 In its broadest sense, kokugaku has been used to refer to scholarship that takes Japan as its focus instead of China. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, it came to refer more narrowly to the effort to discern a native Way distinct from Buddhism and Confucianism within Japan’s most ancient writings, and to the attendant effort to resurrect that Way in the present. Most scholars agree on the major leaders of these studies during the Tokugawa period, with Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) thought to be its greatest intellectual and Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) its most effective popularizer.