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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Kenji Kuroda
Kenji Kuroda*
Affiliation:
Center for Transdisciplinary Innovation, the National Institute for the Humanities and also at the Center for the Modern Middle East Studies, the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU), Japan
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 5 , September 2017 , pp. 651 - 670
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2017

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Footnotes

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI [grant number 26750266] and NIHU Area Studies Project for the Modern Middle East at MINPAKU.

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