The Meiji oceanic imaginary and the paintings of Aoki Shigeru.

In late Meiji Japan, political thought coalesced around an elemental vision in which the geography of the Japanese archipelago offered thinkers evidence of a cultural bond between the Japanese people and the sea that extended backwards into primordial times and forward into an inscrutable future. Public intellectuals looking to establish the roots of Japanese oceanic being turned to the depths of prelapsarian times. The writer Kōda Rohan traced Japanese maritime identity to the earliest extant poetry and recorded myths of the nation. Kimura Takatarō, a translator and critic, centered Japanese oceanic spirit in the depths of ancient myth, tales, and prayer. Both envisioned myth as a medium that offered access to a horizon of experience in which Japanese oceanic identity was grounded. In the waters of the mythical sea, they discovered a space of cultural difference from which the forces of history threatened to estrange them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]