When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane’s Ethnography of the Other World (review)

Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), the fourth of kokugaku’s “great men,” is best known for having popularized nativist studies and scholarship, which heretofore had exhibited a strongly philological character. Atsutane’s nativist scholarship was markedly less accomplished than that of his forebears, especially the celebrated Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), but Atsutane’s influence was arguably greater, for he had hundreds more students by the time of his death and eventually enjoyed the endorsement of both of Japan’s major Shintō establishments, the Yoshida and the Shirakawa. More than any other school including Norinaga’s, Hirata Shintō formed the basis for the State Shintō of the early Meiji period as well as the essentialist Shintō of the influential folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953).

Atsutane’s popularity was accompanied by—some would say was rooted in—a distasteful xenophobia, which made him if not exactly a taboo topic in the aftermath of the Pacific War, then certainly an understudied one. An article by Donald Keene in 1954, another by Carmen Blacker in 1969, and a 1967 Ph.D. dissertation by Walter Odronic (translating Atsutane’s Kodō taii) represent the major English-language studies of Atsutane during the first 40 postwar years, until this relative historiographical silence was broken by Harry Harootunian’s Things Seen and Unseen in 1988. Now some two decades later, we are in the middle of a “Hirata boom” in which Wilburn Hansen’s 2008 volume under review joins Mark McNally’s 2005 Proving the Way as recent book-length monographic studies of Hirata Atsutane and his school.¹

It is common to read Hirata Atsutane as a seminal figure on the road to the Meiji Restoration and the emperor-centered nationalism of the early twentieth century, but Hansen resists this teleology in his admirable attempt to situate Atsutane as much as possible within the context of his own times and to engage Atsutane’s project on its own terms. This is easier said than done, since aspects of Atsutane’s life and oeuvre, like his xenophobia, have traditionally made it difficult for his chroniclers and virtually cry out for value judgments.

Such is the case for both the topic of Wilburn Hansen’s study and Hansen’s study itself. Atsutane moved to Edo in 1795 as a young man of 19, and by 1803 he began claiming the posthumous mantle of Motoori Norinaga’s nativism, asserting that Norinaga, who had died two years earlier, gave his endorsement in a dream. This benediction notwithstanding, in a flurry of writings completed 1810–13, Atsutane moved quickly to establish his independence from Norinaga and especially from the latter’s philology and literary criticism. Whether his reasons were borne of necessity or preference, this shift took Japanese nativism in a new direction.

Simply put, unlike the fundamentalist Norinaga who insisted that the Kojiki be the definitive source on all spiritual matters as well as on Japan’s earliest history, Atsutane sought verification for his theories regarding the supernatural, Japan’s ancient past, and Japan’s present place in the world wherever he could find it: in the Chinese-language writings of European Catholics such as Matteo Ricci, in Rangaku (Dutch) learning and especially Western medical studies, in classical Daoist writings like Huai nan zi, and even in the use of human informants. For example, in his Katsugorō saisei kibun completed in 1832, Atsutane recorded his interview with Katsugorō, who claimed to have visited the underworld before being reborn. A native Shintō understanding of the afterlife was of great interest to Atsutane who sought to mitigate Motoori Norinaga’s harsh eschatology, which following the Kojiki consigned all souls to the gloomy Hades-like underworld called Yomi. Similarly, a decade earlier in 1822 Atsutane wrote Senkyō ibun, which chronicles his relationship with another informant named Torakichi. This latter work forms the lens through which Wilburn Hansen views Hirata Atsutane’s life, thought, and times in the study under review...