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I N T R O D U C T I O N A New Medium for an Old Message The (Dis) Enchanting New Medium and the Importance of Senkyò ibun The Japanese religious academician Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) has been the subject of hundreds of scholarly studies undertaken by Japanese intellectuals of varying types beginning not long after his death and continuing into the twenty-first century. Atsutane’s prodigious output of written text and transcribed lectures still leaves room for, in fact begs for, new discoveries and fresh analyses in this new century of scholarship on Japanese religion. Western scholars of the last century, most notably Donald Keene and Carmen Blacker,1 have confirmed Atsutane’s importance to the Western academy by their recognition and inclusion of his idiosyncratic writings and interests in their own academic publications. Yet within the virtual forest of writings Atsutane left us, there are still too many “shady” areas in need of illumination. These “shady” areas, in my opinion, call for an attempt to cast light on topics ignored in the previous century of Atsutane scholarship. In the early nineteenth century this nativist2 scholar proposed a vision for a new Japan, a vision inherited and refined from his intellectual inspiration , Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), recognized then and now as the greatest of all nativist scholars. In this vision, Japan was second to none in all things and owed nothing except its shortcomings to the influence of foreign cultures. Atsutane writes: All the world’s peoples refer to Japan as the Land of the Kami. In addition, they say that we are all noble descendants of the kami, and in fact, they are not wrong. Our noble country was born from kami, uniquely blessed by the Kami of Heaven.3 There is a world of difference between Japan and all other countries; in fact, there is no comparison. Japan is surpassingly blessed and clearly is the Land of the Kami. Even the humblest man and woman in Japan is an actual descendant of the kami. Given this certain 2 Introduction truth, I find it extremely regrettable that there are so many Japanese people who do not recognize the fundamental fact that this is the Land of the Kami, and that they are the descendants of the kami.4 In Atsutane’s mind, the reason so many Japanese people did not recognize this “fundamental fact” was that the proponents of Indian, Chinese, and Western cultures stood in the way of their realization of this elemental truth. He saw the common Japanese as guilty of championing these foreign cultures—in their guises of Buddhism, Chinese studies,5 and Dutch studies—in ways that flatly contradicted Atsutane’s nativist vision. Furthermore , unlike Atsutane’s nativist teachings, these other discourses were supported by the traditional and authoritative weight of great masses of historical, religious, and scientific text. Atsutane himself begrudgingly validated these non-nativist sources in his own lectures and writings by often quoting the Ming Buddhist canon, the Confucian and Neo-Confucian classics , and Western religious and scientific texts. Atsutane was frustrated by this dependence on the very discourses he despised, and he knew that his alternative vision could not be credibly supported by the same methods used by his competitors, so he embarked on a lifelong project of discrediting, subverting, and even co-opting those “foreign ” writings, claiming some of them to be of Japanese origin. But in the middle of his career he developed a new strategy. Fate and his own cunning delivered a new medium into his hands, an affirmative way to create a new counterdiscourse that supported his new vision of Japan. Atsutane himself chronicled the appearance of that new, carefully premeditated strategy and its implementation in his often misunderstood work Senkyò ibun, which Carmen Blacker translated in the 1960s as “Strange Tidings from the Realm of Immortals.” Atsutane wrote Senkyò ibun in 1822. It is a voluminous work centered upon his interviews with the so-called tengu6 Kozò Torakichi. Deeply interested in supernatural7 experiences, Atsutane was captivated by Torakichi’s claim that supernatural experiences were part of his everyday life for several years of his early youth. In Senkyò ibun, Atsutane records approximately eight months of interaction with the Tengu Boy, who was to live in his house for the following several years. Senkyò ibun has not been considered the most important or definitive work in Hirata Atsutane’s impressive corpus of writings. That distinction most often goes to The August Pillar of...

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