Up to that time we had Shintoism imbued with Buddhism. Now having repudiated the Indian elements out of it, we introduced in their stead the Confucian philosophy. As the philosophy introduced was that expounded by Chutse, who was an intense rigorist, the Shintoism resulting from this mixture was rather narrow and chauvinistic, though fervent enough to inspire people of education. One of the most conspicuous founders of this kind of new national cult was Ansai Yamazaki, who was born in 1619. On account of his hair-splitting doctrines, tolerating none which deviated the least from his, his disciples were always in very bitter controversy with one another, each asserting himself as the only true successor of his master, and dissension followed after dissension. Many of them were so pigheaded as to make it a rule not to serve publicly in any official capacity under the Shogun nor the _daimyo_, and exerted themselves strenuously to spread their propaganda among the intelligent classes of the people. Fuel was added to the flame of the national spirit already in a blaze by the assiduous study of the ancient literature of our country. The old Japanese literature studied and imitated during the Ashikaga period had not gone back farther than the Tempyo era. If we except some novels produced in the prime of the courtiers' regime, such as the _Genji-monogatari_, the literary works of old Japan highly prized by the courtiers and enlightened warriors of the Ashikaga were limited to the anthologies of short Japanese poems by various poets, the oldest of which was called the _Kokin-shu_, said to have been compiled in 905 A.D. under Imperial auspices. The _Mannyo-shu_, which is another collection of Japanese poems, older than those gathered into the _Kokin-shu_, and to which I referred in my former chapter as the oldest collection of all of that kind in Japan, though not entirely abandoned, could not cope with the latter in popularity, being considered as too much out of date. A few of the commentaries or interpretations of trivial topics sung or celebrated in the poems in the _Kokin-shu_ had become matters of great importance in the art of Japanese versification, and had been handed from one master to a favourite disciple as an esoteric literary secret not to be lightly divulged to the _hoi polloi_. The resuscitated national spirit of the early Tokugawa period, however, induced men of the literary circles of the time no longer to be contented with such trivialities, and stimulated them to push their researches backward into the literature still more ancient, that is to say, to launch themselves upon the difficult task of interpreting those more archaic poems contained in the _Mannyo-shu_. The foremost of these philologists was a priest by the name of Keichu, born in 1640 in the vicinity of Osaka. His celebrated work, the Commentaries on the Poems of the _Mannyo-shu_, is said to be the first standard hoisted in the philological study of old