Listen Japan Nobles don't own any land but it's still considered something important. They're not actually important but they still have influence.
If you actually looked at the citation on that sentence on Wikipedia, you'd notice an article from the Washington Post, which has some phrases in it you might want to look at -
"Watanabe, a cheerful, energetic man who comes to the club nearly every day, says club members rarely tell their family stories. He says they all have come to accept their new status as men whose nobility stops at the clubhouse walls."
"And when the rubble was cleared after the Japanese surrender, the Kuroda family's grand home -- and the luxurious way of life it had enjoyed for generations -- was swept away in the new meritocracy that emerged."
""After the war," says Nagahide Kuroda, whose father was chamberlain to Emperor Hirohito, "my mother had to cook for the first time.""
Beyond just that, I've found a
few forums where people
discuss this, and all come to the conclusion that 'basically nobody outside their social club cares'. The only source I could find against this was written by
someone selling Hatsune Miku chairs, and their blog site even says on its landing page that they make 'far-fetched conclusions'. They also just seem to be talking about the turbo-rich and not the Meiji nobility.
But I guess it's easier to trust Google's AI overview than spend 10 minutes looking into it.
