Originally Posted by
Singu
During the Edo period, there were hardly a consciousness of "Japanese" among the people of Japan, they were mostly considered to be subjects of the regional feudal domains called the Han, and the people were loyal to their feudal lords.
During the era of Japanese modernization, most of them went to Germany to study abroad, and they were heavily influenced by Nazi Germany, as Nazism was influential then. When they returned home, they went onto influence the politics of Japan, which were Japanese ultranationalism and Japanese fascism.
On a related note, I think countries like Germany, Italy and Japan went with the path of ethnic nations, because historically they were so late to the game of state modernization. While countries like France, England and China already had the political systems in its place to modernize and unify the state without having to resort to the idea of ethnicity to unify its people.