Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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NOTES

1 In other ways, Japan continued to be influenced by China, especially through the import

of books. See Jansen, China in the Tokugawa World.

2 In addition to the work by William Hauser, see Nakai and McClain, ‘‘Commercial Change

and Urban Growth.’’

3 Crawcour, ‘‘The Tokugawa Period and Japan’s Preparation.’’

4 See Pratt, Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite, esp. ch. 1.

5 Hayami, Historical Demography, pp. 45–9.

6 Saito

, ‘‘Infanticide, Fertility and ‘Population Stagnation’,’’ pp. 374–5.

7 Hayami, Historical Demography, pp. 137–53.

8 Cornell, ‘‘Infanticide in Early Modern Japan?’’, p. 44.

9 Saito

, ‘‘Infanticide, Fertility and ‘Population Stagnation’,’’ p. 378.

10 See Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, pp. 111–14. Wigen also finds greater

parity in sex ratios as a result of the growing importance of women in the burgeoning silk

industry. Pratt describes a similar process at work in Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite, pp. 134–

11 Hanley, Everyday Things, p. 22.

12 In the Hachio

ji area from the 1750s to 1780s, farmers faced a flood or drought every

three or four years. See Pratt, Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite, p. 150.

13 Walthall, Social Protest and Popular Culture; Bix, Peasant Protest in Japan; Vlastos,

Peasant Protests and Uprisings; White, Ikki.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bix, Herbert. Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590–1884. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Cornell, Laurel. ‘‘Infanticide in Early Moder n Japan? Demography, Culture, and Population

Growth.’’ Journal of Asian Studies 55:1 (1996): 22–50.

Crawcour, E. Sydney. ‘‘The Tokugawa Period and Japan’s Preparation for Modern Economic

Growth.’’ In John W. Hall and Marius Jansen, eds., Studies in the Institutional History of

Early Modern Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

Hanley, Susan B. Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture.

Berkeley: University of Califor nia Press, 1997.

Hanley, Susan B., and Yamamura, Kozo. Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial

Japan, 1600–1868. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Hauser, William. Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: O

saka and the Kinai

Cotton Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Hayami Akira. The Historical Demography of Pre-Modern Japan. Tokyo: University of Tokyo

Press, 1999.

Howell, David. Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery.

Berkeley: University of Califor nia Press, 1995.

Jansen, Marius. China in the Tokugawa World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1992.

Katsu Kokichi. Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai, trans. Teruko Craig.

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988.

Leupp, Gary. Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1992.

Nakai Nobuhiko, and McClain, James. ‘‘Commercial Change and Urban Growth in Early

Modern Japan.’’ In John W. Hall, ed., The Cambridge History of Modern Japan, vol. 4, Early

Modern Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

98 EDWARD E. PRATT

Pratt, Edward E. Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the Go

. Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999.

Ravina, Mark. Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University

Press, 1999.

Roberts, Luke. Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Na-

tionalism in 18th-Century Tosa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Saito

Osamu. ‘‘Infanticide, Fertility and ‘Population Stagnation’: The State of Tokugawa

Historical Demography.’’ Japan Forum 4:2 (1992): 369–81.

Smith, Thomas C. The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University

Press, 1959.

Smith, Thomas C. Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in a Japanese Village, 1770–

1830. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1977.

Smith, Thomas C. ‘‘Farm Family By-Employments in Preindustrial Japan.’’ In Thomas

C. Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750–1920. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1988.

Smith, Thomas C. ‘‘The Land Tax in the Tokugawa Period.’’ In Thomas C. Smith, Native

Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press,

1988.

Smith, Thomas C. ‘‘O

kura Nagatsune and the Technologists’’ (1973). In Thomas C. Smith,

Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750–1920. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1988.

Smith, Thomas C. ‘‘Premodern Economic Growth: Japan and the West.’’ In Thomas C. Smith,

Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750–1920. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1988.

Toby, Ronald. State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the

Tokugawa Bakufu. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Vlastos, Stephen. Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1986.

Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi. Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The

New Theses of 1825. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University,

1986.

Walthall, Anne. Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Japan. Tucson:

University of Arizona Press, 1986.

White, James W. Ikki: Social Conflict and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1995.

Wigen, Ka

ren. The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750–1920. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1995.

Yamakawa Kikue. Women of the Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life, trans. Kate

Wildman Nakai. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1992.

