Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

Fujitani Mitsue

493 Fujitani Mitsue 富士谷御杖 (1768–1823) Fujitani Mitsue, or Narimoto as he was also known, was born into a prominent family of intellectuals in Kyoto. His father, Fujitani Nariakira was an erudite and imaginative scholar who authored several works analyzing Japanese poetic language in the light of new grammatical categories of his own device. His uncle, Minagawa Kien, was a well-known Confucian scholar who also had a strong interest in linguistic theory. The Fujitani family served as hereditary retainers of the Yanagawa domain, a position that provided them with a comfortable living. As a youth, Mitsue was schooled in the most important cultural practices of his day, studying the orthodox tradition of wakaž composition, Confucianism, and haikai poetry. In his late teens, through the study of the Kojikiž and Nihon shokiž, he came under the influence of an intellectual movement that was to become Native Studies or Kokugaku. Mitsue’s interest in classical texts brought him to the writings of Motoori Norinaga *, whom he would later describe as one who “illuminated the ancient age of our country and grasped the meaning of the ancient words.” This admiration notwithstanding, Mitsue was critical of the assumptions that underlay Norinaga’s groundbreaking exegesis of the Kojiki. He faulted Norinaga for regarding the Kojiki as a record of actual events, for his understanding of how language had functioned in the ancient period, and for his insistence that the readers of this work must adopt a position of unquestioning belief towards everything contained in it. In the selections below from the opening chapter of his own work, Illuminating the Kojiki, Mitsue outlines his understanding of the Kojiki by critically referencing Norinaga’s work. Central to his discussion is the concept of źkotodamaŻ as it appears in ancient poetry. Mitsue used kotodama to refer to the special ability of figurative language and poetry to make communication possible between complex individuals, who had to contend with their own desires and the social constraints accompanying all interpersonal encounters. In the ancient period, Mitsue insisted, the communicative power of kotodama was known to all, and figurative language and poetry were used routinely to ease all kinds of social relationships, most notably that between ruler and subject. He attributed the disorder and tensions of his own time to the loss of this crucial cultural knowledge. Illuminating the Kojiki was never completed, but the extant sections of the work reveal Mitsue’s attempt to read the Kojiki in light of his conception of kotodama by moving from the surface narrative to the “real” meaning expressed through a complex web of metaphors. Mitsue deployed the same strategy in his writings on other early Japanese works of poetry and prose, including the źMan’yōshūŻ and the One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets. Mitsue died at age fifty-six, disgraced and impoverished, having been dismissed from service to the Yanagawa domain. His works were largely ignored in the modern 494 | s h i n t o a n d nat i v e s t u d i e s period until the 1980s when, as a result of the “cultural turn,” there was renewed interest in his theories on language and subjectivity. È See also pages 1178–9. [slb] Illuminating the kojik i Fujitani Mitsue 1808, 37–43, 46 Among those who have heretofore examined the divine texts, there is no one who did not think that they tell of the origins of the imperial court. Since… these scholars did not yet think in terms of źkotodamaŻ, they were indignant that our great land has nothing like the sutras, and so they made additions and embellishments using the texts of Confucianism and Buddhism. Although they made a show of deciphering the texts based upon some forced logic, their theories were arbitrary, with no basis in fact. Some were like the sutras; others, like histories—and there were things that could be trusted and things that could not. For this reason, in each generation the divine texts competed with Confucianism and Buddhism, and so people, based upon their personal view, said, “those passages are significant, while this is trivial.” Because the divine texts did not seem to have any worth as an ethical teaching, they were overwhelmed by the teachings of Confucianism and Buddhism. However, Motoori Norinaga* of Matsusaka in Ise Province recently realized that the Kojiki is superior to the Nihon shoki, and he discussed the mistakes of that Prince.13 Indeed, when one reads his discussion, it is clear that, as...