Politics, Cultural Identity, and the Japanese Example

Abstract

Ottoman pan-Asianist sentiments were widely shared among people in the Empire. Images of the Japanese nation supported an alternative, pan-Asian, Ottoman doctrine uniting various sectors of society in the face of Western imperialism in a more inclusive fashion that would not violate Islamic or other previous affiliations while suggesting the construction of a future nation. This ideology could be understood to incorporate all members of the Empire into a functional Ottoman political solidarity whose identity was now to be redirected and expanded into the larger entity of the “East.” Solidarity with Japan and its accomplishments informed a kind of “horizontal mediation” among all Ottoman citizens regardless of religion, ethnicity, or other orientation, so that Muslims, Christians and Jews, Druzes, Kurds, Arabs and Turks, modernists, traditionalists, and secularists, statesmen, provincial notables, middle-class professionals, and even the illiterate were attracted by this rationale of “modern Easternism.” In addition, pan-Asian solidarity with Japan could provide ideological support for Ottoman institutions and policies that governed relations between state and civil society in a process of “vertical mediation.” Japanese imagery arbitrated between the Ottoman Sultan and his bureaucrats in conceptions of leadership, monarchical rule, and scientific advance; between the Sultan and his subjects in a merging of Abdülhamidian pan-Islam and pan-Asianism, between members of the Young Turk movement attempting to reinstate the constitution, and generally between Ottoman officialdom and its newly conceived citizenry through justification of modernizing policies, reform initiatives, and other efforts by the state to centralize and/or exert administrative control over society.