A foundational event occurred in 1890, when the Turkish frigate Ertuğrul hit a reef and sank off the coast of Wakayama, Japan, after having an audience with the Meiji Emperor.

The motion picture reflects two important historical incidents in Japanese-Turkish relations, the aforementioned sinking of the Ertuğrul and the evacuation of Japanese nationals from Iran in 1985.

[5] Already starting to promote the ideology of Pan-Asianism, the Japanese began to court the Sublime Porte, the central government of the Ottoman Empire.

The Meiji Emperor sent princes of the House of Yamato to visit the Sultan-Caliph, Abdul Hamid II, bearing gifts and proposals for treaties and generating much excitement in the Ottoman press.

[4] Abdul Hamid II admired Japan to a certain extent but was fearful of the popular rumors that the Meiji Emperor would convert to Islam and proclaim himself Caliph, thereby displacing the Sultan-Caliph as the object of veneration from all the world's Sunni Muslims.

Over the centuries the Turks had wandered across Eurasia, settling in very large numbers in Anatolia after their victory over the Romans at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.

[5] In an inversion of Western paranoia about the "Yellow Peril", the Young Turks often fantasised about creating an alliance with Japan that would unite all the peoples of "the East" to wage war against the much hated Western nations that dominated the world, a "Yellow wave" that would wash away European civilisation for good.

[15] As with the case of the oligarchy that ruled Meiji Japan, the purpose of the modernization policies of the CUP regime to allow the nation to win wars, and the educational policies of the CUP regime, which were closely modeled after the Japanese educational system, were meant to train the male students to be soldiers when they become adults.

[16] The Turkish historian Handan Nezir Akmeșe wrote that the most important factor in Unionist thinking was the "devaluation of life", the belief that Eastern peoples like the Japanese and the Turks attached no value to human life including their own, and unlike the Westerners who allegedly clung pathetically to their lives when confronted with danger, Easterners supposedly died willingly and happily for the cause.

During the 1930s, Japan engaged in a secret attempt to create an Islamic state in Central Asia with Japanese backing, with the Ottoman Crown Prince Şehzade Mehmed Abdülkerim as its Sultan at the Kumul Rebellion.

On July 10, 2010, Prince Tomohito of Mikasa, cousin of the emperor, attended the opening ceremony of the Kaman Kalehöyük Archaeological Museum.

[27] Turkey and Japan are both members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), G20 and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Foreign minister, Toshimitsu Motegi, said in a statement: "Japan is deeply concerned that the latest military operation would make the settlement of Syrian crisis more difficult and cause further deterioration of the humanitarian situation.