Preventing Japanese Unification
- Thread starter Isidro
- Start date
Could a divided Japanese Islands between Aniu and Yamato people work?
Also killing Oda Nobunaga before or during Okehazama could prevent unification, as 1 of the 3 unifiers would be dead, another would just be a peasant and another would still be a vassal. As a result you would still have power struggles between regional warlords not interrupted or taken advantage of by Nobunaga's growing strength.
Also killing Oda Nobunaga before or during Okehazama could prevent unification, as 1 of the 3 unifiers would be dead, another would just be a peasant and another would still be a vassal. As a result you would still have power struggles between regional warlords not interrupted or taken advantage of by Nobunaga's growing strength.
katchen
Banned
Now that would be an interesting time line. It wouldn't have to prevent Japanese unification to the present day. But delaying unification would delay indefinitely any sort of Japan wide seclusion policy.
You might see a patchwork of Christian, Buddhist and Shinto daimyos, for instance. Some Christian daimyos might go Protestant once they discoverfed Dutch and English Christianity. You could have a Dutch rReformed daimyo and an Anglican daimyo and a Russian Orthodox daimyo and an Evangelical Lutheran daimyuo along with Buddhist and Shinto daimyo.
It could all devolve into the Japanese version of wars of religion if the TL went a certain way.
Orit could lead to an earlier Japanese industrial revolution and settlement of Ezo and Sakhalin and Nurgan (the Ussuri Region). How hard the Manchus would fight to etain NORTHEAST Manchuria when they didn't even garrison it much OTL and were quick to cede it to the Russians is an open question.
Unification would likely happen eventually. But it could be delayed until the 19th Century, easily, just as with the Germanies. And Japan might actually be the richer for it.
You might see a patchwork of Christian, Buddhist and Shinto daimyos, for instance. Some Christian daimyos might go Protestant once they discoverfed Dutch and English Christianity. You could have a Dutch rReformed daimyo and an Anglican daimyo and a Russian Orthodox daimyo and an Evangelical Lutheran daimyuo along with Buddhist and Shinto daimyo.
It could all devolve into the Japanese version of wars of religion if the TL went a certain way.
Orit could lead to an earlier Japanese industrial revolution and settlement of Ezo and Sakhalin and Nurgan (the Ussuri Region). How hard the Manchus would fight to etain NORTHEAST Manchuria when they didn't even garrison it much OTL and were quick to cede it to the Russians is an open question. Unification would likely happen eventually. But it could be delayed until the 19th Century, easily, just as with the Germanies. And Japan might actually be the richer for it.
This is why I said that killing off the great unifiers is useless in the OP.
Wouldn't the religious differences be a significant problem AFTER unification?
This is a good one, I don't think people are looking far back enough. Tends to happen a lot around here.
It's true that I hadn't thought that far back, but it wasn't necessarily what I wanted. I imagined a Japan where each shogunate already had an idea of Japanese unification, but for some reason it never happened.
Have an invasion launched by Kublai Khan or one of his successors partially successful, so that you get a large section of Japan under a Mongol/Chinese dynasty & to some extent sinified but a also more purely 'Japanese' remnant-state at the other end of the islands?
I wrote a short TL once, elsewhere (Do any of you already know the gaming apaazine 'A&E'?), that had a successful invasion under Kubiai Khan leading to subsequent conquest by the Ming, early in that dynasty's time of power, and then a Ming survival there into modern times after the Manchu conquered mainland China. The later Ming ITTL were a bit more open to Western influence than either the Manchu or OTL 'Shogunate' Japan, and although their modernisation was slower than OTL 'Meiji'-era Japan's they'd reached a comparable point by c.1910AD. There was an influential 'Church of Japan' (bascially Anglican style, but with reverence for ancestors accepted and some other 'local' features) to which the emperors had converted and whose spread they were strongly encouraging, and then during the 1920s -- after the Manchu had collapsed -- they launched an armed "return" to the mainland.
I wrote a short TL once, elsewhere (Do any of you already know the gaming apaazine 'A&E'?), that had a successful invasion under Kubiai Khan leading to subsequent conquest by the Ming, early in that dynasty's time of power, and then a Ming survival there into modern times after the Manchu conquered mainland China. The later Ming ITTL were a bit more open to Western influence than either the Manchu or OTL 'Shogunate' Japan, and although their modernisation was slower than OTL 'Meiji'-era Japan's they'd reached a comparable point by c.1910AD. There was an influential 'Church of Japan' (bascially Anglican style, but with reverence for ancestors accepted and some other 'local' features) to which the emperors had converted and whose spread they were strongly encouraging, and then during the 1920s -- after the Manchu had collapsed -- they launched an armed "return" to the mainland.
That's not going to work, because if each daimyo is always trying to unify Japan, chances are that it's going to happen eventually. Combined with a relatively homogenous culture and a history of unification, a permanent division seems unlikely.
Even a division of Japan into Yamato and Ainu lands seems a bit late, since most of Japan's area and population would be under the Yamato state. If you wanted all of Japan divided, you'd probably need a really early point of divergence, like Kunu conquering Yamatai in the Yayoi period.