Reflections on the Meaning of Our Country: Kamo no Mabuchi’s Kokuikō

In 1765, when Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) wrote Kokuikō (Reflections on the Meaning of Our Country), he was already an accomplished scholar of the Japanese classics, having produced commentaries on such texts as the Man’yōshū , Kokinshū , and Ise monogatari as well as linguistic studies of ancient Japanese. He was also a prominent poet, famous for reviving the composition of poetry in the style of the Man’yōshū. From 1746 to 1760 he had served as the assistant in Japanese studies (wagaku goyō ) to Tayasu Munetake (1715–1771), son of the shogun Yoshimune (1684–1751, r. 1716–1745), and after retiring from this position, he continued to have an active career, teaching at his private academy in Edo and producing a range of scholarly works until his death in 1769. Although his works primarily took the form of commentaries or lexicons, he laid out his ideas in a more systematic form in his prefaces and in a number of stand-alone discursive essays.¹ Kokuikō is the most ambitious of these essays, presenting a utopian vision of ancient Japan as a society governed in accordance with nature, which was then corrupted by the introduction of foreign philosophies, especially Confucianism.

Mabuchi’s construction of Japanese cultural identity through reference to an idealized past, as well as his framing of this identity in terms of the difference between Japan and China, and between Japan’s native values and Confucianism, are approaches commonly associated with Kokugaku . One reading of Kokuikō would thus be to see it as a salvo in the contest between Kokugaku and Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan.² Such an interpretation, however, raises as many questions as it answers. For one, Confucianism encompasses a wide variety of philosophical perspectives. In criticizing “Confucianism,” Mabuchi necessarily also assigned it a particular shape as an object of discourse. To stress Mabuchi’s role as a critic of Confucianism is implicitly to lend credence to his formulation of this issue. But that formulation hardly went uncontested. And one might even argue that Mabuchi himself still worked within an essentially Confucian worldview, given that, among other things, he envisioned ancient Japan as a hierarchical, well-governed society in which such virtues as humaneness (ren , Jp. jin) and rightness (yi , Jp. gi) existed naturally.³

To take Kokuikō as representative of Kokugaku ideology is likewise not as simple a proposition as it may appear. The term “Kokugaku” itself has carried a range of meanings, both in Tokugawa writings and modern scholarship, and has been associated with various Tokugawa figures who in some way attempted to recover Japanese literary, linguistic, religious, or political traditions through the study of past texts. Even considering just the figures who today are most commonly recognized as Kokugaku scholars, such as those affiliated with the schools of Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), and Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), we can see many differences in their activities and ideas. Recent studies, such as Susan Burns’s Before the Nation and Mark McNally’s Proving the Way, have emphasized the diversity and conflict within Kokugaku,⁴ and in a review article on these two books, Mark Teeuwen calls attention to a key aspect of this diversity: “[W]e need,” he writes, “to lay aside our own orthodoxy about Kokugaku: that Kokugaku is nativism, and that nativism is Kokugaku.” Departing from the common practice of using “nativism” simply as a translation for “Kokugaku,” he instead defines nativism as “the ambition to revive or perpetuate aspects of indigenous culture in response to a perceived threat from other cultures,”⁵ and points out that such a stance is neither present within all Kokugaku, nor absent outside it.⁶

The distinction Teeuwen seeks to draw between nativism and Kokugaku is useful for interpreting Kokuikō: the ideas Mabuchi expresses in this piece fit within Teeuwen’s definition of nativism, but not all of those who are usually counted as Kokugaku scholars agreed with those ideas. Among the most notable critics of Kokuikō were, in fact, Mabuchi’s Edo-ha (Edo school) disciples, who did not see their poetic...