Showcasing moments of convergence between the German and Japanese cultures towards common points of interest over the last one hundred fifty years, the chapters in this book cover such topics as culture, diplomacy, geography, history, law, literature, philosophy, politics, and sports. From the creation of two similar modern nation-states, to the aggressive struggle for national supremacy and subsequent total defeat in 1945, the necessity of coping with their earlier militarism and parallel economic miracles in the postwar era, Germans and Japanese look back on a remarkably similar past.

Joanne Miyang Cho is Professor and Chair of History at William Paterson University of New Jersey, USA. She is the co-editor of Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India (2013) and Germany and China: Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century (2014). She is also the co-editor of Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies. Her research focus is Asian German studies and she is currently working on German-Korean relations and German-Asian gender relations.

Lee M. Roberts is Associate Professor of German Language and Literature at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, USA. He specializes in Asian-German cultural relations. Representative publications include Germany and the Imagined East (2005; 2009) and Literary Nationalism in German and Japanese Germanistik (2010). He is co-editor of Palgrave Series in Asian German Studies.

Christian W. Spang is Associate Professor of German Studies at Dait? Bunka University, Tokyo, Japan. His research deals with German-Japanese relations in the 19th and 20th century. He authored Karl Haushofer und Japan (2013) and co-edited Japanese-German Relations, 1895-1945 (2006) and Heinz Altschul: 'As I Record These Memories . . .' (2014). A co-authored history of the German East Asiatic Society (OAG) is forthcoming in German.