Exploring the emergence and evolution of theories of nationhood that continue to be evoked in present-day Japan, Susan L. Burns provides a close examination of
the late-eighteenth-century intellectual movement
kokugaku, which means 'the study of our country.” Departing from earlier studies of kokugaku that focused on intellectuals whose work has been valorized by modern scholars, Burns seeks to recover the multiple ways 'Japan' as social and cultural identity began to be imagined before modernity.
Central to Burns''s analysis is Motoori Norinaga’s Kojikiden, arguably the most important intellectual work of Japan''s early modern period. Burns situates the Kojikiden as one in a series of attempts to analyze and interpret the mythohistories dating from the early eighth century, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Norinaga saw these texts as keys to an original, authentic, and idyllic Japan that existed before being tainted by 'flawe
Trade Review
“Before the Nation is a significant addition to the field of Japanese intellectual history and a very fine book.”—Leslie Pincus, author of Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shuzo and the Rise of National Aesthetics
“In Before the Nation Susan L. Burns offers rock-solid research on a crucial topic in the intellectual history of state-formation and nationalism in Japan.”—J. Victor Koschmann, author of Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Between Community and the Nation 1
1 Late Tokugawa Society and the Crisis of Community 16
2 Before the Kojikiden: The Divine Age Narrative in Tokugawa Japan 35
3 Motoori Norinaga: Discovering Japan 68
4 Ueda Akinari: History and Community 102
5 Fujitani Mitsue: The Poetics of Community 131
6 Tachibana Moribe: Cosmology and Community 158
7 National Literature, Intellectual History, and the New Kokugaku 187
Conclusion: Imagined Japan(s) 220
Appendix: "Reading" the Kojiki 227
Notes 231
Works Cited 259
Index 271
