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Article: Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Canadian Journal of History
- Article date:
- December 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Canadian Journal of History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan, by Susan L. Burns. Asia-Pacific series. A Weatherhead Study of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2003. x, 282 pp. $84.95 US (cloth), $23.95 US (paper).
Whether dismissed as naive or perceived as ominous, the Tokugawa-era scholars associated with kokugaku ("National Learning") have been typically categorized simply as proto-nationalists who set the Japanese on the path to wartime ultra-nationalism. Burns successfully rescues this scholarship from this rather dishonorable obscurity through a thought-provoking analysis that ...