Islam in Japan
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The history of Islam in Japan is relatively brief in relation with its longstanding presence in other countries around the world.
There few and isolated records of contact between Islam and Japan before the opening of the country in 1853, although some Muslims did arrive in Nagasaki in earlier centuries.
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[edit] History
The first modern Muslim contacts were with Malays who were served aboard British and Dutch ships in the late 19th century. In the late 1870s, the life of Muhammad was translated into Japanese. This helped Islam to find a place in the intellectual imagination of the Japanese people, but only as a part of the history of cultures.
Another important contact was made in 1890 when Ottoman Turkey dispatched a naval vessel to Japan for the purpose of saluting the visit of Japanese Prince Akihito Komatsu to Istanbul several years earlier. This frigate was called the "Ertugrul", and was destroyed in a storm along the coast of Wakayama Prefecture on the evening of September 16, 1890.
[edit] 20th century
The first Muslim Japanese to go on the Hajj was Kotaro Yamaoka who converted to Islam in 1909 and took the name Omar Yamaoka after making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and Bunpachiro Ariga, who about the same time went to India for trading purposes and converted to Islam under the influence of local Muslims there, and subsequently took the name Ahmad Ariga. However, recent studies have also revealed that other Japanese such as Shotaro Noda and Torajiro Yamada were probably the first Japanese who visited Turkey out of sympathy for those who died in the Ertugrul. Yamada converted to Islam, and took the name Abdul Khalil, and probably made a pilgrimage to Mecca.
The real Muslim community life however did not start until the arrival of several hundred Turkoman, Uzbek, Tajik, Kirghiz, Kazakh and other Turko-Tatar Muslim refugees from Central Asia and Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution during World War I. These Muslims who were given asylum in Japan settled in several main cities around Japan and formed small Muslim communities. A number of Japanese converted to Islam through the contact with these Muslims.
With the formation of these small Muslim communities several mosques have been built, the most important of them being the Kobe Mosque built in 1935 and the Tokyo Mosque built in 1938 (completely rennovated in 1990s). One thing that should be emphasized is that Japanese Muslims played little role in building these mosques, and there have been no Japanese so far who have become Imam of any of the mosques.
During World War II, an "Islamic Boom" occurred in Japan through organisations and research centers on Islam and the Muslim World. During this period, over 100 books and journals on Islam were published in Japan. However, these organisations or research centers were not controlled or run by the Muslims. nor was their purpose the propagation of Islam. Their purpose was to let the military be better equipped with the necessary knowledge about Islam and Muslims since there were large Muslim communities in the areas occupied in China and Southeast Asia by the Japanese army. As a result, with the end of the war in 1945, these organisations and research centers disappeared rapidly.
[edit] Post World War Two
In the 1970's, another "Islamic Boom" was set in motion this time in the shade of "Arab Boom" after the "1973 oil crisis. After realizing the importance of the Middle East and its massive oil reserves for the Japanese economy, the Japanese mass media have since been reported to having given big publicity to the Muslim World in general and the Arab World in particular . With this publicity many Japanese who had no idea about Islam got the chance to see the scene of Hajj in Mecca and hear the call of Adhan (Islamic call to prayer) and Qur'anic recitations. Beside many sincere conversions to Islam at the time, there were also mass conversions of several tens of thousands of people.[citation needed] However, with the end of the effect of oil shock, most of those who converted to Islam left the faith.
The Turks have been the biggest Muslim community in Japan until recently. Pre-war Japan was well-known for its sympathy and favour towards Muslims in central Asia, seeing in them an anti-Soviet ally. In those days some Japanese who worked in intelligence circles had contact with these Muslims. A few converted to Islam through these contacts, and embraced it after the war ended. There were also those who went to Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia as soldiers during the war. The pilots were instructed to say "La ilaha illa Allah", ("There is no god but Allah", the muslim declaration of faith) when they were shot down in these regions, so that their lives would be spared. It was reported that one of the pilots was actually shot down and captured by the inhabitants. When he shouted the "magic" words to them, to his astonishment they changed their attitudes and treated him well.[citation needed]
The Japanese invasion of China and South East Asian countries during the second world war brought the Japanese in contact with Muslims. Those who embraced Islam through them returned to Japan and established in 1953, the first Japanese Muslim organisation, the Japan Muslim Association under the leadership of the late Sadiq Imaizumi. Its members, numbering sixty five at the time of inauguration, increased twofold before he died six years later.
