Against the grain of the early modern theory of waka, in which the disparaging of the classicism of Kamono Mabuchi was a dominant trend, Ueda Akinari deliberately insisted on the importance of Manyoshu, inheriting, as it were, Mabuchi's legacies. In other words, he tried to be "the late-arrived believer of the Manyo spirit." What was the significance of this attitude? Having studied with the anti-classicist Roan, Akinari himself is not a replica of Mabuchi. One might say, instead, that Akinari transformed the opportunity to touch the primal and the different, suggested by Mabuchi's appreciation of Manyoshu, into the principle of criticism, to refashion it as the belief in the Manyo spirit as a critical attitude. Through this, he achieved a perspective that relativizes not only the anti-classicist theories of waka in the early modern period, but also the views of Mabuchi himself.
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