The Edo period 1603 1868 saw the dawn of commercial publishing and theappearance of a Japanese mass market Amidst these developments a growing number ofintellectuals from all walks of life started a cultural and political debate seeking to definethe boundaries and center of their nation A wide variety of schools of thought contributedtheir particular views to the question but two scholars of Dutch studies or rangaku offeredone of the most drastic and creative solutions to define Japaneseness The writer scientistHiraga Gennai 1728 1779 and the painter geographer Shiba Kokan 1747 1818 attempted to articulate Mt Fuji as the symbol of a culturally and politically integratedJapan through their written and visual works This thesis attempts to show the variousforces contributing to and the process by which these two polymaths came to conceive andthen propagate the idea of Mt Fuji as a national symbol of their country In order to do so we will first focus on the life of Hiraga Gennai and the ideas contained in his most famouswork of fiction the Furyu Shidoken Den published in 1763 then move to the visual andscholarly output of his spiritual successor Shiba Kokan