Japan? Absolutely ridiculous. The island's one of the most resource poor in the world; to even fuel industrial development sooner or later they'd have to fight Britain, France, the Netherlands, or Russia- they wouldn't be stupid enough to pick a fight with powers that great. The Qing did, of course, but China actually had the industry to drive the West from Asia; it's the biggest economy today for a reason. But really, I can't see how Japan ends up anything more than a tributary of Peking- certainly after the Second Sengoku following the Shogun's murder of Emperor Meiji going public I can't see a way. I don't know, it's hard to see a nation where the Shogun has to call the Qing army in at least once a year to save his ass from the Restorationists ever being a great power.
It may seem that way today, but remember that the Edo was a period of remarkable stability that say a Little Divergence in Asia that Edo Japan quite a bit ahead of Qing in the general sophistication of its economy, and the Meji period was, in its infancy, the beginnings of a major period of modernisation.
The trouble in our world was that Japan eventually got caught as a buffer state between the power politics of Qing and the Americans, ultimately precipitating the internal coup by Beijing's preferred man, the Shogun, when the Meji restorationists played their hand too close to the US.
Then the perennial instability that we associate with Japan today became inevitable (which the Qing are unable to resolve, despite repeated interventions that have turned Japan into the longest running quagmire and arguably, black spot, in Chinese foreign policy), and Japan's constant economic trap of boom-and-bust, as gains growth made under normal times are turned apart by conflict.
In another world, Japan may have got the sweet spot between having a well developed early modern economy (arguably the most in Eastern Asia), a lack of any of the internal ethnic conflicts that have cause problems in modernizing elsewhere, and just enough pressures from outside to focus the state on modernisation, but not too much to risk foreign invasion, and its early promise may not have gone to waste.