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This chapter reveals an anti-Buddhist, Shinto scholar as one of the Buddha’s most important biographers across premodern East Asia. Convinced that the real Buddha was a lying scoundrel, Hirata Atsutane argued that large parts of the traditional Chinese-language accounts of the life of the Buddha were fabrications. In a series of lectures, titled Shutsujo shogo, Atsutane excoriated the traditional textual accounts of the Buddha’s life for their mendacity. But in drafts for his vast unfinished compendium of sources and notes about India, the Indo zoshi, Atsutane labored less to debunk those same accounts than to demythologize them, and thereby to extract historical truths that they concealed. Published in pirated editions by the fanatic Sakura Azumao, Shutsujo shogo circulated widely in the final decades of Japan’s early modern period. Though it alarmed such Buddhist clerical intellectuals as Higuchi Ryuon and Ryogetsu, they proved unable to refute it persuasively.

This chapter examines the relationship between Hirata Atsutane and Kozo Torakichi. The close relationship between the author and the narrator—or the ethnographer and the informant—gives rise to the question of whether and to what extent Atsutane has altered Torakichi’s stories. Although manipulation can be shown at several junctures, this does not suggest that Atsutane merely employed a religious charlatan, or that the two of them conspired to deceive educated Edo salon society. All evidence points to Atsutane’s believing—or at least wanting or even needing to believe—in the Other World, but his personality and his own convictions and intelligence would never allow Torakichi’s imagination to exert control over his own vision of that Other World.

This chapter illustrates the Other World that Atsutane helped Torakichi describe. In many ways, the Other World was supposed to be the same as the revealed world, but it was important that Torakichi also showed it to be qualitatively different. Indeed, the plants and animals of that world were mostly the same as the revealed world, but certain fantastic examples were introduced from time to time. However, the ultimate goal of the ethnography was to discover the practitioners of Atsutane’s Ancient Way who resided there. The process by which Atsutane discovered the sanjin hiding among the tengu is a prime example of how an eager ethnographer can manipulate a willing native informant into telling him exactly what he wants to hear.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Hirata Atsutane’s Senkyō ibun, which he wrote in 1822. Senkyō ibun is a voluminous work centered upon Atsutane’s interviews with the so-called tengu, Kozo Torakichi. Deeply interested in supernatural experiences, Atsutane was captivated by Torakichi’s claim that supernatural experiences were part of his everyday life for several years of his early youth. However, this study argues that the results of Atsutane’s supernatural inquiries should be characterized as a pseudo-ethnographic account of Atsutane’s, rather than Torakichi’s, imagined world of the supernatural. This suggests that Atsutane used Torakichi as a medium to spread his own message.

Examines nativist thought, Kokugaku, in relation to Shinto. Calling for wholesale rejection of Chinese influence in thought, culture, and politics, nativist scholars Motoori Norinaga, Hirata Atsutane, and their students tried to recover a mythical time before Japanese life had been corrupted by foreign influence. Read correctly, they believed, Kojiki would reveal a golden age when the Kami, the emperor, and his people were united in complete harmony. At the end of the period, when Japan was threatened by Western powers, Kokugaku’s definition of the foreign switched from China to the West, and nativism became an anticolonialist discourse seeking to replace the shogunate with direct imperial rule.

This chapter shows how Hirata Atsutane’s nativist discourse concerning the newly discovered sanjin and his independent and superior Japanese cultural identity responded to the challenges from Chinese culture. Japanese scholar Motoori Norinaga’s legacy of hatred for things Chinese and for Japanese sinophiles had been passed on to Atsutane, and the construction of the figure of the sanjin bore traces of that legacy. The chapter then looks at Atsutane’s pre-Senkyō ibun, anti-China arguments. It also shows the new moves that a Tengu Boy medium and ethnographic fiction allowed him to make in his struggle to establish a believable and independent Japanese culture, even one that boasted its own writing script free from Chinese characters.

This chapter locates Hirata Atsutane in the milieu of 1820s Edo Japan, assessing his stance and attitude toward three powerful “enemy” discourses. These discourses originate from within Japan, but each of them concerns what Atsutane conceived as a foreign culture and a threat to his own ideological end. This ideological end is shown to be the construction of a unique Japanese cultural identity, one that was clearly separate, independent, and superior to those offered by the three foreign cultures. Ultimately, Atsutane’s technique is recognized as being in defiance of the accepted practice of history in his day, and his methodological move beyond the history and philology of his time is characterized as a move toward anthropology and ethnography.

This chapter is an in-depth treatment of the life and work of Hirata Atsutane, who developed the ideas of Norinaga into a movement that had religious overtones. He rewrote Japanese history for the common man and produced a coherent story out of incoherent material, arguing that Japan had been the first land in the world to be created. Japan and the Japanese were therefore by their very nature superior to all other races. He then went further and produced a new kind of Shintō, stressing the divine nature of the imperial institution and tying every Japanese to this divinity via the figure of the emperor himself. This ‘democratization’ of Shintō was something new and helped produce the atmosphere that eventually led to the State Shintō of the Meiji period. Atsutane also created his own metaphysics, arguing that the Moon was the abode of the dead.

This section provides an overview of Shinto and Native Studies. Native Studies is a movement that emerged from a series of philosophical reflections and analyses based on four elements of ancient Japanese culture: kami worship; the valorization of the ancient Japanese language in the writing and appreciation of waka poetry; the early mytho-historical chronicles of the Japanese court; and the Japanese imperial lineage. This section begins with a discussion of the history of Shinto and Native Studies in Japan before presenting translations of a variety of texts by Japanese philosophers, including Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga, Fujitani Mitsue, Hirata Atsutane, Ōkuni Takamasa, Orikuchi Shinobu, and Ueda Kenji.