FURTHER READING

For the rural economy, see Furushima Toshio’s ‘‘The Village and Agriculture during

the Edo period,’’ in John Whitney Hall, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4,

Early Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres s, 1991); Penelope

Francks, ‘‘Rural Industry, Growth Linkages, and Economic Development in Nine-

teenth-Century Japan,’’ Journal of Asian Studies 61:1 (2002): 33–55; E. Sydney

Crawcour, ‘‘Economic Change in the Nineteenth Century,’’ in Mariu s Jansen, ed.,

The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5, The Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1989); and Saito

Osamu, ‘‘The Rural Economy: Commercial

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 99

Agriculture, By-Employment, and Wage Work,’’ in Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert

Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1986).

Local studies include William Jones Chambliss, Chiaraijima Village: Land Tenure,

Taxat ion, and Local Trade, 1818–1884 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1965);

Mark W. Fruin, Kikkoman: Company, Clan, and Community (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1983); and Arne Kalland, Fishing Villages in Tokugawa

Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 1995).

For an overview of merchants and their activities in the major cities, see E. Sydney

Crawcour’s ‘‘Changes in Japanese Commerce in the Tokugawa Period,’’ in John

W. Hall and Marius B. Jansen, eds., Studies in the Institutional History of Early

Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

On the important role of technology, see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Technological

Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Penelope Francks, Technology and

Agricultural Development in Pre-war Japan (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1984).

On the impact of epidemics on mortality, see Ann Bowman Jannetta, Epidemics

and Mortality in Early Modern Japan (Pri nceton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

Economic thought is the focus of Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa

Japan: The Kaitokudo

Merchant Academy of Osaka (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1987), and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought (New

York: Routledge, 1991).

100 EDWARD E. PRATT

CHAPTER SIX

Intellectual Change in

Tokugawa Japan

Peter Nosco

Introduction

In order to appreciate the changes that occur red among intellectuals and their circles

during the Edo period, one would do well to compare what this intellectual world

looked like at the outset with its principal features at era’s end. At the start of the

seventeenth century, Japan’s intellectual world was fundamentally Buddhist, though

there was remarkably strong interest in Catholic Christianity among some 1–2

percent of the population that included elite circles and commoners alike. Christianity

and trade represented Europe, which seemed remote, exotic, and potentially de-

stabilizing. Once Christianity was suppressed, as it would be during the Edo period’s

first decades, even kno wledge of Europe itself was forbidden for over a century, and

there was not a single place in Japan where one might obtain instruction in European

matters. Generally, intellectuals engaged in the production of culture in the early

seventeenth century enjoyed either independent wealth or the patronage of a power-

ful individual or institution, and there was remarkably little interest in Japan’s past

history or culture.

Yet two and a half centuries later at the period’s end, Japan’s intellectual

world had become largely Confucian, and as a result more ethnocentric and more

historically minded, though Confucianism itself seeme d to many passe

and demon-

strably unable to address the pressing demands of the times. These demands

were now military and imperial and came from that same Europe, which had been

handled so uncompromisingly within the historical memory and now seemed so

intimidating. Christianity, ironically, was on the verge of returning ‘‘above ground’’

after over two centuries underground as a proscribed creed. Intellectuals – along with

thoughtful individuals generally – recognized the urgency of the times and sought

solutions within the ideas of any number of traditions. And these intellectuals were

most often to be found within self-supporting private academies, which operated

independently.

These changes all had social and sometimes political contexts. For example,

the emergence of a highly commoditized form of popular culture from the 1680s

on was facilitated in important ways by the rapid economic expansion, urbanization,

improvements to the communications and transportation infrastructure, social de-

militarization, and so on that characterized the Edo period’s first century. One

A Companion to Japanese History

Edited by William M. Tsutsui

prominent feature of much of this popular culture was a new realism, which appealed

to an urban audience of samurai and commoners and resonated well with efforts

elsewhere in intellectual circles to better understand the nature of histo rical change.

Similarly, many intellectuals sought to address the crises of the Tokugawa period’s

last decades, and their writing cannot be understood well without studying the

broader contexts of such thought. The social, political, and even diplomatic devel-

opments that form the contexts for these changes are for the most part addressed

elsewhere in this volume and will generally not concern us here, and so though tful

readers will be well advised to see the developments discussed in this chapter along-

side developments in other arenas discussed in the immediately preceding and fol-

lowing chapters.

