Since the 1980s, specialists in Chinese history have largely rejected the idea that the Opium War should serve as the watershed from which 'modern' Chinese history begins, as part of a general move towards a more Asia-centric understanding of the dynamics of the Ming, Qing, Republican and Communist periods. Alternative candidates for the beginning of the process of Chinese 'modernity' have, for instance, included the outbreak of the Taiping War in 1851 and the Qianlong-Jiaqing transition in 1796-9. My cursory understanding of 19th-century Japanese history, however, seems to suggest that Western influence is afforded a far higher role in contemporary assessments. Is it just that I'm forming this impression from outdated and/or pop-history-leaning views on Japan (similar how to a Eurocentric view of Chinese history remains common in popular spaces despite its rejection from academia) or is there genuinely a significant and current historiographical difference?
Historians of early modern Japan generally identify a combination of internal pressures and external forces, including Russian expansion and European imperialism, as contributing to the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the modern "restoration" of imperial rule in the form of the Meiji government. The tipping point was definitely Perry's visit. A good recent study is Mark Ravina's To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History.
Plenty of Anglophone historians of Japan have argued that Japan's "modernization" began before Perry, ranging from Marius Jansen's edited volume Japan in Transition (1986) to David Howell's Capitalism From Within Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (1995).