1730-1801
Motoori Norinaga
Motoori Norinaga, a physician of Matsusaka, spent thirty years on his Kojiki-den, a commentary in forty-four books that read the Kojiki against every Chinese and Buddhist overlay and recovered, he held, the pure Way of the Kami beneath: an order in which the emperors descend from Amaterasu and Japan's way needs no foreign doctrine. His National Learning, Kokugaku, taught readers to hear the ancient text's heart, and his students carried his reverence and his philology into the movements that remade Japan in the next century.