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.

Our 2020 Annual Conference was scheduled to be held at the University of Wrocław in Poland on July 9-11, 2020.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our next Annual Conference will take place from July 8-10, 2021. The conference, "ICON•S Mundo", will be held online. Details regarding the organization of the 2021 Conference will follow soon.
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