Turkish-Japanese Relations
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| Author | Bahadir Pehlivanturk |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070201206700108 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
| International Journal | Winter 2011-12 | 101 |
The last few years have witnessed a dramatic transformation in Turkish
foreign policy, from an introverted approach with limited involvement in
regional and global affairs to an activist approach and eagerness to assume
an assertive role. Coupled with its expanded wealth and supported by the
consolidation of state power, Turkey has found itself better positioned to
more effectively implement its foreign policy objective of asserting itself as
a “central country.”1 A growing number of studies examine the new activism
of Turkish foreign policy in nonwestern neighbourhoods, especially in the
Middle East, Balkans, central Asia, and the Caucasus. However, how the new
Turkish foreign policy asserts itself beyond these immediate neighbourhoods
has scarcely been studied. The aim of this article is to scrutinize the
multidimensional and global aspects of Turkish foreign policy in the
specific case of Turkish-Japanese relations. The central question that drives
this inquiry is the extent to which Turkey has formed a clearly articulated
global strategy to undergird its evolving relations with Japan. Turkey-Japan
relations offer a useful case study to examine Turkey’s global agenda. With
Bahadir Pehlivanturk is an instructor at the TOBB University of Economics and Technology.
1 Ahmet Davutoğlu, “Turkey’s foreign policy vision: An assessment of 2007,” Insight
Turkey 10, no. 1 (winter 2008): 77-98.
Bahadir Pehlivanturk
Turkish-Japanese
relations
Turning romanticism into rationality
| 102 | Winter 2011-12 | International Journal |
| Bahadir Pehlivanturk |
Japan, Turkey has had the longest and most-established relations in Asia.
Moreover, a consistent pattern in the bilateral relationship can be observed
and both countries have a history of partnership in global institutions.
Historically, Japan has occupied a peculiar place in the vision and
discourse of Turkish foreign policy elites. While Turkey’s relations with its
regional neighbours and other great powers in the world have carried a more
realist or pragmatic character, its foreign policymakers have approached
distant Japan with a degree of sentimentality. The phrase coined by the
researchers of Turkish-Japanese relations to explain this sentimentality,
“romanticism,” will be used in this study as well.2
The dominance of a discourse of romanticism in diplomatic language
and also in informal accounts of Turkey-Japan relations can be traced from
the onset of their initial contacts through the present. Today, this romantic
rhetoric is reinforced with historic narratives of rescue, solidarity, and
support, and by a sense of mutual empathy as victims of natural disasters.3
These narratives are accompanied by a vague and undefined sense of
“commonness,” which references various similarities in culture, common
social and paternal values, and occasional claims of common ancestry.
These so-called similarities can range from political ideational factors—both
countries were late modernizers, westernized outside the west, and did so at
times when they were in conflict with the west—to rather inconsequential
and even trifling “cultural similarities,” such as removing one’s shoes when
entering someone’s house.4 However these narratives are old, dating back to
Ottoman times when the challenges both countries faced first created this
sense of commonness among the elites of each country.5
This study claims that surges in Turkey’s interest in Japan—and the
rest of Asia, for that matter—have come at times when Turkey has decided
to adopt a multifaceted and multidimensional foreign policy, generally as a
result of a change in its relations with the west, or when there has been a
2 Selçuk Esenbel, “Japanese perspectives of the Ottoman world,” in Selcuk Esenbel
and Inaba Ciharu, eds., The Rising and Turkish Crescent: New Perspectives on the History
of Japanese Turkish Relations (Istanbul: Bogazici University Press, 2003), 37.
3 While shared feelings with regard to the Hanshin (Kobe) and Izmit earthquakes—
especially by their survivors—are common, empathy in Turkey resulted in a Ministry of
Internal Affairs to lower the Turkish national flag across the country “as an expression
of solidarity with the people of Japan,” Milliyet, 20 March 2011.
4 Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. Rustow, eds., Political Modernization in Japan and
Turkey (Princeton: Princton University Press, 1964).
5 Esenbel, “Japanese perspectives of the Ottoman world.”
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