| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Susan L. Burns. Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan. (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 282. Cloth $84.95, paper $23.95.

Perhaps one of the distinguishing features of Japanese intellectual history was the development of Kokugaku. Scholars from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries studied classical Japanese literature and made observations concerning the nature of Japanese culture. Thus, Kokugaku is typically viewed as the ideological precursor to modern nationalism. In this book, Susan L. Burns argues that scholars of the Meiji and Taisho periods fundamentally distorted the true character of Tokugawa Kokugaku, demonstrating that Kokugaku did not signify a singular vision of Japan during the Tokugawa period but rather a plurality of visions, each focused on the nature of the Japanese "community" (p. 220). The book provides a highly detailed analysis of the works by four important Kokugaku scholars of the early modern period, including those of Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). Three of these scholars (Ueda Akinari [1734–1809], Fujitani Mitsue [1767–1823], and Tachibana Moribe [1781–1849]) are all but unknown in the secondary literature in English, so the book contributes in a major way to the corpus of works that have already defined the field.

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