Texts are more amenable to alteration than people.

[Sassa Seisetsu was] keen to counter the image—perhaps the result of victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904—of the Japanese as a race of battle-hungry samurai. The true Japanese is a lover of beauty, a person of gentility and feeling—in other words, a Heian courtier. The Tale of Genji, as the “epitome of this culture,” thus had important tasks to perform: to make “every citizen” aware of his or her “true national character” and to provide proof of a certain cultural superiority. The Tale of Genji, in short, ought to be one of the prime movers in the Meiji project of forging a new national identity:

[But] the Shinshaku project was never completed; nor would it have been a readable, modern Genji even if it had been. […] In the end, it was Yosano Akiko—self–taught, a disciple of no one, and with no ideological axe to grind—who actually achieved what the scholars of ‘National Literature’ had been aiming to do.