Tsuwano: Where Modern Shinto Was Built

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.

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.

Last time, I noted that no sooner had the Meiji government taken power than it enacted a policy of expelling Buddhism, and that behind its prime mover, Tomomi Iwakura, stood Misao Tamamatsu. That Tamamatsu was himself a disciple of Takamasa Okuni (1793–1871)—a kokugaku scholar and Shinto priest who stood out as the most brilliant of all Hirata's disciples.

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.