Talk:Ueda Akinari

Kokugaku

I think it's important not to say that because Ueda Akinari was a kokugakusha he was therefore "anti-foreign". The problem seems to be that kokugaku encompassed a broad range of views -- it was, after all, not ideologically committed to xenophobia -- and that certain views came to be dominant in later centuries. It is the later, more extreme views that brought kokugaku into disrepute. Someone might like to check it out, but I believe Hirata Atsutane's views on the history and lineage of kokugaku set the anti-foreign bias in stone, excluding people like Ueda Akinari from the mainstream. What may have been "mainstream" in Ueda's day was thus not regarded as mainstream in later centuries.

At the moment the article is reasonably balanced, but there is still an apologetic tone, as if to say "Kokugaku is xenophobic, and Ueda shared in the shortcomings of the school, but he did also have his own 'independent' position". This is taking the notion of 'kokugaku=xenophobia' as a given, which I think is going to far.

In fact, if you look at the origins of kokugaku (such as Motoori Norinaga you'll find quite a few Confucianists and scholars of Chinese have a major influence on the early kokugaku school. It's not nearly so simplistic as our views in hindsight seem to make out.

Bathrobe 05:48, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Forgotten edit summary

With this edit I forgot to mention in my edit summary my rationale for removing "Tales of Moonlight and Rain" as the English translation of Ugetsu, and replacing it with "Tales of Rain and the Moon". The article cites Keene more than it does Zolbrod, and Keene's translation is more appropriate for a scholarly article on the author himself than the one used on the cover of a few translations. elvenscout742 (talk) 06:12, 5 February 2013 (UTC)