The disciplines of “area studies” (exploring the language, culture and religious traditions of particular geographic regions) have always been bound up with geopolitics and perceptions of national interest. Not only does academic (and popular) interest in these studies wax and wane according to their role in contemporary politics, but their basic assumptions and orientations are often strongly influenced by those interests. In Michael Penn's interview with Cemil Aydin, they discuss the rise and decline of Japanese Islamic Studies during the 1930s and 40s. Aydin suggests that the preconceptions of Islamicists during that period were strongly shaped by the geopolitical image of Japan as a leading light in Asian efforts to throw off the yoke of Western imperialism. For these scholars, the monotheistic roots of Islam - shared with both Judaism and Christianity - often seemed to be in tension with the twentieth-century political context of much of the Islamic world, which struggled with the domination of Western powers in ways not unlike Asia. Despite the changes in Japanese Islamic Studies since the end of the Pacific War, this perspective (so very different from many of the preconceptions that drive Islamic Studies in the Western academy) not only helps us understand some of the distinctive features of Japanese images of Islam, but may provide a useful vantage from which to re-evaluate our own images of this tradition.