AH Challenge: Edo Japan rules Pacific
- Thread starter tom
- Start date
tom said:
In the 1630s, Dutch envoys at the Shogun's court were urging Tokugawa Iemitsu to attack Macau and Manila. Say, instead of issuing the Closed Country Edict in 1635, Iemitsu decides that the answer to Christian missionary activity and Spanish intrigue is to take the fight to the enemy. In 1637 a Dutch squadron escorts a Japanese invasion fleet to Manila. Despite fierce resistance by the small Spanish garrison and their loyal Christian Filipino auxiliaries, the town soon falls and is renamed New Edo.
At first the Tokugawa had no transoceanic ambitions beyond their new Philippine possessions. Local wars and Spanish counter-attacks led to them developing their own modern shipyards and cannon-foundries, at first with Dutch help but soon building up an entirely independent capability. When the Ming Chinese loyalist Koxinga evicted their Dutch allies from Taiwan in 1661, the Japanese felt obliged to evict Koxinga's forces in turn, to secure their own communications with New Edo. They co-operated with Manchu Qing forces to destroy the remnants of Koxinga's piratical fleet, and the Qing were happy to recognise Tokugawa rule over Taiwan, a peripheral island mostly inhabited by primitve aboriginals and of no real interest to the Chinese throne. Japan was by now the unchallenged maritime hegemon of the China Sea and the Western Pacific.
Commercial links with both native and Dutch ports in Indonesia led to the accidental discovery of Australia in the early 18th century, and a number of small commercial outposts were established on the coasts of New Guinea and northern Australia by 1750.
Filipino Christian partisans continued to intrigue sporadically with their Spanish co-religionists, and it was an abortive Spanish attack on Manila in 1770 that outraged the Tokugawa authorities sufficiently that, when Spain joined with France in attacking Britain in support of the rebel American colonies, Japan eagerly acceded to a British request to distract Spanish forces in the Pacific. The distraction was so successful that - though it had no impact on the main course of the war - Japanese delegates sat for the first time as equals in a European peace conference at Paris in 1783, to receive the cession of California.
VERY interesting . . . the Japanese were well abreast of contemporary Western levels of technology in the early seventeenth century, had they chosen to expand rather than isolate themselves there are few limits to what they could have accomplished in the Pacific against the weak European presence there.
I'd also suspect that a more outgoing Japan would sooner or later get into a war with Manchu China, perhaps over Korea.
I'd also suspect that a more outgoing Japan would sooner or later get into a war with Manchu China, perhaps over Korea.
Matthew Craw said:
The Japanese were up to European technological levels in some respects, and well behind in others: for example, their matchlock arquebuses were supposed to be better made than European examples, but they were behind in shipbuilding, artillery and fortifications. That's why they need support in the early stages from a European power; I suspect that if they had tried to sail to Manila without the Dutch escort I've given them, a couple of modern Spanish warships could have blown their fleet apart.
But if they made the decision to expand and got that initial leg up, then, as you say, they could have achieved an awful lot.
I'm sure that somewhen between 1783 and 2004 there will be wars with China, but I don't think that it is inevitable that a Japan with interests elsewhere in the Pacific would necessarily let itself get sucked in to huge exhausting land wars as they did in OTL in the 1590s and the 1930s-40s.
I can see it now, the new genre of entertainment. The Samurai in the old west. Just think, gunfights and the martial arts.
The Gunslinger said:
California, about 1800. The population, Indian, Spanish and Chinese alike, suffers under the cruel oppression of arrogant daimyos and collaborating Dons.
Only one masked outlaw defies the rulers. Combining European swordsmanship with secret ninja training, he wields his blade in the name of justice, leaving behind his famous sign - The Mark of Zorro-san!
PaleHorseRiding
Banned
Would You Not have Problems With the Americans they are right there the Japanese are across the Pacific
PaleHorseRiding said:
No, the Americans are (at first at least) half a continent away, and the Great Plains are more of a barrier to communication than the Pacific.
