The Tumult of Asia
Emperor Koji and Empress Kikuko Celebrate the 2600th Anniversary of the Mythological Founding of the Japanese Empire
Red Sun Dawning
With the signing of the Treaty of Vladivostok which brought the Japanese Civil War to an end, a new world dawned for the peoples of Japan. The nascent People's Shogunate was able to shift its focus from the persecution of the bitter and bloody civil war towards reckoning with the massive costs of the war - societally, culturally, economically and in human terms. Nevertheless, the society which emerged from the depths of the Civil War was one united to an intense degree, certain that they were on the right side of history and vindicated in their beliefs by the magnificent naval victory over the seemingly invincible British Royal Navy at the Battle of the East China Sea. The time had now come for the Shogunate to rebuild society in the image of its founders. The advent of the revolution had seen members of the social elite throughout Japanese society driven from positions of power. Tenants assaulted and murdered landlords, factory workers lynched hated factory managers and a slew of age-old feuds burst out into the open, with neighbors at each others' throats and colleagues rushing to condemn one another for disloyalty to the revolution. Organized by some of the more radical members of Nippon Kyosanto, work teams began travelling from village to village with the aim of identifying landlords and other "parasites" whose possessions were confiscated and redistributed, with many of those targeted finding themselves persecuted or even murdered by their neighbors - more often than not at the instigation of the work teams. With their hinterlands rapidly degenerating into open anarchy, the Shogunate was forced to act with speed and decisiveness. Moving against the hasty actions of the radicals, the leadership conducted a swift internal purge of those unwilling to obey directives from the top before setting about organizing a series of major land reforms which would, over the course of the following decade, replace the landlord-centric economy and society with a fully-functional communal village system based upon the concepts pioneered in Soviet Russia - Nippon Kyosanto leadership viewing this much-empowered peasant class as the base and bulwark of their movement. However, the scars of this process, which saw tens of thousands of landlords forced to surrender their lands to state control, were to prove considerable and resulted in a bitterly angered population group which was to continually provoke troubles and retaliatory repression in the years to come. Building upon the pre-existing Meiji-era distinction between urban and rural life, the Shogun Council had already divided its subordinate body, the Jimin Gikai between rural Peasants and urban Workers, and would continue to stress this divide by empowering the Workers' Council with a say in industrial policies and the Peasants' Council with a say in agricultural policies. To determine this distinction, the Shogunate turned to the municipal organizational system and the towns and villages system established under Meiji to determine which council the individual sub-prefectures would send their representatives to, with regular adjustments to be made prior to each electoral cycle by a special committee of central government bureaucrats. While rural Japan would see the rise of the communal village, in the cities of Japan the state was to rule supreme. Every corporation, landholding and asset held by any non-state entity was nationalized and, in time, rationalized with the aim of creating a powerful and harmonious industry and economy to serve as the foundations of the Peoples' Prosperity - the name given to this mass campaign of nationalization and rationalization. Much as with the former landlords, the People's Prosperity campaign was to impoverish a once-powerful population group which could do little more than protest and lament their fate - some amongst them turning towards sabotage of the new regime in whatever capacity they could while others sought to embark on the perilous journey across the Tsushima Strait in small fishing boats and smugglers' rafts for Chosun, where they hoped to receive a friendlier welcome. The first formal elections for the Peoples' Shogunate would occur in mid-1938 to little fanfare, largely serving simply to legitimize the constructions set up by the Shogunate during the preceding two years. However, while the elections themselves proved anti-climactic, the calling of the First Jimin Gikai, the People's Council, was to prove far more momentous as a slew of legislation was passed under the direction and auspices of Yamakawa Hitoshi and Adachi Kenzo. Work on an entirely new Law Code which would take into consideration the priorities of the Shogunate was set into motion while a series of revolutionary tribunals and revolutionary task forces were established to hunt down and determine the fate of enemies of the revolution. Relatively disjointed and without any clear legal system to build off of, these initial tribunals would vary widely in their efforts - some persecuting not only explicitly anti-Shogunate rebels, but also a variety of "class enemies" and "malcontents", which often boiled down to the personal preferences of the individual tribunal judge. However, discontent over the lack of guidelines and arbitrary nature of the tribunals would eventually result in the formulation of "The Seven Enemies" - a short, almost pamphlet-sized, document which outlined a variety of groups classified as revolutionary enemies and the appropriate range of punishments that could be levied by the tribunals. While still vague, these new guidelines were to prove instrumental in the purging of undesired elements, including the Kazoku and Shizoku social classes of former samurai and lords - with some noted exceptions, the mercantile elite and a variety of other so-called class enemies. Ultimately, the various revolutionary tribunals, persecutions, confiscations and various other elements of the official Japanese Red Terror would eventually come to a close in early 1939 when Ikki Kita publicly proclaimed the successful Purification of Japan. The October Revolution was to have an immense impact upon the ethnic minorities of Japan who had been languishing under horridly discriminatory official and unofficial policies and rabid xenophobia. While the new regime would do little to tamp down on the racialist theories and Japanese supremacist tendencies in Shogunate society, they did act to remove the majority of the formal barriers faced by ethnic minorities in their lands, partly motivated by the ideological purpose of their movement espoused by Ikki Kita as Liberators of Asia from Imperialist Oppression, and partly out of a very real-politique understanding of their current geopolitical circumstances - and the important role that their ethnic minorities could come to play in strengthening the ties between the Shogunate and revolutionary movements across the continent. For this reason, particularly the much maligned and oppressed Korean minority population in Japan would find itself the focus of considerable government efforts at rehabilitation - the government viewing this population as the perfect weapon against the Loyalist regime in Chosun. Similarly, the Chinese minority would find many of its legal restrictions lifted while a general purge of repressive policies and legislation targeting minority and colonial populations was undertaken over the course of the late 1930s (8).
