I doubt it would get didvided into spheres of influence. It doesn't have the landmass for that.
Perhaps Russia or the US would start fiddling about with it.
Don't exclude Great Britain or France from the party.
What if the Meiji restoration fails and Japan remains weak? Does Japan get colonized, or divided into spheres of influence like China?
Also what happens in China and Korea without the presence of an aggressive Japan?
So either way Japan was fated to be a great power?Japan modernizes anyhow, but it adopts less Western elements in the process, e.g. traditional dress likely continues to be fashionable.
Seriously, look at the actual documents from within Japan from the 1830s, 40s, and early 50s. The Tokugawa bakufu was definitely heading towards modernization long before the imperialists began a major factor in Japanese politics.
So either way Japan was fated to be a great power?
I wouldn't say "fated," but by as late as 1868 Japan was certainly on the fast track to great powerdom. You'd need a POD at least as early as 1837 to really have a proper Nippo-screw.
1837? More like the seventeenth century!
The economy of contemporary Tokugawa Japan, had a high degree of centralization, an integrated market, and a advanced transport network. The Japanese merchant did not have to cope with internal toll barriers. Twoway trade between town and country was an established fact of Japanese life already in the seventeenth century. Technological progress, helped by a high level of literacy, was a feature of Tokugawa agriculture which had a firmly established rate of growth long before the Meiji restoration. And, in so far as relevant, the Japanese elite in the seventeenth century held an active curiosity about western science and technology, now all these do not add up to a possibility of spontaneous industrialization.But the society and economy of pre-Meiji Japan gave her a great potentiality to respond to the opportunity. And its is very likely they would do so.
But that does not mean that they would develop into a military great power, even if it is very likely.