 The second misunderstanding of the political theory behind the imperial system arose later in the twentieth century with Western intellectual historians influenced by Hayden White's theory of historical discourse and its analysis of tropes (White 1973). One claim was that in the nineteenth century Japanese Native Studies (Kokugaku) had developed a new form of historical narrative centering on the trope of kokutai. The emperor is the body, essence, or formation (tai) of the country, nation, and its people (koku). Thus the term kokutai applies to both the emperor and to Japan. The new ideological narrative, the critics claimed, deceptively used a metonym (the emperor as a part of the state used to symbolize the state) to claim the emperor is the state (Harootunian 1978). Despite its virtues on other counts (see the entry on   philosophy of history, section 3.4), metahistorical criticism ill fits the Japanese situation inasmuch as it overlooks the long-standing Japanese emphasis on internal and holographic relations. That is, the internal relation between emperor and Japan establishes a holographic relation such that each person contains the configuration of the whole Japanese nation. From the standpoint of the traditional Japanese kokutai theory, to claim the emperor is really only a symbol or metonym for Japan is a category mistake comparable to saying the dna found in the blood at the crime scene is only a symbol or metonym for the perpetrator. The philosophical claim (leaving aside here the truth value of that claim) is that the relations among the emperor, the Japanese people, and the state are comparable to the relations among the dna, the blood, and the person from the crime scene. It is simply a false premise (and certainly not one assumed in the history of Japanese thought) that there is no possible sense in which the whole can be contained in one of its parts and that any such claim must be no more than a trope.