China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II by Kelly A. Hammond

Abstract

Reviewed by: China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II by Kelly A. Hammond Selçuk Esenbel (bio) China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II. By Kelly A. Hammond. University of North Carolina Press, 2020. xviii, 294 pages. $95.00, cloth; $29.95, paper, $22.99, E-book. In China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II, Kelly Hammond examines the Japanese empire's cultivation of China's [End Page 453] Muslims—primarily Sino-Muslims—amidst the multiethnic composition of the Japanese-occupied territories in China. Identified as regional collaborators in East Asia, Sino-Muslims were also designated as representatives of Japan's interests in the wider world of Islam beyond East Asia, reaching out to Muslim communities in South East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa through their longstanding transnational network across the Muslim world. The book's first chapter discusses Japan's growing interest in Sino-Muslims from the Meiji period through the puppet regime of Manchukuo until the end of World War II. The second chapter exposes the difficult situation of Sino-Muslims "sitting on a bamboo fence" between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese empire. The third chapter situates Sino-Muslims in the Japanese empire's Islam policy projects to "undermine Soviet Communism and Western imperialism" (p. 109)—projects such as presenting Japan as the savior of Islam, the 1938 opening of the Tokyo Mosque, and providing haven to anticolonial and anti-imperialist Muslims and to Tatar Muslims. The latter were officially designated as Japan's Muslims. The Japanese authorities built mosques, erected schools for the education of Sino-Muslim men and women, and sponsored the 1938 Sino-Muslim religious pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca and Medina and the pilgrimages of Japanese Muslim agents during the 1930s. The government formed the Greater Japan Islamic League (Dai Nippon Kaikyō Kyōkai) in Tokyo in 1938 for Islamoriented public relations propaganda, with General Hayashi Senjurō as its president and the Russian Muslim Tatar religious cleric-activist Abdurresid Ibrahim as the Muslim "face" of the organization. In 1937 Japanese authorities had already founded the All China Muslim League in Beijing with Wang Ruilan as chairman and Takagaki Shinzō as the Japanese advisor. Chapter 4 moves on to the deployment of Sino-Muslims in Japan's aspirational empire in regions beyond East Asia, discussing the reports of the Greater Japan League which argued in favor of using Sino-Muslims as a "model" for modern Muslims and as a commercial network to sell tea in the Middle East and North Africa as part of Japanese "cultural diplomacy." The final chapter 5 and the conclusion link Japan's policy toward Islam with fascist entanglements, whereby "Islamic spaces and overlapping interests" (p. 183) tied policies of the Japanese empire to those of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy within the global fascist project. The book concludes that both the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communists were in their postwar regimes impacted by Japan's Sino-Muslim policies factoring in the formation of Sino-Muslims as an ethnic community—Hui minzu. It ends with an epilogue on lessons of history, addressing the current violent and repressive Chinese oppression of Uyghurs. Highlighting the connection of Sino-Muslims to imperial Japan's prewar "Islam policy" (frequently termed kaikyō seisaku in the writings of [End Page 454] Japanese Pan-Asianist intellectuals such as Ōkawa Shūmei), Hammond makes particular use of the photographs, journals, and policy reports of the Greater Japan Islamic League, the Japanese government's propaganda and networking agency targeting Muslim lands near and far. Many publications on Islam in Japan were written by the first generation of Japan's own Islamic studies experts. These included the Arabist scholar Kobayashi Hajime, who was educated in Egypt and became an instructor in the Army Academy during the war; Tanaka Ippei, an expert on Chinese Muslims and interpreter for the Imperial Army; and the Japanese Muslim Suzuki Takeshi, who participated in and wrote about the Japanese Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Hammond tapped other rich materials deposited in Waseda University's Dai Nippon Kaikyō Kyōkai database, including the journals Isuramu (Islam) and...