 The Japanese word kokugaku has been variously translated into English and this makes simple definition difficult. English terms like ‘Japan Studies’, ‘National Learning/Studies’, ‘nativism’ and ‘essentialism’ all have their advocates.  One approach is to think of kokugaku as having broad and narrow meanings. Scholarship of all sorts expanded dramatically in Japan during the seventeenth century spurred on by relative tranquility, and increasing levels of prosperity and literacy. Alongside the more traditional studies of China, there arose new historical studies of things Japanese—history, literature, philology, poetics, customs, mythology, the tradition of kami worship and so on. Collectively those forms of Japanese studies can be thought of as kokugaku in the broad sense. 