Further, in this chapter we discuss intellectual changes in terms of broad move-

ments such as Confucianism or kokugaku (national learning, national studies,

or nativism), but the reality was different. Though persons who taught or studied

a subject like Confuciani sm or nativism were certainly aware of their forebearers

and contemporaries, they are better understood as a succession of individual

schools that usually gathered around a single teacher, than as movements united

by common themes and shared goals. Schools like the Confucian academies

that emerged after the 1660s actually became a kind of indust ry: they rivaled

each other in the marketplace of ideas, competed for their students, and

often spoke quite critically of each other. And of course, by the mid eighteenth

century ideas of all sorts circulated in and contributed to a limited public

sphere within the otherwise auth oritarian environment of the Tokugawa

state.

Some of these ideas affirmed the status quo, while others unint-

entionally seemed to destabilize (or at least to harbor the potential to destabilize)

it. Unquestionably, these ideas enriched the intellectual world in which they

coursed, and it is hoped that this chapter will convey some of that richness and

attraction.

Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy

and Innovation

Confucianism had of course been known in Japan for over a thousand years before

the Edo period, but not in the way that it would co me to be known during those

years. Originally Confucianism in Japan was identified with the yin–yang and Five

Elements cosmology that emerged in China centuries earlier, and included relat ed

divinatory practice s. This remained the ‘‘Confuciani sm’’ of the Nara, Heian, and

Kamakura periods, and it had little to say on issues of statecraft, the polity, political

economy, ethics, citizenship, education, human relationships, or any of the other

subjects that figure prominently in Tokugawa Confucianism. During the fifteenth

and sixteenth centuries the Ashikaga Gakko

(academy) offered aspiring elites instruc-

tion in a ‘‘Confucianism’’ that continued to emphasize divination but expanded to

include military science, an obvious accommodation to the needs of those turbulent

times.

It was during the twelfth century that Confucianism in China (and then similarly

though later in Korea) was refashioned into a new form that represented a sharp

102 PETER NOSCO

challenge to Buddhism. This Neo-Confucianism favored a curriculum centered

on the Four Books, that is, The Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, ‘‘The Great

Learning,’’ and ‘‘Doctrine of the Mean,’’ since these works returned Confucianism to

the original ethical and political concerns that figu red so promin ently in the early

canon. Neo-Confucianism likewise taught that the same abstract natural principles

that govern the operations of the physical cosmos likewise constitute the moral

principles that govern and infor m human relations and government. Neo-Confucian-

ism maintained that these principles abide within all humans in the form of an

originally good nature or mind, which at times is overwhelmed by the turbulence

of an alluring and agitating world. Rein in this turbulence, restore the original balance

and calm, and then your original goodness will be restored, or so the Neo-Confucians

believed.

During the fourteenth century this same Neo-Confucianism in its so-called Cheng-

Zhu form – called this because it was based on the commentaries on the Four Books

and other classics by the two Cheng brothers and the brilliant Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi,

1130–1200) – became the authorized curriculum for the Chinese civil service exams,

thus acquiring in both China and Korea an unprecedented degree of intellectual

orthodoxy, since mastery of these teachings was the key to entrance into the official

sphere. Though known in Japan, however, understanding of this orthodox Neo-

Confucianism was generally confined during these same centuries to Zen monaster-

ies, where it was represented as a stimulating but still inferior derivative of Zen

insights, and knowledge of variant heterodox Neo-Confucian teachings remained

limited in Japan.

All this changed when libraries with books on Neo-Confucianism – war boo ty

from Japan’s ill-advised invasion of Korea in the 1590s – along with authorities

on Neo-Confucianism taken as prisoners began arriving in Japan, attracting fresh

attention to the tradition and its richly variegated continental developments. It was

owing to these arrivals that one finds the emergence of Fujiwara Seika (1561–1617),

a Zen monk who found the newly introduced Neo-Confucian writings sufficiently

compelling to break with Zen and to embrace a variety of Neo-Confucian interpret-

ations. So too with Seika’s student, Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), who attracted the

attention of Tokugawa Ieyasu and served in the governments of the first four

Tokugawa sho

guns. Razan succeeded in obtaining bakufu assistance for the estab-

lishment of the Sho

heiko

academy in Edo. Headed by Razan’s lineal descendants, the

Sho

heiko

served as official interpreters of Neo-Confucianism for successive Toku-

gawa governments until the period’s end.

Hayashi Razan was more narrowly faithful to the orthodox Cheng-Zhu teachings

than the more eclectic Fujiwara Seika, and owing to the official attention shown to

orthodox Neo-Confucian teaching s within bakufu circles, these same teachings rap-

idly acquired a broad intellectual following. This following was so compre hensive that

by the 1650s and 1660s one can begin to discern the contours of an intellectual

legacy that included a new humanism, rationalism, ethnocentricity, and historical

mindedness in Edo period thought.

By then the prestige of these Neo-Confucian

teachings was so great, and the interpretations they offered so compelling, that even

Shinto

theologians, who had in earlier centurie s sought to reconcile the ir teachings to

Buddhism, now sought to accommodate belief in kami with the most basic assump-

tions of orthodox Neo-Confucianism. Knowledge of Neo-Confuciani sm proved so

INTELLECTUAL CHANGE IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 103

attractive in seventeenth-century Japan that just a few decades later in the 1690s, the

popular novelist Ihara Saikaku (1640–93) listed familiarity with Utsunomiya Ton’an’s

(1634–1710) Neo-Co nfucian teachings among the accomplishments of a cultured

but otherwise wayward urban cho

nin.

Yamazaki Ansai (1618–82) represents the high-water mark of devotion to the

orthodox Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucian teachings in Tokugawa Japan, though he

also espoused a strict moralism that became emblematic of Neo-Confucianism’s

humorless and dour extremes. This helps to explain Neo-Confucianism’s popular

decline, since soon after his death in 1682, this moral rigor seemed to many oddly out

of step with the more liberal times, and other alternative Confucian voices were now

competing to be heard. As noted previously, this competition would now be played

out largely within the private academies that hereafter arose around the major

Tokugawa intellectuals, since it was the tuition paid by their students that freed

these intellectuals from other obligations and enabl ed them to make a living throug h

their teaching and scholarship.

Despite the prestige of Neo-Confucian teachings and bakufu sponsorship of their

study, Neo-Confucians rarely achieved the status of high advisors to different

regimes, though individuals familiar with Confucianism often figured prominently

as domainal advisors. The most impressive exception to this was Arai Hakuseki

(1657–1725), a brilliant and richly gifted scholar, historian, diplomat, and statesman,

who eventually rose to the position of personal tutor to the sixth Tokugawa sho

gun

Ienobu (r. 1709–12) and adviso r to both Ienobu and Ienobu’s son and shogunal

successor Tokugawa Ietsugu.

One alternative Neo-Confucian voice that arose early on was that of Nakae To

(1608–48), a follower of Wang Yangming’s (1472–1528) heterodox Neo-Confucian

teachings that emphasized an intuitive quest for goodness by animating the moral

seeds within, obviating the need for rigorous study. Known in Japan as Yo

meigaku

(Yangming learning), these teachings were again embraced at the end of the Toku-

gawa period by activist reformers who found inspiration in Wang Yangming’s famous

dictum, ‘‘Thought initiat es action, but acti on completes thought.’’

In Japan a more compelling alternative to orthodox Neo-Confucianism was offered

by figures like Yamaga Soko

(1622–85) and Ito

Jinsai (1627–1705) within

the Ancient Learning or Ancient Studies (kogaku) movement. It will be recalled

that the orthod ox Neo-Confucian tradition was grou nded in the commentaries

by the Cheng brothers and their younger contemporary Zhu Xi on the Confucian

Four Books, with these commentaries forming the core curriculum for the

civil service examination in China. The commentators themselves maintained that

their expositions disclosed in all its fullness the true message of the sage authors

of antiquity. What the Ancient Learning scholars shared, by contrast, was the convic-

tion that this true message of the sages might be more effectively accessed by reading

these ancient sages’ writings themselves, without the distraction of a commentary,

and in this way they initiated the systematic study of Chinese historical linguistics in

Japan.

This approach was sufficiently radical in 1665 that Yamaga Soko

was exiled for

advocating so extreme an alternative to the bakufu’s authorized orthodox Neo-

Confucianism. By the 1680s, however, the spirit of intellectual pluralism was such

that Ito

Jinsai’s private academy the Kogido

(Hall of Ancient Meanings) flourished in

104 PETER NOSCO

Kyoto with hundreds of students making it the most successful such venture to date.

Emulating the hereditary leadership of the Hayashi School, headship of the private

Kogido

passed from father to son, and the school continued to expand after the

founder’s death. More importantly, Jinsai’s success established the private academy as

a potential form of livelihood for the private scholar, who soon emerged as a

distinctive kind of cultural producer comparable to a popul ar author or playwright.

