Assuming somehow war with the US is averted and the Russians don't steamroll the Japanese in Asia, is it possible for Japan to hold onto Korea indefinitely, or would Korea be able to free itself like how the Soviet republics gained independence after the collapse of the USSR?
Could the Japanese hold onto korea indefinitely?
- Thread starter Berkeley2017
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They could if they did it right (at least to the present day). But it could very easily go wrong of course, if they heavily mistreat the Koreans and then loosen their grip, than Korea is bound for independence. Autonomy is another useful tip in democratisation. Either way, Korea will have some Japanese influence or another on it, as well as populations that spread into the region. But yeah, its unlikely they could integrate it properly if that's what you mean.
A continually Japanese Formosa/Taiwan on the other hand...
A continually Japanese Formosa/Taiwan on the other hand...
I don't think anyone thinks the Japanese could get the Koreans to love being dominated; I think it's more what is the limit to how many ethnic Japanese they can settle there, and to what extremes the military is willing to go to maintain the dominance of Japanese settlers.
It's kinda funny though, I sort of have a gumption to do a 'realistic' Code Geass timeline at some point (whenever I work up the nerve to ask Pre-1900 for help), but I'm always kinda struck by how the show essentially projected Japan's own imperial sins (stripping a country of its national identity and turning into a resource colony) on an evil Western Empire.
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It's like what Gandhi said: "100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians". Considering how even when the urban and rural poor of Japan were so numerous OTL and only 2 million were in both Korea and Manchuria by 1945, I'm not sure how sending more colonists short of forcing people out of their houses and shipping them en masse to Fushan can work.
Well, for one we're assuming that the Chinese adventurism doesn't happen. I sorta get the feeling the Militarist governments eyes were bigger than it's stomach, and sort of put Korean colonization efforts on the backburner in the 30s as they went about trying to develop Manchuria.
I think if they focused entirely on holding down the Korean Peninsula they could hold it for an indeterminate amount of time, and without much reaction from the West besides maybe Russia which would be annoyed it didn't have any influence there. But I think the problem with that is just holding Korea probably wouldn't get them much respect on the world stage; that the Militarists thinking would demand that they inevitably get involved in China.
Except there's no way the Chinese or the Russians(who, with no Manchurian takeover by Japan would grow even quicker than OTL) would be happy with a Japanese foothold on the continent.
Also, let's not forget that Manchuria's easily a better place to invest because it has wayy more resources to offer than Korea. Note that Korea was not a self-sufficient colony until the 1930s.
Yes, but there are plenty who offer different arguments. I have yet to change my own however, because I'm pretty sure about it.
Frankly Second-Wave Colonialism in general seems ill-conceived; it seems like a mad dash to secure resources without any thought put into how the territories should be governed.
I kinda wonder where Japan's Imperial ambitions came from. Sure Commodore Perry's arrival was a shock, but for several centuries they had seemed content to live an insular existence under the Shogunate. Also did the Japanese have any particular beef with the Koreans before they colonized them or was it just spoils of opportunity from the First Sino-Japanese War?
I kinda wonder where Japan's Imperial ambitions came from. Sure Commodore Perry's arrival was a shock, but for several centuries they had seemed content to live an insular existence under the Shogunate. Also did the Japanese have any particular beef with the Koreans before they colonized them or was it just spoils of opportunity from the First Sino-Japanese War?
Were there calls for centralization and expansion even during the Edo Period of Japan? It's struck me as bizarre that the two modes of thinking foriegn policy wise have been either Isolationism or Imperial Expansion. Has Japan historically (I mean, pre-19th century or so) not played nice with the other East Asian civilizations? I offhandedly heard from a friend that the Chinese Empire considered the Japanese just a bunch of pirates as far as they were concerned.
It's because after the fall of the Edo era the elite deeply felt the need to centralize power and control, and part of the effort was put in nationalist education - ultimately, ultranationalist education even before the end of the 19th century - which came to bite Japan hard on the rear by 1941. Of course, this isn't to say that without such education Japan would even stay unified, as we saw in the IJA-IJN conflicts(surprisingly enough, a continuation of the Satsuma-Choshu conflict before 1868) that drove Japan into unnecessary conflicts.
In historical context, Japan always had a large ego in terms of foreign policy - going so far as to call itself an Empire during the 5th century in a letter to China, although mainly because Korea was sitting inbetween - and it was able to maintain such an attitude because it rarely faced dangers along the border, unlike Korea or China. This is contradictory to the almost prostrating attitude it shows towards Chinese and Korean culture; after the Japanese invasions of Korea a memoirs of a famous Korean politician recollecting the war was highly praised and mass-printed, but the book was barely reprinted in Korea.
The more you know.
In historical context, Japan always had a large ego in terms of foreign policy - going so far as to call itself an Empire during the 5th century in a letter to China, although mainly because Korea was sitting inbetween - and it was able to maintain such an attitude because it rarely faced dangers along the border, unlike Korea or China. This is contradictory to the almost prostrating attitude it shows towards Chinese and Korean culture; after the Japanese invasions of Korea a memoirs of a famous Korean politician recollecting the war was highly praised and mass-printed, but the book was barely reprinted in Korea.
The more you know.
This sounds like a national Inferiority Superiority Complex to me.
Maybe it is a result of Japan's semi-peripheral location/status.
I guess one of the things that I've mulled over, and you could help fix any misconceptions I might have, but something that interests me is a comparison of the interactions of East Asian Civilizations amongst themselves compared to Western European Civilizations. I'm not at all qualified to make judgments, but from my cursory knowledge it seems to me that East Asian civilizations were, to some degree, more insular than European civilizations, who were always either warring or intermarrying or what have you.
I'm very sure the state-state interactions are vastly different between East Asia and Europe, as would in India, the Middle East and so on, although not sure in the way you seem to perceive. One example is that while there was almost no intermarrying in the last five centuries between countries such as China and Korea there was almost what could be called a fierce competition between European kingdoms for princes and princesses; a single queen being called the "Mother of all Euorpe" as was Victoria would be inconceivable in East Asia.