Sanskrit, and so on. He taught himself Arabic when he was a university student. However, it seems to me that, when he wrote his book in the 1940s many years after he had learned Arabic, he seems to almost have forgotten his Arabic. Consequently, he only referred to European studies on Islam in writing his book. He referenced the following scholars in European Islamic studies: Edward Lane (1801-76), Ernest Renan (1823-92), William Muir (1819-1905), R. Bosworth Smith (1839-1908), D.S. Margoliouth (1858-1940), Duncan Black MacDonald (1863-1943), and Alfred Guillaume (1888-1965). The German Orientalists he referred to are Gustav Veil (1808-89), Alois Sprenger (1813-93), Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), Theodor Nöldke (1850-1930), Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), Martin Haltmann (1851-1918), and so on. He also used English translations such as those of French Orientalist H. Lammans and of Dutch Orientalists Michael Jan de Geoje (1836-1909) and C. Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936).(5) Oddly, although he had command of the French language, he did not refer to Louis Massignon (1883-1962), a distinguished scholar of al-Hallaj, as his contemporary. Perhaps this omission bears some relationship to the omission of chapters on Sufism in his book.

The most impressive part of An Introduction to Islam is the chapter on the Prophet Muhammad, who Ōkawa regarded as a holy person throughout his life. He criticized European Orientalists for their biased opinions as follows:

Mahomet satisfied people in Arabia who had religiously needed and waited for the prophet. Even though European Orientalists cursed and swore Prophet Mahomet because of their chauvinistic attitudes to him, there is no doubt that he was a great prophet of the Semite people equal to Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah [Ōkawa 1942: 69-70].

Ōkawa criticized the Orientalists for their politically biased description of Muhammad’s marriage to Khadija: “Not only MacDonald but also two authorities in Britain and Germany, Muir and Sprenger, and other European scholars of Islam shared the same opinion on this point. It is strange that Margoliouth considered Mahomet’s marriage as political, even though he expressed his antagonism against Islam in other paragraphs” [Ōkawa 1942: 76].

In Chapter 8, “Development of Islamic Jurisprudence,” Ōkawa, on the other

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hand, praised another Orientalist, MacDonald, for “his sympathetic understanding of Islamic jurisprudence.” He also wrote that, by contrast, “the description of Islamic jurisprudence in M. Hartmann’s Der Islam was filled with harsh antagonism against Islam” [Ōkawa 1942: 252].

Ōkawa often positively referred to Duncan MacDonald’s Aspects of Islam, which consisted of eight lectures delivered in 1909 as part of the Hartford Lamson Lectures on Comparative Religion. Even though MacDonald wrote carefully that “I have endeavored to avoid direct suggestion as to the training and methods of the missionary to Muslims, except in such broad and human aspects as sympathy, courtesy and patience,” he was here criticized for having a “chauvinistic motive” by Ōkawa. Needless to say, MacDonald is only one of a long list of Orientalists. In fact, MacDonald admitted that he was much influenced by Goldziher, Nöldke, Lane, and Hurgronje in his other books [MacDonald 1903: viii].

MacDonald influenced younger generations such as Sir Hamilton Gibb (1895-1971), who is considered as one of the greatest Orientalists to publish after World War I. We learn from Edward W. Said how dramatic an effect MacDonald had on Gibb:

Among Gibb’s earliest influences was Duncan MacDonald, from whose work Gibb clearly derived the concept that Islam was a coherent system of life, a system made coherent not so much by the people who led that life as by virtue of some body of doctrine, method of religious practice, idea of order, in which all the Muslim people participated. Between the people and “Islam” there was obviously a dynamic encounter of sorts, yet what mattered to the Western student was the supervening power of Islam to make intelligible the experiences of the Islamic people, not the other way around [Said 1979: 276].

While it is true that Ōkawa was free from the stereotypical views of the Orient that were shared by other 19th-century Orientalists with their missionary purpose, ironically he inherited the Orientalists’ understanding of Islam as a coherent system of life: “a system made coherent not so much by the people who led that life as by virtue of some body of doctrine, method of religious practice, idea of order, in which all the Muslim people participated.” Accordingly, Ōkawa wrote the following in the preface of his book:

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Islam is not a “religion” as we ordinarily define it. Islam is a coherent system of life. The objects of study therefore are various, its scope is wide. It is needless to say that I only deal with one side of Islamic studies in my book [Ōkawa 1942: 13].

