What would happen if the Meji restoration failed?
Basically, not much in the long-term as others have said. Japan was already on the path towards modernization. The only real change is what that modernization looks like.
There was that rebellion in early Meiji, that show there was a possibility had Meiji screwed up somehow like bickering factions getting really disunited of civil troubles... longer if else.
Yes, and perhaps a more devastating Boshin War or a more widespread series of rebellions could have delayed or even reversed a lot of the Meiji reformations...but I think the end result is the same. Whether it becomes known as the Meiji Restoration, with Imperial primacy returned, or a Shogunate Revolution where the Emperor is once and for all removed from the political picture, Japan will finish modernizing. It's just that with the victory of the Imperial forces in the civil war, they were able to accelerate industrialization and modernization because Meiji was a modern, forward-thinking man and his opponents were largely reactionary conservatives who didn't want to upset the existing social order, which we know industrialization and the further democratization of lethal force would do.
l-101 said:
Could Japan fall like its neighboors and becoming prey to the european interests? How will this Japan develop?
In short, no. European attention was firmly focused on the 'uncivilized' areas of Asia and Africa by this point, or on China. And while Japan certainly wouldn't be quite as powerful, there is a (distant) history of peaceful cooperation between Europe and Japan to take into consideration.
Also, the fall of the samurai was pretty much inevitable. Either they fell, or they radically changed themselves. Either way, the samurai class as it had been was on the way out. The world around Japan had changed too much for the country to keep its doors mostly shut, and the country itself was changing greatly.
Pretty much, as I mentioned above, while the Sword Hunts and the like were supposed to keep weapons out of the hands of non-samurai, the democratization of lethal force that modern firearms bring to the table ensures that the Samurai will fail as a dominant warrior class. And given that socially-speaking they have been atrophying for the better part of the past 150 years as they had no real place in society and started to wax whimsical about the honor, duty, and the like...it's just a matter of time before they got swept into the dustbin of history, either by this ability for the peasant to more easily kill the samurai, or by the samurai themselves one day waking up and asking "Why are we doing this? We don't have a purpose" and kinda fading into the background and getting forgotten. Sure, a Samurai Officer Class could come up with things, as in Germany with the Junker military class...but there's just too much social baggage, too much conservative thought, their reactionary desire for the past too deeply ingrained for the Samurai to make effective officers in the same sort of systematized way that the Germans harnessed the Junkers.
I was thinking more to something similar to the China which adapted to the western influence and was never conquered but it didn't modernized coherently and was victim of the european countries.
I imagined a Japan that doesn't become rival of the Europeans, it remains indipendent but exploited from the West. However I gather from the responses that the Japan was too homogeneus and in an area less important for the Europeans to end like that.
The only problem with this has already sorta been hinted at. Even before the Meiji Restoration, Japan has been infiltrated by Westerners and their ideas for the better part of the past 15 years or so. If they try to close the doors and undo these reforms, the Europeans will sweep in. You need only look as far as China. In the 1840s, 50s, 60s, with the Opium Wars, with the Boxer Rebellion, with all that stuff, once the door was opened by the EUropeans, they would not at all permit it to close in even the slightest way. For Meiji to truly fail, you'd have to do that...but there's no way a semi-industrialized Japan can hold off all of Western Europe, plus the United States if they decide that gunboats and marines are what they have to do to protect the expats and ensure the further spread of Western society, culture, and values.
That said, you are right. Japan is too centralized and homogenous to be colonized in the traditional sense, but again, cultural or social colonialism is what the Europeans are doing there...planting the seed of Western Civilization and letting it grow like a weed that infects the whole garden of what could be called Japanese Traditional Society.