Analogous Exceptionalisms within Japanese and American History: Kokugaku and Transcendentalism

Abstract

Japanologists have identified the intellectual movement called Kokugaku (“national learning”) as early modern Japan’s version of nativism, even though it bears no resemblance to the original American version of nativism from the 1840s, namely Know-Nothingism. Instead, Kokugaku had striking intellectual and institutional similarities with pre-Civil War Transcendentalism. Americanists have associated Transcendentalism with the broader ideological phenomenon known as exceptionalism, rather than with nativism. For this reason, this article proposes to reclassify Kokugaku as exceptionalism, instead of nativism, via a comparison between it and Transcendentalism. The intellectual linchpin between Transcendentalism and exceptionalism is Fichte, whose ideas influenced Japan’s literary genre known as Nihonjinron (“theories of Japanese[-ness]”), the modern successor of Kokugaku, a connection that bolsters the intellectual legitimacy of the view that Kokugaku and Transcendentalism are analogous versions of exceptionalism.

1. Introduction

Exceptionalism is one of the distinctive themes of nineteenth-century American history (See Greene 1993. See also Hodgson 2009; Lipset 1963, 1996; Lockhart 2003; Madsen 1998; de Tocqueville 2006; Turner 1996; and Rodgers 2004). Similarly, nativism is one of the major themes of Japanese history, especially of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). Americanists have identified the religious/literary/philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism as one of the intellectual sources for exceptionalism during the era before the outbreak of the Civil War. On the other hand, Japanologists have generally associated nativism with the religious/literary/philosophical movement known as Kokugaku (“national learning”)1 during the same era in Japan (See Billington 1938 and Higham 1988. See also Ames 1957; Clemhout 1964; Lanternari 1974; Linton 1943; Mühlmann 1961; and Wallace 1956; see also McNally 2018). When analytically juxtaposed in this way, a meaningful comparison between the two becomes obviously possible, yet such a comparative study has never emerged, as Americanists and Japanologists have generally been loath to view their subjects from a comparative perspective. This academic impediment notwithstanding, the analytical categorization of Transcendentalism and Kokugaku as exceptionalism and nativism, respectively, forecloses any potential attempt to study these intellectual institutions alongside one another, even for scholars who are otherwise amenable to comparison.

Nativism, of course, is relevant to American history as well, as one of the most notorious of institutions from America’s nineteenth century, an era when the word “nativism” itself was coined. In the 1840s and 1850s, militant working-class American Protestants, especially a group who called themselves the Know-Nothings, organized violent campaigns against Catholic immigrants, chiefly German-speakers and the Irish (See McNally 2018). The Know-Nothings were the putative analogs of the adherents of Kokugaku from Tokugawa Japan, the majority of whom were scholars, teachers, and students engaged in the study of poetry, literature, history, and religion (Shinto). Americanists (though not Japanologists) have also identified exceptionalism in Japanese history, especially with the postwar and contemporary non-fiction literary genre known as Nihonjinron (“theories of Japanese[-ness]”). Interestingly, Japanologists, generally unaware of the identification of Nihonjinron with exceptionalism by Americanists, have long associated Kokugaku with Nihonjinron, with the former serving as the intellectual forerunner of the latter. Any potential comparison between Kokugaku and Know-Nothingism seems intellectually doomed to fail, however, which likely explains why no one has attempted to undertake one. At the same time, an analysis of Kokugaku as exceptionalism should look inviting, especially when one considers the intellectual affinity of Nihonjinron with both exceptionalism and Kokugaku.

Both Transcendentalists and the authors of Nihonjinron works share an esteem for the ideas of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Although scholars do not view Fichte as one of the foundational intellectuals of exceptionalism, his influence on both Transcendentalism and Nihonjinron indicate that perhaps he should be. Fichte’s remarkable intellectual resonance with the luminary figures of Kokugaku, especially its greatest mind, Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), bolsters the classification of Kokugaku as a form of exceptionalism (rather than of nativism) from Japan’s Tokugawa period, as the ideas of Fichte and Norinaga resonate with those of other prominent thinkers of American exceptionalism, especially when viewed alongside the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932).

The emergence of the term/name “Kokugaku” during the eighteenth century, and its perpetuation over the centuries since that time, are closely connected to attitudes that we can classify as exceptionalist, namely assertions of superiority based on the qualities of the “exemplary” and/or the “exempt” (See Greene 1993. See also Hodgson 2009; Lipset 1963, 1996; Lockhart 2003; Madsen 1998; de Tocqueville 2006; Turner 1996; and Rodgers 2004). Not surprisingly, some of the most emblematic and representative ideas associated with Kokugaku’s canonical figures, like Norinaga, are thoroughly exceptionalist in nature as well. The intellectual resonance between critical aspects of Kokugaku and exceptionalism is undeniable. For this reason, we can conceptualize Kokugaku, using terms from cultural materialism, as Tokugawa Japan’s emic counterpart to the etic of exceptionalism. Emics (conceptual particulars) are not dependent on any points of reference that are exterior to their narrow cultural context, but the same is not true of etics (conceptual universals), which support, and even demand, comparison in order to produce meaning.2 If Japanologists had acknowledged such an axiom, then at least a cursory comparison between Kokugaku and some analogous institution from another culture, such as Know-Nothingism, would have been undertaken at some point, and the glaring disparities between the two exposed. The purpose of this article is to analyze Kokugaku as an early modern Japanese form of exceptionalism together with one from its conceptual birthplace, the United States, to see if this proposed classification holds up under a direct comparison. Scholars have described Kokugaku as one of many intellectual/religious “movements” of the Tokugawa period, including Neo-Confucianism, the so-called Ancient Learning Confucianism of Yamaga Sokō (1622–1685), Itō Jinsai (1627–1705), and Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), and the Shingaku (“learning of the heart”) of Ishida Baigan (1685–1744), to name a few. Generally speaking, Americanists never speak of exceptionalism as a movement; it is, instead, a mode of thinking that is replete with ideological potential but is otherwise found in all eras of American history, not just a few decades of the middle nineteenth century. In this way, the classification of Kokugaku as exceptionalism, though not an exclusive one, poses historiographical challenges that its classification as nativism does not (See McNally 2016, 2021). One might expect that there were intellectual/religious movements in American history that were associated with exceptionalism but not exclusively so, and this is the case with Transcendentalism. Not only was Transcendentalism a fitting American analog to Kokugaku from the standpoint of institutional similarity, but it was also akin to it intellectually. As was the case with Kokugaku’s place in the history of Japanese exceptionalism,3 Transcendentalism was an influential intellectual movement in American history that occupies a similar place in the history of American exceptionalism (Gura 2007, p. xv).4

2. Kokugaku and Transcendentalism: Major Similarities

At a cursory glance, the similarities between Kokugaku and Transcendentalism are striking. Both institutions were founded on reactions against the dominance of rationalism in religious matters. In the case of Kokugaku, it was Confucian rationalism that its scholars opposed, chiefly the Song Chinese Confucian concept of “principle” (Jp. ri or kotowari). Motoori Norinaga was especially famous for his critiques of Confucian principle, both because of its imposition on and subsequent distortion of Shinto scriptural texts, and because of the Confucian attitude that everything was within the reach of the human intellect. Transcendentalists, notably Walt Whitman (1819–1892), were skeptical of “the rational ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment”, sentiments that were common among both American and European intellectuals during the nineteenth century (Madsen 1998, pp. 73–74). Transcendentalism was an offshoot of Unitarianism, whose adherents had grappled with the dominance within Biblical exegetical circles of the empiricism of John Locke (1632–1704). The Unitarians decided that there was a difference between “reason”, which was connected to God, and “understanding” or “inductive reason”, which was the product of observation (Buell 2006, pp. xix–xx). It was this critique of Lockean empiricism that the Transcendentalists inherited.

In place of reason as the primary means of acquiring knowledge, the Transcendentalists emphasized the role of the emotions and aesthetics in fostering human understanding. Orestes Brownson (1803–1876) conceptualized the break with rationalism as the fundamental divergence of the “heart” from the “head”, noting how Christianity had become “an emotionally bankrupt faith” under the influence of Lockean empiricism (Gura 2007, p. 76). Whitman was also interested in the ways in which the emotions undermined Enlightenment rationality (Madsen 1998, pp. 73–74). Validating emotions5 as a tool against rationalism is also something that we associate with Kokugaku, especially the thought of Norinaga, who criticized the Confucians and the Buddhists for teaching their followers to steel themselves against emotional displays, since the emotions were outward manifestations of worldly attachments and impeded one’s progress toward Sagehood, in the case of Confucianism, or enlightenment, in the case of Buddhism. Norinaga believed that human beings were naturally endowed with emotions, the suppression of which contravened the will of the kami (“spirits/gods”), and he called this capacity to feel mono no aware (“the pathos of things”), and the ancient Japanese were especially good at exhibiting their mono no aware before the influence of foreign teachings had taken hold (McNally 2005, pp. 28–33).

