The new contexts in which Nihon gaishi was reinscribed, of course, are primarily the political movements of the 1850s and 1860s, in which the emperor actually became an actor in history, and the new nationalist discourses of the Meiji period.
This study centres on three questions: (1) What was the significance of such an exaltation of San’yō’s history within the historiographical and ideological debates of Yamaji’s time (the mid to late Meiji period)? (2) What was the philosophy of history that lay behind San’yō’s writings, and what were the implications of this philosophy for political action among his readers? (3) What insights do these Meiji historiographical debates and San’yō’s philosophy of history offer us into the multivalent nature of the emperor-centred ideology upon which modern Japanese national identity was built? I employ two core hermeneutical concepts in trying to answer these questions, one the concept of Paul Ricoeur that the written text escapes the circumstances of its production and becomes open to an indefinite series of possible readers, its meaning always in suspense “in front of” the text and always open to reinscription in new contexts. Aizan believed that it was this national consciousness that lay behind the sonnō jōi 尊皇攘夷 nationalist movement that led to the Meiji Restoration and that laid the foundation for transforming Japan into a modern nation-state. In 1893, the Christian journalist and political commentator Yamaji Aizan 山路愛山 wrote that through Rai San’yō’s (1780–1832) Nihon gaishi《日本外史》(An unofficial history of Japan), the Japanese became aware of the unique history and superior values of their fatherland, and that this awareness was intensified by the aesthetic beauty of San’yō’s language (he wrote in an elegant classical Chinese modelled on the Shiji 史紀 and Zuozhuan 左傳).
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