Life
Norinaga was born in what is now Matsusaka in Ise Province (now part of Mie prefecture) as the second son of an Otsu merchant house (the film director Yasujirō Ozu was a descendant of the same line). After his elder brother’s death, Norinaga succeeded to the Ozu line. At one stage he was adopted out to a paper-making family but the bookish boy was not suited to business.
It was at his mother's suggestion that, at the age of 22, Norinaga went to Kyoto to study medicine. In Kyoto, he also studied Chinese and Japanese philology under the neo-Confucianist Hori Keizan. It was at this time that Norinaga became interested in the Japanese classics and decided to enter the field of Kokugaku under the influence of Ogyū Sorai and Keichū. (With changes in the language, the ancient classics were already poorly understood by Japanese in the Edo period and texts needed philological analysis in order to be properly understood.) Life in Kyoto also instilled in the young Norinaga a love of traditional Japanese court culture.
Returning to Matsusaka, Norinaga opened a medical practice for infants while devoting his spare time to lectures on the Tale of Genji and studies of the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan). At the age of 27, he bought several books by Kamo no Mabuchi and embarked on his Kokugaku researches. As a doctor, he adopted the name of one of his samurai ancestors, Motoori.
In 1763, Norinaga met Mabuchi in person when the latter visited Matsusaka, a meeting that has come down in history as ‘the night in Matsusaka’. Norinaga took the occasion to ask Mabuchi to supervise his annotations of the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters). Mabuchi suggested that Norinaga should first tackle the annotations to the Man'yōshū in order to accustom himself to the ancient kana usage known as the man'yōgana. This was the only meeting between the two men, but they continued to correspond and, with Mabuchi’s encouragement, Norinaga later went on to full-fledged research into the Kojiki.
Norinaga’s disciples included Ishizuka Tatsumaro, Nagase Masaki, Natsume Mikamaro, Takahashi Mikiakira and Motoori Haruniwa (Norinaga’s son).
Although overshadowed by his activities as a Kokugaku scholar, Norinaga spent 40 years as a practicing doctor in Matsusaka and was seeing patients until 10 days before his death in 1801.
Read more about this topic: Motoori Norinaga
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
—Bible: New Testament, Ephesians 4:1-3.
“But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one’s self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)