Title
Toruko Gakan: Japanese Mirror of the Ottoman Turkish World
Abstract
Selçuk Esenbel, Professor Emeritus at the Department of History Asian Studies Center, Bogazici University, Istanbul Turkey, presented her research on the modern Japanese mirror of the Ottoman Turkish world in Yamada Torajirō’s 1911 book, Toruko Gakan土耳古畫観, Illustrated Observations of Turkey. This work shows the beginnings of the patterns in Japanese-Turkish relations. Yamada Torajirō’s book is significant as the first Japanese publication on the Ottoman Turkish world that reveals the modern Japanese imagination, namely, a “mirror” of the Ottoman Turkish world.
Unlike many Meiji Japanese travel accounts of the Ottoman empire—a popular stop over on route between Europe and Asia—Yamada’s work is that of a Meiji Japanese person who knew vernacular Turkish, and lived in Ottoman Istanbul for around 15 years as a merchant managing the Nakamura Shōten, the Japanese store of Istanbul. The year 2024 commemorates the centenary of official relations between Japan and Turkey which began with the ratification of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty that is the legal foundation of today’s Turkey.
Biography
Professor Esenbel was born in Washington D.C. as the child of a diplomatic family. She went to high school in Japan, and studied Japanese and East Asian Studies throughout her education. She completed her Japanese History Ph.D. in East Asian Studies and Cultures at Columbia University. Esenbel is the founding director and current Academic Coordinator of the Asian Studies Center, and the Master of Arts in Asian Studies in Bogazici University. Esenbel has opened a new field of study in the history of modern Japan from a global perspective of transnational Japanese interaction with Islam and the Turkic world, Pan-Asianism and Pan-Islam, as well as perceptions of the West in Japanese and Turkish modernity.