Kokugaku

Abstract: Late Tokugawa society and the crisis of community -- Before the Kojikiden: the divine age narrative in Tokugawa Japan -- Motoori Norinaga: discovering Japan -- Ueda Akinari: history and community -- Fujitani Mitsue: the poetics off community -- Tachibana Moribe: cosmology and community -- National literature, intellectual history, and the new Kokugaku -- Imagined Japan(s).

Abstract: 1. Introduction. 2. Persistent Themes In Japanese Religious History. Part One: THE FORMATION OF JAPANESE RELIGION. 3. The Prehistoric Heritage. 4. Early Shinto. 5. Early Japanese Buddhism: Indian Influence with Chinese Coloration. 6. Confucianism and Taoism: Chinese Importations. 7. Folk Religion: Religiosity Outside Organized Religion. 8. Interaction in the Formation of Japanese Religion. Part Two: THE DEVELOPMENT AND ELABORATION OF JAPANESE RELIGION. 9. The Development of a Japanese Buddhism: Shingon and Tendai. 10. Elaboration Within Japanese Buddhism: Pure Land, Nichiren, and Zen Buddhism. 11. The Development of Medieval Shinto. 12. The Appearance of Christianity in Japan. 13. The Five Traditions: Development and Mutual Influence. Part Three: FORMALISM AND RENEWAL IN JAPANESE RELIGION. 14. Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, and Restoration Shinto in the Tokugawa Period. 15. The Meiji Restoration and Nationalistic Shinto. 16. Religious Currents from 1868 to 1945. 17. Two New Religions: Tenrikyo and Soka Gakkai. 18. Religion in Postwar Japan. 19. Religious Life in Contemporary Japan. 20. Conclusion: The Challenge for Japanese Religion.

Abstract: Those specializing in fields other than Japanese studies may be familiar with "nativism" (kokugaku, sometimes translated as "national learning") in some of its twentieth-century vestiges. In this densely reasoned and intricately argued work, H. D. Harootunian has undertaken to interrogate the nativist discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dissecting it with the tools of poststructuralist literary analysis. He explicitly abjures conventional methodologies, especially "historical common sense." In fact, the author warns away readers expecting a conventional historical narrative of nativism's development or a comprehensive account of its contents. Those idlers hoping to profit from a casual skimming of the text are disabused early on when the author casts scorn upon the "tyranny of lucidity" (6). These caveats aside, Harootunian is carefully precise about what he does intend as well as what he does not. He aims to supply a "reading" of nativist texts in order "to define the space that kokugaku occupied as a discourse in the historical field of late-Tokugawa Japan." Here the focus is on nativist concern with language and speech. The author's objective is also to "examine how the nativist discourse functioned ideologically" (3). He is concerned with ideology less as doctrine than as a semi-autonomous practice or production that generated social identity or group consciousness through a sense of lived experience among individuals (4). This aspect of nativism comes through most clearly when the discourse moves from urban schools to rural villages in the I83os. Nativism was ultimately unsuccessful in establishing a hegemonic ideology of imperial restoration after the i868 Meiji Restoration was an accomplished fact. When it confronted the demands of early Meiji politicians, nativism's history of implicit criticism of the hierarchical, bureaucratic Tokugawa state revealed kokugaku as essentially antithetical to the centralizing drive of the new regime. While it would be wrong to describe nativism as a failed tradi47I

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