Mito School, Japanese school of thought, an amalgamation of Confucianism and Shinto, very influential in the politics of the late Edo period. The school started when Mitsukuni Tokugawa, lord of the Mito fief in south-eastern Japan and leader of the main branch of the ruling Tokugawa dynasty of shoguns founded the Shokokan or Historical Research Institute in 1657. The completion of the major part of the Dai Nihon shi (Great History of Japan) in 1720 marks the end of the early, historiographical, phase of the school. The late Mito school, marked by ideological creativity and political activism, began in the 1790s with the publication of Fujita Yukoku’s Seimeiron (On the Rectification of Names), followed by his student Aizawa Seishisai’s Shinron (New Treatise, 1825), and the latter’s son Fujita Toko’s writings, which sought to define and preserve the kokutai (national essence) centred around a renewed “reverence for the Emperor” (sonno) and a resistance to Western imperialism (“expel the barbarians” joi)—the sonno joi ideology. The late Mito school, a response to internal and external crises (particularly Western colonialism), advocated moral, political, and military reforms for the shogunate. After the opening of the country to the West in 1854, however, Mito teachings provided the ideological thrust for the forces that toppled the shogunate and inaugurated the Meiji Restoration in 1868. This ideology continued to contribute to the pre-war nationalism of the imperial system.