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In no expert but I believe modern Japan was very influenced by the Sengoku y Edo period

I'll put my stake in the ground: 1853-1900 is the answer to your question.

tl:dr;

History and the nature of the Japanese Emperor has a lot to do with the answer to your question. First, Japan is an Empire. Always has been and in some ways, still is today. Unlike Kings/Queens in the West, the Japanese Emperor is a descendant of the Sun God Amaterasu (not just a political ruler appointed by a religious class of people as in the rest of the world). Up, until the end of WWII, this is exactly what the bulk of the Japanese population believed through its long history. Inclusive in the deification of the Emperor, and the Shinto mythology of the creation of the world, came the logical conclusion that Japanese people were superior to all other races. This last thought would cost Japan WWII as their military thought that the Japanese fighting spirit alone could win them the war against the US and the Allies, but I digress...

During the Tokugawa (Edo) period (not too long after the warring states period) the class system in Japan wasn't focused on abroad as Japan was closed off for almost 300 years from the rest of the world, but focused on rice production--which requires a hierarchical government due to land and water requirements. From the Shogun down to the lowly rice paddy laborer, focus was on rice production and maintaining a closed door policy. Also, during this period, Japan maintained its feudal classes (Shi-No-Ko-Sho) and regional leaders (Dimyo) had to have part of their families in Edo (Tokyo) as hostages to the government which kept the peace.

Therefore, during sakkoku (closed door policy), there wasn't a need for 'nationalism' as the population was fully under the control of its samurai overlords. It wasn't until the Meiji period--after the US insisted at gunpoint-- that Japan finally opened their markets to the West and Japan started to modernize its entire society. The Emperor Meiji was at the heart of this decision and small scale civil wars/conflicts ensued, but after just a few decades, Japan emerged on the international scene. My brief sentences here do not do this transformation justice. It is called the Meiji Restoration because the power was moved from the Tokugawa Shogunate to the Emperor Meiji, but they should have called it the Meiji Revolution as it transformed Japanese society from pre-industrialization to contemporary modernization. Japan, for the next 50 years, learned and benefited tremendously from the West and became a 'modernized' economy--on par or surpassing comparably sized countries in the West. This also meant that Japan was out in the world diplomatically.

Fast forward less than 50 years after Matthew Perry forced Japan to open, Japan was more-or-less modern enough that in the early 1900s, Japan went to war with Russia and beat the Russian's soundly in Manchuria and the Sea of Japan. From the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty ending this war (for which Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating this treaty).

Interested if someone has a different take.

The Japanese emerged from a relatively closely-related group of bronze age settlers sharing a similar culture/religion that migrated to the Japanese archipelago from the Korean peninsula, give or take 3000 years ago. Around 2500 years ago, a dominant tribe/clan (the Yamato) established military/political hegemony over this group. This was also the origin of the first and only royal dynastic house in Japan. At the same time, they were also conquering and assimilating the weaker hunter-gatherer tribes that had settled the islands earlier.

The emperors of this royal house claimed they are direct descendants of the sun goddess (Amaterasu), hence have a divine sanctioned authority/right to rule the other Japanese tribes and clans. And from this basis, the Japanese were able to establish and sustain a socially/culturally homogeneous society for the last two thousand years.

The Yamato emperors ruled pretty much uncontested up until the 1100s, and even when the country splintered into territories de-facto controlled by military strongmen, the emperor still held a paramount religious and spiritual role for the country (like the Pope for Catholics).

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Dan Carlin did an insanely great podcast on this whole thing called ‘supernova in the East’. I suggest it to everyone but I am now suggesting it to you. It’s 5 episodes at 3-4 hours a piece and super interesting.

>Unlike Kings/Queens in the West, the Japanese Emperor is a descendant of the Sun God Amaterasu

The British Royal family trace lineage on their German side to Wotan (Odin), so it's not all that exceptional. Also, there were Japanese willing to go to war against their Emperor, so deification had its limits. The rest of your answer does a good job of summarizing the significance of the Meiji restoration. But I think it was less important than you might think. The samurai, which had been the most powerful land-owning class, simply transformed into banks and companies of which many today still share their roots. On the surface, everything changed. But underneath, not as much.

It's why if you visit today, Japan seems westernized. But actually, it has retained its culture. The reason the Japanese are happy to build KFC restaurants and French patisseries is because they don't feel threatened by a foreign cultural invasion, as they're so assured in their own. There's a comforting permanency to living in a place like that, but being slow to change also means people are still stuck in an almost feudal mindset (shakkei, feminism, racism, and so on). You're right that Sakoku, where Japan closed its borders for 200 years, is probably the reason they were late to adopt nationalism. But its ironically also how the Japanese have maintained a coherent and shared cultural identity. Specifically, its not just Sakoku but being protected from external threats. Being an island alone is not enough. The Mongol invasion was famously thwarted by the Kamikaze, but there weren't many other threats. You compare that to an island nation like Britain that was successively invaded or threatened by Anglo-Saxons, Norse, and Normans, the Spanish, the French and Germans, and its easy to see why Sakoku wasn't an option in Western Europe.

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Seems to me that a string of small fiefdoms has less options to maintain a balance of power between language areas, cultures, military alliances etc than a network of fiefdoms, and therefore is more likely to gravitate towards similarity. Lasting political unification on the other hand usually requires a shared enemy that is really perceived as the other, and that was absent most of the time. Japan was relatively isolated and hard to invade. Norway is a bit similar.

Good write up. Japan's navy soundly beat Russia's navy. Didn't help that the British had denied coaling station access and the Russian navy had to go around Africa and then a long trek through warm waters while barnacles and coral built up on their hulls.

The Manchuria campaign did not "soundly" beat the Russians. It was an extremely brutal affair with two armies that were at parity of size and capabilities. Russia had to bring everything via the Siberian RR. Nonetheless it was a defeat of a European white power.