Mathematics teaching is situated in a specific cultural setting and has evolved in ways that are valued in that culture (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999). Consequently, the attributes of a “competent” teacher will be conceptualised in different ways in different cultures. This paper reports an analysis that explored the characteristics of the mathematics classrooms taught by experienced teachers in Germany and Japan, who were recruited for their locally-defined ‘teaching competence’. The analysis focused on teacher’s questioning as a highly prioritized aspect of teacher competence. While similarities in teacher questioning were found in each of the German and Japanese classrooms, there were very specific differences as well. For example, the German teacher developed student understanding of a concept by employing the elicitation-response sequence, while the Japanese teacher achieved the same goal by through a process of posing a task and sharing and discussing the solution. Interestingly, the teachers’ questions were superficially similar, but we would argue that the meanings of the questions for the students were different. The performative realization of the same aspect of teacher competence (questioning), employed for the same purpose (concept development) differed significantly between educational settings, suggesting the cultural-specificity of teaching competence in general.