Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) [Hardcover]

Susan L. Burns (Author)

Book Description

Series: Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society | Publication Date: November 11, 2003

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 "flawed" foreign influences, notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Hailed in the nineteenth century as the begetter of a new national consciousness, Norinaga's Kojikiden was later condemned by some as a source of Japan's twentieth-century descent into militarism, war, and defeat. Burns looks in depth at three kokugaku writers—Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe—who contested Norinaga's interpretations and produced competing readings of the mythohistories that offered new theories of community as the basis for Japanese social and cultural identity. Though relegated to the footnotes by a later generation of scholars, these writers were quite influential in their day, and by recovering their arguments, Burns reveals kokugaku as a complex debate—involving history, language, and subjectivity—with repercussions extending well into the modern era.

Editorial Reviews

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

About the Author

Susan L. Burns is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (November 11, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822331837
• ISBN-13: 978-0822331834
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,633,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Clear and Creative Kokugaku Study, May 15, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) (Paperback)

All in all, this book both clarifies and drastically changes one's ideas about kokugaku in Japan. The exploration of what are today considered "unorthodox" kokugaku scholars is interesting and really brings to light the complexity and plurality within this "school of thought" (if one may still call it that). And the comparison of different scholars' glosses on the first part of the "Kojiki" for what it tells us about their differing agendas is a masterful method. Really fascinating.

This would easily be a five-star book if it weren't for the inconsistent editing. For some reason Tanuma Okitsugu's personal name keeps on showing up here as "Okitsuga." Annoying typos and sentences bearing traces of incomplete revision further mar what is otherwise an excellent and exemplary piece of scholarship.