eli5: how did Japan resist and block contact with western colonial powers so successfully compared to other small nations and islands in Asia and the Pacific?

Question

eli5: how did Japan resist and block contact with western colonial powers so successfully compared to other small nations and islands in Asia and the Pacific?

In: 1

Answer 1

Pretenses are extremely important. The opium wars derived from conflicts over trade. Japan had such a total isolationist policy that it was able to avoid giving any major pretense to engage in conflict.

When finally the US came along and forced treaties anyway, many other nations followed suit and forced unequal trade treaties on the japanese.

However unlike other asian nations japan was successful at rapidly modernising and industrialising. Within only a few decades it was a world power rivaling western nations, thus gained the strength to resist any further encroachment.

Indeed 50 years after the americans forced japan to open, the japanese succeeded in utterly crushing Russia in war. At the same time china had just recently lost yet again to the west with the boxer rebellion.