History of Islam in Japan

You want to know how Islam reached Japan long before any mosque stood in Kobe. You will follow isolated arrivals from the 8th century to the first Japanese converts, then see how small refugee and trader groups created the organizations that built Kobe Mosque in 1935 and shaped Muslim life after the war.

When did Japan first meet the Muslim world?

Before the country opened in 1853, contact was rare and scattered. You can picture it as single travelers, maps and books rather than settled life. The Shoku Nihongi records people from Persia and neighboring regions arriving in the mid-8th century. Through Chinese and Southeast Asian sources, some elements of Islamic philosophy reached Japan as early as the Heian period. The Persian cartographer Ibn Khordadbeh described Japan as the lands of Waqwaq, rich in gold and ebony, and Mahmud Kashgari placed Japan at the easternmost edge of his 11th-century atlas of Silk Road routes. In 754, a Japanese envoy sat next to an Arab delegate at the court of Tang China, and several Chinese delegates to Japan appear to have been Muslim. These points do not show a community, but they show that Japan was already named and visited in Muslim geography.

Who was the first recorded Muslim to reach Japan?

The first recorded Muslim to travel to Japan was Sadr ud-Din, sent by Yuan China in 1275 as part of a diplomatic delegation that demanded Japan submit to the Yuan emperor between the two Mongol invasions. He was beheaded by the Japanese, and a Buddhist monk criticized the execution of the envoys. The Persian historian Rashid al-Din Hamadani later mentioned Japan twice as Jimingu and described it as having many cities and mines. During the Ming period there was contact between the Hui, the general Lan Yu, and Japanese swordsmiths. Chinese sources say Lan Yu owned 10,000 katana, and that the Hongwu Emperor disapproved of his links with Kyoto, and more than 15,000 people were implicated for alleged treason and executed. The account adds that Lan Yu's ethnicity is disputed, with some Hui claiming he was Hui while official Ming records do not describe him that way.

How did a merchant family settle in medieval Osaka?

In the 13th century, a manuscript written by Persians from Quanzhou in China for the Japanese monk Keisei was brought back to Japan. In the 14th century, a man named Hijiri, also written Hishiri, arrived in 1374 and married a local woman in Osaka in 1376. Abdurreshid Ibrahim later noted that Muslims in this early period traded, married, and had children with local Japanese women, but, unlike in China and Southeast Asia, they were unable to create communities and their children assimilated into broader Buddhist and Shinto society. Hijiri's family followed that pattern. His younger son inherited his possessions, and the eldest of that generation, Musuru, became a successful merchant affiliated with Kofuku-ji temple. Musuru received a post from Ashikaga Yoshimochi for his knowledge of foreign affairs, the Ming dynasty, and navigation, later changed his name to Kusuha Nyudo Sainin after his mother, married and had three sons and two daughters, one of whom became a Buddhist monk at Kofuku-ji. Shinji Maejima writes that Sainin seems to have been a Muslim. In 1408, a Hui Muslim chieftain named Shi Jinqing still dealt with Japan from outside, sending an envoy with gifts to the king of Japan.

Why did Portuguese ships and Iranian traders matter?

Early European accounts kept by Portuguese sailors mention a passenger on their ship, an Arab who had preached Islam to the people of Japan and had sailed to the islands from Malacca in 1555. In the 17th century, Iranian merchants from Thailand arrived in Nagasaki during the Edo period. The Iranian Shaykh Ahmad fought and defeated Japanese merchants who attempted a coup against the Thai king in 1611. The 17th-century text Safine-ye Solaymani, by the Shia writer Mohammad Ibrahim, described Japan and its culture, economy, recent political upheavals, and relations with foreign merchants. You can read the full history of Islam in Japan to place these episodes in order. In the late 1870s, the biography of Muhammad was translated into Japanese, which helped Islam reach Japanese readers, but only as part of cultural history rather than as a living local faith.

What changed with the Ottoman shipwreck?

Direct state contact came in 1890, when Sultan and Caliph Abdul Hamid II dispatched the frigate Ertugrul to salute the earlier visit of Japanese Prince Komatsu Akihito to Constantinople. The ship was destroyed in a storm off Wakayama Prefecture on September 16, 1890, and the Kushimoto Turkish Memorial and Museum honors the drowned diplomats and sailors. In 1891, an Ottoman crew that had been shipwrecked on the Japanese coast the previous year received help from the Imperial Japanese Navy for their return to Constantinople. Shotaro Noda, a journalist who accompanied them, became the earliest known Japanese convert during his stay in the Ottoman capital. Around the same period, Yamada Toajiro lived in Constantinople from 1892 for almost 20 years as the only resident Japanese trader, served unofficially as consul, converted to Islam, took the name Abdul Khalil, and made a pilgrimage to Mecca on his way home. Bunpachiro Ariga took a similar path through India, where he went for trade, converted under the influence of local Muslims, and took the name Ahmed Ariga.

