 Mabuchi began lecturing to hundreds of students, many of whom would gather by the veranda of his home on the fringes of Edo. His was the first successful Kokugaku private academy—others would follow—and he was also a notorious antiquarian eccentric; years after his death in 1769, Mabuchi’s biography was the opening entry in Ban Kōkei’s celebrated 1790 study of contemporary eccentrics. Of his roughly three hundred students, none would achieve greater renown as a scholar of Kokugaku than Motoori Norinaga, who only met Mabuchi on one fateful evening in 1763 when Mabuchi stayed the night in Matsusaka on a tour of Japan. 