Two years after the Compromise between the Austrian and Hungarian elites was sealed the Dual Monarchy dispatched its first diplomatic mission to the “Far East.” The 1869 East Asian Expedition was sent by the common Foreign Ministry to establish relations and hopefully sign trade agreements with China, Japan, and Siam. The event did not launch a successful colonial adventure, but it did place Austria-Hungary on the mental map of the educated public in these countries. It also allowed for more directly transmitted information about “exotic lands” to flow to the Danubian Empire. Both the rapid and radical modernization of Japan in the Meiji period and the simultaneous, gradual subjugation of China captivated Western attention, with the traditional admiration toward the once powerful Celestial Empire shifting toward “Charming Nippon.” In Central Europe, too, the Enlightenment's chinoiserie slowly gave place to japanaiserie.

Gergely Tóth's book deals with the bilateral diplomatic, cultural, and ideological connections between Meiji- and Taisho-era Japan and post-Compromise Hungary. A young scholar of Japanese studies, Tóth spent a decade researching Nippo-Hungarian relations in Budapest and Tokyo. His book is partly based on his master's thesis and was accepted by the renowned academic and literary publishing house Gondolat in Budapest. The author being trained primarily as a Japanologist, it is the reviewer's task to relate Tóth's book to recent historiographical trends.

Since the 1990s, the ascendency of global and international perspectives has encouraged inquiries into previously neglected imperial histories. After earlier comparative approaches, “transnational” became the scholarly buzzword of the 2000s, while “new imperial history” has argued for the elimination of conceptual boundaries between the metropole and colony (e.g., Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History [Berkeley, 2005]). Most recently, advocates of the “transimperial” propose to place different empires into the same analytical field (e.g., Daniel Hedinger and Heé Nadin, “Transimperial History—Connectivity, Cooperation and Competition,” Journal of Modern European History 16:4 [November 2018]).

Habsburg Central Europe and East Asia are rarely associated with each other in academic research on either side of the Eurasian continent. Those few scholars with interests in Austria-Hungary's attempt to participate in the scramble for the “Far East” during the “age of high imperialism” tend to look at Sino-Austro-Hungarian relations. There are, however, studies on both ends that aim to discover these multifaceted connections (e.g., Luke Gartlan, A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography [Leiden, 2016] and Atsushi Otsuru, “The State of Austrian/Habsburg Historical Studies in Japan,” in Global Austria: Austria's Place in Europe and the World, eds. Gunter Bischof et al. [Innsbruck, 2011], 297–304).

Recently, the Magyar-reading audience was offered some valuable works on Hungarian thinking about the Orient and also more specifically on the Hungarian side of the Japanese relations during and after the Habsburg period. Balázs Ablonczy's engaging intellectual history of Turanism is an attempt to trace the origins and cultural consequences of a stigmatized tradition that largely influenced the way Hungarians have been relating to “the East” (Keletre, magyar!—A magyar turanizmus története [Budapest, 2016]). Péter Wintermantel's diplomatic history deals with the period between the Great War and the establishment of ambassadorial relations between Japan and Hungary (Nippon-babona: A magyar-japán kapcsolatok története [Budapest, 2017]).

Tóth divides his study into seven chapters, each dedicated to an aspect he deems important to the bilateral ties between the two countries. To set the tone, the first chapter compares Meiji Japan and dualist-period Hungary in the context of late nineteenth-century modernization efforts. Joining the globalizing world as so-called latecomers, both countries’ elites were preoccupied by questions of economic and political sovereignty—though the extent of their success in their respective projects differed. While the author offers some statistical data (without naming its source) that testifies for the more impressive achievements of Japan—such as higher life expectancy, literacy, industrial development, number of railways, and so forth—he does not draw a final conclusion at the end of the section, and his comparison remains only a parallel introduction of the two countries’ histories. The following chapters collect and organize expeditions (chapter two), travelers and their travelogs (chapter three), diplomatic and trade connections (chapter four), artistic and cultural relations (chapter five), and ideas and ideologies about the other (chapter six). Chapter seven is dedicated to a short but concise review of other histories of Japanese connections in the region. At the end of the book there is an additional section in which the author switches gears and turns to the genre of historical short story. Here Tóth uses anecdotes—mixing historical elements and fictitious stories relating to the previous chapters of the book—to talk about the experience of interactions in a different way. Although the author does not prepare the reader or explain this narrative shift, it certainly serves as a light, almost literary conclusion to the historical account.

Methodologically, the book follows a rather straightforward comparative logic whereby the Japanese and Hungarian cases of fin-de-siècle development are followed side by side. Although not a state-centered account, the unit of the analysis is the nation-state and the imagined and desired ethnoculturally homogeneous communities within it. Nowhere is this more explicit than in the case of Hungary, where the author deploys the traditional focus on the dominant ethnocultural group by examining exclusively the voice and experience of Magyar speakers. The author is clearly interested in the Magyars of Austria-Hungary. To be sure his choice can be justified merely by the daunting linguistic task of surveying all the languages in the land of the crown of St. Stephen. In fact, his overview of Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Croatian scholarship in chapter seven does fairly well to contextualize the Magyar perspective. His explanation for why he omitted Austrian voices and scholarship can be accepted too, as these normally receive much more attention (due to their easier accessibility) than those of the “secundus inter pares” component of the Dual Monarchy.

Among the book's several strengths are Tóth's thorough work of collecting and synthetizing the multilingual primary sources and the meticulously constructed tables in the appendix. Tóth offers the reader a list of diplomatic representatives of Austria-Hungary in Japan, and vice versa. The Japanese names (throughout the whole book) are provided in both Latin-alphabet transcription (Hepburn system) as well as in kanjis, making further research and reference considerably easier. His chronological lists of travelogs, expeditions, and warships—as well as of the most important Hungarian travelers (accompanied by short biographies)—serve as potential resources for future studies. Besides being in conversation with international scholarship on both the Habsburg and Japanese fields, Tóth also keeps an eye on other, often-ignored Central European works. The thematic rather than strictly chronologic structure makes it possible for readers to open the book at the chapter of their own specific interest. Tóth's tone also ensures that his work remains accessible not only for experts but also for the popular audience.

I recommend this useful though unprovocative book to those interested in the diplomacy of Austria-Hungary and its attempts to connect with East Asia in the context of imperialism. Those concerned about the cultural relations of Hungary and its ideas about the Orient could also surely benefit from this work. Hopefully an English translation of the book will soon make History of Relations between Japan and Hungary, 1869‒1913 accessible also for those who do not read Magyar.