For Norinaga, the emotions were connected to aesthetics in the way that they were conveyed, namely as poetry. Although he claimed to have discovered traces of mono no aware in the Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji; 11th c. CE), it was actually a poetic concept formulated during the Heian period (794–1192 CE) to describe the qualities of beautiful verse. The difference between classical Chinese verse and authentic Japanese verse was mono no aware, even when comparing especially beautiful examples of each. The poets of Japanese antiquity were adept at capturing their spontaneous responses to emotional situations, their mono no aware, in verse, the effectiveness of which was determined by the reaction of the reader. For Norinaga, a Japanese poem which was truly beautiful was one that captured in words the mono no aware of its author, which was then felt by the poem’s reader; good poetry, therefore, was lauded both for its beautiful words and its ability “to make others understand what we feel [as composers of verse]” (Flueckiger 2011, p. 179). By contrast, the composers of classical Chinese verse, and much of Japanese verse that was inspired by it, were less concerned with communicating emotional sentiment and more concerned with using outwardly beautiful language, which Norinaga criticized as insincere.

Under the influence of German theologian Wilhelm de Wette (1780–1849), the Transcendentalists were also interested in aesthetic expressions as “ways of comprehending [the] Absolute” since they were “essential in man’s attempt to know himself and the universe” (Gura 2007, p. 55). De Wette was a skilled author who acknowledged the importance of verse as an aesthetic expression, and many Transcendentalists similarly esteemed verse for that reason as well (Buell 2006, p. xvii). Although there were prominent poets within Transcendentalism, with Walt Whitman (1819–1892) among the more famous of them, the Transcendentalists were more known for their prose compositions than their poetic ones (Buell 2006, pp. xvii–xviii). Like the deconstructionists and Post-Structuralists do today, the Transcendentalists drew attention to their prose by composing their essays in an unconventional style, something for which they were criticized as abstruse and excessive (Gura 2007, p. 92). Dense prose was one of the ways in which the Transcendentalists were able to engage in “metaphorical and discontinuous rather than straightforward expression”, seeing “formal reasoning as profitless pedantry” (Buell 2006, p. xxiii). The centrality of poetry and poetics to Kokugaku notwithstanding, Kokugaku scholars were also fond of the essay as an important medium for their ideas. Like the Transcendentalists, they were also interested in drawing the reader’s attention to their prose style; rather than write exclusively in literary Chinese, the language of Confucian rationality, Kokugaku scholars mainly composed their intellectual works in styles related to classical Japanese, as it was viewed as both less rational and less analytical.

Philology was critical to Kokugaku as its methodological identity,6 but philology is not as commonly associated with Transcendentalism. The absence of an emphasis on philology in the secondary literature on Transcendentalism should not lead us to conclude that it was completely irrelevant, since this was not the case. Philology was relevant to Transcendentalism in at least two ways. First, philology was at the core of the theological debates that gave rise to Unitarianism and subsequently to Transcendentalism as well. The Unitarians scrutinized the Bible and concluded that the standard Christian view of a trinitarian God (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) was not a biblical belief and was more the product of church tradition (Gura 2007, p. 23). In the absence of biblical evidence for a trinitarian deity, the Unitarians believed in a single-incarnation or “unitarian” deity. The Unitarian interest in biblical exegesis and textual analysis did not end with this split from mainstream Christianity, as their obsession with philology only deepened to the point where their “knowledge of the language and culture of the Bible” proved inadequate, forcing them to turn to the work of continental scholars of whom the Germans were the most prominent (Gura 2007, p. 24). New England intellectuals, whether Unitarian or not, began to undertake the study of German, as English translations of recent German works were few; by the 1830s, “the study of German was all the rage” among New England’s intellectual elite, who either attempted to learn the language at home or were forced to study abroad in Europe (Gura 2007, p. 31). As the Unitarians mastered German, doctrinal disputes arose within their own ranks, leading to a split within them over the centrality of Lockean empiricism, and by the 1840s, Transcendentalism was born (Gura 2007, p. 4). Philology, therefore, spawned Unitarianism and the interest of its members in German theological works, which then led to an interest in German Idealism, which we will discuss later, resulting in the development of Transcendentalism.

As Transcendentalism came together over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, it ceased to be a religious movement and became more of a philosophical one (Buell 2006, p. xxi). While most of its followers were more interested in establishing German Idealism in America than in anything else, that does not mean that their interest in philology, although it had waned, had disappeared entirely. While interest in German theological works was at least partially responsible for the decline in Biblical philology among the Americans, interest in German philosophy renewed the American curiosity in philology, this time not of the Bible, but of the English language itself. Many American intellectuals of the mid-nineteenth century, including Whitman, were enthralled by the philological movement known as Anglo-Saxonism or Gothicism (Kaufmann 1999, p. 455). Anglo-Saxonism held within it the promise of uncovering the ethnic origins of the American people as descendants of the Anglo-Saxons, namely the English before their conquest by the Normans in 1066. Whitman was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), the intellectual and spiritual leader of the Transcendentalists who was so taken by Anglo-Saxonism that he penned one of his most famous works, English Traits (1856), in which he observed the various ways in which Americans were essentially an English people (Kaufmann 2004, p. 31; See Emerson 1866). The Transcendentalist encounter with philology began with scriptural analysis and ended with ethnic nationalism, and much the same can be said of the Kokugaku scholars, with the exception that the two were more prominently linked in the Japanese case.

Aside from the common intellectual interests and activities between Kokugaku and Transcendentalism, the two intellectual institutions also shared similar social and organizational structures. Transcendentalism began when “like-minded” intellectuals who were disaffected with Unitarianism began meeting on their own to share their views which “were critical of contemporary religious and philosophical thought” (Gura 2007, p. 8). These were private individuals who did not necessarily have formal academic affiliations, as was the case with many European intellectuals of the time and was also true of many Confucian scholars in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Kokugaku scholars, with only a few notable exceptions, were also private individuals with no special affiliations, who conducted scholarly gatherings in one another’s homes to discuss their common interests in Japanese antiquity. They referred to these social gatherings for scholarly purposes as shijuku (“private academies”),7 and this was the dominant form of social organization for Kokugaku during the nineteenth century.8 In the case of Transcendentalism, gatherings in private homes were also an important part of their social organization; perhaps the most famous of these was the salon of Elizabeth Peabody (1804–1894). Peabody was a schoolteacher in Boston who opened a bookstore out of her home, the West Street Bookstore, which also functioned as a small press (Gura 2007, p. 124). Peabody hosted gatherings at her bookstore of influential figures in Transcendentalism who gave lectures and participated in lively discussions. She also had a sizable personal library, items from which she allowed people to borrow (Gura 2007, p. 125). Among Kokugaku scholars, there were also figures who were both active participants and book publishers, such as Kido Chidate (1778–1845) of Kyoto, and there were others who also had large personal libraries which they allowed colleagues to use, like Oyamada Tomokiyo (1783–1847) and Yashiro Hirokata (1758–1841), both of Edo. As social institutions, the salons of Transcendentalism and the shijuku of Kokugaku were both important aspects of the public sphere in their respective contexts, even if participation was more restrictive in the Japanese case, since shijuku members had to pay fees and formally enroll as students.

3. An Intellectual Family Resemblance? Exceptionalism, Nature, and Idealism

The commonalities that we have seen between Kokugaku and Transcendentalism thus far are those that are readily apparent for interested parties with nothing more than a passing familiarity with the two. There are, however, other similarities that become apparent once one analyzes the two disparate institutions more carefully. Where one would have some difficulty finding such similarities between the Know-Nothings, as the example of a nativist movement from American history, and Kokugaku, as its alleged counterpart in Japanese history, one finds these much more easily once one turns toward Transcendentalism. As one of many intellectual trends in American history associated with exceptionalism, Transcendentalism is more like Kokugaku than Know-Nothingism and is perhaps the most similar institution that one will ever find in American history.

When studying the history of American exceptionalism, Transcendentalism is part of the discussion, but it does not occupy a central position within it, giving way to either a discussion of the Puritans of the seventeenth century, or to the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of the nineteenth century, including the era of the Transcendentalists, is portrayed as a lull in the otherwise robust history of exceptionalism in the United States, its conceptual point of origin. Exceptionalist ideas, however, were articulated during this time by many Transcendentalists, including some of its most recognizable figures. One contemporary scholar of American literary history, Philip Gura, has characterized the development of Transcendentalism as ending in exceptionalism, even if it did not start that way. During the 1830s and 1840s, the Transcendentalists were interested in “catholic and universal” matters and managed to avoid assertions of American uniqueness and superiority in their quest to find commonalities among peoples of all cultures and all times (Gura 2007, p. xv). By 1850, the Transcendentalists had turned their attention away from the rest of the world and focused it more on the United States and its problems, hailing the end of Transcendentalism as a vibrant philosophical movement but not the end of its influence on American intellectual life and culture.

