UNDER EAGLE EYES: Lithographs, Drawings and Photographs From the Prussian Expedition to Japan, 1860-61, edited by Sebastian Dobson & Sven Saaler. Iudicium, 2011, 392 pp., €49 (hardcover)

Even casual students of Japan are likely to know something about Commodore Matthew Perry and his role in pressuring Japan to open up to American trade in the middle of the 19th century. But how many will have heard of Count Friedrich zu Eulenburg, who led a similar expedition from the Kingdom of Prussia in 1860-61?

This mission has received little scholarly attention outside Germany and Japan, despite the fact that in addition to four diplomats, the civilian staff included four scientists, two artists and one photographer, all of whom used a five-month stay in Edo to examine and record a country still little-known in Europe.

To date, most scholarship on the mission has focused on the diplomatic negotiations that led to the signing in Edo of a Prussian-Japanese treaty in 1861.