Poetry, Sake, and Acrimony. Arakida Hisaoyu and the Kokugaku Movement

R 5 ESEARCH into National Learning or Nativism (Kokugaku 1@), both in Japan and the West, has almost exclusively treated this movement as a school of intellectual thought and approached it from the viewpoint of intellectual history (shisoshi B>1gk. Kokugaku is credited, most typically, with the formulation of new theories about Japanese literature, history, and culture. It is regarded further as an important source of the new nationalism that contributed to the fall of the Tokugawa bakufu and, beyond that, to the development of a Shinto-based state ideology in the course of the Meiji period. This positioning of Kokugaku in Japanese history has led to a strong emphasis on the ideas of Motoori Norinaga Z)9'RA (1730-1801) and Hirata Atsutane -T1BX)L (1776-1843) concerning and the sanctity of the Japanese state-an emphasis most clearly expressed in the term Shinto Revival, used to characterize Kokugaku in Sources of Japanese Tradition.1 It is not the intention of this article to take issue with studies into these aspects of the Kokugaku movement, which rightly stress its importance as an influential intellectual tradition. This article is inspired by another sentence in the account of Kokugaku in Sources of Japanese Tradition, which brings up the subject of poetry writing in this school: The creative participation of people in [the Kokugaku] movement won it far more wholehearted acceptance than volumes of doctrine and history would have.2 This brief remark opens up vistas of a Kokugaku scene inhabited not just, or even primarily, by the ideologues and intellectuals whose works have been the customary focus of

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Movement (music · Poetry · Japanese History and Culture

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• Kokugaku vs. Nativism

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