Japan is in control of the Tokugawa Shogunate, who has closed the country to foreigners. One of the purported reasons is fearing the influence of Christian missionaries as early as the 17th century. You have the British in India. You have the Spanish, who have been in the Philippines for several hundred years at this point. You have the Dutch in control of much of what will eventually be Indonesia. This orange color shows where the French already have a stronghold in Indochina in Southeast Asia, and in this peach color, this is what they would eventually control as we get into the latter half of the 19th century. But to really understand Japanese motivations in the 19th century, you have to think about what was happening in Qing China as we talk about in the video on the Opium Wars.