Turanism in Japan

Turanist movements, which emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in Hungary and Turkey, spread to Japan after World War I. Turanism in Japan was instigated by the Hungarian Turanist Benedek Baráthosi Balogh and his Japanese contact Jūichirō Imaoka in the early 1920s, and it at first aroused little interest in Japanese society and political circles. But as Japanese imperialism intensified following the 1931 Mukden incident, Turanism gained traction as a strategic justification for infiltrating central Eurasia. This article examines the imperialist instrumentalization of Turanism in Japan, drawing on primary and secondary sources. It positions the Japanese inflection of Turanism as the ethnic corollary to the geopolitics of Japan’s Greater Asianism.