AHC: Japan a Colony

Russia can seize Hokkaido and the Kurils, Spain or Portugal might steal Kyushu and set up a pro-Catholic Japanese vassal. Netherlands is also a good candidate, they can do a HongKong-like lease on Nagasaki. China can also set up dominance in the Ryukus, since they're a tributary state. I also heard in the 1848 TL about German Hokkaido.
 
Well, the other issue is that the Brits didn't have the power projection to make it worth it in this period.

They did show up and briefly menace the Dutch trading port in the Napoleonic Wars, but that was about it. Raffles wanted to take it, but...

Oh, I agree they won't get it in this period. But they might get a foot in the door, as they did in India, and slowly encroach over the following 150 years...

Japan exported copper during this period, along with silk, some cotton, and eventually coal.

How high was copper up the list of lucrative things to get? Silk has potential, but cotton is common enough to get elsewhere.

Mind,it's interesting that everyone presumes Japan will lose. The Shogunate was also pursuing modernization...

We're not presuming Japan will lose, we're working out how to get a route so that Japan does lose. Japan losing is the premise of the challenge.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toi_gold_mine

No one's ever heard that Japan has gold? Columbus was crazy enough to demand a thimble-full of gold from the Natives of Hispaniola, and the article says that there were 60 gold-mines in the Izu Peninsula alone. That has to count for something.

I was under the impression that gold available with technology of the time had largely been depleted by the period we're talking about. Happy to be corrected though.
 
For Japan to become a colony requires a set of very early PoDs.

Basically, after the beginning of the Sakoku period it's incredibly unlikely and implausable.

Japan was not only a very unified society (sure their were Daimyo's carving out their own little fifes at some points, but they'd all fight together against a common threat) for most of its history, and especially by the late 17th century onwards, but also homogenous, so any divisions were temporary and power struggles, not attempts to break away.

Aside from that what resources Japan had were simply not worth it.

Another thing to consider is that Japan did'nt just magically industrialize when the Meiji Emperor took over, it had been modernizing most of the 19th century under the Shogunate.

Ultimately the one thing you really have to realize is that Europe's colonies were gained two ways;
-Colonizing an area with relatively low population.
-Having a large technological/weapons edge (only really applies from the 19th century onwards).

Their was a very good reason that the few colonies in East Asia were small and established after 1840, that being that East Asian society, was unified, had large populations and did'nt allow itself to allow the technology gap to become massive.
 
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