Toshio Nishi is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He currently teaches at the Institute of Moralogy in Kashiwa, Japan.

From 1968 to 1971, Nishi worked as the first Japanese account representative for the J. Walter Thomson Company in New York and Tokyo.

From 1977 to 1985, Nishi was a postdoctoral fellow at the Hoover Institution as the first recipient of the Paul and Jean Hanna Endowment Fellowship. From 1985 to 1991, Nishi was a foreign correspondent for NHK Journal, a radio program of Japan's largest media system.

Nishi has written on the US military occupation of defeated Japan and contemporary Japan and Asia. His representative book in English is Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952 (Hoover Institution Press, 1982; reissued in 2003). His books in Japanese are Nichibei Konryokusen [Battle over Japan's soul] (Tokyo: Chuo Koron-shinsha, 2003, 2nd printing), Kuniyaburete MacArthur [The invasion of MacArthur] (Tokyo: Chuo Koron-shinsha, 1996, 6th printing; paperback in 2005), Fukoku Jakumin: Nippon [Wealthy nation, weak people: Japan] (Reitaku University Press, 1996, 5th printing), and MacArthur no Hanzai [The "crime" of MacArthur] (Tokyo: Otemachi Books, 1983).

Nishi is working on several manuscripts: Japan's Last Stand in the 21st Century (in English), Fireflies of the Empire (fiction in English), and an article entitled "Holy Ghost, Divine Greed, Slow Massacre: The Europeans in Sixteenth-Century Japan.” Currently he has been concentrating on Pearl Harbor and its lasting consequences.

Nishi has been awarded many scholarships and grants. From 1977 to 1985, he worked under a postdoctoral fellowship from the Hoover Institution. In 1977 he received the prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship from the Harry S. Truman Library Institute in Missouri.

After earning a BA in literature from Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan in 1964, Nishi received his MA in communications in 1968 and his PhD in political studies of education in 1976, both from the University of Washington at Seattle.