Ōkawa’s naïve claim that Islam was a coherent system of life was thus clearly based on MacDonald’s discourse. In his book, Ōkawa was only interested in showing readers the system that had been created “by virtue of some body of doctrine, method of religious practice, idea of order,” as MacDonald did, according to Said. As a natural consequence, it follows that he only described Muslim beliefs and rituals in his book, not the people going about their daily lives. It is characteristic of his deductive way of thinking that he explained Islam from the general principle of “essentialist” capitalized Islam while he tended to disregard local varieties of plural forms in Islam from area to area. Takeuchi also pointed out that Ōkawa “was not the kind of thinker who starts from practical experience and proceeds to formulate problems. For him, truth resided more in books to be read than in things to be seen. … What drew Ōkawa’s interest to the end was the abstract world of ordered thought; his interest was not aroused by the phenomena of chaos, corruption, or progress” [Takeuchi 1969: 371].

If we take his deductive thinking into consideration, it is interesting to note that Ōkawa believed Islam had a Western character because it carried on Hellenistic cultural traditions. Regarding this, he claimed:

Islam is frequently said to be an Eastern religion and its culture is called an Eastern culture. But Islam is inherited from basic beliefs shared by such religions as Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Christianity. It is not the same religion as those in India and China. Therefore, if we call India and China Eastern, Islam has a distinctly Western character contrary to an Eastern one. The areas where Arabs had advanced at the first stage were a Hellenistic cultural zone. It goes without saying that a Hellenistic cultural zone is meant to be the world of Greco-Roman civilization. The early conquest by Muslims was limited to that cultural zone. Consequently, the great influence that fostered Islam was Hellenistic culture and Persian culture. Islamic scholarship was also thoroughly affected by Greek culture and its theology owed much to Aristotelian philosophy. In consequence, Islamic culture is essentially Western and has a

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close connection with European culture [Ōkawa 1942: 4-5].

When he defined Islamic culture as essentially “Western,” what did Ōkawa think about Muslims living in Asian areas such as British India and Malaya or Dutch Indonesia? In other words, where did he place these Muslims within the Greater East Asian Sphere of Co-Prosperity? While he did not answer this question, he did distinguish between Asia and the East.

Ōkawa described the geographical border between “East” and “West” in his book A History of Anglo-American Aggression of East Asia as follows:

The Asian Continent is divided by mountain ranges running from Southwest to Northeast, that is to say, from the Indus River in the south to the Bering Strait in the north. These mountain ranges are the very long ridge of the world. The Old World is divided into two, East and West. The southeast slope of the roof is East and the southwest slope of it is West [Ōkawa 1962a: 760-761].

According to Ōkawa, “the countries of Persia, Asia Minor and Arabia belong to Asia, but it is clear that these countries belong to the West from the viewpoints of geography and world history. Therefore, East in the true meaning is the area that is located to the east of Pamir” [Ōkawa 1962a: 760-761]. The sphere of Asia is larger than that of the East. Hence, Islam is not an “Eastern religion” as such but is a “Western religion” and “Asian religion” at the same time. Since his dichotomy of West vs. East and Europe vs. Asia does not always overlap, we have to understand his strategy in describing the gaps between these two kinds of dichotomy.

V. Ōkawa’s Translation of al-Qur’ān into Japanese

Ōkawa described, in his personal memoirs, how he began to translate al-Qur’ān into Japanese while he was jailed as a war criminal after the Pacific War as follows:

I asked that the Arabic edition of the Koran and copies of more than ten foreign translations of the Koran such as Japanese, classic Chinese, English, French and Dutch translations be brought into my study room in my hospital.

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I began to read them on December 1, the 21st year in the Showa era. I often saw and talked with Mahomet in my day dream when I was insane. I therefore revived my interest in the Koran. My illness didn’t affect my understanding. On the contrary, I could understand more clearly most of the passages that I couldn’t understand when I first read them. In the latter part of May in the 22nd Showa era, I had finished reading al-Qur’an immediately before I was transferred to a US Army hospital for my psychiatric examination [Ōkawa 1961: 740].

It is worthwhile emphasizing that he met the Prophet Muhammad many times in his day dream after he went mad, and it was these meetings that revived his interest in al-Qur’ān. At this point, he was less interested in the outward face of Islam; that is, in political Islam. He began instead to concentrate on Muhammad as a holy person or perfection for man.

