This question is way too vague. In what era? What kind of influences?

If you're talking about over the whole of history, the people of the archipelago off the North-Eastern coast of Asia (it hasn't always been "Japan") haven't resisted external influences. If anything, the people of the archipelago have shown more of a propensity to readily adopt and adapt external ideas and institutions.

The earliest writings by people in the archipelago are in the characters established by the Qin and Han dynasties on the mainland, for example. As another, the prominent Soga clan in the Yamato court were either from peninsula that we now call Korea, or at the very least had a lot of ties to it and to the mainland. Alternatively, the Taihō-yōrō codes that the Yamato court promulgated were based on the Tang dynasty model. Wet rice culture was another import from the mainland. The poetry of the Heian era makes frequent reference to the Chinese classics. The list of cultural attributes and institutions borrowed from the Asian mainland goes on and on.

Many people of the Sengoku era adopted Christianity and firearms technology from the Spanish and Portuguese. The British and Dutch had people in Nagasaki as well. Englishman William Adams had personal relations with the Tokugawa Ieyasu, and may have played a role in souring relations between the Shogunate and Catholics. Although the Tokugawa eventually kicked out the Catholic powers because of the political threat Catholics represented, they continued trading with the Dutch, Chinese and Koreans. Christianity lived on in secret, and firearms remained standard equipment for the military forces.

From the Meiji era on, the Japanese state rose to global prominence with a concerted program of borrowing technology and institutions from Europe and the US. The Japanese state basically operated in cooperation with the US through the entirety of the Cold War.

So, where's this resistance to influence you're talking about?