Download E-books When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane's Ethnography of the Other World by Wilburn Hansen (2008-11-30) PDF

By Wilburn Hansen

Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) has been the topic of various experiences that target his significance to nationalist politics and jap highbrow and social heritage. even though renowned as an ideologue of eastern nationwide studying (Kokugaku), Atsutane's importance as a non secular philosopher has been mostly neglected. His prolific writings on supernatural matters have by no means been completely analyzed in English previously. In while Tengu speak, Wilburn Hansen makes a speciality of Senkyo ibun (1822), a voluminous paintings centering on Atsutane's interviews with a fourteen-year-old Edo road urchin named Kozo Torakichi who claimed to be an apprentice tengu, a supernatural creature of eastern folklore. Hansen uncovers intimately how Atsutane hired a planned approach to ethnographic inquiry that labored to control and stimulate Torakichi's surreal descriptions of daily life in a supernatural realm, what Atsutane termed the opposite global. Hansen's research and research of the method starts off with the speculation that Atsutane's venture used to be an early try at ethnographic learn, a brand new methodological technique in nineteenth-century Japan. Hansen posits that this "scientific" research was once tainted via Atsutane's wish to identify a discourse on Japan now not restricted via what he thought of to be the unsatisfactory result of verified eastern philological equipment. a coarse cartoon of the milieu of 1820s Edo Japan and Atsutane's place inside of it offers the backdrop opposed to which the drama of Senkyo ibun unfolds. There stick with chapters explaining the connection among the implied writer and the skin narrator, the opposite international that Atsutane helped Torakichi describe, and Atsutane's nativist discourse pertaining to Torakichi's great claims of a newly stumbled on Shinto holy guy referred to as the sanjin. Sanjin have been partially outlined by way of supernatural talents comparable (but eventually more desirable and therefore enhanced) to these of the Buddhist bodhisattva and the Daoist immortal. They have been obvious as holders of mystery and strong applied sciences formerly notion to have come from or been perfected within the West, comparable to geography, astronomy, and army know-how. Atsutane sought to deemphasize the influence of Western know-how through claiming those powers had come from Japan's different international. In doing so, he creates a brand new Shinto hero and, through organization, asserts the prevalence of local jap culture. within the ultimate component of his e-book, Hansen addresses Atsutane's contribution to the development of recent eastern id. through the past due Tokugawa, many intellectuals had grown uncomfortable with persevered cultural dependence on Neo-Confucianism, and the Buddhist institution was once less than fireplace from positivist historiographers who had began to question the numerous contradictions present in Buddhist texts. With those conventional discourses in disarray and Western rationalism and materialism gaining public recognition, Hansen depicts Atsutane's production of a brand new non secular identification for the japanese humans as one artistic reaction to the pressures of modernity. whilst Tengu speak provides to the small physique of labor in English on nationwide studying. It additionally fills a void within the region of ancient spiritual reviews, that's ruled through reports of Buddhist priests and clergymen, through supplying a glimpse of a Shinto non secular determine. eventually, it counters identical to Atsutane as a forerunner of the ultra-nationalism that finally was once deployed within the carrier of empire. Lucid and available, it is going to locate an appreciative viewers between students of Shinto and jap and global faith. as well as faith experts, it will likely be of substantial curiosity to anthropologists and historians of Japan.