 In terms of the Kokugaku tradition, three factors stand out in terms of why later Kokugakusha (native studies scholars) came to see him as a pioneer of their own work. First was Keichū’s near-mystical reverence for waka. By tradition waka were thought to be an invention of the kami rendering them ultimately beyond human ken, and Keichū felt this numinous quality intensely. Second was the relative sophistication of Keichū’s philology, which balanced historical linguistic analysis with an intuitive sense of the meaning behind the text. Later scholars attributed this to Keichū’s earlier study of Sanskrit as part of his study for the Shingon Buddhist priesthood. And third was his representation of the ancient pre-Buddhist and pre-Confucian past as the “land of the kami” (shinkoku) characterized by a simple self-sufficiency rooted in the native Way.