Given the distance which separates the two countries, it is remarkable the interest contemporary Irish poets take in Japan, both as subject and-responding to its rich literature and culture-as exemplar. To mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1957, Our Shared Japan brings together a large selection of poems by Irish writers (both in English and in Irish) written or published during those 50 years. Featuring some of the best-known names in contemporary Irish poetry, it also includes many younger poets who have grown up with and, in various ways, responded to those growing connections. Some of the poets have visited or spent time in Japan and write from that experience; others respond to a Japan of the imagination, adopting or adapting Japanese poetic tecnnique as a means to expand and enrich their own ways of looking at the world. In this respect, Our Shared Japan is a celebration of outside influence, but it is also a celebration of the power of poetry, wherever we may travel to find it, to bring us to ourselves.