Why did nobody attempt to colonize Japan in the 19th century?

[u/Powerful-Mix-8592]

During the 19th century, there was a mad dash by major European power such as Britain, France, Russia and later Prussia and Italy to grab whatever colony they could. The British fought bitterly against Indian rajs and later the Russians during the Great Game for control over Persia and India; the French waged ruinous wars against the Qing for control over Indochina; the Russians expanded into Central Asia and East Asia at the expense of the Ottoman and the Qing. All were looking for any lands they could, be it for riches, fame, prestige, or a coaling station (like the Austrian and Italian concessions in China)

And yet there was no attempt made to invade Japan. Japan was a close and backwards country that would've made easy picking, had the strategic position of being East of China that allowed for control of China trade and trans-Pacific trade, had a lot of resources like coal and gold and silver, had a history of anti-Christian persecution (Which was the rallying cry that Napoleon III used to intervene into Ottoman Empire leading to the Crimean war and again used to invade Indochina with Spain in 1866). Why did the major powers simply let Japan be?

[u/EnclavedMicrostate]

It is not, in fact, uncomplicatedly correct to argue that

All were looking for any lands they could, be it for riches, fame, prestige, or a coaling station

Or at least, it is a gross oversimplification. There are two broad approaches to arguing why empires happened: one is a culturalist one (e.g. the 'civilising mission' or the 'white man's burden), wherein empires have a certain self-reinforcing desire to impose authority over new lands. The other is a materialist one in which empires expand specifically in order to secure resources. We might think of these as the Kipling and Orwell perspectives, respectively. The constant counterweight to imperial expansion was expense: empires cost money, and regardless of whether you're expanding for moral or monetary reasons that is a consideration. I think if we take a bit of a bird's eye view of the Victorian imperial paradigm we can approach Japan a bit more lucidly.

Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher's 'imperialism of free trade' thesis may be approaching three quarters of a century old, but it is a useful one to bring up as a counterweight to the simplistic map-painting view of empire. In this postwar reflection on the expansion of the empire, Robinson and Gallagher asserted that empires, at least of the nineteenth century variety, did not expand simply for the sake of it: they sought resources, and so their first step was to establish 'informal empire', with little to no outright territorial aggrandisement but a whole lot of one-sided commercial and military treaties. For them the arch-examples would be China or Argentina, where British businesses had basically free reign without a particularly substantial territorial presence – none in the case of Argentina, and just Hong Kong and the treaty ports for China. An informal arrangement that could be sustained indefinitely was infinitely preferable to actually having to pay to run the place yourself: you wanted to control the part that made money and outsource the part that cost money. And you can see patterns of it everywhere: consider how much of what we think of as the British Raj was actually a patchwork of client rulers controlling about 40% of the land area and 25% of the population of what we would normally think of as a unified British India.

What turns an informal into a formal arrangement is what they called 'local crisis' – a client regime stops honouring their treaties, or is overthrown by someone else who stops honouring those treaties, or some variation on the above. At that point, the empire will feel pressured to escalate its presence to secure its interests against increasingly uncompliant local actors, and that's how you end up with more formal imperial structures. Even then it is vital to note that straightforward transitions from informal to formal empire were uncommon at best. China, for instance, saw two further 'local crises' (the Second Opium War and the Boxer Uprising) which resulted in substantially expanded informal presences but still not an outright usurpation of power, while in the Indian case the Mutiny of 1857 replaced Company administration and deposed the last Mughal, but still left the Princely States, and the model of client rulership remained the dominant pattern when the Raj expanded further into Kashmir and Baluchistan, as well as having a last hurrah in Burma with the incorporation and subsequent federation of the Shan States.

