AcknowledgementsFor this edited volume we would, of course, first and foremost like to give thanks to our authors. This publication is the result of the international symposium "The East Asian Dimension of the First World War: The German-Japanese War and China, 1914-1919", which was held at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2014 and was attended by more than 100 historians from Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Japan, the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. Most of the authors featured in this book gave presentations at the symposium. We furthermore invested considerable time in trying to secure the participation of a small number of additional authors as this would enable us to consider the topic from further, important angles. To all of the authors we owe thanks for their trust and their endless patience, with which they dealt with our frequent queries and requests during the extended period it took for this book to take [...] contributions needed to be translated from Japanese into English, which was executed by Angelika Koch (Ghent) and David de Cooman (Leuven) with great linguistic and subject-specific competence. Maren Barton was in charge of the copy editing and completed a number of translations from German into English, with Iain Sinclair also contributing [...] the KU Leuven the doctoral candidates Maj Hartmann, Eline Mennens and Lieven Sommen as well as the student assistant Bert Colin contributed considerably to the completion of this [...] colleagues from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Rüdiger Breuer (Sinology) and Thorsten Traulsen (Korean Studies) were always available with help and advice when we needed to solve problems with the transcription from Chinese and Korean. Should there be any errors in this regard, however, they are ours alone.Furthermore we would like to express our gratitude to everyone who enabled our project financially: the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Japan Foundation - Japanisches Kulturinstitut, the Stiftung zur Förderung japanisch-deutscher Wissenschafts- und Kulturbeziehungen (JaDe-Stiftung), the Deutsche Gesellschaft der JSPS-Stipendiaten e. V. (JSPS-Club) and the National Museum of Japanese History. Without their support the symposium, from which this volume of articles eventually grew, would not have been able to happen. The Freie Universität Berlin and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where we were working at the time, supported the symposium in many ways, both financially and in terms of staffing resources. Our special thanks go to Regine Mathias, the then professor of Japanese History at the Department of East Asian Studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, who became the patron-in-chief of the symposium, as well as our then research assistants Juliane Böhm (Berlin) and Teelka Groeneveld (Bochum), who took on most of the organisational duties. The team of interpreters around Yoko Shinohe produced outstanding work covering German, English, Japanese and Chinese. We also would like to thank Susanne Formanek, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Oliver Janz, Kataoka Ichir , Hans-Joachim Schmidt, Tajima Nobuo and Matthias Zachmann for their contributions to the [...] but not least we would like to thank Jürgen Hotz, who oversaw the publication of this volume at Campus patiently and enthusiastically and always gave us valuable advice, and the editors of the series "Eigene und Fremde Welten" for including this [...] East Asian Dimension of the First World War: An IntroductionJan Schmidt and Katja SchmidtpottIn December 1914, about three months after the start of the First World War, the new Tokyo central railway station opened. Just a few weeks later it was the scene of a triumphal welcoming celebration for the Japanese troops that were returning from the German-leased area around the Chinese port of Qingdao on the Shandong peninsula, which the Japanese army had managed to take following several weeks of besieging the city and heavy fighting. The