Shoki, although certain portions may indeed preserve genuine early traditions and sources.) By the Kamakura period (1185–1333), the work languished in obscurity such that very few people had access to the text, particularly that of the middle (second) volume. It is due to this neglect that the Kojiki is available only in comparatively late manuscripts, the earliest of which dates to the late 14th century. It was with the advent of printing in the early modern period that the Kojiki first reached a wide audience. The earliest printed edition of the text was the Kan'ei Kojiki (), published in Kyoto in 1644 (Kan'ei 21). A second edition, the Gōtō Kojiki (, "Kojiki with Marginal Notes") was printed by Deguchi (Watarai) Nobuyoshi, a priest at Ise Shrine, in 1687 (Jōkyō 4). The birth of nativist studies (kokugaku) and nationalist sentiment during the Edo period saw a reappraisal of the Kojiki. Kokugaku scholars saw Japan's earliest writings as the repository of a uniquely superior Japanese identity that could be revived by recovering the ancient language they were written in; the Kojiki, by virtue of its antiquity, gained the status of a sacred text. The Kojiki came to be highly regarded that scholars such as Kada no Azumamaro and Kamo no Mabuchi – himself a student of Azumamaro – produced annotated versions of it. The Kojiki received its most serious study and exposition in the hands of Motoori Norinaga, who obtained a copy of the Kan'ei printed edition in 1754. After meeting Mabuchi in 1763, Norinaga began to devote his efforts to an in-depth scholarly study of the text. A monumental 44-volume study of the Kojiki called , composed over a 34-year period (1764–1798), was the fruit of his labor. With Norinaga, the Kojiki assumed an importance equal to the Nihon Shoki; in fact, in his view the Kojiki was a more trustworthy source for ancient Japanese traditions than was the Shoki precisely because it was free of "Chinese mentality". He viewed the Kojiki as a true account of actual events that when read correctly, could reveal Japan in its pristine, ideal state as a community where the kami, the emperor and the people lived in harmony. Norinaga's work was carried on in different directions by his disciple Hirata Atsutane and his rivals Fujitani Mitsue (1781–1849) and Tachibana Moribe (1768–1823), who each produced commentaries and treatises on the text. The Kojiki became once