There is no shortage of writing about nationalism in modern Japanese history. Nonetheless, the object of investigation has not always been clear, and until recently the term "nationalism" has not been employed with much theoretical rigor. The difficulty of applying the concept to Japanese thought and politics is underscored, as Kevin Doak points out, by the multiple Japanese terms — kokuminshugi, minzokushugi, kokkashugi, and nashonarizumu — all translatable in English as "nationalism."
Doak's book is designed as an intellectual history of Japanese nationalism from the Meiji Era to the present. He begins with a consideration of theories of nationalism and their impact on Japanese intellectuals (with an emphasis on the 1920s and 1930s). He then explores four concepts central to the discourse: tenno (emperor), shakai (society), kokumin (author's translation, civic nation), and minzoku (author's translation, ethnic nation). The central theme of his study is the dialectic of these last two ideas, manifested ideologically as kokuminshugi (civic nationalism) and minzokushugi (ethnic nationalism).
Doak acknowledges from the start that he is redefining the subject as treated in much of the existing scholarly as well as journalistic literature. Nationalism, as he defines it, "is a principle that asserts the people as the privileged principle of political life." His emphasis is less on the construction of identity than on efforts to conceptualize the relationship between "the people" and "the state." In his view, the Japanese term "kokkashugi," better translated into the French as tatisme, ideologically centers "the state" rather than "the people" and should be excluded from the category of nationalism. Accordingly, he places outside the boundaries of treatment what others have described as the nationalism of the state or emperor-centered nationalism.