In the immediate years after the end of World War II, Maruyama Masao, the great political scientist and intellectual historian of Japan, wrote frequently of the perversions and pathology of imperial Japan's version of nationalism. It was “a blindly nationalistic militarism inspired by the crudest belief in the mythology of a uniquely Japanese ‘Imperial Way,’” he wrote in one essay. In another, he lamented, “fused with Imperialism, it was a last-stage degeneration of modern nationalism.” Most particularly, he decried the ignorance of Japanese nationalists who “knew next to nothing about the happy marriage of nationalism with bourgeois democracy and popular sovereignty as seen in classic Western nationalism” (Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics [New York: Oxford University Press, 1963], xii, 143). By the 1960s, ever wary of but eager to confront the ethnic tribal nationalism so responsible for Japanese fascism, Maruyama had become an icon for the liberal democratic left, and as Kevin Doak writes in his intelligent and extensive compendium on Japanese nationalism, “the most powerful advocate in the early postwar period for the individualist nationalism that Meiji intellectuals like Fukuzawa [Yukichi] . . . and others had hoped would secure the future of a democratic modern Japan” (p. 207).

Maruyama is but one of a multitude of Japanese analysts, thinkers, and ideologists whose ideas Doak discusses, deeming their ideas central to the understanding of the history of Japanese nationalism from its introduction into Japan in the middle of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. Doak follows historian Kano Masanao's insight that a sense of Japanese cultural distinctiveness only became transformed into a nationalist ideology with the appearance of the West. “[T]he discovery of the West,” Kano wrote, “also produced the discovery of Japan” (p. 40). Doak describes the appearance of Perry and his intransigence in demanding a treaty as simultaneously a challenge to the legitimacy of the bakufu and a stimulus to a sense among an ever-increasing number of samurai from domains all over Japan that they shared a similar fate and a need for a common defense. Ultimately, Doak argues, “[it] planted the seeds of a truly modern form of nationalism in Japan by heightening a sense of boundary consciousness” (p. 43).

Doak carefully analyzes debates over nationalism and the creation of a Japanese national identity, devoting four chapters to concepts critical to the construction of the different Japanese nationalisms: tennô or emperor; shakai or society; kokuminshugi, translated as civic nationalism; and minzokushugi, which Doak translates as ethnic nationalism. It is in the long and careful studies of the origin and meaning of these terms that Doak does his most interesting and suggestive work. Quite appropriately, he describes his book in an afterword as a handbook on Japanese nationalism: “[T]his volume has tried to identify the basic elements of nationalism in Japan from which other specific arguments and assertions about nationalism in Japan have been, are, and presumably will continue to be, built” (p. 265).

Chapter 1 examines contemporary Western analysts of nationalism and some of their forerunners, considers their influence on Japanese thinkers, and offers an introduction to the Japanese scholarly literature on the topic. Here Doak sets two presumptions that guide his study. First, he defines nationalism as “a principle that asserts the people as the privileged principle of political life” (p. 2). Second, he sees the nation and the state as “separate matters” (p. 9)—indeed, kokkashugi, by “placing the state above all else” (p. 3), is the very antithesis of nationalism. Hence, there is no separate chapter on the state in the book.

In the succeeding six chapters, Doak traces the tangled intellectual history of Japanese nationalism until the emergence of a viable bourgeois “civic” nationalism in the postwar period. Chapter 2 (from late Tokugawa into the first two decades of Meiji) describes the introduction of a new rhetorical discourse on the “public,” “public discussion,” and “public consultation.” Although “consultation” was used as an instrument of an elite eager to manage the public mind, Doak argues that “[s]uch rhetoric [also] served as a catalyst toward a revolutionary view of social and individual worth” (p. 46). Intellectuals attempted to strengthen this vaguely revolutionary view by introducing French republican ideas.

Monarchy, Doak indicates, is “frequently depicted as a form of governance systematically and historically opposed to nationalism” (p. 83). Yet in chapter 3, Doak examines the paradox that in an era of “public consultation,” Meiji leaders rejected republicanism in favor of monarchy as the only legitimate principle for unifying the Japanese people, defining the people as subjects rather than citizens. Simply put, the monarch offered a resolution of the social and political disorder of the time.

Shakai, or society (also the title of chapter 4), early in Meiji history became identified with nation and nationalism (and ultimately with antistatism). Society, as Doak writes, served as a “codeword” for the nation and became used in debates in the Meiji period in an effort to distinguish the national people as a whole from the national state. Later, due to its association with reform and the creation of an egalitarian political order, Japanese government leaders and conservative critics pronounced society itself as a “problem”; social problems included workers' strikes, unions, and a growing urban population.

Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the analysis of kokumin and kokuminshugi, nation and civic nationalism, and minzokushugi, or ethnic nationalism. Doak traces in chapter 5 how the concept of “a civic or political sense of nation,” initially used to aid opponents of the Satsuma-Choshu clique government, broadened into a movement that “aspired to national sovereignty in the constitution” and, ultimately, in 1890, was rejected with the new constitution's assertion that sovereignty was vested in the monarch (p. 164). Christian thinkers, Doak writes, played a significant role, perhaps as great as that of Fukuzawa and Popular Rights theorists in Meiji, in sustaining the idea of civic nationalism. Finally, ethnic nationalism, discussed in both chapters 5 and 6, appeared most prominently in the twentieth century, particularly in the late 1920s, when questions about the character of the Japanese empire inspired a discussion of the Japanese as a homogeneous ethnic people.

I appreciate the achievement of Kevin Doak, and I am certain I have not done justice to it in my summary remarks. His is the most comprehensive analysis of Japanese nationalism that exists in the English language. However, I would like to raise two questions. First, while in his individual chapters Doak offers a concrete examination of nationalist discourse, his overall argument is impelled by an almost “whiggish” narrative that assumes, to put it strongly, the ultimate (inevitable) ascendancy of the “people” within a democratic society. Second, while I accept his assertion that an analysis of the state can be made without discussion of the nation or nationalism, I question whether it is possible to write about nationalism without discussing the state. It is precisely the nature of the imperial state and its interaction with Japanese nationalism that is at the center of Maruyama's analysis. Doak well appreciates and discusses Maruyama's contribution, but I do not believe he fully engages Maruyama's analysis of the relationship between the pathology of Japanese nationalism and the character of monarchical power in the prewar state.