The Modernization of the Japanese State: How to Regulate Foreign Visitors

The standard narrative of modern Japan is the success story of rapid state building, which makes its history interesting and a model case for others to emulate. Nevertheless, because Japan successfully obstructed the development of foreign settlements as autonomous administration, Japanese modern administration from the very beginning had to deal with almost all the spheres of foreigners' lives in its territory and was thus kept under severe monitoring and intervention by the treaty powers. This paper aims to trace the efforts made by the Japanese government to regulate foreign residents through the examination of its conduct on various minor administrative issues, from which this paper extracts distinctive patterns of Japanese tactics. The question is whether and what kind of metamorphosis took place in the core functions of state in Japan, and ultimately to reexamine the modern myth of development that was mentioned at the front of this abstract.