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Exploring how theories of "nation-ness" that continue to be evoked in present-day Japan emerged and evolved, the author provides a close examination of kokugaku, a late-eighteenth-century Japanese intellectual movement.

Before the Nation

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