How did Tatars and the first Japanese converts build a community?

After the October Revolution, several hundred Tatar Muslim refugees from Central Asia and Russia received asylum in Japan, settled in several main cities, and formed small communities. Some Japanese converted through contact with them. Historian Caesar E. Farah documented that in 1909 the Russian-born Ayaz Ishaki and the writer Abdurreshid Ibrahim were the first Muslims who successfully converted the first ethnic Japanese, when Kotaro Yamaoka converted in 1909 in Bombay after contacting Ibrahim and took the name Omar Yamaoka. Yamaoka became the first Japanese to go on the Hajj. He and Ibrahim traveled with support from nationalistic Japanese groups like the Black Dragon Society, and Yamaoka had served with the intelligence service in Manchuria since the Russo-Japanese War. His official reason for travel was to seek the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph's approval for building a mosque in Tokyo, which was granted in 1910. In the late Meiji period, close relations grew between Japanese military elites with an Asianist agenda and Muslims seeking common ground against Western hegemony. In 1906, propaganda campaigns claimed that a congress of religions would be held in Japan where adoption of Islam as the national religion would be considered, and that the Emperor was close to becoming Muslim. Nationalistic organizations like the Ajia Gikai petitioned the government to recognize Islam alongside Shintoism, Christianity, and Buddhism, and helped fund and train Muslim resistance movements in Southeast Asia, including the Hizbullah group funded by Japan in the Dutch Indies.

Why was Kobe Mosque built in 1935?

The Greater Japan Muslim League, founded in 1930, was the first official Islamic organization in Japan, with support from imperial circles during World War II and a program that produced an Islamic Studies Book. During this period, more than 100 books and journals on Islam were published in Japan. Shumei Okawa, a prominent figure in government and academia on Japanese Islamic exchange, completed his translation of the Quran in prison while prosecuted as an alleged class-A war criminal, with charges later dropped after psychiatric tests. Against this background of study and organizing, Japan's first mosque was built in Kobe in 1935 with the support of the Turko-Tatar community of traders there. It was designed by Czech architect Jan Josef Svagr and later survived both American bombing raids and the 1995 Kobe earthquake. The Tokyo Mosque followed, completed on May 12, 1938, with generous financial support from the zaibatsu, and dedicated on the same date. Its first imams were Abdul-Rashid Ibrahim and Abdulhay Kurban Ali. You can use the history of the Kobe building to understand how traders, worship, and memory meet in one place.

What happened after World War II?

Japan's invasion of China and Southeast Asia during the Second World War brought Japanese personnel into contact with Muslims. Those who converted through them returned to Japan and established the first Japanese Muslim organization in 1953, the Japan Muslim Association, which received official recognition as a religious organization from the Japanese government in June 1968. Its second president was Ryoichi Mita, also known as Umar Mita. He worked for the South Manchuria Railway, which controlled Japanese territory in northeastern China, formally became Muslim in Beijing in 1941 through contacts with Chinese Muslims, returned to Japan in 1945, made the Hajj in 1958 as the first Japanese in the postwar period to do so, and produced a Japanese translation of the Quran from a Muslim perspective for the first time. The economic boom of the 1980s brought immigrants from majority Muslim nations, and these immigrants and their descendants form the majority of Muslims in the country. Estimates place the total around 100,000 in the 2000s, 185,000 in 2010, 230,000 at the end of 2019 out of about 126 million people, and 420,000 in 2025, or around 0.3 percent of the population. About 90 percent are of foreign origin and the rest are native converts, with Indonesians, Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis listed in order of size among immigrant groups, and nearly half being Indonesians, Filipinos, and Malaysians as of 2020. Japan counted more than 110 mosques in 2019 compared with 24 in 2001, with Muslim student associations at some universities. You can compare present prayer spaces through mosques in Tokyo and Osaka before you plan visits, then step inside Kobe Mosque on an open visiting hour and look for the traces of the Turko-Tatar traders, wartime survival, and postwar converts described here.