He could complete the translation of al-Qur’ān in December 1948 because he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. It took 1 year and 9 months to translate it. He later recalled his interest in al-Qur’an as follows:

Alif , Bā, Tā, Thā. How difficult I learned Arabic by myself, only relying on Manasevich’s textbook(6) / I ordered the Koran with English translation from India through Maruzen Bookshop / How excited the beginner of Arabic was when he received the Koran of Mahdiyeh Association! / It was at that time that I translated parts of Hadith and published them serially in Michi , Dōkai’s Journal / It was at that time that I wrote a biography of Mahomet as a series of Akagi / It was at that time that I made up my mind to translate the Koran into Japanese / How many drafts did I make? / Firstly I had translated only three chapters / Secondly I stopped after I finished nine chapters / I tried to translate the Koran a few times thereafter / I was too busy those days to devote all my efforts to translate it / I could complete my translation after I was put on trial as a war criminal and lost my reason / I realized my long-cherished wish. Ah! Invisible forces lead me / Due to the May 15th Incident, I was jailed in Toyotama Prison which became my office where I completed writing a history of chartered companies / This confinement made me devote myself to study Islam /Ah! Wishes which sprang in the breast of itself could be realized without

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noticing / It was a wonder that misfortunes for others in this world made me happy! [Ōkawa 1961: 741-744]

It is interesting that he did not touch at all on his well-known book An Introduction to Islam in his memoir. Since that book was a compilation of his earlier articles, he might not have been satisfied with it. After he went mad during the trial, he began to go back to the starting point: to the inner face of Islam, according to Izutsu’s terminology.

Ōkawa quoted a paragraph from East-West Divan (1819) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) at the beginning of his preface to the translation of al-Qur’ān. In it, he writes that “the Koran, at first disgusting us each time afresh, soon attracts, astounds and in the end enforces our reverence. This book will go on exercising, through all ages, a most potent influence” [Ōkawa 1974: 1]. Goethe’s encounter with the 14th-century Persian poetry Divan of Hafiz inspired him to produce his own Divan: the East-West Divan. It is presumed that, in his later years, Ōkawa identified himself with the Goethe who had devoted himself to Hafez. Indeed, Goethe’s East-West Divan functions as an archetypal model for religious and literary syntheses between the Occident and the Orient.

Ōkawa emphasized that “Koran is not just a classic. It should not be considered as an ordinary book since it prescribes religious, moral and social life for Muslims as the holy book for three hundred million Muslims” [Ōkawa 1974: 3].

Yet Ōkawa felt he was not qualified to translate al-Qur’ān because the translation of Buddhist sutras into Chinese had been enabled by the work of great scholars such as Kumārajīva (344-413) and Xuanzang (602-664). Ōkawa called readers’ attentions to the fact that al-Qur’ān was not originally written in literary Arabic but was intended to be recited to people because al-Qur’ān literally means “recitation.” He told us, modestly:

Since I am not a Muslim and poor in the Arabic language, it is not necessary to say that I am not qualified to translate the Koran. I however made religious studies in my university and I have been much interested in Islam. Even now I don’t abandon Islamic studies. I cannot read the original Arabic text of the Koran to the letter, but I can deeply understand the spirit it told us [Ōkawa 1974: 3].

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It should be stressed here that Ōkawa wrote, in his later years, about his idea regarding religious founders in an unpublished manuscript on religion that was composed in the context of meeting the Prophet Muhammad in a daydream after he had been certified insane. This shows how he understood religion and why he wrote a biography of the Prophet Muhammad after World War II. He categorized Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Confucianism as “founder-centered religion” when he wrote the following:

Among the founder-centered religions, the most typical religions are Buddhism and Christianity. We have no difficulty to categorize Islam and Confucianism as the same religion. However, there is a difference between the two categories: in Buddhism and Christianity, the founder is worshiped as the Deity by followers, while in Islam and Confucianism the founder is respected as a messenger or a mediator. Going into detail, in Buddhism and Christianity, the founder is not only a respected man but also the venerated Deity since the followers believe that the Deity transcends the world as the origin of all things in the world and the object of faith, at the same time the founder doesn’t embody part of divinity but perfectly all divinity. Veneration of the founder gives us the Divine’s force and salvation. On the contrary, in Islam and Confucianism the founder is only man to the utmost and respected as an ideal character, but he isn’t put at the same category as God. This is strictly forbidden in Islam [Ōkawa 1962b: 337-338].

Ōkawa emphasized that Islam attached importance to the character of the founder, that is, the Prophet Muhammad, through the study of Hadith and what the Prophet said and did during his life. He summarized the founder-centered religion as follows:

The founder-centered religion regards the founder as perfection of man and his life as norm of perfect deeds. Followers’ ideal is to be like the founder. The best way for the followers to take is to live for this ideal and to believe in god that appears in the founder and then to prove in a real life that the new life they found out in him is true. Therefore in this religion studies of character and divinity are seriously made. The Buddha-Body theory in Buddhism, Christology

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in Christianity and Hadith in Islam prove how strong the worship of the founder is [Ōkawa 1962b: 338].

