In recent years, scholars of the modern Middle East have paid increasing attention to the global currents connecting the region to East Asia and, in particular, to Japan. Historical research on the early twentieth century has examined how an Arab public eagerly consumed information about Japan through translations of European books, essays, and news, which enabled readers to see in the rising Eastern nation an alternative to Western models of modernization (Worringer 2014). Scholars have also discussed the ways in which Japan figured prominently in the discourse of Egyptian reformists, who often cited the country’s political and military progress and drew moral parallels with the Japanese (Abaza 2011, Abbas 1990, Laffan 2001). Yet, little research has addressed another body of writings that contributed to Arab conceptions of modern Japan: travel writing. Over the course of the twentieth century, Japan became a destination that Arabs not only read about in translation but visited for themselves, with many penning vivid accounts of their journeys afterwards. They were journalists and diplomats, tourists and religious reformers. And while they travelled for a range of reasons, their accounts commonly portrayed Japan as an alternative framework for Arab modernization, one in which an “Eastern spirit” could be harmonized with foreign science and technology. This talk explores Arabic travel writing from Japan, drawing on published travelogues as well as popular periodical essays to examine common themes and tropes in this writing as well as the "curious comparisons" it often drew between Arab and Japanese culture. As I show, in these publications, Japan came to serve as a lens through which readers looked outwards onto an exotic other. At the same time, I suggest that such travel accounts also provided a lens for looking inwards and commenting on Arab society. This investigation of the "rihla yabaniyya," or "Japanese journey," sheds light on an unstudied thread of literary works, bringing into new focus cultural flows between East Asia and the Arab world.