This thesis explores how Japan is represented in nine accounts of the world tours written by western globetrotters between 1869 and 1914. Through the analysis of texts and images, it highlights the uniqueness of the Japanese leg og these global journeys. Japan, recently opened to the West, cystallises an ambivalent imagination: both a dream destination and an object of perplexity. Globetrotters perceive it as a modern, industrialised country, but one steeped in traditional aesthetics and codified social rituals. The Western gaze is thus caught between admiration, nostalgia and incomprehension. Through a cross-reading of visual motifs, the work reveals constant rensions between East and West, tradition and modernity. Japan becomes a stage on which the contradictions of a developing tourist image play out in an increasingly globalised world. This thesis thus examines the construction of otherness and the mechanisms of cultural projection at work in a travel narratives, while questioning the emergence of these images (Japonism) and their performativity.