Motoori Norinaga

Life and Intellectual Context

Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) was a central figure of kokugaku (National Learning) in the Edo period of Japan. Born in the merchant town of Matsuzaka, Ise Province, he was adopted into a merchant household and initially trained for commercial life. However, Norinaga early on developed a marked interest in literature and scholarship, reading both classical Japanese texts and the Neo-Confucian materials that dominated official education.

In his twenties he travelled to Kyoto to study medicine, which became his livelihood, but he simultaneously pursued classical learning. Norinaga encountered the writings of Kamo no Mabuchi, an earlier kokugaku scholar, and became convinced that returning to the language and sensibility of ancient Japanese works would reveal a distinctively Japanese way of being that had been obscured by centuries of Chinese influence. Though he only met Mabuchi once in person (in the famous “one-night lesson” of 1763), that encounter confirmed his intellectual direction.

Norinaga practiced as a physician in Matsuzaka while devoting his nights to philological and exegetical work. He gathered pupils and corresponded widely, building an influential circle of disciples. He remained in his hometown for most of his life, rarely holding official positions, yet by the time of his death in 1801 he was recognized as one of the leading interpreters of Japan’s ancient classics.

Philology and the Study of the Classics

Norinaga’s scholarship is inseparable from his philological method. He argued that accurate understanding of early Japanese texts required painstaking reconstruction of their original language, pronunciation, and usage. This conviction guided his major works:

• Kojikiden (Commentary on the Kojiki): His magnum opus, begun in the 1760s and completed over several decades, is an extensive commentary on the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters, 712 CE), long considered Japan’s oldest extant chronicle. Norinaga sought to clarify difficult passages, establish authentic readings, and explicate myths, genealogies, and archaic expressions. He treated the Kojiki not merely as a historical record but as a privileged window into the age of the gods and the untainted heart of early Japan.

• Studies of the Manyōshū: Norinaga also wrote on the Manyōshū, the great 8th-century anthology of waka poetry. He examined diction, orthography, and prosody to restore what he considered the direct emotional expressiveness of early Japanese verse, prior to the more mannered court poetry of later eras.

• Shibun yōryō and grammars: He produced systematic treatments of Japanese grammar and literary style, arguing that clear grasp of indigenous grammatical patterns was essential to understanding the ancient texts on their own terms, rather than through categories drawn from Chinese.

Norinaga criticized prevailing Sinological approaches, which, in his view, read Japanese works as if they were extensions of Chinese classics and moral philosophy. He maintained that such methods imposed alien conceptual schemes, especially Confucian ethical and metaphysical frameworks, onto texts that originally arose from a different sensibility and religious experience.

Key Ideas: Mono no Aware, Shinto, and National Learning

A central concept in Norinaga’s thought is mono no aware, often translated as “the pathos of things” or the poignant sensitivity to the transience and beauty of the world. For Norinaga, mono no aware described:

• a fundamental emotional responsiveness to events and things,
• a capacity to feel sorrow, joy, and tenderness at impermanence,
• and an especially Japanese mode of aesthetic and moral awareness.

He argued that classical works such as The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) exemplified mono no aware. Against critics who condemned Genji as immoral or frivolous, Norinaga claimed that it profoundly revealed the depths of human feeling and the workings of the heart. He thus recast the value of literature: its significance lay not in didactic moral instruction but in its ability to express authentically felt emotion.

In religious terms, Norinaga developed a distinctive interpretation of Shinto. Reading the Kojiki as a primary theological source, he maintained that:

• The kami (deities) are real, active presences, not merely allegories or moral symbols.
• The imperial line traces a direct descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu, giving Japan a uniquely divine origin.
• Human beings originally possessed a “true heart” (magokoro), a pure and spontaneous responsiveness in tune with the kami and the natural world.

He held that this original purity had been clouded by the introduction of Buddhism and Confucianism, which, in his view, overemphasized rationalization, moral calculation, and metaphysical abstraction. Norinaga was not always strictly anti-Buddhist in practice, but his theoretical writings often present Buddhism and Chinese thought as foreign overlays that obscured Japan’s native way.

In the broader project of kokugaku, Norinaga’s work contributed to a re-centering of:

• the Japanese language over classical Chinese as the medium of high scholarship;
• indigenous myths and poetry over imported classics as primary sources of wisdom;
• and the emotional and particular over the universalizing ethical doctrines emphasized in Confucianism.

Supporters have seen this as a significant attempt to articulate an early form of cultural self-understanding, while critics have pointed out that Norinaga’s emphasis on national uniqueness and divine imperial origins could be, and later was, mobilized for nationalist political projects.

Legacy and Influence

Norinaga’s ideas exerted a wide influence, both directly through his pupils and indirectly through later movements. His disciple Hirata Atsutane expanded kokugaku into a more explicitly activist religious and political ideology in the 19th century, contributing to the intellectual climate that favored the Meiji Restoration and the restoration of imperial rule.

During the Meiji and prewar periods, Norinaga’s emphasis on the sacred origins of the emperor and Japan’s unique way of feeling was selectively appropriated in support of State Shinto and imperial nationalism. Some modern scholars therefore approach his work with caution, distinguishing between his philological achievements and later ideological uses.

In literary studies, Norinaga’s analyses of Genji and the Manyōshū helped shape modern understandings of classical Japanese aesthetics, especially the prominence of emotion, impermanence, and subtle nuance in Japanese literature. His theory of mono no aware became a key term in both Japanese and international discussions of Japanese culture.

Contemporary scholarship tends to view Norinaga as:

• a pioneering philologist whose methods prefigured, in some respects, modern historicist and linguistic approaches;
• a major theorist of aesthetics, foregrounding emotion and affect;
• and a complex figure in the history of Japanese nationalism and religious thought.

While evaluations vary—some stressing his contribution to cultural self-reflection, others underscoring the risks of essentializing national character—Motoori Norinaga remains a central reference point for understanding the intellectual history of early modern Japan and the formation of modern ideas about Japanese identity, language, and tradition.