Jews in Japan until 1945. A Case Study of Eidelberg and Shillony's Research on Setsuzo Kotsuji

• Authors: Olga Barbasiewicz
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The relations between the Jewish and Japanese nations have never had top priority in Japanese government policy. This may be because Jewish people have been treated at the same level as all other foreigners from Western countries. Nevertheless, one can find different theories relating the Japanese and Jewish people. First of all, worth mentioning is the theory that the legend of the lost tribe of Israel represents the beginnings of the Japanese nation. This was promoted among others by Yoshiro Saeki, a professor at Waseda University, and is described in the first part of this paper. The first meeting with members of the Jewish nation in Japan came in the 19th and 20th centuries. They were usually merchants or professionals who took part in the Western-inspired modernization of Japan. Some of them will be introduced in this article. Judaism was never popular in Japan, and moreover was often mistaken with Christianity. The first convert was Setsuzô Kotsuji, and an analysis of his life and activity, based on his book, will be published in the third part of this article. The last problem undertaken in this paper will be anti-Semitism, which should be mentioned mainly because of Japanese relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We can observe that Japanese government did not follow German leads on Jewish policy, but anti-Semitic threads can be found in Japanese history. The main aim of this article is to prove that Japanese people rarely distinguished Jewish from other foreigners or treated them in a specific way. The cases mentioned above will describe the situation in prewar Japan with a few references to the situation in World War II.

Keywords

EN

Japan; Jews; anti-Semitism; Israel; Kotsuji

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Kultur Śródziemnomorskich i Orientalnych PAN
• Journal: Hemispheres. Studies on Cultures and Societies
• Year: 2013
• Issue: 28
• Pages: 87-103

Contributors

author

Olga Barbasiewicz

• Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw