Atutane Hirata 2
Harootunian and Nosco, respectively.10 Social interactions that
create conflict, however, do beget ideas.
In order for intellectuals and scholars to assert their differences
face to face, they must have the regular opportunity to meet.
Collins demonstrates that throughout the world and throughout
history scholars and intellectuals have congregated as groups
around shared ideas. In any given field of intellectual endeavor,
they have formed only a few of these groups;11 members of a par-
ticular group have been aware of the other members of the group,
as well as the existence of the other groups in the field. Finally,
every intellectual field has had its favorites, those who upheld or-
thodoxy, and its dissidents,12 those who challenged it. Collins’s ob-
servations about intellectuals across time and culture are especially
apropos in the study of Atsutane and the historical development of
Kokugaku.
Atsutane’s prominence in Japanese intellectual history is not
only the result of nationalist appropriations during the 1930s and
1940s. His scholarship was popular during his lifetime, and his
academy boasted an enrollment of students from throughout Japan.
Thus, his ascendancy was closely linked to confrontations with his
opponents both within and outside the group of students of Moto-
ori Norinaga, which I call the Norinaga School. Both his scholar-
ship and his behavior toward these opponents reflect these ten-
sions. The process by which Atsutane subdued his intellectual foes
cannot, however, be fully explained by exclusive reference to ei-
ther the contents of his scholarship (a text-centered approach) or
the extant data on his life (a context-centered approach).13 To
simply declare his inheritance of the Kokugaku tradition (which he
did) did not necessarily guarantee that all members of that tradi-
tion would accept it. At the same time, an analysis of Atsutane’s
14. Roger Chartier, historian of French cultural history, uses the categories of
“discursive production” and the “objective social positions and properties external
to discourse” within which practice takes place (On the Edge of the Cliff, p. 20).
15. Uchino, Shinkokugakuron no tenkai, p. 91.
practice, such as the alliances he formed both with the Yoshida
house of Shinto ritualists in Kyoto and with rural elites, must be
contextualized. While biographical details can be one useful con-
textualization of practice, his intellectual production, interpreted as
fundamentally ideological in nature, provides the most compelling
framework. Practice cannot be understood without ideology, and
ideology is only comprehensible when analyzed with practice.14 In
this study, I will analyze Atsutane’s ascendancy by relating it to
the homologous relationship between his ideology and practice.
This study will foreground the fierce resistance to Atsutane during
his lifetime as evidence of his objective social and intellectual mar-
ginality within the Norinaga School.
Many of Atsutane’s contemporaries resisted his scholarship and
membership within the Norinaga School because of their inher-
ently opposing views of nativism. The scholar Uchino Gor. con-
ceptualizes these different views as a “narrow definition” and a
“broad definition” of Kokugaku.15 The former, brandished as or-
thodox by Atsutane’s students during the bakumatsu period, em-
phasized scholarship on the ancient Way (kod.). The latter, which
emphasized literature and literary analysis, is the more accurate
view of Kokugaku history, he argues. Uchino locates Atsutane and
Norinaga, perhaps the most famous of all Kokugaku scholars
(kokugakusha), in the lineage of the ancient Way, while placing
Kamo no Mabuchi (1697.1769) and his students in the lineage of
classical literary studies. The main source of tensions between Atsu-
tane and his critics within the Norinaga School was his loose ap-
proach to classical literature, as well as shortcomings in his textual
methodology. Uchino, however, emphasizes the tensions between
Atsutane and his contemporaries in the Edo-ha (Edo Faction),
most of whom were scholars within Mabuchi’s lineage. Despite
Uchino’s groundbreaking research, he has told only part of the
story. Textualism and classical literature were also central to the
scholarship of Norinaga and his students. Atsutane’s negative atti-
tude toward these subjects was irritating for them as well. Both
Atsutane’s attitude toward literature and his eschatological inter-
ests were recurrent themes in criticisms made against him by
scholars among Norinaga’s students.
Missing from Uchino’s history of Kokugaku is an analysis of
Atsutane’s position within the Norinaga School, which he for-
mally joined in 1805. The rules for inclusion within the School
were never outlined as such by Norinaga or his disciples. Thus,
Atsutane’s first challenge was to establish his credentials as a mem-
ber while probing the limits of these unarticulated rules. This chal-
lenge was made difficult because of the School’s emphasis on phi-
lology. At the ideological level, he justified his membership within
the Norinaga School by attempting to define its orthodoxy. In-
stead of classical literature and philology, he advocated eschatology
as the School’s intellectual priority. At a practical level, he bor-
rowed discursive elements of succession and legitimation from
other cultural institutions in order to support his assertions. In the
process, he gave the Norinaga School an institutional identity that
it did not have prior to his ascendancy. No longer was it merely
one group of nativists active during the late Tokugawa period;
Atsutane believed that the members of the Norinaga School prac-
ticed the only legitimate form of scholarship. He transformed the
Norinaga School into Kokugaku.
Atsutane reoriented his own scholarship away from classical
texts, breaking from the leading figures of both the Norinaga
School and the Edo-ha. He maintained an avid interest in eschatol-
ogy, even before joining the Norinaga School. He first attempted
to ground his views of the afterlife in the Shinto classics, with very
little success. Instead, he tried to maintain the Norinaga School’s
emphasis on evidentialism without referring to the classics. At the
same time, he took advantage of Norinaga’s assertions that the es-
sence of the ancient Way was not exclusively literary; the ancient
Way for Norinaga was much broader than that. In Atsutane’s
estimation, the ancient Way was indeed not found exclusively in
literary sources as Norinaga had argued; instead, the Way as prac-
ticed by the ancients was about living in accordance with knowl-
edge of the afterlife. His conceptualization of the ancient Way, as
well as his non-textualist methodology, were vehemently rejected
by many, if not most, of his colleagues in the Norinaga School.
