What if no Meiji Restoration?

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?
 
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.
 
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?

Firstly, bye the Meiji restoration failing, do you mean a continuation of Tokugawa rule or the failure of Japanese industrialization? Or both?
Secondly Japanese strength would not necessarily be based on said options in a conclusive degree.
 
Russia taking Hokkaido would be pretty certain, the other islands could go to either Britain, France, the Netherlands or, if the partition of Japan amongst the colonial powers happens late enough, the USA. Both China and Korea would be the playground for european colonial powers until decolonisation finally comes along.
 
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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.
 
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?
 
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 for the 19th century, IMHO.
 
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.
 
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.

All very true, but local and petty politics has a way of interfering in long-term trends. A different, more reactionary, response to the Morrison Incident would mean that the bakufu wasn't already in the process of modernizing and ending Sakoku when Perry, or his ITTL analogue, shows up on the scene. That would have a major impact on Japanese development.
 
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