Useless Losers: Marginality and Modernization in Early Meiji Japan

Abstract

Nation-building initiatives during Japan's Meiji period (1868–1912) erected a rigid normalcy that galvanized a culture of exclusionism. They afforded broader spheres of social activity but a narrower range of acceptable behaviors, greater opportunities for individual empowerment but less tolerance for individuality itself. Backward-looking artists and writers were particularly susceptible to these developments, many earning repute as “useless losers,” heretics, or traitors. This article speaks to the dynamics between modernity and marginalization through an analysis of the exclusionism that accompanied Japan's modernization initiatives in the late nineteenth century. It demonstrates how Meiji's modernization program fostered the development of new paradigms of knowledge while condemning non-conformists as social misfits. The article begins with a review of early Meiji's construction of normalcy and then proceeds with a discussion of talented writers and artists rendered irrelevant by this process, ultimately exploring how conceptions of marginality played out in the social, political, and cultural contexts of that period.