From Nara to Osaka

Naitō Konan is famous as a historian of China, but he also looked hard at Japan's own past. This collection follows him from the temples of Nara to the merchant academies of Osaka.

In 1893 the young journalist rides the crowded new railway to Nara and records the old capital with an amused, skeptical eye. Three lectures of 1920 and 1921 survey Chinese learning at the Heian court, the great age of portraiture of Fujiwara no Takanobu and his son Nobuzane, and the Ōnin War, which Naitō saw as the moment when Japan was made anew. Two Osaka lectures close the book: a sketch of three centuries of townsmen's learning, and a full portrait of Tominaga Nakamoto, the eighteenth-century merchant's son who built his critique of Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto on an explicit method.

Each piece is translated complete and unabridged from Japanese, with the lecturer's asides and the audience's laughter kept, a translator's note, endnotes and source information.