Authors

Discussion

The presentation explores the poetic interpretation of the image of each other by two nations: the Turkic-speaking Russian Muslims of the Russian Empire and the Japanese. In the early 20th century, Russian Muslim writers viewed Japan and the Japanese not as a "yellow threat," as claimed by state propaganda, but as a close partner and leader in the anti-colonial struggle. In A. Ibragimov's travelogue (1910), which became the most popular book about Japan in the Middle East, and in the poems of the Tatar "Pushkin," Gabdulla Tukay, and other Tatar modern authors, Japan and the Japanese were described as a people with a similar spirit and an role model. 

     In the first half of the 20th century, a group of Turkic-speaking emigrants with an Islamic identity from Russia arrived in Japan, initially seeking trade opportunities and later due to the Civil War. The presence of Turkic-Muslim representatives of Russian emigration in Japan was noticed not only by the press, but also by Japanese writers. For example, the future writer Yukio Mishima dedicated one of his youthful essays to a Turkic-Muslim school in the Yoyogi district of Tokyo. The distinctive characters of the emigrants can be found in the novellas of the poet Saito Sanki, such as "The Hotel in Kobe," and the writer Yaeko Nogami described her encounters with them in Karuizawa in her diaries. The Imam of the Tokyo Mosque, Abdurashid Ibrahim, and the famous Muslim thinker Musa Bigiev, under their real names, became the protagonists of Toyoko Izutsu's fictional novel "The Story of Bahr al-Nur" (1959). Despite its small scale, the artistic representation of the Turkic-Muslim emigration in Japan highlights the significant cultural influence it has had on Japanese society, which has yet to be fully explored.