Ogyu

Sorai (1666–1728) is often thought of as part of this Ancient Learning

movement, though he differs in important ways and distinguished himself from these

others by styling his movement, the ‘‘study of ancient words and phrases’’ (kobunji-

gaku). Earlier Confucians and Neo-Confucians in Japan had debated such questions

as whether principle was ontologically prior to the material force in which principle

ordinarily resides, or whether there were emotional responses appropriate to the

circumstances (or whether all emotional responses were essentially suspect). Despite

these differences, all of these Confucians and Neo-Confucians regarded the Confu-

cian Way as something that was ontologically linked to Heaven, itself a kind of

supreme principle of nature. In this sense, the Confucian Way was understood to

be the Way of the Sages, because sages in their nearly supernatural wisdom discerned

the outlines of this Way within the world around them, and through observation and

insight gleaned many of its particular principles. Confucians and Neo-Confucians

alike thus believed that these principles could be found within the sages’ canonical

writings, and that the principles are both enduring and universal, since they are

grounded in the cosmos itself.

Ogyu

Sorai challenged this view by asserting that the Way is to be found not in

nature or the cosmos but rather in the all too human world of history. He insisted

that the ‘‘Way’’ is simply a convenient and comprehensive term inclusive of all those

state policies, administrative practices, laws and punishments, rituals, and even music,

which have at different times been adopted by ancient rulers in order to alleviate

specific problems and to advance civilization and effective government. Sorai thus

styled this Way the Way of the Former Kings, and argued that it is there to be found

today in ancient texts, which are themselves to be studied, pondered, and have their

lessons applied anew, but only after taking into account the different circumstances of

a different time and place. This novel view of the Way as a dynamic human creation

proved immensely attractive and influenced views on everything from literary criti-

cism to the function and responsibilities of samurai in a time of peace.

With such innovations Confucianism by the mid eighteenth century had lost much

of its originally foreign character, and only Confucianism’s rivals continued to call

attention to its continental origins. In fact, some scholars think of Confucianism as a

whole as having peaked during the mid eighteenth century, though this may be

exaggerated.

Confucianism remained the doctrine of first recourse when times

seemed troubled and in need of rescue, so that Confucianism was at the heart of

the conservative reforms of Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758–1829) in the 1790s, and

also during subsequent reform efforts. During the last decades of the Tokugawa,

Confucian scholars continued to look within the tradition for solutions to the day’s

ills, but they had little success in either winning a following or affecting a solution.

Some like O

shio Heihachiro

(1798–1837) turned to heterodox Confucianism to

justify radical reform, while other more obscure voices hoped that answers might still

be found within the Confucian tradition.

INTELLECTUAL CHANGE IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 105

Kokugaku

All Confucians and Neo-Confucians in Japan recognized a measure of intellectual

indebtedness to China. Some were overtly Sinophilic – none, it was said, more than

Ogyu

Sorai, who seemed to admire little within his own tradition other than cherry

blossoms and Mt. Fuji – but the leading Neo-Confucians all had robust interests in

Japanese history and Japan’s heritage of kami worship. The interest in Japanese

history was important because if the Conf ucian principles were truly universal, then

one would expect to find them dem onstrated in Japanese history no less than in

Chinese. Japane se Confucian historians eventually took this argument of parity a step

further by arguing, as Yamaga Soko

and then others did, that Japan’ s past better

represented core Confucian virtues like filial piety and loyalty than did China’s. The

interest in kami worship and native spirituality generally stemmed from the assump-

tion that if Confucian and Neo-Confuc ian principles are true, and if kami are likewise

real, then these principles and these deities cannot be in conflict with one another.

Further, these same intellectuals saw their scholarship as representing portions –

perhaps the most important portions but still only portions – of a world of scholar-

ship that included a broad range of subjects, encompassing both things Chinese and

things Japanese. In this sense, seve nteenth-century Sinology and Japanology were

simply compon ents of a larger singular world of gakumon or scholarship, and thus,

the study of Confucianism was able to coexist in an unproblematic manner with such

seemingly remote subjects as the study of Japanese history or even Shinto

theology.

This chang ed in the eighteenth century as certain scholars began to assert the study

of things Japanese as a field of inquiry distinct from Chine se studies and juxtaposed

against it in the marketplace of ideas. This emergence of a new form of Japanese studies

is perhaps best understood as a gradual narrowing of Japanese studies in the broadest

sense – including the study of Japanese literature, history, customs, language, and

religions (particularly Shinto

) – to a more ideological and nativist form of Japanese

studies that sought to articulate the essence of Japanese culture by looking at its earliest

pre-Confucian and pre-Buddhist manifestations in poetry and myth.