It is important to point out that Ōkawa understood that “in Islam and Confucianism the founder is only man to the utmost and respected as an ideal character, but he isn’t put at the same category as God. This is strictly forbidden in Islam.” He found out that a point in common between Islam and Confucianism is the ideal character of the founder. Because Ōkawa was tutored in Confucian classics when young, he understood Islam in the context of Confucianism. After World War II, when he had been certified insane, he translated al-Qur’ān into Japanese and wrote a life of Muhammad. He tried to identify himself with Muhammad as an ideal character; that is, as a perfect man. His interest in Islam continued intermittently thereafter through his interest in Muhammad.

VI. Concluding Remarks

Ōkawa Shūmei was interested in Islam especially when he was young and in his later years. But his understanding of and interest in Islam changed during the course of his life, as summarized below.

When he was a student at the university, he became interested in Sufism through a general reading of literature on Christian Mysticism. In 1913, he was awakened as a nationalist and Asianist by Henry Cotton’s New India. His interest thus changed from the inward, spiritual Islam to the outward, political Islam. At this time, he emphasized a Jihadist side of Islam by interpreting “the Sword and the Koran” as Muhammad’s expression of the fighting spirit. But, he kept silent on Islam following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923.

After an interval of about 20 years, he published in 1942 his best-known book An Introduction of Islam during the Pacific War. Despite readers’ expectations to the contrary, this book was not intended to support Japanese war propaganda or to make him a famous Asianist. This is because he only described in the book the ideal types of Islam or the idealized Islamic state at the zenith of the Islamic Empire from a Japanese Orientalist’s point of view. He did not touch at all on current issues related to the ongoing war.

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Finally, it is interesting to note that Ōkawa’s book on Islam contains no chapter on Sufism although he wrote an essay on the subject when he was a university student. In the aftermath of the war, at the time of the Tokyo war crime trial, he was declared legally insane. It was while he was in Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo, when he returned to Islam through a veneration of the Prophet Muhammad with a perfect personality, that he began to translate al-Qur’an. It is further interesting to note how he came to understand, in his later years, how he had arrived at his own religious education in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and so forth through the founders.

Notes

(1) Before World War II, the term “Kaikyo （回教）,” not Isuramu (Islam), was commonly used in Japanese. In this article, the term Islam is used even if the old-fashioned term ‘Kaikyo’ is used in the original Japanese texts.

(2) In this article, “al-Qur’ān” and “Prophet Muhammad” are used; but so, too, are the old-fashioned forms “the Koran” and “Mahomet” specifically when referring to the original Japanese texts.

(3) The first edition of the book consists of the following chapters [Ōkawa 1922]: Chapter 1 “Europe in Revolution and Asia in Revival”; Chapter 2 “The Origin and Development of Tibet Problem”; Chapter 3 “The Kingdom of Thailand Liberating British and French Invasions”; Chapter 4 “India through the Course of Revolution”; Chapter 5 “Afghanistan and its Problems”; Chapter 6 “Persia on way of Restoration”; Chapter 7 “Bolshevists’ Policy of the Middle East”; Chapter 8 “Young Turks’ Fifty Years”; Chapter 9 “The Victory of Egyptian Nationalist Movement in 1919”; Chapter 10 “Muslim Nations under European Rules”; Chapter 11 “Muslim League as the Front of Awakening Asia”; Chapter 12 “The Significance of Mesopotamian Problem”; Chapter 13 “Awakening Jewish National Movement”; and Chapter 14 “The Development of Baghdad Railway.” Chapter 13, on Zionism, was omitted from the second edition of this book, which was republished in 1936, without any explanation.

(4) Two biographies, i. e. Matsumoto [2004] and Otsuka [2009], were reissued as paperbacks.(5) Most of the books Ōkawa read when he worked at the East Asian Economic Bureau were

confiscated by the G.H.Q. during the U.S. occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952. We can read the European books and encyclopedias he used when he translated al-Quran into Japanese because the Sakata City Library has compiled them together in the Ōkawa Shūmei book collection.

(6) Manassewitsch [1912].

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References

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Izutsu, Toshihiko. 1941. A History of Arabic Thoughts: Islamic Theology and Islamic Philosophy. Tokyo: Hakubunkan (in Japanese).

