Motoori Norinaga

Motoori Norinaga (21 June 1730 to 5 November 1801) was a Japanese scholar of Kokugaku, the nativist study of Japan's own classics, active in the Edo period and ranked among the Four Great Men of Kokugaku. Born in Matsusaka in Ise Province, he studied medicine in Kyoto, learned philology there, and then practised as a doctor for forty years while devoting his spare time to lectures on the Tale of Genji and to the Kojiki. His Kojiki-den, a commentary made over about thirty five years, treated the Kojiki as the oldest surviving Japanese text. He held that ancient Japan lived by natural spontaneity of feeling and that imported Confucianism ran against it, and he criticized the Chinese-minded habits of thought he called karagokoro. He named mono no aware, a sensibility of sorrow at evanescence, as the essence of Japanese literature.