Emperor Hanazono was a retired emperor at the margins. As such, he used scholarship as a tool to counter the courtiers who frequently employed the Daikakuji line and the continuation of the family for their own interests, and to justify his own position. Consequently, such scholarship was not intended to redesign the scheme that stressed the lord-vassal relationship as based on propriety (rei) and the concept of the transfer of heaven's mandate (ekisei kakumei), but it resembled "the king and the subject" (taigi meibun) concept. Moreover, Hanazono's praising of the scholarship surrounding Emperor Go-Daigo was a way for him to underscore his own superiority. Needless to say, Hanazono's learning did not exist as an independent entity but contained important political and historical aspects. The issue of fourteenth-century scholarship, especially Neo-Confucianism, has come to be viewed as a reception of Emperor Go-Daigo's political scheme and the concept of the transfer of heaven's mandate. Within this context, The Diary of Emperor Hanazono has often acted as a source for frequent reference. Previous studies have tended to de-contextualize the individual descriptions of the events and Hanazono's views on scholarship as recorded in The Diary. Finding this problematic as an approach, I argue for the importance of contextualizing these descriptions within the frame of The Diary, and propose a new reading.