Concrete Suffocated the Kunitsukami｜From Keichu to Atsutane Hirata's Restoration

Wherever human life has been nurtured, something always comes to dwell. The story begins with the hunting and gathering grounds of the Jomon people, the villages the Yayoi people formed on land suited to dry-field farming, and the villages the Kofun people formed on land suited to wet-rice cultivation, and it runs through the Asuka period, when tribes merged into composite groups, into the age of capitals built under the ritsuryo codes of law.

As the capital moved from Fujiwara-kyo to Heijo-kyo, then to Nagaoka-kyo and Heian-kyo, the building of capitals was sublimated through repeated fusion and departure, and something lay at the base of it all. There remains, even now, something undivided and fused together that can never be fully explained. That substratum left the Kinai region around the old capitals and flowed into the Kanto, and in time it flowed into the design of each of the major cities of the Meiji era. Alongside it lie the countless ways of life nurtured within the archipelago, from the tides, ocean currents, and seasonal winds that governed the lives of the seafaring peoples, to the gods who return again and again like migratory birds, and the oni, the demons who come down from the mountains.

Now we have surely lost that something, and we writhe as if suffocating. What was there, and what suffocated it? However much the state tightens its rule, however heavy the pressure of society grows, however many laws and regulations are added, there is something at the root that goes unspoken. Like raindrops falling on a pond in the rainy season, it is a state of stillness with no center, in which everything is the very center of each passing moment. This is exactly the configuration in which the kunitsukami are enshrined.

Human activity in all its plurality, different in every place, has been held down beneath the earth by something, and so has culture, the air that rises from its accumulation. I see what that something is in concrete.

If concrete, an artificial stone, is understood as something born to triumph over nature and conquer it, then it was inevitable that the Japanese who lived in the age before concrete and the Japanese who came after would differ in every respect. The calls for “restoration” raised today from every angle, in culture, custom, region, faith, and nature, may share a single underlying concern. Could they be, at heart, a psychological revolt against a daily life that has been filled in and covered over with concrete?

What comes to mind now is Restoration Shinto, or Fukko Shinto, which arose at the end of the Edo period. In the end, it too was born from a wellspring dug up from beneath layers of faith that foreign influence had buried, and the man who dug it up was Atsutane Hirata, more a charismatic religious figure than a scholar of Kokugaku, the school of National Learning.

What the Kokugaku scholars set out to do was redefine Japan. They saw it as a country that for more than a thousand years had been covered by membranes, of Buddhism, born in India and arriving by way of China, and of Taoism and Confucianism, born in China, and they sought the true Japan that lay beneath, where those membranes were cut away. Their brilliance lay in seeing that in the thin skin between “the underground (Japan)” and “the surface (the foreign),” a transformation of language had taken place.

Considering that Keichu (1640–1701), the founder of Kokugaku, was a priest of the Shingon school that descends from Kukai, it makes sense that the movement began with setting language right. Shingon, “true word,” is the translation of the Sanskrit mantra, a term for the “true words” of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Kukai clarified the words of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and tied them to a practice in which, by voicing them as prayers and incantations, one’s heart becomes one with the Buddha.

Because this teaching lay at the foundation of Shingon, Keichu, as if inheriting its spirit, fixed his gaze on language. He resolved to restore the language of the Heian period, in which the school’s founder Kukai had lived, and having put kana spelling in order on the basis of texts from that time, he published his principal work, Waji Shoransho, the first book to use the name gojuon-zu for the table of the fifty sounds. He also joined a project of the Mito domain then being promoted by its lord, Mitsukuni Tokugawa, and over some fifteen years he completed a commentary on the Manyoshu. This became the cornerstone of Kokugaku.

Still, he remained a Buddhist monk to the end. In time, the spirit at the foundation of Kokugaku flowed to Kada no Azumamaro, a priest of what is now Fushimi Inari Taisha, and an age began in which it was ground and polished from the standpoint of Shinto.

