Watarai Nobuyoshi

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Watarai Nobuyoshi (1615–90). A Shinto scholar and religious leader of the early Tokugawa period in Japan. As a descendant of the famous Watarai line of priests, who were the hereditary officiants at the outer shrine of Ise, Nobuyoshi reversed the flagging fortunes of his school of Shinto. Since the 13th cent., Watarai Shinto had developed a complex syncretic system synthesizing Confucian and Buddhist ideas within a Shinto framework. His major work, the Yōfukuji, is the most important source of his own religious ruminations, which largely follow the traditional doctrines originally set forth in the Five Books of Shinto (Shintō gobusho).