Japanese mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. create statistically significant wealth gains for both Japanese bidders and U.S. targets. Consistent with the literature on foreign direct investment and the market for corporate control, bidder-specific characteristics and exchange-rate movements are useful in explaining the cross-sectional variation in bidder returns: returns to Japanese bidders and to the portfolio of Japanese bidders and U.S. targets increase with the bidder's leverage, the bidder's ties to financial institutions through borrowings, and the depreciation of the dollar in relation to the Japanese yen.