ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Meiji Japan's Fin-De-Siècle story from two sides of the same coin, as a Janus-faced revelation of modernity that entails progress and decadence. The period between 1868-1912 witnessed the young Emperor Meiji’s reign over the new leadership of former samurai from the victorious rebel domains that overthrew and abolished the 250-year-old centralized feudal polity of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It serves very conveniently as the time and spatial setting for a Fin-De-Siècle history of modern Japan. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 marks the radical dismantling of the old order and the conscious effort to construct a new legal, social, economic, and political frame for modern Japan. It explains the content of the difference from the rest of Asia. The Meiji Fin-De-Siècle generation of Japanese men and women had to learn to shift between the pro-Western stance of the early Meiji and the turn to an authoritarian, nationalist Japan depending on class and gender differences.
