From Kokugaku to the Ketsumeidan: Nativist Shintō and the Budō World

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Across the Edo period the nativist undertow inside high Sinophilia — the ka-i hentai (華夷変態) sense that civilization itself had migrated, leaving Japan the truer heir of the Middle Kingdom (中華) — grew through kokugaku into a full ideological program, and from there into the kokutai nationalism of the early-Shōwa decades that the budō world brushed against. This piece traces that arc. For how it bears on the dating of Chinese-origin claims in the martial schools, see From Ming to Meiji; for one budōka formed by its endpoint, see Kunii Zen’ya of Kashima Shin-ryū.

Nativist Shintō Thought

The nativist program of Motoori Norinaga, continued by Hirata Atsutane, attacked karagokoro (漢意; “the Chinese mind”) and elevated a purified native-Shintō interiority over Chinese learning, so by late Edo the automatic prestige of a Chinese pedigree was already eroding.

Motoori Norinaga (本居宣長, 1730–1801) gave kokugaku (国学; “national learning”) its mature form as a philological recovery of antiquity, above all in the Kojiki-den (古事記伝), his decades-long commentary on the Kojiki. Its polemical core is the rejection of karagokoro (漢意; “the Chinese mind”) — the rationalizing, moralizing Confucian-Buddhist cast of thought — in favor of a native magokoro (真心; “true heart”) recoverable from the oldest texts.

He held that the contrived “Way” of the Confucian sages was an artificial human device for governing a badly-ordered society, whereas Japan, under the imperial line descended from Amaterasu, was naturally well-ordered and needed no explicit moral teaching, no kotoage (言挙げ; “explicit moralizing assertion”). His literary theory of mono no aware (物の哀れ; “the pathos of things”) rehabilitated feeling over didacticism as the authentic register of Japanese sensibility. On religion he was a literalist about the age of the gods and counseled humility before kami whose workings exceed human reason; and his view of death was bleak — the dead go to the polluted Yomi (黄泉) regardless of merit, to be grieved honestly rather than consoled by foreign doctrines. His program was scholarly, aesthetic, and devotional more than political.

Restoration Shintō

Hirata Atsutane (平田篤胤, 1776–1843), who styled himself Norinaga’s posthumous disciple, radicalized this into fukko Shintō (復古神道; “Restoration Shintō”) — a systematic theology and cosmology with a devotional and activist charge. He foregrounded a creator principle in Ame-no-Minakanushi (天御中主神) and the zōka no sanshin (造化三神; “three deities of creation”), giving kokugaku a more structured, near-monotheistic cosmogony. His decisive break with Norinaga was the afterlife: against the bleak Yomi, he taught a hidden world, kakuriyo (幽冥界; “the unseen realm”), ruled by Ōkuninushi (大国主), where souls are judged and from which the dead continue to watch over the manifest world — a consoling, salvation-oriented doctrine that openly absorbed Christian and other foreign materials while claiming to recover the pure native truth.

He paired this with a supremacist comparativism, treating the myths of China, India, and the West as corrupted dialects of an original Japanese revelation, and with a populist, ritually practical Shintō aimed at ordinary rural people rather than elite scholars. That combination made the Hirata school a mobilizing ideology: it fed bakumatsu sonnō thought, the Restoration, the early-Meiji program of saisei itchi (祭政一致; “unity of rite and rule”), and the short-lived attempt to install Restoration Shintō as a state religion.

The shift between them — from Norinaga’s philological-aesthetic recovery to Atsutane’s theological-political system — is the hinge by which kokugaku passes into the Meiji de-syncretization and the kokutai/Kōdō nationalism.

Kokutai Doctrine

Imaizumi Sadasuke (今泉定助, 1863–1944) was a Shintō ideologue, kokugaku-trained scholar of classical Japanese letters, and one of the principal early-Shōwa authorities on kokutai (国体; “national polity”) doctrine. Imaizumi was born into a samurai household in the Shiroishi castle town in Mutsu (present Miyagi), a son of a retainer of the Katakura house, briefly adopted into the Satō family of the Shiroishi Shinmei-sha before reverting to the Imaizumi name. He entered the classics course (古典講習科) of the Faculty of Letters at Tokyo University in 1882 and graduated in 1886. Through the Meiji period he worked as a scholar of national literature: a compiler on the Koji Ruien (古事類苑) encyclopedia project, an assistant supervisor (学監補) and lecturer at Kokugakuin (國學院), and an editor of the Kojitsu Sōsho (故実叢書), with a specialty in yūsoku kojitsu (有職故実; court and warrior ceremonial precedent). Favored by the first justice minister Yamada Akiyoshi (山田顕義), he was brought in to lecture at the Kōten Kōkyūsho (皇典講究所).