———. 1980. “Two Faces of Islam.” Chūō Kōron 95(9): 70-92 (in Japanese). ———. 1993. “Darkness and Brightness in the Last Decade of Twenty Century.” In Selected Works of

Izutsu Toshihiko, Supplementary Volume, 369-399. Tokyo: Chūō Kōron (in Japanese).Kaikyō Ken. 1943. “The Institute’s Book Review: A Report on Research Seminar of the Institute.”

Kaikyō Ken 7(3): 61-64.MacDonald, D.B. 1903. Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory.

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.Manassewitsch [Manasevich], Boris. 1912. Lehrbuch, die arabische Sprache durch Selbstunterricht

schnell und leicht zu erlernen. Wien and Leipzig: A. Hartleben’s Verlag.Matsumoto, Ken’ichi. 2004. Ōkawa Shūmei. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten (in Japanese).Misawa, Nobuo. 2003. “ŌKAWA Shūmei and the Islamic Studies in Japan.” Bulletin of Asian and

African Cultures Research Institute (Toyo University) (37): 73-83 (in Japanese).Müller, Friedrich Max. 1893. “Lecture 11 Sufiism.” In Theosophy or Psychological Religion: The

Gifford Lectures delivered before the University of Glasgow in 1892 by F. Max Müller. London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co.

Okakura, Kakuzo. 1903. The Ideal of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan. London. Rep. in 2007, Tokyo: Yohan.

Ōkawa, Shūmei. 1913a. “Mahomet and his Religion (1): Lecture on Religion, Part 13.” Michi (65): 38-42 (in Japanese).

———. 1913b. “Mahomet and his Religion (2): Lecture on Religion, Part 14.” Michi (66): 39-45 (in Japanese).

———. 1913c. “Mahomet and his Religion (3): Lecture on Religion, Part 15.” Michi (67): 23-31 (in Japanese).

———. 1913d. “Mahomet and his Religion (4): Lecture on Religion, Part 16.” Michi (68): 37-42 (in Japanese).

———. 1915a. “Muslims’ anti-Christian Spirit.” Michi (82): 76-78 (in Japanese).———. 1915b. “Islam and its Founder.” Michi (85): 18-31 (in Japanese).———. 1916. “What is Islam?” Michi (95): 42-54 (in Japanese).———. 1921. A History of Japanese Civilization. Tokyo: Daitōkaku (in Japanese).———. 1922. Some Issues in Reviving Asia. Tokyo: Daitōkaku (in Japanese).———. 1942. An Introduction to Islam. Tokyo: Keiō Shobō (in Japanese).———. 1951. Koran: Japanese Translation of al-Qur’ān. Tokyo: Iwasaki Shoten.

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———. 1961. “A Gate to Peace of Mind: A Spiritual Autobiography.” In The Complete Works of Ōkawa Shūmei, Vol. 1, 721-878. Tokyo: Iwasaki Shoten (in Japanese, originally published in 1951).

———. 1962a. “A History of Anglo-American Aggression of East Asia.” In The Complete Works of Ōkawa Shūmei, Vol. 2, 688-766. Tokyo: Iwasaki Shoten (in Japanese, originally published in 1942).

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8, 177-199. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō (in Japanese).

ABSTRACTUSUKI AkiraA Japanese Asianist’s View of Islam: A Case Study of Ōkawa Shūmei

This article analyzes Ōkawa Shūmei’s changing interest in Islam during the course of his life. Although he was a famous right wing ideologue and Asianist, Ōkawa worked as a scholar in Islam. When he was a student at Tokyo imperial university, he became interested in Sufism. His interest however changed from the inward, spiritual Islam to the outward, political Islam in 1913. At this time, he interpreted “the Sword and the Koran” as Muhammad’s expression of the fighting spirit. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, he kept silent on Islam. After an interval of about 20 years, he published his best-known book An Introduction of Islam in 1942. Despite readers’ expectations to the contrary, this book was not intended to support Japanese war propaganda, because he only described in the book the ideal types of Islam or the idealized Islamic state at the zenith of the

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Islamic Empire from a Japanese Orientalist’s point of view. In the aftermath of the war, at the time of the Tokyo war crime trial, he was declared legally insane. While he translated al-Qur’an in Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo, he returned to Islam through a veneration of the Prophet Muhammad with a perfect personality. He came to understand religions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and so forth through the founders in his later years

Professor, Faculty of Humanities, Japan Women’s University日本女子大学文学部教授

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A Japanese Asianist's View of Islam - J-Stage

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