“‘Twilight Diplomacy’ and the Japanese Mirror of the Ottoman Turkish World: Yamada Torajirō’s Illustrated Observations of Turkey”
Selçuk Esenbel, Emerita Professor of History, Boğaziçi University, İstanbul, Turkey
A discussion centered on Yamada Torajirō’s 1911 book Toruko Gakan, Illustrated Observations of Turkey, the Meiji Japanese “Mirror” of the Ottoman Turkish world, and the multi-religious culture in Istanbul. Yamada’s career exhibits the practice of informal “twilight diplomacy ” with Meiji Japan to circumvent the problem of “extraterritoriality ” embedded into the great power politics of international law, and a geo-political strategy targeting the Russian and British Empire, intended to challenge the very distinction between reality and representation.
Co-sponsored by the Department of History, Harvey Goldberg Center, East Asian Legal Studies Center, & the Middle East Studies Program