The final two decades of the seventeenth century saw in the intellectual life of Japan two developments that would prove to have influence on waka poetry, first on its poetics but later also on its practice. These were Kokugaku and Kogaku. Waka had traditionally eschewed all diction of foreign derivation, and its poetics came to occupy pride of place in Kokugaku writing. Both Kamo no Mabuchi and his nominal disciple Motoori Norinaga were poets of some repute but today they are remembered for their theories. Waka poetry was practiced by many literati, polymaths accomplished in several arts who tended to look askance at popular culture and who remained aloof from coteries and schools. The final generation of Edo period waka poets may be represented by two whose works are still often cited and admired: O kuma Kotomichi and Tachibana Akemi, both of whose merchant-class origins bespeak the extent of liberation of the art from its aristocratic monopoly two centuries earlier.

In the Tokugawa period, poetry played an important role in the ethical and political philosophies of many Confucians in the Ancient Learning or Kogaku movement, such as Ito Jinsai and Ogyu Sorai, who sought to recover the original meaning of Confucian texts, which they believed had been distorted by later commentaries. Poetry played a similar role for many scholars of Kokugaku or nativism, such as Kamo no Mabuchi and Motoori Norinaga, who advocated a purely native Japanese culture freed from Confucianism and other foreign influences. Sorai linked empathy to a political ideal of decentralized feudalism, which he saw as characteristic of ancient China up until the Zhou dynasty, and contrasted with the centralized bureaucracies of the Qin dynasty and later. In his later works Mabuchi put forth a philosophy of Japanese cultural superiority in which he claimed that Japan originally possessed a spontaneous social harmony and unity with nature that were lacking in China.