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

by Susan L. Burns

Exploring the emergence and evolution of theories of nationhood that continue to be evoked in present-day Japan, Susan L. Burns provides a close examination of the late-eighteenth-century intellectual movement kokugaku, which means "the study of our country.” Departing from earlier studies of kokugaku that focused on intellectuals whose work has been valorized by modern scholars, Burns seeks to recover the multiple ways "Japan" as social and cultural identity began to be imagined before modernity. Central to Burns's analysis is Motoori Norinaga’s Kojikiden , arguably the most important intellectual work of Japan's early modern period. Burns situates the Kojikiden as one in a series of attempts to analyze and interpret the mythohistories dating from the early eighth century, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Norinaga saw these texts as keys to an original, authentic, and idyllic Japan that existed before being tainted by "flawed" foreign influences, notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Hailed in the nineteenth century as the begetter of a new national consciousness, Norinaga's Kojikiden was later condemned by some as a source of Japan's twentieth-century descent into militarism, war, and defeat. Burns looks in depth at three kokugaku writers—Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe—who contested Norinaga's interpretations and produced competing readings of the mythohistories that offered new theories of community as the basis for Japanese social and cultural identity. Though relegated to the footnotes by a later generation of scholars, these writers were quite influential in their day, and by recovering their arguments, Burns reveals kokugaku as a complex debate—involving history, language, and subjectivity—with repercussions extending well into the modern era.

Genres: Japan, History, Japanese History, Nonfiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2003

About the author

Her work focuses on Japan's long nineteenth century, the period from the late Tokugawa period to the end of Meiji. Her first book, Before the Nation, examines the Kokugaku discourse of the late Tokugawa period and explored how "Japan" was constituted as a form of cultural and social identity by nativist scholars. Her second project, still in progress, explores the medical culture of the nineteenth century and analyzes the impact of the rise of "Western medicine" and "public health" upon conceptions of the body and subjecthood. Recently, She have turned to explore the intersection of medical and legal discourse in the formation of modern conceptions of gender. In a series of conference papers, Burns have taken up issues such as abortion, sexual violence, and the formation of "family law."

Publications

Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Guest editor, special issue on "Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Context of Modernity." US-Japan Women’s Journal 24 (Winter 2003).

"Making Illness Identity: Writing 'Leprosy Literature' in Modern Japan." Japan Review 16 (2003)

"From 'Leper Villages' to Leprosariums: Public Health, Medicine, and the Culture of Exclusion in Modern Japan." In Isolation: Polices and Practices of Exclusion. Edited by Alison Bashford and Carolyn Strange. London: Routledge, 2003.

"The Body as Text: Confucianism, Reproduction, and Gender in Early Modern Japan." In Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Edited by Benjamin Elman, Herman Ooms, and John Duncan. Los Angeles: UCLA Asia Pacific Monograph Series, 2002.

"Constructing the National Body: Public Health and the Nation in Meiji Japan." In Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities. Edited by Timothy Brook and André Schmid, 17–50. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

"Bodies and Borders: Syphilis, Prostitution, and the Nation in Nineteenth Century Japan." U.S.-Japan Women's Journal 15 (December 1998): 3-30.

"Contemplating Places: The Hospital as Modern Experience in Meiji Japan." In New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan. Edited by Helen Hardacre and Adam L. Kern, 702-718. Leiden: E. J. Brill Publishers, 1997.

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's difficult to actually give a rating to Burns' book as it skillfully accomplishes what it set out to do, yet my expectations from the premise were left unfulfilled. En bréf, the author maps out an intellectual history, tracing debates amongst Tokugawa Era nativists and the divergent methods they used in their readings of mytho-histories. This is important, as most English-language scholarship on kokugaku has generally focused on Motoori Norinaga and a handful of his peers and students. This has created a homogeneous interpretation on an early-culturalist movement that, as Burns demonstrates, was actually quite diverse.

The first two chapters establish the setting, briefly outlining late-Tokugawa Era culture and politics and introducing Confucianist and Buddhist interpretations of the Japanese classics. Burns then shifts to Norinaga, who believed that the Kojiki contained the key to understanding native Japanese language before the introduction of Chinese influence (Confucianism, writing, etc.). He believed that uncovering the "original language" could lead to a recovery of the nation outside of foreign influence, and a resurgence of what he termed mono no aware. Meanwhile, Tachibana Moribe believed that outside influence could be a supplement to a Japanese cosmology, the kokutai ( concept appropriated in the Meiji Era as a nationalist force), in which the Emperor acts as an intermediary between the gods and the people. Fujitani Mitsue that the language in the classics reveal something he called tōgo, the act of disguising true intentions and feelings through metaphor, allegory, etc. He believed that this use of language could create empathy and thus form community. Finally, Ueda Akinari theorized that all the classics were written by human mediators, abandoning the notion of recreating an original sense of "Japaneseness" in favor of understanding how humans can work as historical actors through readings of these early texts.

All of these scholars were essentially committed to understanding the political chaos of their time and attempting to find a way to establish stability in late-Tokugawa Japan. Through different means, they all believed that the emperor played a pivotal role in the "re-establishment" of community and the creation of a common culture. As such, the final chapter is dedicated to a wide variety of views, interpretations of kokugaku in the Meiji Era and beyond. How have these works, and the "culturalism" the espoused, been interpreted in the creation of nationalism in Japan? Burns analyzes the modern reassessments of nativism, concluding that there is a gap between the cultural community preached in the Tokugawa Era and the national community constructed in the Meiji Era.

The answers I desired from this book begin to unravel in the final chapter, where we can truly see the effects of nativist studies on the public and in policy. However, this wasn't enough for me. As intellectual history, this might be one of the most illustrative and comprehensive texts on kokugaku available, that challenges longstanding views on the academic movement's homogeneity. However, I was expecting this intellectual history to be more intertwined with social and political history, so now I'm stuck with many lingering questions. How did kokugaku influence policies in the Tokugawa Era? It's quite evident from this book that these scholars did not attempt to rock the boat and overthrow the contemporary government, we are never given any examples of policy change. More importantly, what was the impact of these theories on the general public? In the large goal of creating (or re-creating) a community, we're never introduced to the effects these theories had on the population and their dialogical relationship to the government (see Katsuya Hirano's The Politics of the Dialogic Imagination for an excellent look into socio-political relations in Tokugawa Japan). We can clearly see the influence of kokugaku during the Meiji Era, as many other studies have previously set out to demonstrate, but can we qualitatively analyze their contemporaneous impact? While I'm glad that such an interesting reading into this simplified intellectual movement exists, I'm still left with a number of aporias that I hope future (or past?) studies can solve.