A Topos and Its Dissolution: Japan in Some 20th-century Iranian Texts

Abstract

Towards the end of the 19th century, different parts of the Islamic world, occupied with various attempts to cope with the European power play, became aware of a country that seemed to have “made it”: Japan, remote and in self-imposed, almost complete isolation from the Western world for more than 200 years up to 1853, fascinated Muslim viewers. In different aspects, Japan's situation lent itself to comparison. It had been a military confrontation with economic incentives that had forced Japan to come into contact with the West. In the first military confrontation with the American warships sent to force the opening of Japanese ports in 1853, Japan could not withstand the Western threat and thus confirmed the stereotype of the inferior traditional Oriental country retreating in the face of the superior, advanced West.