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Native Studies

Native Studies (kokugaku) turned the Confucians’ philology on Japan’s own oldest texts, the Kojiki and the poems of the Man’yōshū, to recover what Japan had been before the Chinese learning came. Its teachers included Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) and Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801).

Mabuchi set the old Japan against the imported theories: “Ancient Japan was governed well in accordance with the spirit of heaven and earth, and there was none of this petty sophistry; but then suddenly when these convincing theories were imported from China …” (Kokui kō). His way back was to recite the oldest verses aloud, so that one’s “language and heart (kokoro) are transported back to the ancient past”.

Norinaga drew the conclusion for the very idea of a Way. In Naobi no mitama (1771) he writes that in the great age of antiquity no one lifted up words about a “Way” at all. Michi is only the road one takes to go somewhere, and “to call the principles of things and every teaching ‘this Way’ or ‘that Way’ is the custom of foreign countries”. What stands in the way is the Chinese heart (karagokoro): “to take one’s own clever heart for one’s heart is the Chinese heart passed over to us”. Against it he set, in Kuzubana, the true heart (magokoro), “that heart with which one is born by virtue of the Musubi (creating) kami” (tr. Fujiwara).

The method follows. “Purify away the soiled Chinese-book heart, and with the clear heart of the august land study the ancient texts well; then you will know of yourself that there is no Way to be received and practised, and to know that is to receive and practise the Way of the kami.” Argument itself is under suspicion: of his own pages Norinaga says that “even to argue this far is not in the spirit of the Way”.

The same text calls the Chinese sages “only thieves who succeeded” and makes following the emperor’s heart the Way. Native Studies later became a resource for State Shinto.