Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860-2010

Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860–2010 examines the mutual images formed between Japan and Germany from the mid-nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, and the influence of these images on the development of bilateral relations. Unlike earlier research on Japanese-German relations, which focused on the similarity of these countries’ historical trajectories, this publication presents a more nuanced picture. It relativizes perceptions of a special “spiritual relationship” between Japan and Germany as well as their commonalities of “national character” through an exploration of previously untapped historical visual and textual sources. With essays by sixteen leading scholars in the field, this collection is an invaluable contribution to the historiography of modern Japan and Germany, and to the field of international relations.
Contributors are: Hans-Joachim Bieber, Fukuoka Mariko, Hakoishi Hiroshi, Iwasa Takurō, Katō Yōko, Kawakita Atsuko, Gerhard Krebs, Kudō Akira, Heinrich Menkhaus, Danny Orbach, Peter Pantzer, Sven Saaler, Satō Takumi, Volker Stanzel, Suzuki Naoko, Tajima Nobuo, Tano Daisuke, and Rolf-Harald Wippich.

Sven Saaler, Ph.D., Bonn University, is Professor of Modern Japanese History at Sophia University in Tokyo. He has written intensively on the history of regionalism in East Asia, on history controversies in Japan and on Japanese-German relations.

Kudō Akira is Professor Emeritus of The University of Tokyo. A graduate from the Graduate School of Economics of The University of Tokyo, he has intensively published on Japanese-German business and economic relations.

Tajima Nobuo, Ph.D., Sapporo University, is professor at Seijō University in Tokyo. He has published monographs and articles on the Far Eastern policies of Germany during the Nazi era and Japanese-German relations in general.