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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, various Western countries competed for influence, trade, and territory in East Asia, and Japan sought to join these modern colonial powers. The newly modernized Meiji government of Japan turned to Korea, then in the sphere of influence of China's Qing dynasty .
Early Meiji. In the nineteenth century, Western powers saddled non-Western states with a variety of unequal arrangements, from fixed tariffs and extraterritoriality to formal colonization. The 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the United States and Japan marked the inclusion of Japan into the unfortunate side of this equation.
Japan was not formally colonized by Western powers, but was a colonizer itself. It has, however, experienced formal semicolonial situations, and modern Japan was profoundly influenced by Western colonialism in wide-ranging ways. Japan's first encounter with Western colonialism was with Portugal in the mid-sixteenth century.
Contents. Home Geography & Travel Countries of the World. The emergence of imperial Japan. Foreign affairs. Japanese expansion in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Achieving equality with the West was one of the primary goals of the Meiji leaders.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, various Western countries actively competed for influence, trade, and territory in East Asia, and Japan sought to join these modern colonial powers. The newly modernised Meiji government of Japan turned to Korea (under the Joseon dynasty), then in the sphere of influence of China's Qing dynasty.
At the same time, rural Japan provided the bulk of the laborers for the new industries, and daughters from farming families were found in many textile plants. But the early 20th century was not a time of agricultural prosperity. Colonial competition tended to depress domestic agricultural prices.
As it was, Japan's emergence as a colonial power in the late 1890s came just as the nation was extricating itself from the unequal treaty system imposed three decades earlier by the Western powers.
