Nativism as a social movement: Katagiri Harukazu and the Hongaku reisha

On the auspicious first day of 1865 Katagiri Harukazu (1818–66) proposed to a circle of like-minded men that they build a shrine to the four great teachers of the native Japanese way. These included the man they called their teacher, Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), the eighteenth-century philologist and thinker Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), the poet Kamo Mabuchi (1697–1769) and the Shinto priest Kada no Azumamaro (1669–1736). ¹ The site was to be on the flank of a mountain overlooking the lower Ina valley, a site Harukazu’s father and grandfather had many years earlier praised in poetry as one of the eight most beautiful in their locality. Although Katagiri died before the shrine could be built, his associates completed his task and held an inaugural ceremony in the third month of 1867. Called the Hongaku reisha (‘Spirit hall for the fundamental teaching’), the shrine marked the most concrete realisation of the religious and political fervour that swept the Ina valley in the 1860s.