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.

This volume contributes to an emerging field of Asian German Studies by bringing together cutting-edge scholarship from international scholars working in a variety of disciplines. The chapters survey transnational encounters between Germany and East Asia since 1900. By rejecting traditional dichotomies between the East and the West or the colonizer and the colonized, these essays highlight connectedness and hybridity. They show how closely Germany and East Asia cooperated and negotiated the challenges of modernity in a range of topics, such as politics, history, literature, religion, environment, architecture, sexology, migration, and sports.

This book examines the history of the German-Korean relationship from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing on the nations’ varied encounters with each other during the last years of the Yi dynasty, the Japanese occupation of Korea, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War era. With essays from a range of internationally respected scholars, this collection moves between history, diplomacy, politics, education, migration, literature, cinema, and architecture to uncover historical and cultural intersections between Germany and Korea. Each nation has navigated the challenges of modernity in different ways, and yet traditional East-West dichotomies belie the deeper affinities between them. This book points to those affinities, focusing in particular on the past and present internal divisions that perhaps make Germany and Korea as similar as Germany and Japan.

The history of German medicine has undergone intense scrutiny because of its indelible connection to Nazi crimes. What is less well known is that Meiji Japan adopted German medicine as its official model in 1869. In Doctors of Empire, Hoi-eun Kim recounts the story of the almost 1,200 Japanese medical students who rushed to German universities to learn cutting-edge knowledge from the world leaders in medicine, and of the dozen German physicians who were invited to Japan to transform the country’s medical institutions and education. Shifting fluently between German, English, and Japanese sources, Kim’s book uses the colourful lives of these men to examine the impact of German medicine in Japan from its arrival to the pinnacle of its influence and its abrupt but temporary collapse at the outbreak of the First World War. Transnational history at its finest, Doctors of Empire not only illuminates the German origins of modern medical science in Japan but also reinterprets the nature of German imperialism in East Asia.

The first English-language study of German-Japanese interwar relations to employ sources in both languages.

This volume surveys transnational encounters and entanglements between Germany and East Asia since 1945, a period that has witnessed unprecedented global connections between the two regions. It examines their sociopolitical and cultural connections through a variety of media. Since 1945, cultural flow between Germany and East Asia has increasingly become bidirectional, spurred by East Asian economies’ unprecedented growth. In exploring their dynamic and evolving relations, this volume emphasizes how they have negotiated their differences and have frequently cooperated toward common goals in meeting the challenges of the contemporary world. Given their long-standing historical differences, their post-1945 relations reveal a surprisingly high degree of affinity in many areas. To show how they have deeply shaped each other’s views, this volume presents 12 chapters by scholars from the fields of history, sinology, sociology, literature, music, and film. Topics include cultural topics, such as German and Swiss writers on East Asia (Enzensberg, Muschg, and Kreitz), Japanese writer on Germany (Tezuka and Tawada), German commemorative culture in Korea, Beethoven in China, metal music in Germany and Japan, diary films on Japan (Wenders), as well as sociopolitical topics, such as Sino– East German diplomacy, Germans and Korean democracy, and Japanes and Korean communities in Germany.

This edited volume explores musical encounters and entanglements between Germany and East Asian nations from 1900 to the present. In so doing, it speaks to their dynamic and multi-faceted musical relations in multiple ways. Despite East Asia and Germany being located at opposite ends of the globe, German music has found remarkably fertile soil in East Asia. East Asians have enthusiastically adopted it, while at the same time adding their own musical interpretations. These musical encounters have produced compositions that reflect this mutual influence, stimulating and enriching each other through their entanglement. After more than a century of entanglement, Germany and East Asia have become kindred musical spirits.