Rotem Kowner is Professor of Japanese History and Culture at the University of Haifa, Israel. His research has focused on the social and racial nexus between Japan and the West since the sixteenth century as well as on wartime behavior and attitudes in modern Japan. Walter Demel is Professor of Early Modern History at the Universität der Bundeswehr (University of the Armed Forces) Munich, Germany. He has mainly published on the relations between Europe and East Asia, particularly the perceptions of China and Japan, on the Bavarian and German politics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and on the history of the European nobility.