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) was one of the most important Transcendentalists of her time. Early in her professional career, Fuller worked on Emerson’s journal, The Dial, before accepting a job with the New York Tribune. In 1846, she was sent to Europe as one of its correspondents, eventually traveling to Italy where she became embroiled in the revolutionary movement that culminated in the founding of the Roman Republic in 1849. Along with her husband, Giovanni Ossoli (d. 1850), a supporter of one of the three leaders of the Roman Republic, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), and their child, they fled Italy shortly before the collapse of the Roman Republic, and all three of them died in a shipwreck off the coast of Long Island (Gura 2007, p. 238). Her writings during these exciting times reveal how “the significance of national culture and destiny” had a profound impact on her thinking, a subject in which her Transcendentalist colleagues back in New England had shown little interest. Moreover, she was moved by the efforts of the Italian revolutionaries who were motivated, she realized, by “the principles for which her countrymen had fought and secured for the entire American people” (Gura 2007, p. 237). Fuller concluded that the United States was a special nation in the world, even though Americans seemed to take their nation for granted. She tempered her praise for American institutions, therefore, with critical evaluations of its people at the same time, so it would be an exaggeration to classify her as an exceptionalist in her final years. The impact of her writings, especially in the wake of the failed European revolutions of 1848, did encourage a sense of hopelessness for Europeans among Americans, which enhanced their self-perception as the world’s last, best hope (Gura 2007, p. 208).

John Weiss (1818–1879) was one of the Transcendentalists who exemplified what Gura calls the “inward turn” in the Transcendentalist movement (Gura 2007, p. 278). His most influential book, American Religion (1871), details the ways in which the United States occupied a special place in the world “because of its unique social conditions” and its emphasis on the individual (Gura 2007, p. 278). Only Americans, under the influence of Transcendentalist-inspired theology, could realize within themselves the true nature of reality, namely that “God was simply everything” (Gura 2007, p. 279). With this knowledge, Americans could create a kind of democracy the world had never seen, which would become “America’s gift to the world” (Gura 2007, p. 279). The same year in which Weiss published his influential work, another important Transcendentalist thinker, James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888), published his own assessment of the state of American religious thought under the title Ten Great Religions. One of the distinctive aspects of Transcendentalism was the interest its followers had in world religions, especially Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and even Confucianism, an interest they shared with their Kokugaku counterparts in Japan (Buell 2006, p. xiii). Prior to Clarke’s work, Transcendentalists looked with reverence on the teachings of other traditions as wisdom worthy of study and emulation. With the publication of Ten Great Religions, these religious traditions of the world were reduced to the status of “various stages through which humanity passed before it arrived at Christianity, the universal religion” (Gura 2007, p. 292). “True” Christianity, of course, was associated with Transcendentalism, so that, by definition, the United States was the only place in the world that had achieved this final stage in the development of the universal religion. These exceptionalist views echo similar statements about Shinto that Kokugaku scholars made during the Edo period. At the end of the eighteenth century, Norinaga referred to Buddhism and Confucianism as “branches” of Shinto, meaning that their teachings were only partially true, but that the full wisdom of the cosmos was reserved only for Shinto. Norinaga’s views of Shinto and Clarke’s views of Christianity are united in their exceptionalist foundations, adding further evidence to the view that aspects of Transcendentalism and Kokugaku are emic examples of a broader etic (exceptionalism).

While Fuller, Weiss, and Clarke were certainly prominent within Transcendentalism, they did not have the kind of iconic status that Emerson, Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and Whitman had, but that does not mean that the intellectual giants of the movement successfully resisted the lure of exceptionalism. While the Puritans of the seventeenth century viewed their settlement in America as the beginning of the realization on earth of God’s true Church, the idea of America’s potential for ecclesiastical perfection gave way to the idea of its potential for political perfection during the nineteenth century (Madsen 1998, p. 71). Weiss subscribed to this idea, as did Whitman, who believed that America would one day “become a global force to dominate the world in political, commercial, and cultural terms” (Madsen 1998, p. 72). Whereas Weiss lauded American democracy for its roots in Transcendentalist religious values, Whitman’s esteem for American institutions owed much to Emerson’s influence (Madsen 1998, pp. 73–74). Lecturing in 1837, Emerson talked about how the United States was on the precipice of world greatness:

Perhaps the time has already come, when it ought to be, and will be something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of independence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.

(Emerson 2006a, p. 83)

It was the American intellectual, under the influence of Transcendentalism, who embodied the union of thought and action, as the source of true wisdom, which life in the United States fostered:

The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an [sic] university of knowledges [sic]. If there be one lesson more than another which should pierce his ear, it is, the world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man, belongs by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.

(Emerson 2006a, p. 98)

Emerson’s privileging of American intellectuals as leading the United States into a position of world leadership was reminiscent of the views of Orestes Brownson, a Transcendentalist who eventually converted to Catholicism and left the movement in 1844, which he had expressed the previous year in 1836:

In this country more than in any other is the man of thought united in the same person with the man of action. The people here have a strong tendency to profound and philosophic thought, as well as to the skilful [sic], energetic and persevering action. The time is not far distant when our whole population will be practical men...This characteristic of our population fits us above all other nations to bring out and realize great and important ideas.

(Brownson 2006, New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church, in Buell 2006, p. 78)

Emerson believed that America’s vast wilderness made it a unique place in the world, especially by comparison with the European powers. For Emerson, it was the encounter of individual Americans with the wilderness that was the key to “the realisation [sic] of a unique alternative destiny” (Madsen 1998, p. 74). Emerson’s close friend and disciple, Henry David Thoreau, shared this view of nature, composing Walden (1854), his most famous work, after living in the woods by himself for more than two years. An emphasis on nature and the natural environment was an issue that was related to the exceptionalist ideas of many Transcendentalists, especially Emerson and Thoreau, but it was also a critical commonality that Transcendentalism shared with Kokugaku.

Emerson refuted the idea, widely held among American Christians, that nature was somehow “fallen,” believing instead that nature was synonymous with spiritual perfection and even “worthy of our worship” (Gura 2007, p. 103). He saw within the perfection of the natural world the potential for the establishment of a perfect society in America, since anyone who truly experienced life in the natural environment would experience “the living out of truths before apprehending them as truths” (Madsen 1998, p. 75). In other words, life in the wilderness forced one into self-reliance for survival which brought about a kind of enlightenment experience in which one realized cosmic truth within oneself. Emerson’s interest in the natural world was not primarily to gain knowledge about it, but the ways in which it stimulated the human mind to gain knowledge of itself: “The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature” (Emerson 2006a, p. 85). Since Americans lived in such close proximity to unsettled wildernesses, Emerson believed, they were in a better position than others in the world to achieve this sublime state of mind.

Thoreau decided to experience the natural environment himself. Under Emerson’s guidance, Thoreau became convinced that immersion in nature would reveal to him “the universal laws that underpin all life” (Gura 2007, p. 205). Emerson gave Thoreau permission to build a one-room cabin on some wooded land that Emerson owned outside of Concord, Massachusetts. From the summer of 1845 until the summer of 1847, Thoreau lived in this cabin, keeping a detailed journal and notes of his activities and observations, which formed the basis for Walden. Thoreau’s book, though a modest commercial success at the time, has since become perhaps the most famous example of literary Transcendentalism in American history. Although the work is thematically rich, Thoreau found confirmation of Emerson’s belief that the interaction of a solitary individual with the natural environment elicited from them self-reliance which was the result of a perfect balance between thought and action. With an abundance of pristine wilderness, the United States was the ideal nation for the realization of this balance, which leads Philip Gura to observe that Walden “embodies a love affair with America” (Gura 2007, p. 269).

Although Kokugaku scholars never undertook an experiment in wilderness living like Thoreau, nature was a recurring theme in their writings as well, especially for eighteenth-century figures, notably Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga.9 For Mabuchi and Norinaga, nature did not signify the environment or the wilderness, as it did with the Transcendentalists, but was associated with life before the advent of Buddhism and Confucianism in antiquity. Since ancient Japan was governed directly by the imperial court, whose emperor was a descendant of the kami, they believed that the ancient Japanese had lived in accordance with Shinto,10 resulting in a harmonious union between themselves and nature. For Mabuchi and Norinaga, a return to nature meant purging Japan of foreign cultural institutions, and not living the life of a hermit in the wilderness. Kokugaku scholars believed that the Japanese people had enjoyed a special relationship with nature in antiquity, but that this relationship had gone into decline with the ascent of foreign teachings in Japan. The Transcendentalists had a similar view about the relationship between Americans and nature, but this relationship was not a distant memory of some ancient past, and it was mostly unrealized in the present. For this reason, the followers of the two movements believed that the exceptional nature of their respective societies could only come about once this connection with nature was made. For Kokugaku scholars, the locus of Japan’s exceptionalism was in the remote past, so that the connection with nature was more of a re-connection, while the Transcendentalists located America’s exceptionalism in the future, once Americans were made aware of their unique opportunities to connect with nature.