Then, in early Taishō, influenced by Kawazura Bonji’s (川面凡児) practical, ascetic Shintō, he grafted a faith-based, practice-oriented dimension onto the Motoori-derived literary Shintō and named the synthesis Kōdō (皇道; “the Imperial Way”), then devoted himself to propagating it as a national guiding doctrine. Through the priestly-family networker Ashizu Kōjirō (葦津耕次郎) he reached government, military and financial elites, taught kokutai doctrine to politicians and officers amid the unrest of the 1920s–30s — most prime ministers of the era are said to have received his instruction — and held formal positions as chairman of the Jingū Hōsai-kai (神宮奉斎会), director of the Kōdō Gakuin (皇道学院) at Nihon University, and adviser (参与) to the wartime Jingiin (神祇院). He served as a special defense counsel at the 1934 trial of the Ketsumeidan (血盟団). He was, in short, an architect and popularizer of the kokutai/Kōdō ideology that undergirded prewar State Shintō. It was through Imaizumi that this intellectual lineage reached directly into the budō world; one student so formed was Kunii Zen’ya of Kashima Shin-ryū.

The Ketsumeidan Incident

The Ketsumeidan Incident (血盟団事件, “League of Blood Incident”) was a campaign of political assassinations in Japan in early 1932, one of the episodes of ultranationalist terror that marked the collapse of party government in the early Shōwa years.

It centered on Inoue Nisshō (井上日召), a Nichiren-influenced agrarian-nationalist preacher who had gathered a group of young followers — students and rural youth — at his base near Ōarai in Ibaraki.¹

Later in life, after hearing what he took to be a divine voice in 1924, he immersed himself in Nichiren Buddhism — reading Nichiren’s doctrine, training at Mount Minobu, attending Tanaka Chigaku’s study sessions, and when that left him unsatisfied he turned to Zen, becoming a disciple of Yamamoto Gempō at Shōinji. He then moved to the Risshō Gokokudō he built at Ōarai in Ibaraki, aiming to cultivate young men — the “dōjō” in his story is a religious and communal-living hall, not a martial training ground. Earlier he had also spent time on the continent (China/Manchuria) in nationalist and intelligence-adjacent activity.

Inoue’s doctrine was summarized in the slogan ichinin issatsu (一人一殺; “one person, one kill”): each member would assassinate one corrupt leader, the targets being a list of roughly twenty senior politicians, court officials and zaibatsu businessmen held responsible for Japan’s economic distress, party corruption and the 1930 London Naval Treaty. The aim was to clear the way for a “Shōwa Restoration” of direct imperial rule.

Two killings were carried out before the group was broken up. On 9 February 1932 Onuma Shō (小沼正) shot Inoue Junnosuke (井上準之助), a former finance minister and a leading Minseitō figure, while he was campaigning. On 5 March 1932 Hishinuma Gorō (菱沼五郎) shot Dan Takuma (團琢磨), the head of the Mitsui holding company, outside the Mitsui Bank in Nihonbashi. Arrests followed and the remaining plot collapsed; the name “Ketsumeidan” was applied externally, by prosecutors and the press, rather than chosen by the group.

Inoue’s authority over his followers was religious, not martial — the ichinin issatsu doctrine framed in Nichiren and Zen terms — and the two assassinations were carried out with pistols, not blades.

So, although the League sat in the same Shōwa-Restoration milieu that the budō world brushed against (and where Imaizumi appears as defense counsel), it was not a martial-arts-rooted cell.

If there is a bujutsu thread into this milieu, it likely runs through other figures such as the naval-officer corps, and not through Inoue himself, but figures like Imaizumi strongly influenced famous budō practitioners such as Kunii Zen’ya.

Honma Ken’ichirō (本間憲一郎), head of the Shizan-juku (紫山塾) was documented in Inoue’s network from Manchurian-railway years — during his time working for the Mantetsu, Inoue became acquainted with Honma Ken’ichirō and Maeda Torao — and it was Honma who, at the time of Inoue’s surrender, asked Amano Tatsuo to talk Inoue out of suicide and into giving himself up. His Shizan-juku was a nationalist training-juku that had martial components.

The Ketsumeidan was a religious-and-student cell that killed with pistols supplied by naval officers; its martial-arts content is Inoue’s own youthful Jikishinkage-ryū training and the Genyōsha dōjō culture (the Tenkōkai hall, Honma’s juku) that surrounded and sheltered it — not the participation of professional swordsmen.

When Inoue went underground before surrendering, his hiding place was the Tenkōkai dōjō (天行会道場) within Tōyama Mitsuru’s estate — specifically the residence of Tōyama Hidezō — and the police could not bring themselves to raid the Tōyama compound. The Genyōsha patriarch’s family compound, with its training hall, sheltered him. Tōyama and his son Hidezō belonged to the Ketsumeidan circle as nationalist patrons.

The Ketsumeidan members were tried in 1933–34, and the proceedings became a sounding board for nationalist sympathy, with relatively light outcomes — life sentences for Inoue and the two assassins, most of them released within the decade. The incident sits in a chain with the 15 May 1932 assassination of Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi (which drew on the same naval-officer and Inoue circles) and, later, the February 1936 mutiny, marking the shift from party politics toward military-backed authoritarianism.

For how this milieu specifically touched the koryū world — Kunii Zen’ya, the Genyōsha jō arts, Nakayama Hakudō and the Army Toyama School — see the Excursus on Kunii in the Shōwa-Restoration milieu in the Kashima Shin-ryū article.

End Notes