Episode 450 - Gimme That Old Time Religion

Patreon's link support appears to be broken again, so the link to the episode and show notes is here.

Hirata Atsutane is another one of those figures--like Fujiwara no Teika-- I've been meaning to get to for some time now. Obviously, Hirata's approach to kokugaku was pretty influential during the late Edo period, as all the language from that time about revering the emperor might suggest. However, the school's rapid fall from grace in the early 1870s also meant that when it comes to the actual Meiji period, it's more of a road not traveled than anything else.

However, when I decided to do an episode on the fascinating Matsuo Taseko, who will be our subject next week, I quickly realized that little of her story made sense without some understanding of who Hirata was. That was when I settled on a sort of "semi" two-part series, with one episode on the Hirata school and then the biography of Matsuo Taseko.

I think one interesting aspect of this week's episode that I wish I had spent a bit more time on is the idea of the Hirata school as a type of religious movement. Anne Walthall's comparison of the Hirata school to Mormonism or the Baha'i faith is a very intriguing one, and there are absolutely elements of his teachings that resemble a sort of "Shinto revivalism" and which presage the "separate Buddhism and Shinto" movement of the early Meiji period.  It's also a good reminder of something that's important when studying history; our modern concepts about what is religion vs. a scholarly movement are not objectively true categories, and it's perfectly possible to have something that straddles those lines or defies them outright. Kokugaku as taught by Hirata was a type of scholarship, but it was also a type of religion--and that ambiguity is part of what makes it interesting!