Kokugaku: An Archaeology of the Japanese Heart

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.

Rather than turning to the scriptures of Buddhism or Confucianism, the Kokugaku scholars set out on a thoroughgoing struggle to explore "the Japanese heart," and they found the truth in the Manyoshu and the Kojiki. The work that followed over some two centuries, reading the Kojiki by way of the Manyoshu, became a great achievement that truly deserves to be called "an archaeology of the Japanese heart."

Behind his work lay the climate of the Edo period, where, under the direction of the Tokugawa shoguns, education spread beyond the warrior elite to the common people, fostering a rising respect for rational textual critique rather than closed, authoritative master-disciple lineages. Keichu was a priest of the Shingon sect, proficient in the study of Sanskrit characters and equipped with the phonetic knowledge required to chant dharanis accurately in esoteric Buddhism—a tradition originating with Kukai (774–835), whom I touched upon in my last piece. Keichu's esoteric Buddhist training and his quest to understand ancient Japanese fused in an extraordinary way, culminating in the groundbreaking systematization of the fifty-sound chart, which mapped the sounds of kana across the two axes of vowels and consonants.

Keichu remarked of Japanese speech that "though it lies on the eastern frontier, its sounds are the purest and most elegant, holding their own alongside those of China and India." Above all, he insisted that "the words of our country harbor a mysterious spiritual power." This is what has come to be known as kotodama (言霊)—the spiritual power of words. Indeed, the rise of kotodama is inseparable from the growth of kokugaku.

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.

Mabuchi had already set himself against Buddhism, which held great influence in Japan before the Edo period, and Confucianism, which held great influence in the Edo period, and conceptualized these foreign values as "karagokoro," the Chinese mind. Karagokoro comprehensively names the thought and philosophy of China that deeply influenced Japan through history. The idea is that beyond removing its influence lies the true Japanese spirit. Mabuchi and Norinaga took karagokoro to be "a mold of thinking that rationalizes things and tries to judge right and wrong." For my part, I take setting this mold aside for a time to be the way to come near the words of antiquity. Mabuchi did not simply reject karagokoro; he made a point of studying in detail how it had influenced the Japanese spirit. It was Norinaga who, setting karagokoro aside for the time being, pushed straight on to the source of the Japanese spirit. At that time Confucianism held overwhelming influence, and the revolt against karagokoro was a spirit shared by only a few scholars of kokugaku.

As this will for the future began to form in Japan, the aged Mabuchi, who had laid the foundation of kokugaku, and the young Norinaga, who would become its most important figure, finally met, in 1763. It was the night of May 25, 1763. Kamo no Mabuchi (67), traveling in the Kansai area to visit Ise Shrine and for other purposes, was staying at an inn in Matsusaka. The young Motoori Norinaga (34) heard of it and suddenly came to call. Norinaga, who had long admired Mabuchi, learned that he was staying in his hometown and went to the inn on nerve alone, to show his own will for kokugaku. It was an important event. And in fact it was the only time the two ever met in their lives.

Remarkably, Norinaga began serious study of the Kojiki around 1764 and spent 35 years on it. He gave his whole life to the work of deciphering it. In 1798 he completed the great work in 44 volumes, the Kojiki-den, and changed history.

They were written more than a thousand years ago, but the ground that allowed them to be widely read was laid not so very long ago. In the Edo period, Norinaga Motoori, the scholar of Kokugaku, spent more than thirty years working his way through the Kojiki, and in 1798 he finished the manuscript of his Kojiki-den. Only when all forty-four volumes were published, from around 1822 after his death, was the foundation in place for the Kojiki to be widely read.

For the thousand years before the Kojiki-den appeared, the Nihon Shoki more or less had the stage to itself. The Kojiki was scarcely ever mentioned, and it ranked low among the books that learned people cared about. And yet it survived for a thousand years. That fact is where the fascination of the Kojiki lies hidden.

Norinaga's Kojiki-den set off a structural turning point, after which the Kojiki came to be valued above the Nihon Shoki. His successor Atsutane Hirata then reinterpreted his master's work from a spiritual standpoint and opened a door that connected it to religious movements. Coinciding with the unsettled times of the late Edo period, this set off an explosion of religious movements, in region after region, that took the Kojiki as their foundation.

Yet many movements also denied Razan's Zhu Xi reading, and the reading changed with each Confucian school. Kokugaku read wa differently as well. It thought of wa as an action and working that existed before it was conceptualized under Chinese influence, and called this yamatogokoro (大和心), "the Japanese heart." Wa was set neither as a Confucian principle of order nor as a Buddhist one, but as a natural, emotional resonance with the climate (fudo) and the gods of the archipelago. The Kokugaku scholars wrote it 大和心, and Norinaga Motoori set it in opposition to karagokoro. In Hirata's day, the next, yamatogokoro began to turn gradually into the wa of the modern theory of the state.

Examining the thought of kokugaku scholars reveals that its driving core was a fierce critique of the Japanese Confucianists of the Edo period, who sought to construct theories using the brain. Kokugaku is commonly described as an attempt to excavate and unfold the essential Japanese nature that existed before Confucianism and Buddhism entered the country; analyze their critique, however, and one finds at its root an instinctive revulsion against an overreliance on the brain.