MIDDLE PERIOD
made it an imprisonable offence to investigate or teach any philosophy save that of the Sung expounder of the Analects. Of course such an attempt to coerce men's intellects strengthened the moral revolt it was intended to check. The study of Japanese literature and Japanese history acquired fresh popularity. It has been already shown that this study owed its inception to the great Mitsukuni (Kōmon), feudal chief of Mito, under whose patronage a hundred-volume history, Dai-Nihon-shi, was compiled in the second half of the seventeenth century. A still profounder scholar, Motoori Norinaga, wore the mantle of Mitsukuni in the second half of the eighteenth century, and threw all his intellectual strength into the cause of a revival of whatever was purely Japanese, whether of language, of literature, of religion, or of tradition. Strange to say, the Shōgun and his chief minister, although they sought so earnestly to popularise Confucianism as expounded by Chu, ultimately tolerated the Japanese revival and even encouraged it, opening an academy for its advocates, and themselves taking a share in the investigations. They did not see that Japanese history was a story of perpetual usurpations on the part of rival clans, of encroachments upon the prerogatives of the sovereign and thefts of his authority, of the culture and dignity of the Court nobles despite their many faults, and of the neglected right of the Emperor to exercise administrative power. An incident of the
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