4. Romanticism and German Idealism

The Transcendentalists were directly influenced by two intellectual trends of eighteenth-century Europe, Romanticism and German Idealism. While certain Transcendentalist ideas were clearly identifiable with one or the other, their most important influences on Transcendentalism were as a mixture of both, embodied most notably in the ideas of Johann Gottleib Fichte. Fichte’s work had an impact on both Transcendentalism and on Nihonjinron; analyzing his ideas will further solidify the status of the latter as Japan’s modern incarnation of exceptionalism, as it helps us understand, more precisely, the exceptionalist character of the former (Lipset 1996, p. 212). As we will see, there are implications for Kokugaku in the analysis of Fichte as well, not for any direct influence via homology, but for the affinities, via analogy, between his thought and those of the canonical Kokugaku scholars, something that Meiji intellectuals, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, recognized well.

The most important philosophical inspiration for the Transcendentalists was the work of Idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Idealism was so crucial to the identity of Transcendentalism that Emerson saw the latter as the American version of the former: “What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842” (Emerson 2006b, p. 108). To put it another way, Transcendentalism was the American emic equivalent of the German emic of Idealism. Before the advent of Transcendentalism in the 1830s, there were theological debates within Unitarianism over some of the central teachings of Calvinism, such as predestination, the proof of which was based on Lockean empiricism (Gura 2007, pp. 5–6). Skeptical Unitarians who were critical of Calvinism grew dissatisfied with empiricism and began to read about Idealism, a philosophical reaction to empiricism whose popularity was growing in Europe during the early nineteenth century. For empiricists, the reality of external objects was the product of the extent to which they could be apprehended via the senses, which created a situation in which the objective was dependent on the subjective. Idealists believed that the division between the objective and the subjective was false, since the external world could only be understood via internal categories or ideas:

It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that there were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms.

(Emerson 2006b, p. 113 [original emphasis])

In a sense, the external was the internal, so the Transcendentalists proposed to replace empiricism with a philosophy that seeks “to ‘transcend’ subjective space and time” (Gura 2007, p. 185). People experience these internal categories as intuition,11 or “a higher ‘Reason’”, which Transcendentalists distinguished “from mere ‘Understanding’”, which they viewed as “inductive reasoning.” Intuition was superior to Understanding, as it gave people the capacity to perceive “Truth” (Buell 2006, pp. xix–xx).

Another Idealist philosopher whose work was influential in pre-Civil War America was Hegel (1770–1831). In 1842, James Murdock (1776–1856), a pastor and scholar of ancient Christianity, published Sketches of Modern Philosophy, Especially Among the Germans, in which the focus of the final three chapters was on German Idealism (Gura 2007, p. 12). Murdock’s work, which also included his views on the relationship between German Idealism and Transcendentalism, recounted the ideas and works of Idealism’s greatest minds, including Kant and Hegel. Hegel’s influence on Transcendentalism, though not as great as Kant’s, was also felt comparatively later and in a very interesting way. A group of intellectuals, known as the “St. Louis Hegelians”, was largely responsible for stimulating interest in Hegel’s works among the New England Transcendentalists. The leaders of the St. Louis Hegelians were exposed to his writings as students in New England, when they studied with many of the prominent figures of Transcendentalism, but their intellectual curiosity was stimulated the most with the publication of John Stallo’s (1823–1900) General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature (1848), which “offered American readers a sophisticated introduction to Hegel’s philosophy” (Gura 2007, p. 271). Emerson himself drew heavily on Stallo’s work for his understanding of Hegel (Gura 2007, p. 272). Hegel’s view of history as the unfolding of “spirit” had an especially profound effect on the thinking of the St. Louis Hegelians, who, in the aftermath of the Civil War, began to believe that “the United States occupied the highest step of humanity’s progress, even as, given the dialectical nature of history, the country was still evolving, for good or ill” (Gura 2007, p. 273). Given the close ties, and even mutual admiration, between the St. Louis Hegelians and the New England Transcendentalists, it is not hard to imagine that this exceptionalist view of America was transmitted from the former to the latter, if not vice versa.

While the impact of German Idealism on Transcendentalism was clear, the influence of the European Romantic movement was no less important, to the point where some scholars conflate the ideas of the two movements when discussing Transcendentalism. Hegel, though associated with Idealism, subscribed to the Romantic notion that nations had a “natural destiny” that would eventually culminate in “independent statehood” (Kaufmann 1999, p. 454). Nationalism was one of the legacies of the Romantic movement, but not the nationalism of modern states, what has been called civic nationalism, but the bonds and feelings of commonality that scholars refer to as ethnic nationalism. The search for the historical origins of a people or nation was one of the intellectual priorities of Romantic nationalism, which helps to explain the popularity of Anglo-Saxonism among nineteenth-century American intellectuals, including some Transcendentalists (Kaufmann 1999, p. 454). Both Whitman and Emerson were intrigued by Anglo-Saxonism, and their work blended “the mythology of American exceptionalism...with the ideals of the Romantic movement that was sweeping Europe” (Madsen 1998, pp. 73–74). An influential Transcendentalist, George Ripley (1802–1880), sought to revive Christianity in the United States by emphasizing human emotions, since “vital religion demanded ascent to the heart”; he undertook translations of Romantic authors and some who were only distantly related to Romanticism, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), believing that they shared his esteem for the emotions (Gura 2007, pp. 47–48).

As a reaction against “rational, civilized modernity,” Romantic scholars believed in “the idea of raw nature as the source of power and wisdom” (Kaufmann 1999, p. 454). The influence of such a view on the Transcendentalists cannot be overstated, as key figures in the movement, such as both Emerson and Thoreau, elevated the natural environment to a spiritual status. The Transcendentalists combined this Romantic conception of nature with Idealism by arguing that the individual’s encounter with the natural environment stimulated their intuition into action, allowing them to realize the objective truth within themselves. Nature was the most effective crucible within which an individual experienced this enlightened perspective, but it was also the source of nations; the natural status of nations was another way in which Idealism and Romanticism came together. The nation, existing outside of the individual, was an abstraction whose reality was dependent on the fact that it was an idea; for Idealists, ideas were reality, so the belief in the existence of a nation that could not be experienced with the senses was not unreasonable to them. Moreover, the emphasis on human emotion within the Romantic movement translated into the notion that an individual should feel an attachment to their nation, one that remains a critical component of modern nationalism to this day.

5. Fichte

The figure who perhaps best exemplified the blending of Romanticism and Idealism for the Transcendentalists was Fichte, one of the central figures in the history of German nationalism. Fichte delivered a series of lectures or “addresses” in Berlin during late 1807 and early 1808 in which he outlined his views on the condition of the German nation; these lectures were published as Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation) in the spring of 1808 (Fichte 1922, p. xviii). At the time, Berlin was under occupation by French troops following Napoleon’s (1769–1821) defeat of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1806. Fichte lamented that the German people were scattered among several states, but insisted that they still comprised a coherent German nation:

As was the case with the ancient Greeks alone, with the Germans the State and the nation were actually separated from each other, and each was represented for itself, the former in the separate German realms and principalities, the latter represented visibly in the imperial connection and invisibly—by virtue of a law, not written, but living and valid in the minds of all, a law whose results struck the eye everywhere—in a mass of customs and institutions.

(Fichte 1922, p. 147)

Fichte accepted the geopolitical situation of disunity, but he maintained that the German people naturally loved their nation and that they should continue to do so even in the face of occupation. Inspired by Romanticism, Fichte believed that the love the German people had for their nation was naturally stronger than their feelings for any state:

People and fatherland in this sense, as a support and a guarantee of eternity on earth and as that which can be eternal here below, far transcend the State in the ordinary sense of the word, viz., the social order as comprehended by mere intellectual conception and as established and maintained under the guidance of this conception...That is why this love of fatherland must itself govern the State and be the supreme, final, and absolute authority.

(Fichte 1922, p. 138)

While the state has boundaries, Fichte observed, nations do not, as they exist where people speaking the same language reside: “Just as it is true beyond doubt that, wherever a separate language is found, there a separate nation exists, which has the right to take independent charge of its affairs and to govern itself” (Fichte 1922, p. 215). Aside from the appeal that such a view would later have for Germans in the early decades of the twentieth century, the assertion that the cultural and linguistic nation of Germans should eventually become a political entity was shared by Fichte’s contemporary, Hegel, who attached to it the concept of a world spirit that made the development of such a political entity a preordained inevitability.

