Relations between Japan and Germany date from the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), when Germans in Dutch service arrived in Japan to work for the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The first well-documented cases are those of the physicians Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716) and Philipp Franz Balthasar von Siebold (1796–1866) in the 1690s and 1820s, respectively.
