Hirata Atsutane

Hirata was born as the fourth son of Ōwada Yoshitane, an Obangashira (low-ranking) samurai of Kubota Domain, in what is now part of the city of Akita in northern Japan. Little is known of his early childhood, but it appears to have been troubled by poverty and by hostility from his step-mother. He left home in 1795, renouncing his ties to his family and to the Domain and traveled to Edo and worked as a laborer and as a servant, while pushing opportunities to study rangaku, geography, and astronomy. In 1800, at the age of 25, he caught the attention of Hirata Tōbei, a scholar formerly of Bitchū-Matsuyama Domain, who adopted him and from whom he received the family name of Hirata. Around this time, he met Orose, the daughter of a hatamoto of Numazu Domain, whom he married the following year.

Atsutane's Portrait by his pupil

While in Edo, Hirata was a student of the Neo-Confucianism of Yamazaki Ansai (1619–1682); however, his interests were very broad. He later turned towards Daoism as found in the works of the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi. He learned about the works of Motoori Norinaga, the founder of the kokugaku movement, in 1803, two years after Motoori's death. Hirata claimed later to have received the mantle of kokugaku teacher in a dream directly from Motoori Norinaga, but the story is apocryphal. He became a student of Motoori Haruniwa, and read voraciously the ancient and Chinese classics, foreign works by Nicolaus Copernicus and Isaac Newton and treatises on Buddhism and Shinto. He was also a prolific writer. Representative works in the study of ancient Japanese traditions include Tama no mihashira (The True Pillar of Spirit), Koshi seibun (Treatise on Ancient History), Kodō taii (True Meaning of the Ancient Way) and Zoku Shintō taii (True Meaning of Common Shintō), and the commentaries Koshi-chō and Koshi-den. He is also noted for his studies of ancient Indian and Chinese tradition (Indo zōshi and Morokoshi taikoden), and texts dealing with the spirit world, including Senkyō ibun (Strange Tales of the Land of Immortals) and Katsugorō saisei kibun (Chronicle of the Rebirth of Katsugorō). His early work Honkyō gaihen indicates an acquaintance with Christian literature that had been authored by Jesuits in China

Though he is traditionally ranked fourth in the lineage of kokugaku scholars, Hirata actually represents a break with the purely scholarly urban culture characteristic of the revival of classical nativist learning, and represents a trend toward a populist message. Hirata laid particular emphasis on reaching the average man, and adapted his own style to them by employing at times the vernacular idiom. Hirata frequently expressed hostility to the Confucian and Buddhist scholars of the day, advocating instead a revival of the “ancient ways” in which the emperor was to be revered. Hirata's first published work, Kamosho (1803) was a scathing attack on the works of Confucian philosopher Dazai Shundai (1680–1747) on Buddhism, and resulted in an invitation to teach from the Yoshida family, the hereditary clan leading Yoshida Shinto.

The contents of his 1841 treatise Tenchō mukyūreki (Chronicle of the Perpetual Rule of the Emperor) angered the ruling Tokugawa bakufu government, and he was sentenced to confinement in Akita until his death in 1843.