Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth-Century Japan

This work studies three major eighteenth-century nativist scholars in Japan: Kada no Azumamaro, Kamo no Mabuchi, and the celebrated Motoori Norinaga. Nosco demonstrates that these three, frequently depicted as the formulators of a rabid exenophobic nationalism, were intellectuals engaged in a quest for meaning, wholeness, and solace in what they perceived to be disordered times.