Shoes and Modern Civilization Between Racism and Imperialism: The 1880 Yoshida Masaharu Mission of Meiji Japan to Qajar Iran as Global History

Abstract

This paper discusses the nineteenth century Meiji Japanese self-reflection on modernity, civilization and identity that was compelled to negotiate between Racism and Imperialism. The Meiji vision of a global world was made up of a hierarchy of nations according to their level of enlightenment and civilization using the West as a benchmark. The study of Yoshida Masaharu’s travel account Kaikyō Tanken Perusha no Tabi (The Expedition to the Islamic World: The Journey to Persia) (Tokyo: Hakubunka, 1894) shows this attitude. Yoshida’s book is also quite valuable as the firsthand account of the Japanese interaction in 1880 with Persia of the Qajar dynasty in Iran as an entry into the Muslim world. Sent by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Japanese Mission was a small-scale version of the famous Iwakura Mission to learn about the West earlier between 1871-1873, as an investigation expedition to study the Muslim Middle East-Islamic affairs. The Japanese Mission of seven members including an Army officer representing the newly established Sanbō Honbu, the Japanese General Staff, and five businessmen, were headed by the envoy Yoshida Masaharu, a liberal Constitutionalist from Tosa domain whose views colored his interpretation of Qajar Iran and Shah Nasir al-Din’s reforms using Western know-how. The Yoshida Mission’s experience shows us some of the enduring perceptions as well as stereotyped images among the general Japanese public even today classifying Islam as an alien religion and the Middle Eastern world as a strange geography: exotic but alien, fascinating but also unfamiliar. Shoes and Modern Civilization Between Racism and Imperialism: The 1880 Yoshida Masaharu Mission of Meiji Japan to Qajar Iran as Global History Selçuk Esenbel Department of History, Boğaziçi University 13 This paper argues that the Yoshida travelogue actually reveals to us the complex cultural and political layers with which Yoshida saw Qajar Iran and provides an instructive journey into the mind of a nineteenth century Meiji Japanese elite who still carried their Edo cultural background as well as the more obvious Westernism of the new regime in order to decipher the global context of Iran. In turn, the Yoshida Mission’s impact on Iranian intellectuals and their subsequent 1906 Constitutional Revolution shows the global influences and connections between the history of two so-called Non-Western worlds in the process of adapting Western forms and ideas in their respective reformist agendas.