Meiji era

The Meiji era is described as the beginning of Japan’s modernization and Westernization, a transformation whose social effects outlasted the period itself. In Tiger Tanaka’s account, it marks both the opening of Japan to long-term foreign settlement and the upheaval that left unemployed samurai behind—some of whom became the earliest members of the Black Dragon Society.

Modernization and Historical Setting

Tiger places the start of the era nearly a hundred years before his conversation with James Bond and identifies the Emperor who inaugurated it as the force behind Japan’s modernization and Westernization. The period is thus framed as a decisive reorientation of the country, not merely a change of rulers: it provides the historical starting point for later transformations in Japanese society and for the arrival of outsiders who chose to settle there.

Foreign Residents and Cultural Boundaries

Tiger says foreigners had come to Japan and made lives there from the beginning of the era. Many were scholars or eccentrics; Lafcadio Hearn, a European-born American who became a Japanese citizen, serves as his example. Such residents were generally tolerated, often with amusement, when they pursued their interests peaceably. Tiger makes the principle vivid by imagining a Japanese person settling in the Scottish Highlands, learning Gaelic, and studying local customs: polite conduct could make even conspicuous cultural difference seem harmless. That tolerance had limits, however. In wartime, foreigners might be suspected of espionage and subjected to internment and hardship.

Social Upheaval and Political Afterlife

The era also left a class of unemployed samurai, the soshi, whom Tiger identifies as the original recruits of the Black Dragon Society. The Society later drew from a much wider and more dangerous range of people, but its origins lay in the displacement that followed the Meiji Restoration. The connection gives the era a double significance in Tiger’s history: it represents Japan’s state-led turn toward modernity, while its disruptions furnished a source of recruits for later extremist politics.