Reflections on the Meaning of Our Country

Abstract

IN 1765, when Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) wrote Kokuiko (Reflections on the Meaning of Our Country), he was already an accomplished scholar of the Japanese classics, having produced commentaries on such texts as the Man’yoshu , Kokinshu , and Ise monogatari as well as linguistic studies of ancient Japanese. He was also a prominent poet, famous for reviving the composition of poetry in the style of the Man’yoshu. From 1746 to 1760 he had served as the assistant in Japanese studies (wagaku goyo ) to Tayasu Munetake (1715–1771), son of the shogun Yoshimune (1684–1751, r. 1716–1745), and after retiring from this position, he continued to have an active career, teaching at his private academy in Edo and producing a range of scholarly works until his death in 1769. Although his works primarily took the form of commentaries or lexicons, he laid out his ideas in a more systematic form in his prefaces and in a number of stand-alone discursive essays.1 Kokuiko is the most ambitious of these essays, presenting a utopian vision of ancient Japan as a society governed in accordance with nature, which was then corrupted by the introduction of foreign philosophies, especially Confucianism. Mabuchi’s construction of Japanese cultural identity through reference to an idealized past, as well as his framing of this identity in terms of the difference between Japan and China, and between Japan’s native values and Confucianism, are approaches commonly associated with Kokugaku . One reading of Kokuiko would thus be to see it as a salvo in the contest between Kokugaku and Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan.2 Such an interpretation, however, raises as