halfway house between secularism and religion. In a fully secular intellectual
ethos, religion can indeed be defended, but only by showing forth religious
tradition in its full particularism and non-rationality.
In the early 1800s, a contact of the later generation of Norinaga’s lineage,
Hirata Atsutane, elevated the militancy of the Neo-Shintoist movement still
further. Shinto organization itself, he declared, must be purged of the tinges of
syncretism, in both Ansai’s Suika Shinto with its Chinese influences, and
Yoshida Shinto with its Buddhism. Hirata was the last significant thinker in
the direct lineage of the Ansai school, which had been intellectually dormant
for generations. He took most of his inspiration from Norinaga, while down-
playing the poetic-historical scholarship in favor of political-religious propa-
ganda. Later in the century the Hirata school became known as nationalist
extremists fulminating against Westernization. Hirata helped prepare the way
for this escalation of intellectual experimentation. He had already rationalized
Shinto by introducing a monotheist “heavenly center lord” above Amaterasu,
the sun goddess, and incorporating notions of creation and eschatology taken
from Christian sources filtering in with Dutch Learning. Despite his claims,
Hirata was no deep-rooted reactionary but was a modern neoconservative. His
Christian counterparts may be found in France and England in the same
generation.
Conservatism and Intellectual Creativity
Throughout the history of Japanese intellectual networks we witness a conser-
vative path to innovation. The ideological trajectory of Tokugawa thought
pointed backwards in time. The Neo-Confucian revolt against Zen was legiti-
mated by a nationalist note; Hayashi Razan pointed out that the Shinto shrines
historically predated the import of Buddhism, although he twisted this into a
support for Chu Hsi by equating li with the do (way) of the kami. Ansai
claimed to purify Japanese Neo-Confucianism of the compromises left by the
Hayashi school. Yamaga Soko’s Bushido school and Ito Jinsai’s Ancient Learn-
ing leaped over Sung Neo-Confucianism by appealing to earlier Confucian
texts. This was not simple traditionalism. The progression was initiated by
continual sharpening in the standards of scholarship, and energized by con-
temporary conflicts among rival intellectuals. These conflicts built up an accu-
mulation of technical tools and conceptual innovations. Jinsai and Sorai, who
justified their work as purified Confucianism, differentiated cosmology from
ethics, public affairs from private sensibilities; their network fellows recognized
and critiqued abstraction as distinct from concrete principles. The ensuing
wave of criticism arising against the naturalism of the Sorai style further
sharpened philosophical acuteness; the limits of rationalism were explicitly
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 367