In Tiger Tanaka’s account, the Meiji Restoration marks the start of Japan’s modernization and Westernization and casts a long shadow over the later history of the Black Dragon Society. Its significance in the novel lies both in the transformation attributed to the era and in the social dislocation from which Tiger traces the society’s origins.

Modernization and Foreign Settlement

Tiger describes the Meiji emperor as the figure who fathered Japan’s modernization and Westernization from the beginning of his reign, nearly a century earlier. He places the Restoration at the threshold of a changed Japan, one in which foreigners came to settle. Most, he says, were scholars or eccentrics and were generally tolerated, sometimes with amusement; wartime suspicion could nevertheless lead to their internment and hardship.

To explain this tolerance, Tiger offers James Bond a comparison: a hypothetical Japanese resident in the Scottish Highlands who learned Gaelic and took an unusual interest in local customs might be regarded as an amiable eccentric if he behaved peacefully. The example makes foreign settlement legible through a British analogy, while also showing that tolerance had limits when war recast a resident as a possible spy.

Displacement and the Black Dragon Society

Tiger links the Restoration to the society’s beginnings through the soshi: unemployed samurai left without a place after the old order changed. He identifies these men as the original recruits of the Black Dragon Society, before it expanded to include a far broader and more dangerous assortment of people. The Restoration thus appears not only as modernization but also as a rupture that left former warriors socially displaced.

The society’s later reach sharpens that contrast. Tiger says it became Japan’s most feared and powerful secret society, drawing in terrorists, gangsters, Fascist politicians, dismissed military officers, secret agents, and others, as well as influential figures in industry and finance and, occasionally, a Cabinet Minister. The account does not make the Restoration the sole cause of that later organization; it does identify the displaced samurai as its original human base.

Historical Legacy in Tiger’s Account

Tiger invokes the Restoration while explaining why Doctor Shatterhand could recruit former members of the Black Dragon Society as servants and gardeners. Although the society had been officially disbanded before the war, Tiger argues that extremist groups do not simply disappear, and he connects Shatterhand’s recruitment to the Society’s enduring legacy. The historical episode therefore serves the novel as more than background: it helps explain how an upheaval associated with national modernization could leave behind social and political currents that remained available to later conspirators.