Peter Nosco

A Christian Samurai: The Trials of Baba Bunkō by William J. Farge (review)

there were practically no Christians left in Japan by the 1660s. . . . Deprived of priests, cut off from the sources of their faith, their memories of its doctrines fading even as the Tokugawa era progressed, the “cryptoChristians” (kakure Kirishitan) of these isolated groups imperceptibly drifted from Catholicism into a syncretic folk creed tinctured with Buddhism and Shinto, the native Japanese religion. And yet the machinery of surveillance did not rest. . . . a fruitless search for Christians where none was to be found.

Kokugaku Critiques of Confucianism and Chinese Culture

It has become commonplace to think of Kokugaku (Tokugawa-era nativism) as unremittingly hostile toward Confucianism and Chinese culture, but this obscures several important factors: first, for most of Japanese history, the study of China and the study of things Japanese coexisted comfortably and to mutual advantage; second, even during the years of greatest polarization between the two, nativist thought ironically owed much to Confucian perspectives on the primordially distant past, its attributes, and how to resurrect its best qualities in the present; and third, the two discourses converge again after the 1820s in a manner that places them at the center of the new ideology.

When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane's Ethnography of the Other World (review)

Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), the fourth of kokugaku’s “great men,” is best known for having popularized nativist studies and scholarship, which heretofore had exhibited a strongly philological character. Atsutane’s nativist scholarship was markedly less accomplished than that of his forebears, especially the celebrated Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), but Atsutane’s infl uence was arguably greater, for he had hundreds more students by the time of his death and eventually enjoyed the endorsement of both of Japan’s major Shintō establishments, the Yoshida and the Shirakawa. More than any other school including Norinaga’s, Hirata Shintō formed the basis for the State Shintō of the early Meiji period as well as the essentialist Shintō of the infl uential folklorist Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953). Atsutane’s popularity was accompanied by—some would say was rooted in—a distasteful xenophobia, which made him if not exactly a taboo topic in the aftermath of the Pacifi c War, then certainly an understudied one. An article by Donald Keene in 1954, another by Carmen Blacker in 1969, and a 1967 Ph.D. dissertation by Walter Odronic (translating Atsutane’s Kodō taii) represent the major English-language studies of Atsutane during the fi rst 40 postwar years, until this relative historiographical silence was broken by Harry Harootunian’s Things Seen and Unseen in 1988. Now some two decades later, we are in the middle of a “Hirata boom” in which Wilburn Hansen’s 2008 volume under review joins Mark McNally’s 2005 Proving the Way as recent book-length monographic studies of Hirata Atsutane and his school. It is common to read Hirata Atsutane as a seminal fi gure on the road to the Meiji Restoration and the emperor-centered nationalism of the early twentieth century, but Hansen resists this teleology in his admirable attempt to situate Atsutane as much as possible within the context of his own times and to engage Atsutane’s project on its own terms. This is easier said than