 After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 Kokugaku became an ideologically charged academic field that was harnessed to create empire and imperial subjects at home and abroad. It also spawned related enquiries into folklore and ethnography. Following Japan’s military defeat and during the Allied Occupation 1945–52, aside from a handful of places such as Kokugaku-in University, Kokugaku was stripped of its imperial and spiritual coloring, leaving behind sterilized notions of what was asserted to be uniquely Japanese about Japan and its people. From roughly the 1980s these came to be grouped under the rubric Nihonjinron or theories of Japaneseness, reintroducing a spiritual component that can be seen in the animism characteristic of much anime and “soft power” diplomacy. As a result, the word kokugaku is no longer used in contemporary discourse to refer to present-day nativist or essentialist scholarship. 