While we can see the influence of Romanticism on Fichte’s views of the nation as defined by language and for which its people feel love, he was also an important figure in German Idealism. Fichte admired Kant’s work during his student days; he was so inspired by Kant’s philosophy that he composed a philosophical work which he submitted to Kant for his approval. Kant was impressed with Fichte’s work, and he assisted with its publication; due to a mistake with the publisher, however, Fichte was not credited as the author of the work, which scholars and students who read it assumed was Kant himself (Fichte 1922, p. xii). Of course, Kant and others eventually corrected the mistake, and Fichte was given credit for the work, and his rise within German philosophical circles began. It is not surprising to see that Fichte incorporated Kant’s Idealism in his lectures: “We have nothing more to do here with the stupid surprise of some, when we assert such a world of pure thought, and assert it, indeed, as the only possible world, and reject the world of sense; nor have we anything more to do with those who deny the former world altogether, or deny the possibility that the majority of the people at large can be brought into it” (Fichte 1922, p. 157). While Fichte did not deal with Idealism at length in his Reden an die deutsche Nation, Idealism was crucial to his views of the nation, as it eluded sensory perception (as opposed to the state), and so he had no patience for empiricism. Fichte spoke as if empiricism was so passé as to render its refutation superfluous, leaving summary dismissal as his only rhetorical option. The importance of Kantian Idealism, for Fichte, was its foundational role in the establishment of a “new education” for the German people:

As a rule, the world of the senses was formerly accepted as the only true and existing world; it was the first that was brought before the pupil in education. From it alone was he led on to thought and, for the most part, to thought that was about it and in its service. The new education exactly reverses this order. For it the world that is comprehended by thought is the only true and existing world, and into this it wishes to introduce the pupil from the very beginning. It is only to this world of the spirit that it wishes to link his whole love and his whole pleasure, so that with him there will inevitably begin and develop a life in it alone.

(Fichte 1922, p. 156)

So, it was to education that Fichte looked for the undoing of empiricism. Education, in fact, was the main purpose of his Reden, rather than the articulation of German nationalism, but assailing the dominance of empiricism was a secondary goal for Fichte. He looked to education as the best way of maintaining the German nation: “In a word, it is a total change of the existing system of education that I propose as the sole means of preserving the existence of the German nation” (Fichte 1922, p. 13). Fichte’s fear was that the political disunity of the German people would eventually lead to the decline and annihilation of the German nation, unless steps were taken to keep the nation together. While a German nation that was unified under one state authority was ideal for Fichte, such a prospect was uncertain at best in 1807, so he proposed his radical vision of a “German national education, such as never existed in any other nation” (Fichte 1922, p. 19). Just as the nation existed so long as its linguistic community existed, the absence of such a language signified that the nation had disappeared.

Fichte’s works made a significant impact on the thinking of American Transcendentalists, chiefly in the person of John Weiss, an intellectual who studied at Harvard with Thoreau, and whom Gura refers to as “Fichte’s chief American representative” (Gura 2007, p. 279). In secondary narratives on Transcendentalism, Fichte’s influence is described in terms of his credentials as a figure in both Romanticism and Idealism, such that Transcendentalism was the American manifestation of both. Fichte’s views, especially those articulated in the Reden, are also exceptionalist in character (though Americanists have not identified him as such), so that we can think of Fichte as an important figure in the increasingly exceptionalist tone in Transcendentalism, especially after 1850.

Despite the geopolitical disunity of the German nation, Fichte believed in its superiority over all other nations and states in the world, and the basis for this belief was the German language itself. Fichte distinguishes the German people from their Teutonic cousins as the former had maintained their language over time, while the latter succumbed to linguistic influences from other languages, chiefly the Romance languages:

With this our immediate task is performed, which was to find the characteristic that differentiates the German from the other peoples of Teutonic descent. The difference arose at the moment of the separation of the common stock and consists in this, that the German speaks a language which has been alive ever since it first issued from the force of nature, whereas the other Teutonic races speak a language which has movement on the surface only but is dead at the root.

(Fichte 1922, p. 68)

Fichte believes that language was not originally arbitrary in terms of “objects in language” and the “sounds from the organs of speech,” and the German language, of all the languages of the world, preserved this natural quality, prompting him to make the observation, “There is and can be but one single language” (Fichte 1922, p. 56). The German nation, comprised of the German people, was superior because the German language was the only natural language left in the world.12 The superiority of the German language gave its people an intellectual advantage over other peoples in the world:

In the first place, the German has a means of investigating his living language more thoroughly by comparing it with the closed Latin language, which differs very widely from his own in the development of verbal images; on the other hand, he has a means of understanding Latin more clearly in the same way. This is not possible to a member of the neo-Latin peoples, who fundamentally remains a captive in the sphere of one and the same language. Then the German, in learning the original Latin, at the same time acquires to a certain extent the derived languages also; and if he should learn the former more thoroughly than a foreigner does, which for the reason given the German will very likely be able to do, he at the same time learns to understand this foreigner’s own language far more thoroughly and to possess it far more intimately than does the foreigner himself who speaks it. Hence the German, if only he makes use of all his advantages, can always be superior to the foreigner and understand him fully, even better than the foreigner understands himself, and can translate the foreigner to the fullest extent. On the other hand, the foreigner can never understand the true German without a thorough and extremely laborious study of the German language, and there is no doubt that he will leave what is genuinely German untranslated.

(Fichte 1922, pp. 69–70)

For Fichte, Germans will always understand the cultures of non-Germans better than the latter can understand the German culture. Cultural and linguistic competency, however, are not the only advantages that the Germans enjoyed over the non-Germans of the world:

Where the people has a living language, mental culture influences life; where the contrary is the case, mental culture and life go their way independently of each other...From all this together it follows that in a nation of the former kind the mass of the people is capable of education, and the educators of such a nation test their discoveries on the people and wish to influence it; whereas in a nation of the latter kind the educated classes separate themselves from the people and regard it as nothing more than a blind instrument of their plans.

(Fichte 1922, pp. 70–71)

Fichte admits that even among the Germans there was a class of educated elites and everyone else, a social bifurcation seen in non-German nations as well. The key difference, however, is that the German people had the capacity to learn, which emanated from the German language, while the non-educated in non-German societies would always remain that way. Philosophy, which Fichte argues was another superior aspect of the German nation, would always be more relevant to the lives of even the uneducated as they could be coaxed out of their ignorance with education, while there would always be an unbridgeable gap between philosophy and the ordinary people of other nations (Fichte 1922, p. 110). While he emphasizes the social differences among non-German societies, he argues that such differences among Germans are illusory; the greatness of the German people, no matter how humble their social origins were, is what Fichte asserts makes them a superior nation. These claims of superiority must have sounded somewhat hollow at the time, even to Fichte himself, since the Kingdom of Prussia had just suffered defeat the year before he delivered his Reden, and the German nation was scattered among many distinct states, and Fichte was left wondering what a politically unified nation would someday do:

If only Germany at any rate had remained one, it would have rested on itself in the centre of the civilized world like the sun in the centre of the universe; it would have kept itself at peace, and with itself the adjacent countries; and without any artificial measures it would have kept everything in equilibrium by the mere fact of its natural existence. It was only the deceit of foreign countries that dragged Germany into their own lawlessness and their own disputes; it was they who taught Germany the treacherous notion of the balance of power, for they knew it to be one of the most effective means of deluding Germany as to its own true advantage and of keeping it in that state of delusion.

(Fichte 1922, p. 229)

6. Fichte and Kokugaku

Peter Dale argues that German philosophy exerted a considerable influence on Japanese intellectuals in both the prewar and postwar eras, going so far as to argue that Nihonjinron amounted to “[t]he Japanisation [sic] of German nationalism”; while exhibiting its own distinctive traits, Nihonjinron was nonetheless heavily indebted to the “negative German tradition” (Dale 1986, pp. 73, 213). Aside from Dale’s obvious association of Nihonjinron with Nazism via homology, he suggests that the profound “affinities” between Nihonjinron and “German ideologies in the heyday of nationalism” are more than merely coincidental (Dale 1986, p. 134). Japanese intellectuals, he believes, recognized the ways in which their ideas resonated with those articulated in German nationalistic writings, even if they never admitted it as such. Dale sees commonalities between Nihonjinron ideas and those of Fichte, especially regarding language, an issue that was particularly important to Fichte (Dale 1986, p. 73). It is true that Japanese intellectuals studied German philosophy assiduously after the Meiji Restoration (1868) for several decades until the advent of the First World War. In his lectures at Tokyo Imperial University on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, Haga Yaichi (1867–1927) did acknowledge affinities between Japanese and German thought, not in the context of nationalism, but in the context of philology. These affinities (via analogy) with German philology were the strongest in the case of Kokugaku, which Haga interpreted as proof that the Japanese could establish a modern state in much the same way as the Germans had done in 1871, as philology was instrumental in the establishment of the intellectual foundations for the German Empire. Such was also the case for those Japanese intellectuals who contributed to Nihonjinron in both the prewar and postwar eras, namely, rather than recognize the similarity of their ideas and those of German intellectuals, like Fichte, they recognized the similarity between the ideas of Kokugaku and those of nineteenth-century German thinkers. In fact, one could argue that the analogous similarity between Fichte’s ideas and those of Kokugaku scholars like Mabuchi and Norinaga, in the absence of any direct homologous influence, was more profound than the similarity between Fichte’s philosophy and Transcendentalism, even though there was a direct connection between the two.

