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Spare a thought for one of the less revered members of Japan's first family: the Taisho emperor. Squeezed between the Great Moderniser Meiji and the Great Destructor Showa (Hirohito), the man known to his drinking buddies as Yoshihito is now famous mainly for being a few buttons short of a full imperial tunic.
Mostly kept out of public sight during his reign (1912-1926), rumours that lead poisoning from suckling his powdered wet-nurse had left Japan's living god mentally impaired were fuelled when the emperor made a telescope out of his prepared speech to parliament in 1913 and stared through it at his goggle-eyed subjects.
Whereas his father stood watch over wars with Russia and China and his son is associated outside Japan with the epic destruction rained down on much of Asia in the 1930s and 40s, the Great Half-Wit is associated with the Taisho era: a brief flowering of democracy, liberalism, art and culture.
The era is celebrated in an exhibition called Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia and Deco at the Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, and is a must-see for anyone who believes history moves in straight lines. As the paintings, prints and other exhibits make clear, Japan was a much more open, comfortable place in the 20s than it would be a decade later.
The leading cultural figure of the era was the moga (modern girl) who, like today's youngsters in Shibuya and Harajuku, avidly mimicked the western fashions of the day. Financially and sexually liberated compared with their mothers, these secretaries, factory workers and waitresses put the fear of god into male conservatives. Within a decade the conservatives would have their revenge, shutting out western popular culture,