You might get an American war with Japan, instead of or in addition to one with Mexico, around the 1840s. Japanese victory may depend on having worked out an acceptable modus vivendi with the Californios. US expansion, or the threat of it, would then prompt Japan to consolidate their hold on the West coast and deal with Russian America - perhaps conquer or buy it.
tom said:
Dunno. A wealthy, cosmopolitan, open, culture with a superfically democratic parliamentary government and a strong military, I suspect.
Let's see: the question was "a Japan which, in 2004, has an empire consisting of Australia, the Pacific islands and the west coast of North America". To which I managed to add Taiwan, the Philippines and New Guinea in the course of starting them off...
So we must assume that Japan still holds this empire, it hasn't been affected by a C20th decolonisation. At most it's some sort of federal commonwealth. That also must mean Japan hasn't lost a world war, or at least hasn't lost anything too badly. Which in turn means we haven't had the compulsory democratisation of OTL modern Japan.
In addition, a Japan which has been active in the global economy since the 17th century, and which controls all this territory, is probably the leading economic power in this world, and at last one of the leading military powers too.
The Imperial house still reigns. The Tokugawa shogunal house probably still reigns, as well, but the way Japanese politics goes they are probably no longer the real power either. At some point the dynasty will have weakened, and real power been taken either by a "deputy", like the Hojo regents for the later Kamakura shoguns, or by representative institutions. The combination of an educated and industrialised population with the influence of European and American models suggests the latter.
We have a very multi-ethnic empire, from Maoris and Hawaiians to Hispanic Californians, indigenous Australians, Alaskans and Taiwanese, plus probably milliions of Chinese and Korean immigrants and their descendants seeking economic opportunity. This could result in a reactionary ethnic hierarchy, with pure Japanese looking down on barbaric provincials; but if this empire has lasted until 2004 I suspect something more tolerant must have evolved, and I see the Japanese commonwealth as quite a happily diverse sort of place. Perhaps they stress the parallel with the 4th-7th centuries, when so many Korean and Chinese families settled in Japan that one-third of the official class was said to be of foreign ancestry.
This is a world where Captain Kazuo Te Kanawa of the 3rd Imperial Aotearoa Ashigaru Battalion serves in a garrison on Karafuto (Sakhalin) against the not especially likely event of a Russian attack. His battalion replaced a detachment from the Daimyo of Hawaiyu's Royal Guard a few months ago (the Japanese backed Kamehameha's unification of Hawaii, and the Kings of Hawaii were eventually incorporated into the empire with the status of Japanese provincial daimyo). The captain wears a Japanese-made automatic pistol at his belt, balanced by a tewhatewha, a steel-bladed version of a traditional axe-like club which the Maori officers carry instead of the sword of their Japanese counterparts. He rides on an inspection tour of his company's outposts in a hovercar, doing his paperwork on a palmtop organiser while half-listening to the Californio guitar music his driver's playing on the radio. It's interrupted by a news bulletin, the Aotearoan election results. The Daimyo of Aotearoa has officially invited the Imperial Liberals to try to form the new provincial government, they don't have a majority but they are now the single largest party. Kazuo smiles, he voted Imperial Liberal because he'd like a little more autonomy for his homeland but isn't radical enough to vote for one of the pro-independence nationalist parties. A new aircraft carrier launched in Osaka. Riots in the Korean quarter of Sapporo, nothing too bad. A terrorist bomb in New Edo - no casualties, but that is more serious, Muslim fundamentalists in the Philippines are becoming more anti-Japanese these days. International news, the American election campaign - Kazuo isn't remotely interested, the Americans don't count for much anyway, though he realises he might feel differently if he was a Californio or Alyeskan. More Iran-Iraq border fighting. Japanese mediation seems to have come to nothing, though the newsreaders aren't drawing attention to that... Hmm, Morocco have just won the African Cup, beating Tunisia 3-2.