'Strange Tidings from the Realm of Immortals': Hirata Atsutane's ethnography of the other world

The nineteenth century Japanese nativist scholar Hirata Atsutane's work Senkyo ibun, or Strange Tidings from the Realm of Immortals, has been long misunderstood. This dissertation starts by classifying the work as the proper object of religious studies. From there it identifies it as ethnographic fiction and subjects it to a literary analysis to find important new meaning in the text.;Hirata Atsutane started recording his work Senkyo ibun in 1822. The message it was intended to deliver was ultimately no different than Atsutane's standard offering that he usually delivered through a textual medium. The import of the standard message was that the Japanese people are essentially different and superior to all other human beings in the world. This case study examines the packaging of that message in a new delivery system, as described in the text of Senkyo ibun.;The key to the new system was a supernatural Shinto medium. This record of the whole exotic episode, where Atsutane performed as an emcee touting his sideshow Tengu Boy oddity, shows an elaborate presentation staged to introduce and give supernatural credence to Atsutane's own theological innovation called the sanjin (mountain man). This was to be the Shinto hero, holy man, and religious medium who, by his own superior abilities, could show the Japanese people that they no longer needed to look outside of native Japanese culture; that is, to China, India, or the West, for a champion in whom they could take pride.;However, this choice of a spiritual medium had consequences for the redefinition of Japanese identity. The new medium ultimately suggested that the best signifiers of Japanese identity were not in the material world, but rather, lay in the spiritual world because the Japanese claim to originality in material culture was tenuous. Furthermore, close study of the sanjin shows just how reliant Atsutane's imaginary hero was on foreign precedents.