Since Fichte lauded the German language as the world’s only “living language”, he was concerned with any foreign linguistic influences, as it would dilute the power of the German language and lead to “degradations” in the “ethical standard” of the German nation (Fichte 1922, p. 65). Fichte cites the example of other “Teutonic” peoples who had adopted one or more of the Romance languages, as well as the example of the use of foreign loanwords in German itself as evidence for his assertions. Kamo no Mabuchi made nearly identical observations about the Japanese language and literary Chinese. Literary Chinese for Mabuchi, and for Kokugaku scholars in subsequent generations, was a foreign language, even if it came from the brush of a Japanese person; without recognizing its foreign origins, those Japanese officials and scholars who used literary Chinese were manipulated into a mode of thinking that was also foreign, which Mabuchi referred to as the “Chinese mind”. Mabuchi was also critical of the many loanwords from Chinese that the Japanese used in his own time, referring to it as zokugo (“vulgar language”), a feature of Japanese that endures to this day (McNally 2005, p. 21). He believed that the spoken language of Japanese antiquity before the arrival of foreigners from the Asian mainland was eminently natural, so that words and meanings were in perfect harmony with each other; the relationship between words and meanings was not arbitrary (McNally 2005, p. 19). Chinese was opposed to the natural language of the Japanese, and he associated Chinese with artificiality or what Norinaga referred to as sakui (“something created”). Fichte also operated within the nature/artifice binary in his own analysis of the German language:

So long as we are German we appear to ourselves men like any others; when half or more than half of our vocabulary is non-German, and when we adopt conspicuous customs and wear conspicuous clothes which seem to come from foreign parts, then we fancy ourselves distinguished. But the summit of our triumph is reached when we are no longer taken for Germans, but actually for Spaniards or Englishmen, whichever of the two happens to be fashionable at the moment. We are right. Naturalness on the German side, arbitrariness and artificiality on the foreign side, are the fundamental differences.

(Fichte 1922, pp. 82–83)

Fichte insists that literature would be a cornerstone of his proposal for a “new education”. A nation’s literary legacy was the key to apprehending and appreciating its cultural distinctiveness, especially in the face of foreign cultural encroachments: “[T]hat even if our political independence were lost, we should still keep our language and our literature, and thereby always remain a nation; so we could easily console ourselves for the loss of everything else” (Fichte 1922, p. 213). The importance of a society’s literary tradition was also something that Kokugaku scholars advocated, for which Haga Yaichi heaped great praise on them. For Kokugaku scholars of the Tokugawa period, Japan’s literary history was both long and rich, but not everything within it was worthy of preservation, since only those works composed in ancient or classical Japanese were spared historical oblivion. The same was true of Fichte, namely that only works composed in German preserved the German national heritage, and not the works of German authors composed in other languages. Of particular importance to Mabuchi and his followers was ancient Japanese verse, especially the eighth-century anthology, Man’yōshū (Collection of Ten-Thousand Verses; 759 CE). Norinaga and his followers also acknowledged prose works, such as the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters; 712 CE) and the Genji monogatari, but Norinaga argued that even prose works were related to poetry; in particular, the Genji monogatari embodied mono no aware, a concept that scholars had mostly associated with classical verse (McNally 2005, p. 32). Fichte argues for the centrality of verse within the German literary tradition as well: “Of the means of introducing into the lives of all the thought that had begun in the life of the individual, the highest and best is poetry” (Fichte 1922, p. 78). For Norinaga, verse served as the means by which one conveys one’s feelings and emotions, and Fichte’s observations in the Reden are not in conflict with Norinaga on this issue. Unlike Fichte, Norinaga was not an Idealist thinker, since Fichte viewed poetry as communicating not only one’s inner sentiments, but also one’s ideas, which “cannot be done except by images of sense and, moreover, by an act of creation extending beyond the previous range of sensuous imagery” (Fichte 1922, p. 78). Thus, the blending of Romanticism and Idealism is something we see even in Fichte’s theory of poetry. Only a “living language”, of which German was the sole example, was capable of manifesting ideas in verse: “To such a language, therefore, poetry is the highest and best means of flooding the life of all with the spiritual culture that has been attained” (Fichte 1922, p. 79). The poetry produced by other cultures in other languages, for Fichte, could never exhibit such a connection with Idealism. In the Japanese case, the composition of classical Chinese verse (kanshi) was ancient, even if its origins were not as old as Japanese verse. Kokugaku scholars believed that knowledge of the “ancient Way” (archaic Shinto) was only possible via the study and composition of Japanese verse; for such a purpose, the composition and study of classical Chinese verse was virtually useless. The distinction that Fichte drew between German and non-German languages, especially the Romance languages, was something that he applied to poetry as well, and the same is true for Mabuchi, Norinaga, and other Kokugaku scholars in their attitudes toward the Japanese and Chinese languages.

Fichte advocates for the centrality of education in the preservation of the German nation, and his Reden were oriented primarily to these issues. “The present problem”, he writes, “the first task, we said, is simply to preserve the existence and continuance of what is German” (Fichte 1922, p. 152). Fichte’s fear was that the lack of a politically unified German nation-state, coupled with the adoption of either foreign loanwords into German or the use of non-German languages, had brought the German nation to the brink of annihilation. Kokugaku scholars had similar concerns about the preservation of Japanese culture, since foreign teachings had become so dominant and prevalent in Japanese society that the Japanese people themselves could no longer distinguish between what was foreign and what was authentically Japanese. The Japanese Confucian, Matsumiya Kanzan (1686–1780), spoke of “loyalty” to Japan, by which he meant that scholars should not privilege China over Japan, and that this was the distinguishing feature of Kokugaku. Mabuchi and Norinaga taught their followers to uncover and explicate the ancient Way, as Japan’s authentic culture before the arrival of foreign teachings, in their work on Japanese antiquity. Mabuchi and Norinaga did not argue for the preservation of the ancient Way so much as its extraction from the ancient sources, which could only be accomplished with the proper mindset, namely the Yamatogokoro (“Japanese heart”). Fichte, therefore, feels a sense of urgency concerning the impending decline of the German nation at some point in the future; for Kokugaku scholars, the decline of the ancient Way was already at hand.

For Fichte, the preservation of the German nation could not proceed without efforts to preserve the German language, and on this issue of linguistic preservation there is some common ground with Kokugaku. This issue also, however, represents significant differences as well with the Kokugaku scholars, as the canonical figures of the eighteenth century never argued for the preservation of the Japanese nation. Although Tokugawa Japan was politically unified under the shogunate, which nominally served the imperial court, it was also divided among the more than two hundred domains or han. For many of the larger domains, their dimensions reached the borders of the provinces or kuni, so it was not uncommon to speak of one’s home province rather than of one’s domain. The Japanese also used the same word for province to signify political/cultural entities outside of Japan, so that kuni also meant “realm”, a meaning that also applied to Japan when speaking about Japan as a whole. Thus, when Matsumiya Kanzan argued for loyalty to Japan, he used kuni (whose Chinese ideograph can also be read as koku) to signify Japan, so that Kokugaku for him meant not just learning about Japan but learning about the realm. The realm for Kanzan, and all others who chose to use the term Kokugaku, like Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), was defined more in cultural terms rather than in political terms, in much the same way as Fichte’s use of nation. Kokugaku scholars did not view the realm in linguistic terms, however, but this is understandable, since there was no widespread use of spoken languages in Japan other than Japanese, and they addressed the issue of Chinese loanwords by scrupulously using archaic Japanese words in their writings, as well as minimizing their use of Chinese ideographs in favor of characters from Japan’s syllabary. For Fichte, the political threat to the German nation was a fait accompli, and so he focused his efforts on the various cultural threats to the nation. For Kokugaku scholars, the cultural threat to Japan had been ongoing since antiquity, for more than a thousand years; after Commodore Matthew Perry’s (1794–1858) arrival in 1853, however, the political threat to Japan was undeniable.13 Like Fichte, Kokugaku scholars, as well as other Tokugawa intellectuals, referred to the realm, but they did not see the need to furnish their followers with a precise political definition for kuni, most likely because they simply saw no need for it.

Hegel argued that there was a divine plan for every nation in the world, either to achieve independence as a nation-state, or to succumb to conquest by another nation-state. Fichte also believed there was a connection between a nation’s destiny and the divine, but the German nation had a divine status unlike those of other nations:

Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality—then, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be; and only a man who either entirely lacks the notion of the rule of law and divine order, or else is an obdurate enemy thereto, could take upon himself to want to interfere with that law, which is the highest law in the spiritual world.

(Fichte 1922, p. 232)

Since Fichte believed that the German nation was superior, he certainly also believed that it was the destiny of the German nation to realize the divine, but this development would only occur as a result of the will and determination of the German people; without their resolve and hard work, the divine potential of the German nation would never become a reality. Fichte had more than a small role in this effort, as his Reden were intended to exhort the German people into action. Like Fichte, Kokugaku scholars were also convinced of Japan’s divine status, which was signified by the term shinkoku (“realm of the kami” or “divine realm”). Ultimately, Japan’s superiority emanated from its status as a shinkoku, meaning that it was the first realm created by the kami, and whose imperial line was descended from the kami. While foreign incursions certainly posed a threat to Japan’s political independence during the final years of the shogunate, the adherents of Kokugaku believed that Japan’s divine status was unchanged since antiquity, and that the kami would ultimately come to its aid when its need was most keen, as the expulsion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century had demonstrated. For Fichte, foreign interactions that were clearly detrimental to the German nation, like the defeat of the Kingdom of Prussia, threatened the German nation with extinction, its divine connection notwithstanding. Thus, Fichte warns those who would interfere in the realization of Germany’s divine status against breaking “the highest law in the spiritual world”. He believed that the union of the German nation with the divine was to come, while Kokugaku scholars, and even those who were not associated with Kokugaku,14 believed that their kami, who were the reason for Japan’s divine status, would always be there to preserve and protect Japan against foreign threats.

