 In Shintō philosophy, however, in the centuries following the Watarai formulations, the search for the primordial––the primal energy of creation, the primal source of language, the primal origin of the Japanese land and its people—became a deepening interest. Certainly, we find that emphasis in Native Studies, in both its early philological and literary project as well as in its focus on Kojiki. Because of Norinaga’s influence, Kojiki became not only the central canon for Shintō, but also revered as the oldest text with substantial portions written in the “original” language of the Japanese people (yamato no kotoba). That language was understood to consist of word-things (koto) imbued with the creation of the spirit of ancient Japan (yamato no damashii). (See the entry on   The Kokugaku School, section 3.2.)  That claim continued into the nineteenth-century ideology of State Shintō that argued for the restoration of the original purity of the Japanese people and their appropriate role in the “new moment of world history,” a keynote of the Japanese ethnocentrism and imperial militarism of the modern period.