Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (review)

In Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan, Susan Burns sets out to do three things. First, she gives us a new interpretation of the kokugaku movement, one that eschews the conventional focus on the Four Great Men—Kamo no Mabuchi, Kada no Azumamaro, Motoori Norinaga, and Hirata Atsutane. Second, she reads kokugaku texts in a conspicuously intertextual way. Third, she reexamines the relationship of kokugaku and modern Japanese nationalism and asks how much modern articulations of Japan owe to early modern conceptions. Although each of these tasks could have been the subject of an entire book, Burns attempts to do all three, for reasons that become clear by the end of this book.

The central thesis of her book is that a new national consciousness of Japan emerged out of the dramatic changes that took place during the Tokugawa period. Echoing Tetsuo Najita, one of her mentors, Burns sees these changes as causing a crisis that challenged "the social and political order authorized by means of the ideology of virtue" (p. 34), a Confucian ideology. The kokugaku writers that she discusses responded to this crisis with the "alternate conceptions of community" articulated in their commentaries on the Divine Age narrative in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki (p. 34). Here she invokes theorist Miroslav Hroch's notion that "national consciousness" arises in the context of dramatic change. Although Burns does a good job of documenting the many changes that occurred midway through the Tokugawa period, she does not show exactly how these various changes in turn engendered changes in national consciousness. One wishes she had followed the lead of Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, and the practitioners of the new cultural history; looked more closely at the relationship between dramatic institutional changes and intellectual ferment; and shown precisely what indicated that "one 'imaginary' was beginning to fail and another was taking form" or that "Japan" came to be constituted as the primary mode of community (p. 3). In any case, this is not Burns's chief concern. Instead, she is most interested in the "new vocabulary" (p. 223) and "epistemological strategies" (p. 220) that appeared in the writings of certain kokugaku thinkers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and comprised what she terms a new kokugaku discourse. Hers is a study of discursive change and its political implications.

Burns begins with a catalogue of the different seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century readings of the mythohistories in the Manyōshū, Kojiki, and Nihon shoki. She starts with the widely divergent interpretations of Suika Shintō, Watarai Nobuyoshi, and Fujiwara Isei; she then turns to the historicistic interpretations of the Mito historians and Arai Hakuseki; and she closes with a masterful exploration of the linguistic studies of the kokugaku pioneers Keichū, Kada no Azumamaro, Kamō no Mabuchi, Tayasu Munetake, and Tanigawa Kotosuga. This inventory of pre-Motoori Norinaga readings of the Divine Age narratives of the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki is impressive. Burns has read and understood these difficult texts and identifies the discursive paradigms informing each text. She also is sensitive to the broader seventeenth-century context in which these readings were produced, noting, for example, Keichū's obvious debt to the revisionist Confucian Itō Jinsai. All this, especially the new interest in the "ancient language" of China and Japan, comprises the intellectual context, she argues, for the new kokugaku discourse.

Burns then turns to Motoori Norinaga. She reviews his key ideas, and her selection is telling. First, Norinaga made the "ancient language" of Japan (Yamato kotoba), which he found in the Kojiki, the basis for a new vision of Japanese community. Second, he used Yamato kotoba to distinguish China and Japan, identifying the former with the transcendental ethical norms of Neo-Confucianism and the "public realm" and the latter with an original Japanese identity and a...