In the contemporary world the word “Asia” invokes a sense of regional integration or solidarity among Asian peoples. This sense of the word is rather recent and can only be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that period, Japan called on Asian people to unify against the Western threat under its leadership. But until the late nineteenth century, “Asia” was a purely geographical term; merely the name of one of the five continents-a concept that had been modeled by early modern Europeans.

In this essay I will discuss how and why the political usage of the word “Asia,” stressing Asian solidarity, was invented by the Japanese around the 1880s. I also investigate the ways in which this sense of the word spread to the rest of the geographical region of Asia. In order to understand the unfolding of this historical process, we should first examine the traditional concepts of world geography in Japan and how the European concept of Asia was introduced into East Asia.

The leading intellectual and ideologue of the Japanese Asianist agenda of Japanese imperialism until the end of World War II, Okawa Shumei (1886-1957), was tried in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial as a war criminal but found to be mentally disturbed. The post-war memory about Okawa is an alien image-Okawa spending his days translating the Qur'an while detained in a mental hospital in solitary confinement. The clinical description of Okawa's hallucinations on 13 March 1947, while under psychiatric treatment, is a telling climax of the narrative on the fusion of Japanese Pan Asianism and Islam. The examination report describes in detail the psychological state of Okawa, who might have been suffering from syphilis-induced hallucinations: “Okawa believes Mohammed comes to him. In his vision, he states that he sees Mohammed dressed in a green mantle and white turban. Mohammed's eyes glow brilliantly, and his presence fills him with courage, enthusiasm, and contentment […] Patient believes that this is a religious experience. Mohammed enables him to understand the ‘Koran’ as he was never able to understand it before. There is no conflict with his Buddhist faith because he states there is only one God: and Mohammed, Christ, and Buddha are all prophets of the same God.” The report notes that the prisoner's principal interest is now in “Mohammedanism and the translation and interpretation of the Koran.”

This project started as an update of the volume by Ward and Rustow on political modernization in Japan and Turkey. I think we all agree that we have moved on to something entirely different, and original. Comparisons of Japan and Turkey in terms of industrialization, westernization and so forth are obviously quite absurd, but what still has validity is the question of how these two non-Western societies encountered the West and modernity. The paper will focus on questions of perceptions and mentalities which have not been discussed at length previously. In this paper, I will look at some general themes in the beginning, and then focus more specifically on the encounters of several Ottomans with the West in comparison with the experience of their Japanese counterparts.

In Turkey, Japan has often been perceived as an industrial country that developed economically while keeping to its traditions. This perception has been especially strong among Islamists and conservatives who have been critical of the process of Westernization since the nineteenth century. In their view, Turkey understood modernity as imitation of Western culture but failed to industrialize. Japan, on the other hand, proved that it was possible to modernize while preserving one's tradition, religion, and culture. Hence, according to this analysis, Japan's successful transition from agrarian to industrial society was in stark contrast to the Turkish course of modernization.

The decay paradigm is part of the historiography of empires. Many scholars have also interpreted the demise of the Ottoman Empire in terms of decay. In contrast, the aim of this commentary is to offer a reconstruction of the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish republic in terms of structural change and economic development. Thus, I argue that the Ottoman case would be better understood if viewed within the context of a more dynamic process of change versus inertia, rather than one of decay.