Samurai and Mongols: How a Medieval Samurai Became Chinggis Khan

Abstract:In 1924, Oyabe Zen’ichirō (1867–1941), an amateur historian, published a small book, Chinggis Khan was Minamoto no Yoshitsune (Jingisu Kan wa Minamoto no Yoshitsune nari), which revived the old tale of the medieval samurai Yoshitsune’s escape to the territory of present Mongolia, where after unifying the Mongolian tribes he took the name of Chinggis Khan. Oyabe’s book reveals how in the interwar period the imagined medieval past and historical personalities were mobilized in the Japanese imperial expansion into the Mongolian lands. This article demonstrates how in the post–World War I years Japanese imperial boosters formulated a new rhetoric of the shared historical, cultural, political, and racial heritage with the Mongols, which ultimately justified the Japanese military plans to bring the Mongolian lands and its people, formally divided between the Qing and Romanov empires, under imperial Japan’s control.