Drastic political, economic and societal change often generates dystopic imaginaries of disruption, decline, and failure. Japan’s modern transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century was no exception. The crisis and fall of the Tokugawa regime (1603-1868) and the concomitant encounter with world capitalism were associated with the rise of millenarian movements in Japan.2 At the same time, after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, Japan’s newly manifested imperialistic ambitions generated international concerns, feeding into the Yellow Peril narrative.3 Some subtler anxieties about Japan, however, emerged in the anglophone world even before that moment. In this chapter, I look specifically, in this perspective, at the ways in which Japan’s modern transformation was discussed in periodicals published in Britain up to the aftermath of the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution (1889). I argue that periodicals shaped a complex narrative of Japan’s modernization – a narrative where Japan worked as a mirror to Britain’s own fears, anxieties, and expectations in specific reference to modernity. I discuss how, in light of this, Japan came to be ambiguously painted as both remote from and close to Britain, and how publications about Japan incorporated some of the language and tropes of more general contemporary British debates on modernity and its perils.