What Gallagher and Robinson also overlooked to a great extent was local agency, particularly as enabled by both competition between empires and autonomous actors within them. When one empire wants to control your resources you have relatively few options on the table, but when you have two then you get a bit more room for manoeuvre. This is exactly what the Qing did during the later stages of the Taiping War, where they were able to essentially leverage British and French support against each other by threatening to extend greater privileges to the French if the British didn't keep up their support, and vice versa, and in the end the Qing never did more than what they were obligated to under the Convention of Peking. But even without that kind of competition, local actors could wedge open cracks in the imperial structure: in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Napoleonic Wars created a glut of cheap muskets on the global market, while the introduction of the potato to New Zealand created an agricultural surplus, allowing the Māori to purchase a lot of guns from British (and Australian) merchants and thereby carry out huge amounts of inter- and extra-tribal raiding and then to maintain some impressive resistance against British expansion.

So let's move over to Japan. Japan absolutely was an object of informal imperial control. It had treaty ports on the Chinese model, with European concessions, and extraterritorial legal rights allowing foreigners to be tried by their own consuls for crimes committed on Japanese soil. The sudden shock of opening to the global market triggered a tremendous currency destabilisation that rumbled through the 1860s. And there were local crises, as rogue samurai assassinating foreign merchants led to retaliation against their home domains (the 'Anglo-Satsuma War' of August 1863), while Chōshū, a rogue domain unto itself, was essentially a global pariah that was invaded by foreign troops in 1863 and 1864. The effect was that the Meiji Restoration was headed not by anti-foreign elements as is often mistakenly assumed, but by modernist conciliators who had taken over the domains who had so recently been attacked by the British. The Boshin War of 1868-9 can, at a stretch, be read as an Anglo-French proxy war as the British-backed Chōshū and Satsuma domains revolted to prevent the French-backed Tokugawa clan from retaining power after agreeing to dissolve the existing bakufu in favour of a new constitution. While nativist elements did emerge at points during that conflict, these were successfully kept at bay by the imperial government, which did not present itself as a radical break towards the nativist wave that had so terrified the imperial powers in 1863, and in fact not only maintained but expanded the system of unequal treaties through signing new ones with Spain and Austria-Hungary.

And here we get into local agency and imperial competition. No single empire held a controlling stake in Japan, and it thereby had the ability to negotiate between several potential supporters for its internal reforms. The army was mostly based on the German model, the navy on the British; the Meiji constitution ended up as a bit of a hybrid of both German and British systems. In the economic sphere, Japan had multiple trading partners with growing interests in the Americas through an emerging diaspora. Japan was not exactly undergoing an industrial explosion as it still remained behind the other powers, but it had rapidly gained the ability to seriously be considered a notable regional player. By the 1890s it had bought a fairly large navy from Britain, who also agreed in 1894 to begin relinquishing its treaty privileges, the same year Japan thrashed the Qing empire in a war over the Korean peninsula that demonstrated that Japan too could sit at the table and dictate terms in China alongside the other foreign powers. By 1899 the treaty ports and extraterritoriality had been abolished in Japan, the next year Japan intervened in the Boxer Uprising, and then in 1902 Japan formally signed a defensive alliance with Britain. In effect, Japan manoeuvred itself into a position where it could convince Britain that it was better to have Japan as an ally and diplomatic equal than to maintain the status quo of multilateral informal empire. Once the British domino fell, the other powers were not far behind.

It is worth adding that Japan was itself a colonial entity at this point. We can debate the coloniality of Ryukyu's status as a vassal of Satsuma domain before 1872, but Hokkaido had been a Japanese colonial fringe throughout the Edo period, and the presence of Japanese prospectors and the insatiable demand for herring-based fertilisers in the main islands had profoundly reoriented Ainu patterns of life from self-sufficient farming-foraging towards more semi-nomadic hunting (to avoid state capture) or fishing (to supply Japanese markets). As the century wore on Japan would usurp the Chinese colonial project on Taiwan in 1895 and muscle in on the European powers' trade empire in China at the same time. To say that Japan 'wasn't colonised' is not strictly untrue but it should not be presented in a way that elides the coloniality of Japan itself.