From then on, the Kokugaku scholars studied the Manyoshu exhaustively because they sought to grasp the gods who become manifest when one’s own heart resonates with the world carried in each word of the Manyo age. Once they came to believe that, in this state of resonance, there lay the pure Japan of old, untainted by foreign doctrine, Kokugaku rose into a great current that answered the demands of its time.

In today’s terms, it was the first intellectual current to begin facing the question of what Japan is, as something that is neither China nor Korea. From here, an archaeology of thought began, and through the Manyoshu it was bound into a practical discipline of self-cultivation, pursued thoroughly as Kogo, Koi, and Kodo, the ancient words, the ancient heart, and the ancient Way.

Kogo means reading the words of the Manyoshu and the Kojiki accurately. Rather than interpreting the meanings recorded in the texts, it begins by turning one’s attention to the moment a word appears, and it is a tense labor of grasping that moment not with the head but with body and mind. Koi means reliving, through the sounds and expressions of the ancient language one has thus made one’s own, the honest and rich feeling of Japan before it was dyed by Confucianism and Buddhism. The Mono no Aware of Norinaga Motoori, his sensitivity to the poignancy of things, is the emblematic sensibility of this state. Kodo, the culmination, is the practice of reaching, once Kogo and Koi have been mastered, the myths, the way of governing centered on the emperor, and the teachings of the gods.

The transformation took nearly two centuries, but as they kept searching for a state that would open the way between “the underground (Japan)” and “the surface (the foreign),” “restoration” was at last proclaimed with the arrival of Atsutane Hirata. In other words, restoration is not something that can be loudly declared today or tomorrow, without any struggle of thought or trial and error in practice. It is a state that comes into view only at the end of a search into that thin skin carried out at the cost of one’s life. The path runs along a sheer cliff, and one false step sends you plunging into the abyss. The scholars of that time surely lived with this tension.

Atsutane Hirata’s Restoration Shinto is a world in which “Shinto” itself does not exist. Atsutane started from a sense of unease with the “Shinto that was not Shinto” that had been spoken of as Shinto until then, and he was irritated that people went on talking about the object in a place where the object itself did not exist. This unease can be applied today to every sphere of life. The true worth of Restoration Shinto thus lies in its creative power, which gave birth to Shinto anew, and not in any reflection of something nurtured in Japan since ancient times. What gave birth to it, one could say, was the age itself.

When we cut through that skin and reach what is to be restored, what is it that we will see? Ours is an age in which tradition and restoration are cried out at every turn, without any of that inner struggle. The emptiness and self-interest I hear in those cries seem to me to reflect nothing but the fate of a fallen nation and people.

Even when it does not take the form of words, our bodies and minds take on the pain of nature, translate it, and give it out each day as words. To understand that language, to make it one’s own, and to translate it is not easy, because it is an unknown language born of untold years, of tension, and of one failure after another.

What lies at its root cannot be defined on the surface as mere destruction of nature, and it does not come into view unless we dive down into the problem of the heart. When we look with eyes that carry that awareness, we come face to face with something. If what is enshrined there is the kunitsukami, then what will be asked of us is how to take on their will and carry it into the world.

On January 3, 2026, a country’s political order was destroyed overnight by the designs of an empire, and in the chaos that followed, the Venezuela earthquake struck. Media around the world have called it the greatest natural disaster in Venezuelan history, but the death toll climbed to a historic high because people were crushed beneath collapsed masses of concrete, and that is the result of an empire’s designs, which destroyed all order.

The scenes from the Venezuela earthquake look to me like a déjà vu of Japan’s future. Places are destroyed and filled with concrete one after another, and politics is tied directly to the general contractors. If an earthquake strikes directly beneath the Tokyo metropolitan area, or the Nankai Trough earthquake arrives, in the midst of all this, the damage will go far beyond Venezuela’s. Just as the burned-out ruins left by the air raids allowed Japan to be reborn, this time the collapse of concrete may become the key to Japan’s rebirth.

What kind of nation will we envision building then? I cannot help feeling that what is asked of the Japanese living now is to turn our eyes once more to the gods, to recover prayer, and, from within that prayer, to think through to the end how our homeland might be created anew after its collapse.