This book offers a useful and extensive account of Japan’s past discoveries and present interactions with Muslim states and societies across Asia. Bearing in mind the U.S.-led global meta-narrative of Islam spoken in tandem with security and threats, this book examines how this reconciles with Japan’s self-proclaimed “values-based” approach to diplomacy across Asia in the twenty-first century. The author considers Japan’s historic conceptualization and learning of Islam, and its acute needs for access to markets and energy from Muslim-majority states in Asia. He also argues that Japan securitizes Islam in a manner distinct from Western, Russian, or Chinese securitization today, but that Japan promotes itself as a model for human security and development across an Asia inclusive of Muslim states. Japan’s approach to Islam and Muslim societies today offers much from which other great powers can learn.

In this transnational history of World War II, Kelly A. Hammond places Sino-Muslims at the center of imperial Japan's challenges to Chinese nation-building efforts. Revealing the little-known story of Japan's interest in Islam during its occupation of North China, Hammond shows how imperial Japanese aimed to defeat the Chinese Nationalists in winning the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population. Offering programs that presented themselves as protectors of Islam, the Japanese aimed to provide Muslims with a viable alternative—and, at the same time, to create new Muslim consumer markets that would, the Japanese hoped, act to subvert the existing global capitalist world order and destabilize the Soviets. This history can be told only by reinstating agency to Muslims in China who became active participants in the brokering and political jockeying between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese Empire. Hammond argues that the competition for their loyalty was central to the creation of the ethnoreligious identity of Muslims living on the Chinese mainland. Their wartime experience ultimately helped shape the formation of Sino-Muslims' religious identities within global Islamic networks, as well as their incorporation into the Chinese state, where the conditions of that incorporation remain unstable and contested to this day.

Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History 2 (CMR2) is the second part of a general history of relations between the faiths. Covering the period from 900 to 1050, it comprises a series of introductory essays, together with the main body of more than one hundred detailed entries on all the works by Christians and Muslims about and against one another that are known from this period. These entries provide biographical details of the authors where known, descriptions and assessments of the works themselves, and complete accounts of manuscripts, editions, translations and studies. The result of collaboration between leading scholars in the field, CMR2 is an indispensable basis for research in all elements of the history of Christian-Muslim relations.

Widely known for her writings on Islam with a particular focus on the transnational history of politics in Islam and Japan, this volume brings together twenty of the author’s key essays thematically structured as 'Japan and Islam', 'Japanese Ottoman Relations and Japanese-Turkish Interaction', and 'Reflections on Tokugawa Japan from Turkey'. Awarded the Japan Foundation Special Prize for Japanese Studies in 2007, Selçuk Esenbel’s volume will provide an invaluable reference resource for current and future research in an increasingly important context.

Japan on the Silk Road provides for the first time the historical background indispensable for understanding Japan's current perspectives and policies in the vast area of Eurasia across the Middle East and Central Asia. Japanese diplomats, military officers, archaeologists, and linguists traversed the Silk Road, involving Japan in the Great Game and exploring ancient civilizations.The book exposes the entanglements of pre-war Japanese Pan-Asianism with Pan-Islamism, Turkic nationalism and Mongolian independence as a global history of imperialism. Japanese connections to Ottoman Turkey, India, Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, and China at the same time reveal a discrete global narrative of cosmopolitanism and transnationality. The global team of scholars brings to light Japan’s intellectual and political encounters with the peoples and cultures of Asia, in particular Turks and Persians, Hindus and Muslims of India, Mongolians and the Uyghur of Inner Asia, and Muslims in China. Contributors include: Ian Nish, Christopher Szpilman, Sven Saaler, Selcuk Esenbel, Li Narangoa, Komatsu Hisao, Brij Tankha, Erdal Küçükyalcın, A. Merthan Dündar, Katayama Akio, Miyuki Aoki Girardelli, Klaus Röhborn, Mehmet Ölmez, Banu Kaygusuz, Oğuz Baykara, and Satō Masako.

Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History 16 (CMR 16) covering North America, South-East Asia, China, Japan and Australasia in the period 1800-1914, is a further volume in a general history of relations between the two faiths from the 7th century to the early 20th century. It comprises a series of introductory essays and the main body of detailed entries. These treat all the works, surviving or lost, that have been recorded. They provide biographical details of the authors, descriptions and assessments of the works themselves, and complete accounts of manuscripts, editions, translations and studies. The result of collaboration between numerous leading scholars, CMR 16, along with the other volumes in this series, is intended as a basic tool for research in Christian-Muslim relations. Section Editors: Clinton Bennett, Luis F. Bernabe Pons, Jaco Beyers, Emanuele Colombo, Lejla Demiri, Martha Frederiks, David D. Grafton, Stanisław Grodź, Alan Guenther, Vincenzo Lavenia, Arely Medina, Alain Messaoudi, Gordon Nickel, Claire Norton, Reza Pourjavady, Douglas Pratt, Radu Păun, Charles Ramsey, Peter Riddell, Umar Ryad, Mehdi Sajid, Cornelia Soldat, Karel Steenbrink, Charles Tieszen, Carsten Walbiner, Catherina Wenzel.

Winner of the prestigious Yoshida Shigeru Prize 1999 for the best book in public history when it was published in its original Japanese, this book presents a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of Japan’s international relations from the end of the Pacific War to the present. Written by leading Japanese authorities on the subject, it makes extensive use of the most recently declassified Japanese documents, memoirs, and diaries. It introduces the personalities and approaches Japan’s postwar leaders and statesmen took in dealing with a rapidly changing world and the challenges they faced. Importantly, the book also discusses the evolution of Japan’s presence on the international stage and the important – if underappreciated role – Japan has played. The book examines the many issues which Japan has had to confront in this important period: from the occupation authorities in the latter half 1940s, to the crisis-filled 1970s; from the post-Cold War decade to the contemporary war on terrorism. The book examines the effect of the changing international climate and domestic scene on Japan’s foreign policy; and the way its foreign policy has been conducted. It discusses how the aims of Japan’s foreign relations, and how its relationships with its neighbours, allies and other major world powers have developed, and assesses how far Japan has succeeded in realising its aims. It concludes by discussing the current state of Japanese foreign policy and likely future developments.