Turkey Japan

The Turkish government's "open trade policy" to negotiate and conclude bilateral and multilateral economic partnership agreements (EPAs) or free trade agreements (FTAs) with various states across the world have become particularly salient since 2013. Since then, against the backdrop of a global protectionist wave, Turkey has significantly intensified its efforts to conclude "new generation FTAs." The ongoing FTA negotiations with the Japanese government-active since 2014-are one of the outcomes of those efforts. In this paper, the general characteristics of new generation FTAs and their significance in the context of the global protectionist currents will be tackled. Subsequently, advances in economic relations between Turkey and Japan will be examined in comparison with Turkey's previous new generation FTAs with Korea and Singapore and assessed in the context of Turkey's active and open trade policy of enhancing international EPAs and its priorities for leaving a considerable maneuver space for implementing its national economic policies.

One of the most important parts of Turkish-Japanese relations is the Turkic peoples in the Far East. Specifically the Bashkirs and Tatars who had migrated from the Idil-Ural area to the Far East are the prominent ones within this context. Beginning with 1890 some small Bashkir-Tatar groups began to settle in the Far East because of the building of Trans-Siberian Railroad or the Eastern China Railroad and after the 1917 Russian Revolution more populated groups settled in China’s Manchuria region, Korea, and Japan. A diasporic population was formed in 1919 in Japan and Bashkir-Tatar Turks got involved in the business life of such big urban centers as Kumamoto, Yokohama, Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya. The families were generally involved in textile commerce but there were also others who maintained their lives on butchery and grain merchandise. It is possible to argue that the most populated group living in Japan was situated in Tokyo and its surroundings. People living in this region kept houses in close proximity to one another and called their neighborhood “Mahalle-i İslamiye,” or the Muslim neighborhood.