Japan needs Sakhalin and it's coal from 1850 on at the very least. Just a forcible opening to the outside world and an end to the Tokugawa Shogunate a few decades earlier, say in the 1800s or 1810s at the hands of Raffles that the British Parliament could not or would not follow up with a permanent conquest could make a big difference. Perhaps Raffles would be satisfied with, say, Sakeshima Gunto (the southernmost Ryukyu Islands ) as an East Pacific counterpart to Singapore and jumping off point to Taiwan and China.
If Imperial Restoration and a modern state started, say in 1820, Japan would be modernizing and industrializing at a time when the European nations had much less strength in the Pacific. Japan would be in a position to take much of Manchuria that is largely empty of settlers and take over the Amur Basin which leads to the iron and coal of Culman and Aldan (which is just over the Russian border, but not in an area that Russia has settled at that time). The Amur and Sungari could be accessed via steamboats.
With those kinds of resources, Japan would the mineral resources needed for its industrial base even without further conquests--which would likely come from Russia. And in the EARLY 19th Century, Japan would likely have free rein in the islands of the Pacific, including Hawaii, as well, as long as they did not get too close to British Australia or New Zealand.
So the Japanese wouldn't have to avoid their seclusion policy of the 17th Century to industrialize. They just needed to abandon it a few decades sooner than they did. IOTL. And a TL in which they do would be an interesting TL indeed.