How was Japan able to quickly master the challenges posed by the West?

During the nineteenth century, while China’s standing in the world plummeted, Japan’s was rising. European traders and missionaries first arrived in Japan in the sixteenth century, but in the early seventeenth century, in part because of the remarkable success of Catholic missionaries (see “Christian Missionaries” in Chapter 21), the Japanese government expelled them. During the eighteenth century Japan much more effectively than China kept foreign merchants and missionaries at bay. It limited trade to a single port (Nagasaki), where only the Dutch were allowed, and forbade Japanese to travel abroad. Because Japan’s land and population were so much smaller than China’s, the Western powers never expected much from Japan as a trading partner and did not press it as urgently. Still, the European threat was part of what propelled Japan to modernize.