Phantom history: Hirata Atsutane and Tokugawa nativism

Scholars of Japanese nativism (kokugaku) have assumed that it was a distinct intellectual school from the late seventeenth century through to the end of the Tokugawa period in 1868. This assumption has led scholars to emphasize the intellectual continuities of nativists throughout this period, while obfuscating the profound differences and discontinuities among them. This study focuses on the formation of Tokugawa nativism both as a discourse and as a social institution. The argument of this dissertation is that the notion of an intellectual continuity unifying Tokugawa nativists into a coherent tradition was fabricated by the scholar Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) as a self-legitimating strategy designed to secure his position within the nativist school founded by Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801). Using Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social fields, the present study conceptualizes Atsutane's attempts to establish his credentials as a legitimate member of the Norinaga school as an assault on the school's orthodox scholarship, generating the critical polar opposition within the school that produced the conditions necessary for a social field. Atsutane's attempt to establish his legitimate membership in the field resulted in an intellectual contestation for the definition of orthodoxy within the Norinaga school that produced the intellectual self-awareness for its members, as well as the coherence that contemporary scholars assumed had existed throughout the Tokugawa period.