DBWI: Japan Opens Up Later

We all know Japan opened up after the Portugese came in and started trading. This (among other, less pleasant things) led to the Japanese coming out of their pouty box they've been in for some hundreds of years and finally join the world at large. Well what if the Japanese took longer to unturn its back on the world? How would that effect Japan's stance in the world? What about the Sino-Japanese War(s)?
 
I think keeping an entire country the size of Japan isolated is pretty much ASB but assuming it's possible here's what I think happens. Japanese technology stagnates and one of the European countries eventually decides they'd make a good colony and invades or supports a coup probably mid-1800s. The internal power struggles in Japan would give an excellent basis for dividing and conquering the islands. Instead of a powerful Japan expanding their influence into a weakening China we get a Japan that's divided up like India by the European powers. I think the Sino-Japanese Wars simply wouldn't happen as there would be no Japan to have them.
 
Japan would be left behind in technology- they would likely to today be a poorly-developed country. That is, if they even are a country ITTL- such a weak position would leave them easy to be conquered by China or a European colonizer. Also, if they are isolated for so long, it would leave the Japanese people open to being hit by a plague they lack immunity to- like a small scale version of what happened to the Native Americans. In any case, Japan would probably not be the great power they are in OTL.
 

Gian

Banned
And it wouldn't be Christian as well, since the Portuguese also largely converted the Japanese to Catholicism as well.
 
Japan would be left behind in technology- they would likely to today be a poorly-developed country. That is, if they even are a country ITTL- such a weak position would leave them easy to be conquered by China or a European colonizer. Also, if they are isolated for so long, it would leave the Japanese people open to being hit by a plague they lack immunity to- like a small scale version of what happened to the Native Americans. In any case, Japan would probably not be the great power they are in OTL.

I don't think even a couple of centuries of isolation is going to have that kind of immunological effect... And that's presuming we can find some way for Japan to be cut off even that long.
 
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