Top Meiji Quotes

Life is a tiring business indeed.Soy sauce runs out. Milk runs out. Dishwashing detergent runs out. Lancôme lipsticks—I thought I had stockpiled several years' worth—run out. Dust underneath the dinin...

And yet, as you all know, joining humanity is never a simple matter. By beginning to live the same temporality as Westerners, the Japanese now had to live two temporalities simultaneously. On the one...

Daisuke was of course equipped with conversation that, even if they went further, would allow him to retreat as if nothing had happened. He had always wondered at the conversations recorded in Western...

The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot. I’m trying to fend off your admiration for me, you see, in order to save myself from your future contempt....

That Seigo could go into geisha houses, accept luncheon invitations, drop in at the Club, see people off at Shimabashi, meet them at Yokohama, run out to Oiso to humor the elders—that he could put in...

Hirota feels strongly drawn toward nature and the natural, is hyper-sensitive to the artificial—particularly that most cramped and constraining man-made creation, society—and does his best to avoid it...

The call for political freedom took place long ago. The call for freedom of speech is also a thing of the past. Freedom is not a word to be used exclusively for phenomena such as this which are so eas...

But do you imagine there’s a certain type of person in the world who conforms to the idea of a ‘bad person'? You’ll never find someone who fits that mold neatly, you know. On the whole, all people are...

But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ideals...

When I was a student, there wasn't a single thing we did that was unrelated to others. It was all for the Emperor, or parents, or the country, or society—everything was other-centered, which means tha...

It was Daisuke's conviction that all morality traced its origins to social realities. He believed there could be no greater confusion of cause and effect than to attempt to conform social reality to a...