Analogous Exceptionalisms within Japanese and American History: Kokugaku and Transcendentalism

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...

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1. VerfasserIn: McNally, Mark 1968- (VerfasserIn)
Medienart: Elektronisch Aufsatz
Sprache:Englisch
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Veröffentlicht: MDPI 2022
In: Religions
Jahr: 2022, Band: 13, Heft: 5
weitere Schlagwörter:B Fichte
B Unitarianism
B Kokugaku
B Ralph Waldo Emerson
B Shinto
B Exceptionalism
B Henry David Thoreau
B Transcendentalism
B Motoori Norinaga
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Zusammenfassung: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.
ISSN:2077-1444
Enthält:Enthalten in: Religions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3390/rel13050409