This paper presents the content of this thematic issue of Diogenes on Asian studies in Turkey. It explains the origins of this set of papers in light of relevant scholarship, relates it to current academic work in the field, and provides a rationale for issuing a volume on Asian scholarship in Turkey.

The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) is the probably the earliest prose fiction in the world that still lives today as a masterpiece since the first decade of the 11th century. This 1200-page Japanese classic was written by a noble court woman, Murasaki Shikibu, and it spans almost three quarters of a century. The first part has to do with the life and loves of the nobleman known as “The Shining Genji”, and the final chapters follow the fate and fortunes of the characters that survived after Genji's death.

There have been four English translations of the novel: one partial translation (1882) by a Japanese translator and three other complete translations by different English native speakers in the 20th century.

This paper studies the Turkish translation process of The Tale of Genji from Edward G. Seidensticker's English version. It points out the plentitude of potential translation choices and tries to explore the reasons of translators for their decisions. It compares the translators’ strategies and assesses their impact on the meanings and functions of the allusions and the connections between the adopted strategies.

The three Ōtani Expeditions (1902–1914) constitute the first non-Western attempt to carry out systematic research in Central Asia. The mastermind behind these Japanese enterprises was Ōtani Kōzui, the 22nd lord-abbot of the Western Honganji temple in Kyoto and the patriarch of the Honpa Honganji denomination of the Jōdo Shinshū sect, which was and remains the largest Buddhist community in Japan. Kōzui's position as a monk during the period the expeditions were carried out reveals his religious motivation as the planner and sponsor of these research trips. Inspired by the 7th century traveler-monk Xuanzang, the main purpose of the Ōtani Expeditions was therefore to find the routes through which Buddhism had passed before reaching Japan. This is what makes them unique when compared with other exploration missions.

This article aims to compare the Turkish and Chinese reception of the “human rights” term, which enjoyed wide currency across the globe after the end of the Cold War. During the 1990s, as the global human rights discourse was embraced by dissidents in Turkey and China, the state elites remained skeptical of this concept, which was often perceived as a tool of Western imperialism. Unlike nationalists, Muslim and Confucianist conservatives saw some merit in the term “human rights” and discussed ways to appropriate it in their local contexts. In China and Turkey, “human rights” was often instrumental in promoting collective identities during the 1990s. Although the term's original emphasis on the individual somewhat disappeared in these countries, its embrace by various groups demonstrates that “human rights” discourse resonates with non-Western audiences.

This paper outlines the development of Asian studies in Turkey from their early years to 2022. A particular focus is put on the development of academic programs at Bogazici University and on the international academic partnerships it entailed. The author argues that the end of the Cold War, the “rise of Asia” in public opinion, the new Asia initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as the global attraction due to international employment opportunities, represent multiple factors that have accelerated interest in Asian Studies in Turkey.

Regional studies in Turkey have long focused on Europe and the Middle East, with which Turkey has traditionally been associated. East Asian studies seem to remain out of the spotlight. This study claims firstly that different phases of Asian studies scholarship in Turkey have all been geared towards confirmation and validation of the process of Turkish national identity formation. Secondly, this process also reflects the Western-centrism of Turkish academic knowledge production.

This paper presents a periodization of Asian Studies in Turkey in three phases to contextualize and demonstrate these claims. During the first phase of the early republican years, the first Sinology departments were expected to actively contribute to writing Turkish national history. Throughout the second phase of the Cold War years, Turkey found itself in both political and intellectual isolation. In the final phase of post-Cold War globalization, the scope of regional studies scholarship expanded to include East Asia. Despite this development, academic scholarship in Turkey still suffers from Western-centrism and it is not able to directly communicate with East Asia. Knowledge production on East Asia in Turkey is still filtered through the theoretical framework of the Western Anglophone academic world.

The term “tribute” had a strong presence in Western literature on China, as a result of Sino-European encounters in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. In these studies tribute was examined from the China angle. When views of the neighboring peoples are taken into consideration, it becomes evident that the smaller states in Inner Asia had not adopted the notion of China. A comparison with the practices of the Ottoman empire reveals that they also were using a strategy similar China. The paper suggests examining the practices of the smaller states in their own terms rather than in the shadow of the larger states.

The Tang period (618–907) stands out as one of the most important chapters of the history of early Inner Asia, where bilateral diplomatic interactions on the Chinese – Inner Asian frontier reached a high point. Since its establishment, the Tang pursued close relations with the neighboring Türk Qaghanate and various other Turkic and Mongolic speaking groups in the Inner Asian steppes. These relations, sometimes friendly, other times hostile, were to a great extent recorded in the official histories, a genre of historical writing that was systematized with the establishment of Historiography Office at the Tang court. As political texts written with particular agendas, official histories present certain limitations. Recent archaeological research in both China and Inner Asia provide a different line of evidence for the study of diplomatic relations between China and Inner Asia. This paper aims to discuss the history of Pugu, a Turkic speaking Inner Asian group who had submitted to the Tang in the seventh century, through an analysis of the tomb inscription of Pugu Yitu, then leader of the Pugu, and an army general and court official of the Tang.

This paper does not attempt to breathe a new life into the sociology of literature. The real concern here is limited to making a possible contribution to the work conducted in Japanese language and literature departments by using the sociology of literature as a method. The discussion begins with a summary of the sociology of literature, merely to make clear the basic characteristics of the method developed by well-known intellectuals. Then the novel Botchan is taken as an example for the suggested approach.

Various studies have been made on different aspects of the Turkish and Japanese languages, but comparative studies between the two languages are still limited. The aim of this study is to describe the politeness strategy of these two languages from a cultural perspective within the paradigm of cognitive linguistics. Both Turkish and Japanese are agglutinative languages, and speakers of both languages prefer the subjective construal. So, if the typology of a language might be related to its perception, the conceptualization of ‘polite’ and the perception of politeness in that language may be alike.

This paper considers Western approaches at different time periods to Chinese landscape painting, with a focus on the eleventh century Chinese painter Guo Xi's Essay on landscape painting. First, brief information will be given about the artist and his work. A brief scrutiny of a review published in 1936 will show how the Essay became influential in the West. Later publications, which appeared in 1969, 2007, and 2009 respectively, will show some changes in Western approaches to Chinese landscape painting, revealing the main rhetoric of their times along with changing debates and approaches within Western art history.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world is witnessing rapid changes in every field, and this refers not only to the accelerated pace of technological developments, social changes, economic booms and crashes, etc. but also to a major transformation in the international system from the post-1945 liberal international structure under the hegemonic stability provided by the United States to one that is marked with a larger number of major actors who do not necessarily subscribe to the tenets of free markets and electoral democracy. In this rapidly transforming world, efforts made by the scholarly inquiry of international relations fail to keep up with the speed of the empirical change. This paper asserts that the main reason of this shortcoming of the IR as a discipline is its lack of pluralism, meaning that mainstream IR theories continue to reflect Western viewpoints and interests while at the same time ignoring alternative, non-Western theories to large extent. This paper's argument is that such alternative IR theories and approaches have to emerge and reinforce the Western-centric mainstream so that the discipline can be in a better position to explain international change, as a multi-actor process cannot be adequately explained through the lens of one single actor. The potential offered by Chinese IR theory making is discussed within this context on the grounds that as China is one of the main proponents of change at the international level, Chinese perspectives produced through Chinese geocultural reference points are needed not to replace but to complement Western narratives in order to explain the change at the global level.