Kokugaku

History

What later became known as the kokugaku tradition began in the 17th and 18th centuries as kogaku ("ancient studies"), wagaku ("Japanese studies") or inishie manabi ("antiquity studies"), a term favored by Motoori Norinaga and his school. Drawing heavily from Shinto and Japan's ancient literature, the school looked back to a golden age of culture and society. They drew upon ancient Japanese poetry, predating the rise of medieval Japan's feudal orders in the mid-twelfth century, and other cultural achievements to show the emotion of Japan. One famous emotion appealed to by the kokugakusha is 'mono no aware'.

Kada no Azumamaro (1669–1736), a Shinto priest at Fushimi Inari Shrine, is traditionally credited as the movement's founder, a status the scholar Ōkuni Takamasa later formalized by naming him first among the "four great men of kokugaku" (kokugaku yondaijin), alongside Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane. This attribution rests chiefly on the Sō gakkō kei, a petition calling for the Tokugawa shogunate to establish a school of national studies; the document only came to light in 1798, some sixty years after Azumamaro's death, and its authorship remains disputed: some scholars attribute it instead to his student Yamana Reien, and suggest its original aim may have been wagaku (the study of purely Japanese subjects) rather than kokugaku in its later, more ideologically charged sense.

The word kokugaku, coined to distinguish this school from kangaku ("Chinese studies"), was popularized by Hirata Atsutane in the 19th century. It has been translated as 'Native Studies' and represented a response to Sinocentric Neo-Confucian theories. Kokugaku scholars criticized the repressive moralizing of Confucian thinkers, and tried to re-establish Japanese culture before the influx of foreign modes of thought and behaviour.

Eventually, the thinking of kokugaku scholars influenced the sonnō jōi philosophy and movement. It was this philosophy, amongst other things, that led to the eventual collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868 and the subsequent Meiji Restoration.