AHC: Open Japan Earlier

Suggest a way to get Japan to open up earlier (say, between 1800 and 1840). What would Japan's likely course of development be in that case?
 

SunDeep

Banned
Suggest a way to get Japan to open up earlier (say, between 1800 and 1840). What would Japan's likely course of development be in that case?

Shift the primary focus of The Great Game from Central Asia to the Far East from the very beginning, with the British deciding not to intermediate in their peace negotiations with the Persians in the Russo-Persian War. As such, facing Napoleon's invasion, the Russians are forced to accept far less favorable terms in order to bring the Russo-Persian War to a swift end and bring those troops back home. Afterwards, this bad experience leads the Russian Empire to focus on expansion over in the Far East instead, bringing the isolationist Imperial Korea under its control by the mid-1830's before immediately moving on to open up the isolationist Imperial Japan in the same manner.
 
St. Francis Xavier survives in 1552 and continues to proselytize with much more success; Oda Nobunaga successfully becomes shogun, pursues a path of tolerance, and the country converts within a few decades. By 1600 they are actively pursuing relations with Catholic Europe.
 
Japanese conversion to Christianity is, while perhaps more likely than French conversion to Buddhism, not that much more likely, IMO.
 

SunDeep

Banned
IIRC, Japan was approx 13% Christian in 1600. So it's not unreasonable.

What % of the Spanish population was Muslim at this time? Just for the sake of drawing a suitable analogy. (BTW, I thought the OP's AHC was to open up Japan between 1800 and 1840?)
 
Hey, Buddhism started as a small foreign cult in Japan until Prince Shoutoku promoted it as a state religion.
 
IIRC, Japan was approx 13% Christian in 1600. So it's not unreasonable.

While Christianity had spread greatly at this time period, particularly in Kyushu, it is important not to exaggerate the depth to which it had truly penetrated in Japan. Jesuit missionaries, in an attempt to gain as much breadth in conversions as possible, had given the barest minimum depth in actual religious education to the new 'converts.' In order to spread the message as far as possible, the Portuguese missionaries had tried to take a leaf out of the book of the missionaries in China, and attempted to explain the tenets of Christianity in the terms of native Buddhist and Confucian tenets, but ended up watering down Christianity so much that it's not a stretch to say that a substantial portion of converts, if not an outright majority, probably believed at first that Christianity was actually a new Buddhist sect, rather than an entirely different religion.

Hey, Buddhism started as a small foreign cult in Japan until Prince Shoutoku promoted it as a state religion.

This was back when Japanese cultural development was not so much in the cradle so much as climbing out of the womb.
 
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