7. Ethnic Nationalism and Transcendentalism

While Kokugaku scholars did not hold universalism, which they associated with Buddhism and Confucianism, in very high regard, and they actively sought to undermine it in their scholarly work, the ideas of cosmopolitanism in general, and of Japan as a cosmopolitan society specifically, were also anathema to their particularistic conception of Japan. At the same time, the belief in the existence of an American ethnicity, namely that the American identity was both a civic and an ethnic one, contradicts not only the cosmopolitan15 and universalist credentials of Transcendentalism, but also those of the United States itself. The belief in and assertion of an ethnic identity, in other words, were issues that we would normally associate with Kokugaku and not with Transcendentalism, so that these issues should bolster the narrative of the fundamental differences between these two intellectual movements. Eric Kaufmann’s work, however, demonstrates that there was an inherent hypocrisy in the American commitment to cosmopolitanism, a phenomenon of which the Transcendentalists were a part, since some of its most prominent advocates also believed that the American identity was essentially an ethnic one, rather than a civic one, which was the avenue to Americanness for which all immigrants were legally eligible (see Kaufmann 2004). The issue of ethnicity, which was so crucial to Kokugaku, was actually a commonality that it shared with Transcendentalism, rather than a critical difference.

Emerson himself was aware of the contradiction between the Transcendentalist embrace of cosmopolitanism and the popular belief among Americans that they were an Anglo-Saxon people. Whitman, whose poetry was inspired by Emerson’s philosophy, indulged his interests in the ethnic origins of the American people by dabbling in Anglo-Saxon philology, leading him to conclude that the English language was unlike any other language in the world (Kaufmann 1999, p. 453). Emerson referred to the simultaneous support of these opposing views among not just the Transcendentalists but among Americans in general as “double-consciousness”, a contradiction that Emerson tried to reconcile in his own writings (Kaufmann 2002, p. 114). The concept of double-consciousness, which Emerson insightfully articulated in 1860, helps to explain the disjuncture between the universalist ideals upon which the United States was founded, famously encapsulated by the phrase “all men are created equal”, and the everyday reality of the “ethnic discourse” of the Anglo-Saxon “dominant ethnicity”, which resulted in nativism during the 1840s (Kaufmann 2002, p. 114; Kaufmann 2004, p. 42). Although Emerson called for a resolution of this contradiction, he was never able to do it himself, since the rejection of the idea of an American ethnicity, and the full acceptance of cosmopolitanism that such a rejection would enable, was essentially “unthinkable to nineteenth-century writers” (Kaufmann 2004, p. 42). Eric Kaufmann argues that this tension between the real and the ideal in the American political consciousness, symbolized by Emerson’s notion of double-consciousness, endured well into the twentieth century (Kaufmann 2002, p. 114).

Kaufmann argues that the Transcendentalist silence on the issue of American ethnicity should not be interpreted as a “rebellion”, dedicated as the Transcendentalists were to universalism, but rather an intellectual “disengagement” with it (Kaufmann 2004, p. 43). In other words, the Transcendentalists did not become ethnocentric over time, even as the tone of their writings became more exceptionalist; they were ethnocentric at the very founding of their movement. Prior to 1850, Transcendentalism was still largely a religious movement whose followers were closely tied to Unitarianism, focusing on issues of scriptural interpretation and the application of German Idealism to Christian theology. Once slavery moved to the political forefront of Transcendentalism, in the decade leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War, its leading figures, like Emerson, had to confront “the imagery that sustained the myths and symbols of American dominant ethnicity” (Kaufmann 2004, p. 43). Abolition forced its supporters, like the Transcendentalists, to come to grips with the notion that the only true Americans were those of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, the logic of which dictated that slaves of African ancestry were naturally excluded as authentic Americans, as were the indigenous natives, the Catholic immigrants of German and Irish ancestry, and those of other non-WASP groups. The idea that only those of Anglo-Saxon descent were real Americans could ideologically sustain, and likely did sustain, the continued enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants, so that the sine qua non for the ideological undoing of slavery was to undermine the ethnic equation of Anglo-Saxon with American. At the height of the abolitionist movement, Emerson penned his famous work, English Traits, in which he observed that the Americans were the Anglo-Saxon heirs of the English (Kaufmann 2004, p. 31). For Emerson, the Americans were obviously a derivative ethnicity from an original English stock, and both peoples had Anglo-Saxon ancestors.16 According to Emerson, authentic Americans traced their ancestry back to England, interestingly not to Great Britain or the United Kingdom, polities that included the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish, for whom Emerson had far less praise and from whom he believed the American ethnicity did not derive.

While the Transcendentalists were not nativists, the followers of a movement which they generally opposed, they were not wholly committed to cosmopolitanism either, and in this way, they overlapped intellectually with their contemporaries in the Kokugaku movement in Japan. It is worth repeating that the followers of Kokugaku never pledged their support for universalist ideas, such as cosmopolitanism, something that many Japanese people today still arguably do not support. Rather than view the position of the Kokugaku scholars as hypocritical, which is the way Kaufmann views the Transcendentalists, we should acknowledge that their position on Japanese ethnicity was at least consistent; there was no analogous concept of “double-consciousness” among the scholars of Kokugaku. Similarly, there was no tension or intellectual contradiction over the issue of ethnicity in Fichte’s philosophy either, despite his universalist and Idealist credentials. As one of the main philosophical inspirations for Transcendentalism, it should not surprise us to see the victory of the particularism of ethnicity over the universalism of German Idealism in the thought of the Transcendentalists, as the same victory is readily apparent in Fichte’s contributions to German nationalism.

Fichte’s focus on the German language as the foundation of the German nation by itself leaves open the possibility that people of non-German ethnicities can master German and thereby become members of the nation. He argues that it is possible for Germans to learn any of the Romance languages, with the implication that they could become members of the French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish nations (Fichte 1922, pp. 69–71). While admitting that non-Germans successfully learn German, their mastery is never as complete as the German mastery of the Romance languages (Fichte 1922, p. 70). Since the non-German’s mastery of German is always incomplete, their membership in the German nation is fundamentally impossible for Fichte. Language was not just a language for Fichte, it also functioned as a marker of ethnicity. As Arash Abizadeh observes of Fichte, “Ultimately, then, the motivating nation is natural in two senses: it possesses a natural boundary to mark members off from non-members (language), and it is passed on through time via descent (ethnicity)” (Abizadeh 2005, p. 357). Ethnic descent, then, was at the heart of Fichte’s views on German nationalism, even though he was one of Europe’s prominent Idealist (and universalist) thinkers. The fact that his particularistic fascination with the German people co-existed alongside his universalistic support for Idealism should serve as a conceptual model for understanding the same phenomenon among the Transcendentalists.

8. Conclusions

Any potential comparison between Kokugaku and Transcendentalism seems, at first glance, rather futile, and the classification of Kokugaku as nativism by many scholars in the field of Japanese studies has much to do with this. If one thinks of Kokugaku as a movement, and thinks of nativism in the same way, then the correspondence between the two phenomena seems even more appropriate. Even if one were to insist that Kokugaku was but one institutional form of Tokugawa nativism, the fact that the same could be said of Know-Nothingism in the case of American nativism preserves the sense that Kokugaku and nativism have a natural affinity for one another that precludes any other comparative analysis. Indeed, the obvious differences between Kokugaku and Transcendentalism are impossible to deny.

The Transcendentalists asked universal questions for which they sought universal answers, while Kokugaku scholars associated such universalist ambitions with foreign institutions, which forced the Japanese to yield their own traditions to the implied superiority of foreign cultures. The Transcendentalists were confident in their philosophical conclusions because they directed their analytical focus inward, by developing their intuitive capacity which they believed was divinely bestowed on all human beings. It was human intuition, they believed, that transcended space and time, uniting human beings no matter where or when they lived. The followers of Kokugaku were familiar with a philosophy based on intuitive insight, specifically, the thought of Wang Yangming, a Chinese Confucian philosopher whose ideas had already garnered a following among the Tokugawa Japanese. Although an influential thinker, Wang Yangming emerged from the ranks of philosophers in the orthodox tradition of Song Confucianism, a universalist tradition that the followers of Kokugaku had already decided was pernicious for the study of Japanese antiquity; Wang Yangming’s innovative emphasis on intuition was no innovation at all for the scholars of Kokugaku,17 and its critical role in the universalist character of Confucianism made it even more suspicious. While the intuitive search for cosmic truth was an endeavor which the Transcendentalists believed would ultimately culminate in social reform, it had to begin with the conscience of each person individually. The emphasis on individualism within Transcendentalism resonated with nineteenth-century Americans, who, as Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, had already distinguished themselves as strong, independent individuals by comparison with their European counterparts. Frederick Jackson Turner noticed the same strong individualism among Americans at the end of the nineteenth century; rather than conclude that Transcendentalism inspired Americans to adopt individualism, it is more likely that the Transcendentalists tapped into a cultural trend that had already formed. In this way, the emphasis on individualism, and its related values like self-reliance, essentially guaranteed that Transcendentalism would eventually reach the status as the quintessential American philosophy by the end of the nineteenth century. Kokugaku, by comparison, was less the embodiment of Japanese culture and more the attempt to articulate the essence of that culture.

