Even before the Meiji period, the cultural and political elite of Tokugawa Japan and Ottoman Turkey, while having no known direct contact, were aware of each other through descriptions by travelers and the maps of the 17 th and 18 th centuries, which allowed both countries to “gaze” from a distance at each other. In the Ottoman world, Katip Celebi's Cihannuma, the famous seventeenth century Ottoman traveler, had made the first known descriptions of traditional Japanese society. He never had direct contact with the Japanese culture, and his accounts were not extensive, but he first represented the new inquisitive cosmopolitan sensibilities of the late Ottoman era, known as the Tulip era. His comments, such as how the Japanese people loved to take cold baths and had high morals, signaled the beginning of a positive image of the Japanese people within the Turkish psyche.

The Tokugawa Shoguns and their circle in Japan, after the seventeenth century, were also aware of the Ottoman Turks. In fact, numerous Japanese popular works of the eighteenth century, including Momozatsuwa (Miscellaneous Stories About the Red–Haired Peoples) or Bankoku Shinwa (Tales of 10 Thousands Lands), described Toruko as a ferocious military power in three continents, and the books contained illustrations of Turkish men and women. The Tokugawa got their information on Ottoman Turkey through Chinese map markers and the Dutch captains, who visited Edo every year and reported extensively on world affairs to the Shoguns. Evidence remains in the form of Oranda Fusetsugaki (Dutch reports) that shows detailed descriptions of the Ottoman Turks. According to the Dutch reports, the Ottomans were a formidable power in the Western world during the early modern era. The famous advisor of the Tokugawa Shoguns concerning international affairs and political thought, Arai Hakuseki (1656–1725), also discussed the importance of the Ottoman's power in the West in his well–known work Seiyokibu, which is the earliest known Japanese study of the West.

Looking at the 17th century's beautiful traditional byobu (Japanese screen), Tai sei oko kiba zu (The Mounted Kings of the West) in the Kobe City Museum, we can say that the Tokugawa imagination about the Turkish world represented the Turkish factor in the political and military history of the West in its early history. In short, the Tokugawa Japanese may not have been directly embroiled in the politics of the Western world at this time, where they remained within Sakoku or the isolationist policy of Tokugawa Shoguns, but the Japanese interest in the outside world during the early modern era can be seen in these various geographic and intellectual works of the age. This work can be interpreted as Genroku-style cosmopolitanism, which had nourished the Tokugawa Japanese gaze toward Turkey as well.

Distant awareness of the outside world in traditional Japan and Turkey transformed into a concern of immediacy about evaluating the problems of survival in the modern world, which was being restructured with the advent of the West as a challenge to traditional Eastern countries. In the late Tokugawa period, the Japanese intellectuals such as Aizawa Seishisia (1782–1853) of the Mito domain, one of the early proponents of the nationalist agenda of sonno joi (revere the emperor and repel the barbarians), debated the dangers of Western power in the world, especially in view of the defeat of China to Western imperialism and the need for swift undertaking of self–strengthening and reform at home. While a nationalist whose ideas were influential in the Meiji restoration, Aizawa argued from an international perspective when he discussed the late Ottoman Empire 's difficulties under the unequal treaties with the Western powers.