Tsuwano Kokugaku as a Source of Modern Shinto｜Koremi Kamei, Takamasa Okuni, and Kumaomi Oka

There is a place where the groundwork of “Shinto,” as it began to take real shape in the upheavals of the late Edo period and the first years of Meiji, was decisively laid. It is the Tsuwano Domain in Shimane. Tsuwano rarely stands out in the history of the late Edo and Meiji periods, yet it was the home of Amane Nishi, who brought philosophy into Japan, and of the writer Ogai Mori, and it quietly produced great figures who came to embody the Meiji era.

Among them, Tsuwano produced a man who became the wellspring of a great structural turning point that leads to the Shinto of today. He was Takamasa Okuni, born in the fourth year of Kansei (1793) and dead in 1871, just after the Meiji Restoration.

Okuni was a disciple of Atsutane Hirata, the scholar of Kokugaku, or National Learning, who held charismatic sway in those days, and he also studied widely in Confucianism, painting, and Rangaku, the Dutch learning. What he pursued most thoroughly, though, was the phonology of the Kokugaku scholar Norinaga Motoori, which he learned from Norinaga’s disciple Harukado Murata.

Having studied broadly in the disciplines that defined his age, Okuni finally resolved to pursue a learning of his own. While writing, he left his domain and traveled from place to place, redefining the heart of Kokugaku as “Hongaku,” the learning of the origin. He was the unsung figure who did more than anyone to transplant it into the modern system.

The other key figure was Kumaomi Oka. He too trained in Kokugaku as a disciple of Harukado Murata, and in 1849 he became the first teacher of Kokugaku at the Yorokan, the domain school of Tsuwano. Until then, Tsuwano, like every other domain, had taught at its school the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi favored by the shogunate, but now it switched the whole learning of the domain over to Kokugaku at a stroke. The man who led this change was the domain’s own leader, its lord. He was Koremi Kamei, who would become the last lord of Tsuwano.

Kamei’s achievements as a lord are immeasurable. The domain spared no expense on learning and raised one gifted young man after another. His greatest aim was the promotion of Kokugaku, and it was Kumaomi Oka whom he appointed to carry it out. In other words, as if to announce the opening of the 1850s on the eve of the end of the Edo period, the lord Kamei and the Kokugaku scholar Oka joined forces and formed the source of what would later be called Tsuwano Kokugaku. The man who later raised this foundation to a higher level was Takamasa Okuni.

It was a crucial period in which the current of Tsuwano Kokugaku was taking shape, but Kumaomi Oka died on September 1, 1851. Two weeks later, Kamei restored Okuni to the domain. Okuni had talent for learning but had left the domain because he was not understood at the time, and by bringing him back Kamei made sure that the samurai of Tsuwano would not lose their place of learning.

The one who benefited from Kamei’s restoring Okuni and keeping the relationship alive was Bisei Fukuba. Kamei ordered the young Fukuba, who was devoted to his studies in Tsuwano, to go in 1853 to Kyoto, where Okuni was teaching. During his years in Kyoto, while an ominous mood gripped the old capital, Fukuba passed from Kokugaku thought into the creed of sonno joi, “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians.” With his resolve settled, he returned to the domain in 1857 and began teaching at the Yorokan.

Then came the turmoil at the end of the Edo period, and here the location of Tsuwano decided the course of the transition from Edo to Meiji. Although Tsuwano lies in Shimane, it is in fact very close to Yamaguchi. What lay closest of all was the Choshu Domain.

Bordering Choshu, which might be called the protagonist of the end of the Edo period, Tsuwano was buffeted by the shogunate’s punitive expeditions against Choshu, yet it played an important role in keeping relations with Choshu intact somehow, thanks to the skill of its lord Kamei. Perhaps because of this debt, in 1868, when the Choshu faction secured its supremacy, Kamei was appointed a councilor of the new government. Valued as the champion of Tsuwano Kokugaku and for having produced the outstanding scholars described above, he was then chosen for posts such as judge of the Office of Divinities.

This body was the parent organization of the Meiji government’s policies of uniting rites and government and of making Shinto the state religion, and it was in effect an administrative agency for religion. Those who did the most to lay its early foundations were the men of Tsuwano, with Kamei at their head. The thought of Tsuwano, one might say, was built into the very beginning of modern Shinto.

Yet as I looked down on the castle town from the ruins of Tsuwano Castle on its mountain, I found myself wondering. “Why did thought that cried out for ‘Japan’ arise in a small mountain district and not in the capital?”

As the Meiji order was established, the influence of Tsuwano Kokugaku faded away, but it remains a fact that it formed one of the sources of the later State Shinto. Even so, the power that this small domain enclosed by mountains once held is hard to imagine now.

The history of Japan, however, has in every age begun not in the capital but in small places. A new era begins with a small step, though also a great one, in an unexpected place that everyone has overlooked. Standing in the wind of this place, I cannot help feeling that the first voice of the next great turning point, too, will rise not in cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto but in some small, inconspicuous region.