Proving the Way: Conflict and Practice in the History of Japanese Nativism (review)

In fall 2004, the National Museum of Japanese History held a large exhibition on the Meiji Restoration and Hirata kokugaku. On display were portraits, maps, divination utensils, eyeglasses, swords, clothing, and documents used and/or produced by Hirata Atsutane and his disciples. It was my good fortune to join a tour of the exhibition led by its curator, Miyachi Masato. He argued then and in the exhibition catalogue that Atsutane's intellectual trajectory cannot be understood without taking into account his obsession with the foreign threat posed by Russia that motivated his research into Japan's national character and history.¹ Atsutane studied Rus-sian; he collected documents and maps detailing the Russian encroachment on Sakhalin and Hokkaido. Miyachi's insistence on this point can been seen as congruent with the current trend by historians working in Japan to emphasize a more outward-looking international orientation for people living during the Edo period than has heretofore been acknowledged.

Mark McNally has a different frame of reference. He attacks previous scholarship on intellectual history epitomized by H. D. Harootunian for being too discourse oriented, for ignoring changes in discourse, and for focusing simply on the history of ideas without taking the social, political, and institutional context into account.² Instead of basing his theoretical framework on Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, McNally prefers the sociological insights of Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins that juxtapose text and context, discourse and social position, ideology and practice. He has ambitious goals: he challenges what he sees as an overemphasis on continuity between Atsutane and his eighteenth-century predecessors, a continuity that he claims was deliberately constructed by Atsutane to legitimize his school, and he provides a broad history of the nativist movement through its demise in the late nineteenth century and its resurrection in the folk ethnology of Yanagita Kunio and Orikuchi Shinobu. His aims are to establish Atsutane's "true position within Kokugaku history" (p. 11), to "revitalize Tokugawa intellectual history" (p. xiv), and to undermine the cultural chauvinism we know today as Nihonjinron by exposing its historically contingent roots in political infighting and individual self-aggrandizement.

McNally grounds his intellectual history in conflict between schools and competition for intellectual prominence. His argument that ideas take shape in a climate of rivalry and dissension makes this a good book for people interested in the ins and outs of scholarly debate and how this debate gets reflected in, and is a reflection of, institutional affiliation. Although Motoori Norinaga gracefully acknowledged Kamo no Mabuchi's work on Man'yōshū poetics, his own scholarship was scarcely in the same universe. Mabuchi's disciples in what is known as the Edo-ha allowed themselves to be so seduced by the scintillating literary sphere populated by Santō Kyōden and his friends that they renounced scholarship for versification at the same time arrogating for themselves the decision on whose scholarship counted and whose did not. Among those whom they rejected was Atsutane. Norinaga spawned a network of schools stretching from Kyoto to Edo whose leaders nursed personal and intellectual grudges.

By making adroit use of notions regarding the importance of regularized scholarly transmission, Atsutane managed to create a nativist genealogy that, according to McNally, has deceived all subsequent intellectual historians. Among the unexpected pleasures of this book is a discussion of the difference between the iemoto-based school structure that constructs descent lineages from father to (adopted) son and the dōtō structure drawn from Song Confucianism and Zen Buddhism that allows disciples to intuit the mind and teachings of a dead master. Based on a text that Kada no Azumamaro may not have written, Atsutane claimed that Azumamaro initiated the pronouncement that Japan's indigenous way (kokugaku) was equal to that of China (Confucianism) or India (Buddhism). Alone of his disciples, Mabuchi inherited Azumamaro's spirit if not his school. Norinaga likewise inherited...