Kokugaku

The claim

The oldest Japanese writings record a way of feeling that Confucian and Buddhist moralising has buried. Recovering the language recovers the sensibility.

What it held

Kokugaku begins as philology and becomes something much larger. Motoori Norinaga spent thirty-five years on the Kojiki, Japan's oldest text, written in a script and language nobody could any longer read properly, and produced a commentary that made it legible again.

What he found, or claimed to find, was a sensibility without moral system. His term is mono no aware — the pathos of things, a susceptibility to how affecting the world is, which he located in the Tale of Genji and argued was the point of literature. Against the Confucian reading of the Genji as a moral warning, Norinaga said it teaches nothing and is about feeling deeply, which is enough.

He also attacked Chinese thought — karagokoro, the Chinese heart — as an overlay of clever reasoning on something more direct, and argued that the compulsion to justify everything rationally was itself the foreign import.

The political consequences were not what a philologist would have predicted. Kokugaku's elevation of the native and the imperial fed directly into the Meiji Restoration and, later, into state ideology — which is part of why the movement is difficult to assess without arguing about what came after.

How it argued

Philology of extraordinary patience, applied to texts whose language had become unreadable, combined with literary criticism.

What it was arguing against

Confucian and Buddhist commentary, and the assumption that a text must yield a moral lesson.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether recovering an original sensibility is possible or whether Norinaga constructed one. How much responsibility the movement bears for later nationalism.

Common misconceptions

That it is simply proto-nationalism. The philological work is of high quality and the aesthetic theory is a real contribution, whatever was later done with the political rhetoric.

How it began

Tokugawa peace, a growing publishing industry, and a generation of scholars with the leisure to spend decades on a single text.

What became of it

Ended as a movement with the Restoration it helped cause, its energies absorbed into state Shinto and national ideology.

Lasting influence

The Meiji Restoration. Japanese literary criticism, where mono no aware remains a central term. The modern study of classical Japanese is founded on its philology.

Why it still matters

The claim that literature's business is feeling rather than instruction is a real aesthetic position, argued against a strong opposing tradition.

Put another way

Scraping a painting to find what was under the varnish, and arguing about whether what emerges was ever there.

Where to start

The essays on mono no aware. The Kojiki-den is a lifetime's work in both senses.

The surprising bit

Norinaga was a practising physician who did his scholarship in the evenings for thirty-five years, and the Kojiki-den runs to forty-four volumes.

In their own words

Connections

Opposed by

Cheng-Zhu School, Confucianism (classical)

Influenced

Mito School

The verdict

Superb philology, a genuine aesthetics, and political consequences its author could not have foreseen.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy