Identity on the Move: The Creation of a German National Identity through Nineteenth Century German Tourism to Japan

This thesis examines the process of creating a German identity through nineteenth century tourism to Japan. The production and the subsequent maintenance of a national identity within the context of a nation state is something that can be relatively uniformed. A nation’s population is exposed to the same national symbols and national rhetoric and therefore a degree of similarity is present in the ways in which people identify themselves on a national level. Traveling changes this process. The subjects of this paper Germans who traveled to Japan at the end of the nineteenth century. They did not travel together, and presumably did not know each other, but they all wrote and published travel narratives of their trip. Through the examination of these books it is evident that the process of creating an identity, be it national or individual, becomes more complex once a person steps outside of the borders of the nation state. I argue that travel narratives illuminate the complexities and clarify the ways in which Germans understood what it meant to be German during a time of uncertainty for their newly unified country.