Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

(1) Meiji: The period in which Hearn wrote this book. It lasted from 1868 to 1912, and was a time when Japan plunged head-first into Western-style modernization. By the “fashions and the changes and the disintegrations of Meiji” Hearn is lamenting that this process of modernization was destroying some of the good things in traditional Japanese culture.