Despite these important differences between the two institutions, Kokugaku and Transcendentalism had surprisingly much in common. The literary and religious connections that were characteristic of Transcendentalism was also true of Kokugaku, even if their trajectories were different, namely that Transcendentalism was initially a religious movement that became more literary and philosophical over time, while Kokugaku’s ties with literary matters18 were strong in the eighteenth century, giving way to more of an emphasis on Shinto cosmology and ritual in the nineteenth, culminating in the establishment of State Shinto in the Meiji period (see Wachutka 2013). Issues related to language and philology were also important to the followers of both Kokugaku and Transcendentalism. Seeking to shake off the dominance of Buddhist and Confucian interpretations of Japanese antiquity, Mabuchi, Norinaga, and their students and disciples, used careful philological methodologies so that the Japanese people could learn about their ancient heritage without any foreign distortions or biases. In the process of their scholarly work on antiquity, the Kokugaku scholars were confronted with the very different languages of ancient Japan, contemporary Japan, and ancient China, as well as with the issue of written versus spoken language, which forced them to develop a theory of language that privileged the language spoken in Japanese antiquity as natural, as opposed to other languages, including the spoken languages of their own time, which they believed were artificial. The Transcendentalists were similarly intrigued with philological matters through their interests in biblical exegesis. For them, philology meant the study of Hebrew and ancient Greek; as there were few in the United States who knew these languages well enough to pronounce on the interpretation of the Bible, they turned to the work of German scholars. They also developed a theory of language that was based on a non-arbitrary, natural correspondence between words and their meanings, even though they did not necessarily believe that any one language was more natural than others, an idea that was advocated by one of their main Idealist inspirations, Fichte (Gura 2007, p. 42).

The interest in nature for the Transcendentalists was not limited to discussions of language. Emerson believed that an individual communed with their intuitive insight best when interacting with the natural environment, something that Thoreau put into practice on land owned by Emerson at Walden Pond. Both Mabuchi and Norinaga championed the strong links between the people living in Japan’s ancient past and nature, which they associated with the kami. Foreign doctrines ruptured this link between nature and the Japanese people, resulting in Japan’s long decline from its ancient state of spiritual perfection. As a people living in harmony with nature, the ancient Japanese, according to Mabuchi and Norinaga, were more in touch with their feelings and emotions, to which they gave expression in poetry. Kokugaku scholars associated the suppression of one’s emotions with Buddhism and Confucianism, an act that contravened the will of the kami, since it was the kami who had endowed humanity with the capacity to feel strong emotions. In formulating his famous interpretation of mono no aware, Norinaga argued that it was natural to feel moved by emotional situations, and to express these feelings in poetry, of course, but to act on them as well (See his Shibun yōryō (Essentials of Murasaki’s Writing), Uiyamabumi (Beginning Mountain Steps), and Naobi no mitama (The August Spirit of Naobi). The validation of aesthetics, including poetry, and the emotions was important to the Transcendentalists, as well. By rejecting Lockean empiricism, the Transcendentalists embraced knowledge that was gained in more subjective ways that included the emotions and aesthetics (Gura 2007, p. 55).

Aside from the interesting similarities and even differences between Kokugaku and Transcendentalism, we should note the critical ways in which they occupied analogous positions in their respective contexts. They were both cultural institutions that figure prominently in the intellectual histories of their respective countries. Many Transcendentalists, especially its leading intellects like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and even Fuller, espoused views asserting America’s distinctiveness, if not outright superiority, that we can characterize as exceptionalist. For this reason, scholars of American exceptionalism today often include Transcendentalism in their narrative histories, even if the role of Transcendentalism was minor by comparison with those of other groups or institutions, such as the Puritans. By contrast, Kokugaku, while a significant part of the intellectual history of Tokugawa Japan, has heretofore been classified as nativism, not as one of its major or minor actors, but as nativism itself. As is clear by now, Kokugaku scholars formulated ideas that were no less exceptionalist than those of their Transcendentalist counterparts, so that Kokugaku must be included in the history of Japanese exceptionalism, as is the case with its modern-day and homologous successor, Nihonjinron. The example of Transcendentalism helps us to conceptualize the position of Kokugaku within the history of exceptionalism. Just as Transcendentalism is never interpreted as synonymous with exceptionalism, this should also be the case with the relationship of Kokugaku to Japanese exceptionalism. Kokugaku should not be seen as identical with exceptionalism. Kokugaku was one form of Tokugawa exceptionalism, the story of which is but a part of the broader history of Japanese exceptionalism.

The universalist aspirations of the Transcendentalists should have made the issue of ethnocentrism a significant intellectual cleavage between their movement and Kokugaku. Indeed, as their general ambivalence toward the idea of an American ethnicity during the 1830s and 1840s would seem to indicate, the Transcendentalists embraced the cosmopolitanism of the nation’s founding and opposed the nativism of the Know-Nothings. As the urgency of abolitionism engaged the political energies of the Transcendentalists after 1850, the fact that they had to confront the issue of American ethnicity was something that they could no longer ignore, and they revealed their beliefs in the Anglo-Saxon identity of authentic Americans. Emerson himself, who upheld his own belief in the Anglo-Saxon identity of Americans, was aware of the inherent hypocrisy at the heart of not only Transcendentalism, but also of American intellectual life in general. In fact, the belief in the Anglo-Saxon origins of the American people was something that the Transcendentalists shared with the Know-Nothings. In the case of Kokugaku, the particularistic orientation of its scholarship understandably pushed them into an embrace of Japanese ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism was, for many scholars of Japanese studies today, one of the most distinctive aspects of Kokugaku, and was undoubtedly a factor in its classification as nativism. Rather than a critical difference, ethnocentrism was actually a commonality between Transcendentalism and Kokugaku.

By not fully believing in true cosmopolitanism, the followers of Transcendentalism ultimately succumbed to ethnocentrism, and this fact has profound implications for American exceptionalism itself. Specifically, American exceptionalism, of which Transcendentalism was a part, has historically functioned as a set of ideological assumptions for the dominant ethnic group in America, namely those of English ancestry. Rather than distinguish between American and Japanese exceptionalism, ethnocentrism brings the two together. As the discussion of Fichte demonstrated, such ethnocentric thinking was a significant component of German nationalism, such that it should also be classified as exceptionalism. Such ethnocentric beliefs, therefore, were common in German, American, and Japanese exceptionalism, and is perhaps a hallmark of exceptionalism more generally, rather than a distinctive feature of any one form of it. The attitudes toward ethnicity demonstrated by the Transcendentalists made their ideas typical for their day, such that a true commitment to cosmopolitanism was the exception. In a similar manner, the connection between ethnocentrism and exceptionalism is perhaps more common than not, so that American exceptionalism was a rather representative example of it, instead of an exceptional one. To put it another way, the ethnocentric underpinnings of American exceptionalism made it unexceptional by comparison with Japanese exceptionalism, and likely by comparison with examples from other cultures and societies as well.

The discussion of Fichte’s ruminations on German nationalism bring to light the profound (analogous) affinities between Kokugaku and Romanticism and Idealism. The overlap between Fichte’s ideas and those of the Transcendentalists is noteworthy as well, but the relationship between the two sides was one of (homologous) influence; the same cannot be said of Kokugaku. While Emerson was comfortable with the characterization of Transcendentalism as an American form of Idealism, it would be strange to make the same observation of Kokugaku as a Japanese form of either Idealism or Romanticism, its striking commonalities notwithstanding. Idealism and Romanticism, while exhibiting the hallmarks of emic categories, have not been used as etic categories with non-Western applications, owing to their roots in a specifically European context. The same can be said of Transcendentalism; its usage has been limited to the emic rather than broadened to include the etic. It would be odd, in other words, to describe Kokugaku as a kind of Japanese Transcendentalism, or even to describe the intuitionism of the Wang Yangming school of Confucianism in that way. The etic limitations of terms like Romanticism, Idealism, and Transcendentalism are not true for the concepts of nativism and exceptionalism. Although there were likely no such etic ambitions for either concept when it was created, both have since been applied in etic ways to other cultures and to other societies, including Japan. Of the two, exceptionalism is more relevant to the ways in which we understand Kokugaku.