- Used Book in Good Condition.
Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) has been the subject of numerous
studies that focus on his importance to nationalist politics and
Japanese intellectual and social history. Although well known as
an ideologue of Japanese National Learning (Kokugaku), Atsutane’s
significance as a religious thinker has been largely overlooked.
His prolific writings on supernatural subjects have never been
thoroughly analyzed in English until now. In When Tengu Talk,
Wilburn Hansen focuses on Senkyo ibun (1822), a voluminous work
centering on Atsutane’s interviews with a fourteen-year-old Edo
street urchin named Kozo Torakichi who cled to be an
apprentice tengu, a supernatural creature of Japanese folklore.
Hansen uncovers in detail how Atsutane employed a deliberate
method of ethnographic inquiry that worked to manipulate and
stimulate Torakichi’s surreal descriptions of everyday existence
in a supernatural realm, what Atsutane termed the Other World.
Hansen’s investigation and analysis of the process begins with
the hypothesis that Atsutane’s project was an early attempt at
ethnographic research, a new methodological approach in
nineteenth-century Japan. Hansen posits that this "scientific"
analysis was tainted by Atsutane’s desire to establish a
discourse on Japan not limited by what he considered to be the
unsatisfactory results of established Japanese philological
methods.
A rough sketch of the milieu of 1820s Edo Japan and Atsutane’s
position within it provides the backdrop against which the drama
of Senkyo ibun unfolds. There follow chapters explaining the
relationship between the implied author and the outside narrator,
the Other World that Atsutane helped Torakichi describe, and
Atsutane’s nativist discourse concerning Torakichi’s fantastic
cls of a newly discovered Shinto holy man called the sanjin.
Sanjin were partly defined by supernatural abilities similar (but
ultimately more effective and thus superior) to those of the
Buddhist bodhisattva and the Daoist immortal. They were seen as
holders of secret and powerful technologies previously thought to
have come from or been perfected in the West, such as geography,
astronomy, and technology. Atsutane sought to
deemphasize the impact of Western technology by cling these
powers had come from Japan’s Other World. In doing so, he creates
a new Shinto hero and, by association, asserts the superiority of
native Japanese tradition. In the final portion of his book,
Hansen addresses Atsutane’s contribution to the construction of
modern Japanese identity. By the late Tokugawa, many
intellectuals had grown uncomfortable with continued cultural
dependence on Neo-Confucianism, and the Buddhist establishment
was under fire from positivist historiographers who had be to
question the many contradictions found in Buddhist texts. With
these traditional discourses in disarray and Western rationalism
and materialism gaining public acceptance, Hansen depicts
Atsutane’s creation of a new spiritual identity for the Japanese
people as one creative response to the pressures of modernity.
When Tengu Talk adds to the small body of work in English on
National Learning. It moreover fills a void in the area of
historical religious studies, which is dominated by studies of
Buddhist monks and priests, by offering a glimpse of a Shinto
religious figure. Finally, it counters the image of Atsutane as a
forerunner of the ultra-nationalism that ultimately was deployed
in the service of empire. Lucid and accessible, it will find an
appreciative audience among scholars of Shinto and Japanese and
world religion. In addition to religion spets, it will be
of considerable interest to anthropologists and historians of
Japan.