The Renewal of Japan’s Interests in the Caucasus Ë 125
It is likely that Hashimoto associated with Caucasian émigré groups in Turkey. It is
striking, however, that his views of the Caucasus were purely strategic and expedient.
The Caucasus was important to him only insofar as it was useful for Japan’s strategy
against the Soviet Union. Not all Japanese military o cers were like him, however.
There were those who genuinely sympathized with the cause of the Caucasians, as
will be seen. Yet the geographical distance of the Caucasus from Japan and the lack
of common interests except for their anti-Russian/Soviet common front made Japan’s
Caucasian strategy innately weak. This weakness was to haunt Japanese-Caucasian
relations throughout the period.
Hashimoto’s interest in the “Caucasian Muslim states” outlined above is signi -
cant. By this time already, Tokyo had been energetically cultivating political relations
with Muslim leaders from the former Soviet Union, developing what was calledKaikyo ̄
k ̄osakuor the Muslim Operation. After the Civil War’s end in Russia, some ten thou-
sand Tatar émigrés settled in the Far East, many of whom volunteered to work for
Japan. Mukhammed Gabdulkhai Kurbangaliev (Muhammed Abdulhay Kurabn Ali in
Turkish, 1892–1972), a former commander of the Bashkir military who fought along-
side the White forces of Aleksandr Kolchak and Ataman Semenov in the Far East, was
prominent among them. In 1922, he addressed a letter to Japanese authorities, stress-
ing the importance of “Japanese-Turkish friendship” and the founding of “a world of
equality and of humanity based on the principle of just world humanism.” Kurban-
galiev’s missive was characterized by “an eclectic combination of Pan-Turkism and
Pan-Islamism that appealed to Pan-Asianists in Japan, assuring that the vast Turk-
ish populations in the Euro-Asian and North African continents befriended by Japan
[would] aid the achievement of a just future for the peoples of Asia under the lead-
ership of Japan.”⁶⁹He ended his letter with practical suggestions for the study and
promotion of Turkic languages and cultures in Japan and an oer to help.⁷⁰Whether
Kurbangaliev wrote this letter on his own or in collaboration with Japanese supporters
of the Islamic world, it found a ready response in Japan. Emigrating to Japan in 1924,
he created Muslim societies, began printing o ces, taught Islam at Muslim schools
he created, and was closely associated with Japan’s in uential military leaders and
politicians. He also assisted Japan’s anti-Soviet intelligence from the 1920s to 1940s.
In turn, Japan dreamed of a grand Muslim alliance against the Soviet Union extending
from Japan and Manchuria to Xinjiang (Chinese Turkestan) and Central Asia and all
the way to Afghanistan, Persia, Turkey, the Caucasus, and beyond.⁷¹
ument also fell into Soviet hands. NARA RG331, Doc. 1682. It is not known whether any contact was
ever made between the Japanese military attaché and Trotsky.
69 Selçuk Esenbel, “Japan and Islam Policy during the 1930s,” inTurning Points in Japanese History,
ed. by Bert Edström (Richmond: Japan Library, 2002), 183.
70 Esenbel, “Japan and Islam Policy during the 1930s,” 184.
71 Selçuk Esenbel, “Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism
and World Power, 1900–1945.”The American Historical Review, 109, no. 4 (October 2004), 1157–70; Fu-