Afin de siècleJapanese romantic in Istanbul: the life of Yamada Torajirō and hisToruko gakan

Abstract

The modern Japanese tourist visiting the Topkapi Sarai may well be struck by a display of sixteenth-century samurai armour and helmet held there. It was presented, along with a sword, to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1892 by Yamada Torajirō (1866–1957), an important pioneer in the history of Turkish-Japanese relations and the subject of this paper. Yamada, who was to remain in the imperial capital for almost twenty years, was witness to the history of the Hamidian era of conservative modernism under the despotic regime of the so-called ‘Red Sultan’, and the subsequent dramatic transition to constitutionalism that came with the Young Turk revolution of 1908. He was one of only two Japanese resident in the city (possibly in the whole empire) in this period. The other was Nakamura Ejirō, owner of the first Japanese shop in Istanbul, and Yamada's friend and partner.

Japan, Turkey and the World of Islam

“…Yamada was quickly accepted by the Ottoman Porte as the unofficial conduit for conducting relations between Ottoman Turkey and Japan. During the following decades he was to become the sole agent for trade with the Ottoman empire and acted as an unofficial consulate-general for Japanese visitors taking advantage of his congenial relations with the palace and the Ottoman élite circles who seem to have developed a liking for this young Japanese (for the details on Yamada and Turkish experience, see Esenbel, 1996).…”

Forgotten Futures: Indian Muslims in the Trans-Islamic Turn to Japan

“…Nor is it the aim of this essay to suggest that India and the Middle East were solely at the receiving end of these travel lessons. For in the years on either side of 1900, these regions served as places of inspiration for Japanese religious and cultural reformers, with Indian forms imported into Japanese Buddhist architecture, though it has to be said that India was envisioned as the locus of tradition rather than progress, which Japanese travelers instead sought in America and Europe (Esenbel 1996;Jaffe 2004Jaffe , 2006. Imperial Japan, then, had its own orientalism.…”