This aspect of Atsutane’s scholarship faded into obscurity after his
death, proving to be unpopular with many of his successors as well.
Yet, at the same time, it was instrumental in making his scholar-
ship distinctive enough for him to claim leadership within the
Norinaga School and, eventually, Kokugaku itself. Thus, modern
researchers have not analyzed his true position within Kokugaku
history. One of the goals of this study is to analyze Atsutane’s
scholarship within the context of the social conditions of its pro-
duction and to assess its impact on the history of nativism.
Outline of the Chapters
In Chapter 2, I conceptualize the relationship between two con-
temporaneous groups of nativists during the early nineteenth cen-
tury: the Edo-ha and the Norinaga School. I argue that these two
schools held divergent views and assumptions regarding nativism,
despite superficial similarities. The members of the Norinaga
School grew more aware of the distinctive nature of their scholar-
ship vis-a-vis their rivals in Edo, which led to its dominance over
the Edo-ha outside Edo, due in part to the latter’s looser institu-
tional structure and ambivalence toward ideological matters.
In Chapters 3 through 6, I chart the trajectory of Atsutane’s as-
cendancy within the Norinaga School. In Chapter 3, I explain his
relationships to both the Norinaga School and the Edo-ha. I ac-
count for the apparent paradox of Atsutane’s membership in the
Nochi-Suzunoya in Matsusaka, an affiliate academy of the Nori-
naga School, despite his being a resident of Edo and living in close
proximity to many of the leading scholars of the Edo-ha. Their in-
difference to the idea of an exclusively native approach to Japanese
antiquity was a reflection of their preoccupation with the study of
poetry, an obsession that many of the members of the Norinaga
School did not share. It is for this reason that Atsutane became a
member of the Norinaga School and was not an active participant
in the Edo-ha.
Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Atsutane’s career in the Norinaga
School. In Chapter 4, the focus of attention is the formulation of
16. Bourdieu, Rules of Art, p. 193.
his distinctive scholarship against the backdrop of a debate within
the Norinaga School over an astronomical text. Atsutane used this
debate as an opportunity to advance his eschatological interests
against the primacy of classical literature. His participation in the
controversy factionalized the Norinaga School and created an in-
tellectual position within it that was the polar opposite of its lead-
ers. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that the crea-
tion of opposing poles is a necessary first step in the formation of
an autonomous field of cultural production.16 This is an important
insight, as the aftermath was perhaps the most significant devel-
opment for the institutional identity of Kokugaku.
Chapter 5 illustrates Atsutane’s attempts to wrest control of the
Norinaga School away from the advocates of classicism. He made
claims of legitimacy, and eventually succession, against the ener-
getic objections of these rivals. He gave even more shape to what
later became Kokugaku by constructing the first orthodox lineage
or d.t. for Kokugaku. In the context of Atsutane’s creation of the
Kokugaku d.t., I focus on the two reputed founders of Kokugaku,
Keich. (1640.1701) and Kada no Azumamaro (1669.1736). My ar-
gument is that these scholars were, contrary to the standard view,
ideologically unremarkable for the history of Kokugaku. In other
words, the two scholars were assigned an ideological agenda.the
discourse of Kokugaku.that they never actually espoused. Kamo
no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga were also prominent in Atsu-
tane’s lineage. I situate these two scholars within an intellectual mi-
lieu of increasing dissatisfaction with the hegemony of Song (Neo-)
Confucianism. The intellectual contributions of these scholars to
nativism, therefore, cannot be understood without reference to cri-
tiques of Song Confucian thought.
Having secured for himself a leading position within the Nori-
naga School, Atsutane nearly abandoned philology in favor of in-
vestigations of the afterlife and the supernatural. This is the topic
covered in Chapter 6. This shift had two important elements. First,
he attempted, by using informants as sources of empirical data, to
be no less evidential in these paranormal investigations than his
colleagues were in their use of philology. Second, since urban
commoners and especially peasants were eager to share their stories,
he began to emphasize their personal experiences over the endeav-
ors of scholars. His esteem for rural society had a significant corol-
lary effect as well. Many peasants were enthusiastic about his work,
and Atsutane was eager to recruit them into his academy. They
were a crucial part of his desire to become a professional scholar so
that he could abandon his medical practice. His rural supporters
were essential to the logistical and financial support of his academy,
since he was never able to attain the official employment that he
sought.
In Chapter 7, I discuss how Atsutane’s invention of Kokugaku
survived into the early Meiji period. Despite selective changes in
his message, informed by the ideological concerns of later genera-
tions, scholars even today accept to some degree his idea of Koku-
gaku as standard. Unfortunately for contemporary researchers,
Atsutane’s ideological triumph, the projection of intellectual and
spiritual coherence onto the past, is a legacy that has obscured the
historical development of Kokugaku.
..
The first priority of this study is to restore the historicity that has
been suppressed and eventually forgotten since the middle of the
nineteenth century. Ultimately such a restoration can undermine
the intellectual and epistemological basis for Japanese cultural
chauvinism, and all such cultural chauvinisms, by conceptualizing
the history of Kokugaku as a competition of conflicting discourses
advanced by specific scholars. In the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury, this discursive plurality was suppressed for particular socio-
political reasons, but this suppression was not the result of a con-
scious design as such. Atsutane did not plan the invention of
Kokugaku. Instead, it was the culmination of a process in which
Atsutane responded to his rivals. Consequently, Kokugaku, as the
intellectual basis for Japanese cultural chauvinism, was more the
result of his political savvy, his “feel for the game,” than a desire to
formulate a new intellectual tradition. As a discursive irruption in
the nineteenth century, Kokugaku was an accident of history and
not the realization of a spiritual destiny.
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