seventeenth century, started a monumental history of Japan which was not finally completed until the early years of the twentieth century.
A group even more responsible for the growth of nationalism consisted of certain Shinto scholars who studied the old myths and traditions and reintroduced them to the educated public. In the latter part of the eighteenth century one of these Shinto scholars produced a commentary to the Kojiki, which did much to make this early history the primary text of Japanese nationalism. He and other Shinto scholars studied the primitive pre-Chinese period of Japanese history, searching for native virtues which would explain to their own satisfaction the superiority to China which their unreasoning nationalism now led them to feel. What they often found was simply naïve myths and historically absurd traditions, but in their blind zeal they accepted these as true and foisted them on a nation which should have been too sophisticated to have taken them seriously.
One sidelight of the intellectual revival of Shinto was the sudden appearance in the first half of the nineteenth century of popular Shinto sects. Some were founded by women, and several stressed faith healing. All these sects added many Buddhist concepts and practices to basic Shinto principles, but generally they were strongly colored by nationalism. The popular Shinto sects were not only a sign of growing national consciousness; they also indicated that Buddhism was no longer able to meet all the spiritual needs of the lower classes. Converts flocked to the new sects in great num-