The second president of the association was the late Umar Mita. Mita was typical of the old generation, who learned Islam in the territories occupied by the Japanese Empire. He was working for the Manshu Railway Company, which virtually controlled the Japanese territory in the north eastern province of China at that time. Through his contacts with Chinese Muslims, he became a Muslim in Peking. When he returned to Japan after the war, he made the Hajj, the first Japanese in the post-war period to do so. He also made a Japanese translation of the meaning of the Qur'an from a Muslim perspective for the first time.
Thus, it was only after the second world war, that what can properly be called "a Japanese Muslim community" came into existence. Though many Islamic organisations were established since the 1900s, each of them had only very few active members.
[edit] Muslim Demographics
There is no reliable estimate of the Muslim population in Japan as the government does not inquire about people's religion on census forms or other official documents. The majority of estimates of the Muslim population have been put at around 100,000, but this is claimed to be an exaggerated figure provided by Muslim associations in Japan.
The most reliable scholarship puts the number of Muslims in Japan at around 60,000-70,000, of which about 90% are foreign residents, and 10% are ethnic Japanese. At the present time, Indonesians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Iranians make up the largest communities of foreign Muslims in Japan.
[edit] Education about Muslims in Japan
Religious campaigns are no more successful for other divine revelations or New Religions. The statistics indicate that some 80% of the total population believe in either Buddhism or Shintoism while as few as 0.7% are Christians (however this is a huge percentage as compared to muslims). The latest results of a poll conducted by a Japanese monthly opinion magazine imply however an important caveat. Only one out of four Japanese effectively believes in any particular religion. The lack of faith is even more pronounced for Japanese youth in their 20s with a rate of atheism as high as 85%.
The potential direct agents of Islamic preaching represented by the Muslim community in Japan is itself extremely small in proportion compared with the total population of more than one hundred and twenty million citizens. Students together with immigrant workers constitute a large segment of the muslim community. They are concentrated in big urban cities such as Hiroshima, Kyoto, Nagoya, Osaka and Tokyo but are seldom organised into established units in order to conduct effective programs of introducing and explaining Islam. In fact, the Muslim students association as well as some local societies organise periodical camps and gatherings in an effort to improve the understanding of Islamic teachings and for the sake of strengthening brotherhood relations among Muslims.
Further difficulties are faced by Muslims with respect to communication, housing, child education or the availability of halal food and Islamic literature, and these constitute additional factors hindering the course of da'wah in Japan.
Because of poor distribution, even translations of the meanings of Qur'an into Japanese language are not publicly available. Islamic literature is virtually absent from bookstores or public libraries to the exception of few English-written essays and books that are sold at relatively high prices.
As a result, it is relatively unsurprising to find out that the knowledge of ordinary Japanese about Islam is modest. With increasingly significant evidence of a responsible recognition of its duties and rational assessment of its limits and capabilities, there are indications that the Muslim community in general is showing stronger commitment to accomplish its task of educating ordinary Japanese people about Islam and Muslims in general, in a better organized fashion whilst ignoring the fact of the lack of general interest from the mainstream Japanese public.
[edit] References
- Abu Bakr Morimoto, Islam in Japan: Its Past, Present and Future, Islamic Centre Japan, 1980.
- Arabia, Vol. 5, No. 54. February 1986/Jamad al-Awal 1406.
- Hiroshi Kojima, "Demographic Analysis of Muslims in Japan," The 13th KAMES and 5th AFMA International Symposium, Pusan, 2004.
- Michael Penn, "Islam in Japan: Adversity and Diversity," Harvard Asia Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1, Winter 2006.
- Keiko Sakurai, Nihon no Musurimu Shakai (Japan's Muslim Society), Chikuma Shobo, 2003.
[edit] External links
- Islam-QA Japanese - Japanese Islamic website offering a comprehensive library of Islamic references and resources in the Japanese language.
- Shingetsu Institute The Shingetsu Institute tracks Japanese-Islamic relations from an academic perspective.
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