Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 450, give me that old-time religion.

When it comes to the intellectual history of Japan, I personally find one of the more

interesting areas of consideration to be Kokugaku, often translated as national studies,

or given a more political twist, nativism.

This is a school of thought originating in the Edo period, though as we'll see the impulses

behind it are far older, that began simply as a study of linguistics and philology, but

which eventually morphed into a political and arguably religious movement,

which had a massive impact on the political evolution of Japan.

We've talked a bit about some famous nativists in the past.

One of the old episodes in the back catalog, for example, is on the famous Motori Norinaga.

That's episode 58.

But we haven't spent much time on arguably the most important of all the nativists,

Hirata Aztane, who is chiefly responsible for taking nativism out of the rarefied circles of intellectual studies and making it into an actual political force.

So this week we're going to spend some time unpacking the history of what you might call the Hirata School of Nativism,

both because it's interesting in its own right and because, in a bit of dramatic foreshadowing, it nicely sets up the biography I plan to record next week. What could it be, I wonder? Enjoy the suspense.

So first, we should probably define what nativism even is, and that's kind of tricky to do,

because it's one of those intellectual movements that is somewhat loose in its cohesion,

and defined less by a series of rigid principles, and more by a series of broadly shared concerns.

Broadly defined, Kokugaku, the two characters together, means something like national learning,

is best understood in relation to its opposite, the study of things outside of the nation,

which in the context of pre-modern Japan

usually means China.

...