A Japanese Asianist’s View of Islam: A Case Study of Ōkawa Shūmei (<Special Feature> New Trends in Japan's Study of the Middle East: Searching for Roots)

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  • ある日本人アジア主義者のイスラム観：大川周明の場合
  • A Japanese Asianist's View of Islam : A Case Study of Okawa Shumei

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This article analyzes Ōkawa Shūmei’s changing interest in Islam during the course of his life. Although he was a famous right wing ideologue and Asianist, Ōkawa worked as a scholar in Islam. When he was a student at Tokyo imperial university, he became interested in Sufism. His interest however changed from the inward, spiritual Islam to the outward, political Islam in 1913. At this time, he interpreted “the Sword and the Koran” as Muhammad’s expression of the fighting spirit. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, he kept silent on Islam. After an interval of about 20 years, he published his best-known book An Introduction of Islam in 1942. Despite readers’ expectations to the contrary, this book was not intended to support Japanese war propaganda, because he only described in the book the ideal types of Islam or the idealized Islamic state at the zenith of the Islamic Empire from a Japanese Orientalist’s point of view. In the aftermath of the war, at the time of the Tokyo war crime trial, he was declared legally insane. While he translated al-Qur’an in Matsuzawa Hospital in Tokyo, he returned to Islam through a veneration of the Prophet Muhammad with a perfect personality. He came to understand religions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and so forth through the founders in his later years.

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