What i meant was Japan overtaking britain at the same time as America and Germany.
Maybe they annex Manchuria and Korea earlier and begin to industrialise it.
The problem for this is capital, and they would probably need BRITISH capital in order to industrialise faster, and British capital is only coming to foreign lands once it is sated in its homeland - in addition, destroy British industry and you destroy British capital
Of course, if you alter other things you could have French or perhaps German capital instead (tho IMHO its a bit early for German in the 1880s-1890s).
The second consideration is that you cannot just "industrialise" somewhere - as well as the capital to buy the plant etc, you need the workforce and for that you need the specialist engineering schools, and you need the money to pay for these too. Otherwise, you end up with foreign-owned companies employing largely immigrant populations. Its why it takes time to build up an industrial base - access to money alone won't do it
Of course, you also need markets and a reason for the industrial development. Arms build-up is one, but for that to work in your homeland you again need the technological basis from which to build - ie China in the 1890s could build small cruisers and smaller ships at its navy yards but did not have the infrastructure to cope with larger ships. Even if it had got hold of the money and built the dockyards (and to do this it would have had to borrow from Europe) it would not have had the workforce capable of constructing the ships - look at the Ottoman attempt to build a battleship at this period, or the Hungarian yard and all the trouble it had constructing the
Szent Istvan
Best regards
Grey Wolf