Motoori Norinaga was a Japanese scholar of Kokugaku active during the Edo period. He is conventionally ranked as one of the Four Great Men of Kokugaku (nativist) studies.

Kokugaku was an academic movement, a school of Japanese philology and philosophy originating during the Tokugawa period. Kokugaku scholars worked to refocus Japanese scholarship away from the then-dominant study of Chinese, Confucian, and Buddhist texts in favor of research into the early Japanese classics.