Motoori Norinaga's The Two Shrines of Ise, an Essay of Split Bamboo

Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) wrote The Two Shrines of Ise: An Essay of Split Bamboo (Ise nikü sakitake no ben) in early 1798. At this time he was a leading scholar with more than four hundred students and a position as an adviser to the Tokugawa Lord of Kii. He had.all but finished his life work and main claim to fame, the Tradition of the Record of Ancient Matters (Kojiki-den), which he had begun in 1764 and finally completed in the sixth month of 1798. He had in fact already published the first seventeen chapters of this work, in three portions appearing in 1790, 1792, and 1797. During the last period in his life, in which our text was written, Norinaga concentrated on spreading his ideas, rather than new research. The Two Shrines of Ise was one outcome of this. As indicated by its title, the text discusses theological matters pertaining to the Inner Shrine (Naiku) and the Outer Shrine (Gekü) of Ise, concentrating on the identities and charac­teristics of their deities—Amaterasu at the Inner, and Toyouke (or Toyuke) at the Outer Shrine. Most of the points argued in the text draw on Norinagas po­lemic works (such as Arrowroot Flowers, Kuzubana, 1780, and Scolding [Ueda Akinari] from Osaka, Kagaika, c. 1787-1790) for the discussion of Amaterasu, and on chapter 15 of the Tradition of the Record of Ancient Matters on the subject of Toyouke. Many of the themes that pervade Norinaga's oeuvre also make their appearance in the first part of The Two Shrines of Ise. The text stresses that the Japanese of "high antiquity" had had a sincere faith in the ancient tradition, and that this faith was lost when the "Chinese way of thinking" gained a foothold in Japan. Much emphasis is further given to the notion that Japan is the "land of origin," the land in which the gods were born, and from which they spread their beneficence throughout the world...