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Kangakusha's extravagant admiration for everything Chinese, and their persistent and largely successful endeavours to mould the thoughts and institutions of Japan upon Chinese models, were followed by an inevitable reaction in favour of a more genuinely national development. This movement, which has been fully described by Sir E. Satow in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan (1875), forms one of the most interesting features of recent Japanese literature.

It began with the renewed study of the old literary monuments of Japan, which for centuries had been so much neglected that the very language in which they are written was no longer understood. Iyeyasu's patronage of literature, and his measures for the preservation of old books, have been already referred to. One of his grandsons, the famous Mitsukuni (1622–1700), Daimio of Mito, inherited his great ancestor's love of learning. He appropriated a considerable part of his revenue to the cost of collecting a vast library of books of all kinds, and to the maintenance of scholars whom he employed in the compilation of works of research. The chief outcome of their labours was the well-known Dai Nihonshi, a history