concerned with public matters (primarily economics and governmental policy)
and those devoted to the scholarship as a cultural realm in its own right.
Instead of religion and ethics, however, the focus of the latter was literature
and philology. This continued the main textual concerns of Confucian literati;
it also held potential for evoking disputes between Japanese and Chinese
literature, as well as the long-standing line of cleavage between aesthetic and
moral-religious values.
From literary disputes developed the ideological movement of National
Learning. Catching the center of attention was Kamo Mabuchi. He derived
from network connections which brought together the literary and philological
side of the Sorai lineage with the growing militancy of Shinto priests. Among
his teachers there was already a critical stance toward Confucian philosophy.
Hori Keizan was explicitly hostile to the concept of li, precisely because it was
an abstraction and therefore applicable in a meaningless fashion that did not
explain anything concrete.^40 The philosophical defense of particularism was
building up. Mabuchi was spurred to bring out its larger significance on the
occasion of a dispute in the early 1740s over the teaching of poetry at the court
of the shogun’s son. The public affairs wing of the Sorai school, as well as the
neo-Confucian line descending from Arai Hakuseki, attacked poetry as useless.
The Shinto priest Kada no Azumamaro, a former pupil of Ito Jinsai, had
lectured on poetry to the Edo court; since Mabuchi was also his pupil, the
pro-poetry faction at court asked Mabuchi to prepare a defense of poetry, and
rewarded him with an official stipend to teach Japanese poetry.
Mabuchi promoted national poetry as the linchpin of a new intellectual
alliance. Confucian interpretations, he said, must be removed from obscuring
the pure development of Japanese literature; scholarship must approach its
materials through the Japanese language. It was much the same break as took
place in Europe when the Romanticist movement repudiated Latin as the
language of scholarship and replaced it with the study of national languages.
Mabuchi connected this claim for the scholarly autonomy of his specialty with
the study of the ancient Shinto chronicles and mythologies. In part this is to
be seen as a move in the growing mobilization of Shinto priests; but it also
had roots in the expansion and accumulation of textual scholarship through
the previous three generations. The individual retrospectively named progeni-
tor of National Learning, Keichu, was a Shingon monk in the 1665 generation,
hired by the Mito school to work up a scholarly commentary on the Man’yoshu
(the ancient poems in the waka style), which had first been collected in the
late 700s. Such texts had been written in archaic Sino-Japanese from the
period when writing was not yet standardized, and hence were long since
unintelligible; explicating them became a new specialty, which Mabuchi con-
tinued (Nosco, 1990: 9, 57–58).
364 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths