著者

福田 義昭

出版者

東洋大学アジア文化研究所

雑誌

アジア文化研究所研究年報 = Annual journal of the Asian Cultures Research Institute (ISSN:18801714)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.52, pp.1(366)-22(345), 2017

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This article is a sequel to my two earlier articles on the literary representation of Muslims in Japan during the Showa period. While the earlier articles each dealt with several writers, this article exclusively deals with works of the Taiwanese-Japanese writer Chin Shunshin (1924-2015). Chin was born in the city of Kobe and encountered Tatar children there in his youth. As he studied Hindustani and Persian at Osaka School of Foreign Languages he increased his interest in the Islamic world. He reminisces about his frequenting the Kobe mosque during the WWII. After the war, he made several visits to countries of the "Silk Road" and met in Istanbul some Turks of Tatar origin, who had lived in Japan until the aftermath of the war and spoke Japanese fluently. Chin wrote a lot of novels set in Kobe, some of which include Tatar characters. He drew attention to the "statelessness" of the Tatars and depicted them with sympathy and understanding. For him, Tatars were co-members of the community of strangers of Kobe who shared Japanese as the common language.