This movement came to be known as kokugaku (national learning or national

studies), and like the Confucians, the kokugakusha or nativists were organized by

schools, each of which centered on a single leading teacher. Some kokugakusha

located the genesis of their movement in the writings of the Shingon monk Keichu

(1640–1701) whose commentarial work on the Manyo

shu

, Japan’s oldest extan t

poetry anthology, raised scholarship on the antho logy to a new level. Others traced

their intellectual roots to the efforts of the Shinto

theologian Kada no Azumamaro

(1669–1736) who sought to establish his own academy in Fushimi wherein Japanese

studies were offered as a viable alter native to Chinese studies.

However, it was Kamo no Mabuchi who turned Japanese studies into a philological

quest for the very roots of a freshly posited Japaneseness. Mabuchi was enamored of

poetry, which he believed represented a more transparent expression of what lay within

the individual heart, and whose poetic rhythms he believed replicated the very rhythms

of Heaven and Earth. He believed that within Japan’s most ancient extant verse, one

could find exp ressions and in some cases echoes of a pre-Confucian, pre-Buddhist

arcadia, whose characteristics included august government and a robust polity rooted

in such virtues as directness, straightforwardness, and a masculine vigor, of which all

106 PETER NOSCO

were said to partake equally. This, he argued, was in fact the true ancient Way of Heaven

and Earth, which had been lost in C hina owing to the deleterious effects of first

Confucianism and then Buddhism. These moral and ethical doctrines, Mabuchi

asserted, were originally intended to be a cure for the ills of an earlier age, but instead

the antidote proved to be an ironic toxin, as individuals exposed to these doctrines now

learned immorality along with morality and indulged in personal scheming.

The good news, accor ding to Mabuchi, was that the original arcadia was recover-

able in Japan through the medium of the Manyo

shu

. This was so, he argued, because

people now, as then, possess magokoro, or true hearts, which enable them to live

together successfully and relatively harmoniously without recourse to social, moral, or

ethical instruction of any kind. In this way, despite the fact that magokoro have been

overwhelmed generation after generation by the deleterious effects of Confucian

rationalism and Buddhist moralism, through the verses of the Manyo

shu

the effects

can be reversed, and pers ons in Japan can once again enjoy the same blessings as their

archaic forebears.

Though he only met Kamo no Mabuchi once, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801)

carried on Mabuchi’s teachings and is regarded by many as the greatest of the

nativists. Norinaga sought his aesthetic ideals in the less remote past. His theory of

mono no aware – the sadness or pathos of things in which emoti onal truth supersedes

either literal truth or moral truth – remains perhaps the single most important

heuristic principle in literary analysis of Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji. In this

way, Norinaga decisively overcame the didactic literary criticism that had colored

interpretations of the classic novel for centuries, and he applied the same aesthetic

principle to his analysis of post-Manyo

shu

Japanese verse.

It was his lifelong project to decipher Japan’s oldest extant mytho-history, the

Kojiki (712), which remains Norinaga’s greatest achievement. In his 1771 essay

Naobi no mitama (‘‘The Rectifying Spirit’’) Norinaga used his analysis of the

earliest myths to conclude that Japan’s ancient Way was not the natural Way of

Heaven and Earth, as his mentor Mabuchi had argued, but rather the Way of the

Kami or Shinto

, a Way created neither by humans nor by natural principles but

by the deities themselves. A lifelong Buddhist, Norinaga particularly objected to

Confucianism’s effects on the Japanese heart or mind, but instead of proposing that

these effects be overcome through the medium of ancient texts, Norinaga counseled

reliance on the rectifying properties of native deities. Only then, he maintained, will

one be able to reunite with the deities all around one and to resum e one’s rightful

place in a chain of authority that extends through one’s local lords to the divine

tenno

and ultimately as far as the solar deity and imperial ancestress Amaterasu

herself.

Norinaga also vilified China and Chinese ways, arguing for Japanese ethnic and

cultural superiority largely on religious grounds, and this xenophobic message was

later popularized by Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), who stressed the themes of

purity, fecundity, and superiority as he took his appeal beyond the confines of the

academy and into the streets and countryside. Less philologi cal than Norinaga but

also more spiritual, Atsutane sought verification for his theories in a variety of sources

including even proscribed Christian writings imported from China, laying the

foundation for a robust Japanism that would re-emerge later with unfortunate

consequences.

INTELLECTUAL CHANGE IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 107