Red Brick, Gaslight, and the Japan That Feels Like Nostalgia

The Fastest Industrialisation Anywhere The Meiji government that took power in 1868 faced a straightforward problem: modernise or be colonised, as much of Asia already had been. Its response was systematic to a degree that still startles.

Delegations were sent abroad to study — the Iwakura Mission spent nearly two years touring America and Europe examining constitutions, factories, schools and navies. Foreign experts were hired at enormous salaries to build railways, draft legal codes and design buildings, with the explicit intention of replacing them with Japanese personnel as soon as possible. The slogan was rich country, strong army, and the state built model factories and then sold them to private conglomerates.

Within roughly a generation Japan had a constitution, a national rail network, universal elementary education, a modern navy, and heavy industry. It was also, by the end of the period, an imperial power with colonies — the same drive taken to its logical and destructive conclusion.

The Cost and the Backlash This was not painless. Traditional crafts collapsed as machine goods arrived, rural taxation funded the industrial push, and there was a period of enthusiastic Westernisation — ballroom dancing at government receptions, Western dress mandated for officials — that produced a nationalist reaction within two decades.

The reaction is where a great deal of what is now considered timelessly traditional was consolidated. Certain crafts, martial arts and religious practices were codified and promoted in the Meiji and later periods specifically as national heritage, in response to modernisation. The traditional and the modern in Japan are not sequential; they were constructed together and partly against each other.

Taishō Roman The Taishō era was short, barely fifteen years, and it has an outsized place in Japanese cultural memory. It was a period of relative liberalism, urban consumer culture, and a distinctive hybrid style — women in kimono with Western hairstyles and boots, cafés, department stores, magazines, cinema, jazz arriving.

The term Taishō roman covers this aesthetic, and it is used constantly in contemporary design, animation and photography. Yumeji Takehisa's illustrations of wistful, large-eyed women are the visual signature, and their influence on later Japanese illustration and manga is direct.

The era ended with the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, which destroyed much of Tokyo and Yokohama and killed enormous numbers, and the political drift toward militarism followed within a decade. Part of why the period is remembered so fondly is that it was brief and was followed by something much worse.

Where the Buildings Are Yokohama was the treaty port and it shows: the red-brick warehouses on the waterfront, now restored as shops and event space, are the most photographed remnant of the period. Kobe's Kitano district holds the ijinkan — Western-style houses built for foreign merchants, weatherboard and stained glass on a Japanese hillside, and thoroughly strange in the best way.

The unexpected one is Ginzan Onsen in Yamagata: a narrow river valley lined with wooden multi-storey inns from the Taishō period, gas-style lamps along the water, and in winter deep snow. It is the single most atmospheric surviving expression of the era and it is genuinely difficult to reach, which is part of why it still looks like that.

Reading It Honestly The nostalgia is real and it is selective. The same decades produced universal education and colonial expansion, a vibrant urban culture and rural poverty severe enough to drive emigration. Enjoying the red brick and the gas lamps is fine; it is worth knowing they belong to the same project as everything that followed.