Abstract
It has become commonplace to think of Kokugaku (Tokugawa-era nativism) as unremittingly hostile toward Confucianism and Chinese culture, but this obscures several important factors: first, for most of Japanese history, the study of China and the study of things Japanese coexisted comfortably and to mutual advantage; second, even during the years of greatest polarization between the two, nativist thought ironically owed much to Confucian perspectives on the primordially distant past, its attributes, and how to resurrect its best qualities in the present; and third, the two discourses converge again after the 1820s in a manner that places them at the center of the new ideology.
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Notes
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Kamōsho can also be regarded as a spirited defense of Norinaga’s Naobi no mitama, which had itself been attacked by the Sorai-school Confucianist Ichikawa Tazumaro (1740–1795).
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Nosco, P. (2014). Kokugaku Critiques of Confucianism and Chinese Culture. In: Huang, Cc., Tucker, J. (eds) Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2921-8_9
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