Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021. xi, 277 pp. (Map, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-5393-0.
The intellectual movement known as kokugaku (translated variously as “nativism,” “national learning,” “Japan studies,” etc.), which emerged in Japan in the late eighteenth century, has attracted considerable scholarly attention from anglophone scholars in the last three last decades, and within this literature, the work of Hirata Atsutane has been particularly well studied, reflecting his rise to prominence in the turbulent mid-nineteenth century, the period that saw the “opening” of Japan to Western contact and the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868. Two works are particularly noteworthy. In Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse in Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (University of Chicago Press, 1988), Harry Harootunian argued that Atsutane and his successors interpreted the eighth century mytho-histories in a manner that gave new meaning to agricultural work and the spiritual beliefs of rural cultivators. Ten years later, Anne Walthall published The Weak Body of a Useless Women: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration (University of Chicago Press, 1998) in which she explored the appeal of Hirata’s nativism for a middle-aged woman from a prosperous farming family who was drawn into pro-imperial activism. Other recent works that explore the Hirata “school” include those by Mark McNally, Wilburn Hansen, and Michael Wachutka.
Gideon Fujiwara’s From Country to Nation builds on the work of Harootunian and Walthall and deepens our understanding of the social and cultural influence of Hirata’s brand of nativism at the local level by exploring in depth the formation and scholarship of a small group of posthumous Hirata followers. It focuses on a group of commoners in Tsugaru (also known as Hirosaki domain) in far northern Honshū, an area on the periphery of early modern Japan. At the centre of Fujiwara’s work are the leaders of the group, Hirao Rosen and Tsuruya Ariyo. Although born of merchant-class families, both men turned to artistic and scholarly pursuits. Hirao supported himself as an artist, but he was also, in Fujiwara’s words, an “ethnographer,” and he created compelling illustrations to record local customs, both of his home domain and of Ezo (now Hokkaidō), to which he traveled in 1855, not long after the port city of Hakodate was opened to Western and Chinese ships. Tsuruya, in contrast, was primarily a poet who composed both waka and haikai.
The book is organized into eight short chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the Hirosaki domain and Hirao and Tsuruya. Chapter 2 describes Hirao’s trip to Ezo, and Fujiwara argues that his encounter with foreign “others,” including the indigenous Ainu people of the island, sparked a growing awareness of the cultural specificity of both Tsugaru and Japan. Chapter 3 provides an overview of Hirata Atsutane’s life, work, and the growth of his network of disciples before and after his death.
These introductory chapters set the stage for chapter 4, which explores Tsuruya’s involvement with the Hirata School, which by this time was headed by Atsutane’s adopted son, Kanetane. Fujiwara suggests that it was his interest in poetry that brought Tsuruya to kokugaku and that initially he was not particularly well-informed about Atsutane’s work. However, formal registration with Hirata’s academy allowed Truruya access to both print and manuscript materials authored by Atsutane, and this led to his “intellectual and spiritual ‘rebirth,’” which was newly centred on the worship of ancestors and deities (including the recently deified Atsutane) (102). Chapter 5 focuses on Hirao Rosen. Fujiwara argues that his encounter with Atsutane’s work was no less productive. Atsutane’s conception of the “hidden world” (kakuriyo)—the unseen space inhabited by ancestral spirits and deities—provided Hirao with a “theoretical framework” for his ethnographic pursuits on both Tsugaru and Japan (122). In the aftermath of his encounter with Hirata’s work, Hirao authored a series of works on mysterious and uncanny events in Tsugaru that he believed proved the existence and power of this invisible realm. Chapter 6 returns to Tsuruya and explores the central role that Mount Iwaki, a sacred mountain located in Tsugaru, played in his poetry and scholarship. Mount Iwaki had long been associated with Buddhism and the syncretic religion known as Shugendō, but Ariyo re-sacralized it by arguing that it was instead populated by indigenous deities or kami, including Ōkuninushi, the deity Atsutane had identified as ruling over the “hidden world.”
The two concluding chapters are more “national” in their focus: chapter 7 examines Tsugaru’s involvement in the Boshin War, the civil conflict of 1868 that ushered in the new government under the emperor, while chapter 8 discusses the aftermath of the overthrow of the shogunate for kokugaku and the Hirata disciples. Although most of the domains of northern Honshū remained loyal to the Tokugawa, Tsugaru’s forces fought on the side of the imperial cause, in part due to the influence of kokugaku in the domain, and at least one Hirata disciple died in the fighting. Chapter 8 covers the post-Restoration fate of the Hirata school: the rapid move of its members into official positions in the new government and their subsequent dismissal and disillusionment as the process of building a modern nation-state got underway. Hirao and Ariyo played no role in these events, nor it seems in the “separation of Shinto and Buddhism” that got underway in Tsugaru at the order of the central government, although other Hirata disciples were involved in the latter. Like their counterparts in the capital, these men too grew frustrated as local forms of worship were supplanted by new (and recently invented) forms of state ritual. Ariyo died in 1871; Hirao, who lived until 1880, found some satisfaction instructing local children in his nativist beliefs.
In his introduction, Fujiwara states that his book has five aims: 1) to document the diversity of kokugaku; 2) to “pinpoint” the dynamics that shaped the intersection of two identities, Tsugaru and Japan; 3) to uncover links between ethnographic studies and kokugaku; 4) to explore the spirituality and religiosity of Hirata kokugaku; and 5) to trace how commoners experienced the transformation from residents of an early modern domain to a modern prefecture. He is, in my estimation, quite successful at fulfilling 1, 3, and 4, and although others have addressed these issues as well (the link between kokugaku and ethnographic studies is well established), his examination of the work of Hirao and Ariyo sheds new light on each of these topics. I am less convinced by his treatment of 2 and 5, in part because his discussion of Hirao and Ariyo is too narrow to satisfactorily address the complicated issues of identity formation and the experience of modernity. That said, this is a well-researched and well-argued book that should be of interest to many readers.
Susan L. Burns
The University of Chicago, Chicago