Pioneering Iranian Studies in Meiji Japan: Between Modern Academia and International Strategy

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between academic studies concerning Iran in Meiji Japan (1868‒1912) and Orientalism in Western scholarship. Many researchers who have limited their definition of Iranian studies to the professional works published since the 1930s have concluded that there is an indirect relation between Iranian studies in Japan and Orientalism. In contrast, this paper takes it in a wider sense to mean all academic studies regarding Iran. The paper focuses on two such important proto-academic fields regarding foreign countries in Meiji Japan: geography and international politics. It concludes that the pioneering Iranian studies scholars in the Meiji period were not totally immune to Orientalism on the one hand but, on the other, that their research on Iran was less closely connected to imperialism than the Western scholarship that Edward Said famously critiqued.