The Japanese Civil War had fundamentally undermined the Japanese industrial and economic foundation, wreaking havoc across the heartland of Japan and seeing the outright transportation of significant amounts of industrial resources to Chosun - outside of the control of the Shogunate. As such, one of the first and most significant tasks awaiting the young Shogunate was the reconstruction of Japan and the adaptation of the country's existing infrastructure and industry to match the needs and ideological demands of the new state. The swift capture of Tokyo and its environs at the start of the Civil War had done much to save the city's role as an industrial center and the city proved relatively easy to transition to new government standards - largely amounting to a near-total nationalization of all industry and commerce in the region and their assignment to various sub-bugyos of the Financial Magistracy - the Kanjo Bugyo, led by the formidable Marxist economist Sakisaka Itsuro. By contrast the former industrial heart of Japan, the Chubu Region, had seen its cities reduced to ruins, its factories and infrastructure plundered, its populace subjugated to harsh Loyalist rule and a subsequent collapse into anarchy which would take months to bring under control. This was where the Trotskyite remnant truly came to shine, as their experience from Russia's own reconstruction helped to facilitate what was to prove an astonishingly successful reconstruction campaign. Mobilizing the entire populace of the region to the task in what amounted to a militarized campaign of forced labour, the Shogunate would succeed in repairing and rebuilding much of the lost infrastructure - fixing bridges and railways, establishing new roads, organizing urban and rural districts into carefully planned constellations wielding the latest theories in communist urban planning and much more. For the development of their industrial capacity, the Shogunate turned to their new allies to the north - acquiring large-scale loans of raw resources and technological experts in the design and development of factories, foundries and large-scale workshops drawing inspiration and experience from not only the Soviets, but also from the rationalized Red Italian industrial policies which had allowed that country to recover from its ordeals with surprising speed. To ensure their successful retention of the knowledge and experience which these advisors brought with them, the Shogunate restructured the Japanese educational system, further centralizing control beyond the Meiji-era reforms by placing the entire educational portfolio under the personal direction of Shogun Fukumoto Kazuo while massively expanding the availability of schooling at all levels. Schooling was restructured with the formation of National People's Schools based on the German Volkschule model alongside a series of vocational and scholastic schools - the former of which mixed vocational training, home economics and basic military training for both genders, while the latter were directly affiliated with universities and came to serve as the starting point for the development of a professional white-collar class loyal to the Shogunate - training them in medicine, law, economics, commerce, science, engineering and management alongside classes on class consciousness, revolutionary ethos and Communist ideology. All of these efforts were to ultimately allow for the general economic recovery of Japan by the early 1940s, if with a significantly changed profile. The mass redistribution of rural lands, and the resultant creation of a powerful small-holder farming class, was to center the economy and introduce a level of dynamism and agricultural rejuvenation while the replacement of the ponderous Zaibatsus with a vast sea of small state-owned enterprises was to introduce a surprising degree of competition and economic growth. Major investments were made into the development of electrical power, light industries and what would prove to be a highly successful high technology sector. With the Russian alliance, Japan found a seemingly unending source of coal, steel and other important resources which allowed them to expand and improve upon their heavy industries and as such they were able to weather the initial international trade transition as access to American and British markets disappeared quite suddenly, only to be replaced by the Russian market (9). The end of the Japanese Civil War was to prove a critical period for the development of the nascent Shogunate's military forces as they transitioned from war-time to peace-time. While Japan had possessed a robust military-industrial complex before the war, the majority of the associated factories had been located in central Japan and as such been the focus of both relocation to Chosun and the devastation of war. As a result, the Government and later Shogunate had seen itself forced to source military armaments abroad as the scale of the fighting grew and the demand for weaponry and ammunitions grew. Initially this had come in the form of major arms purchases from British and American alongside a smaller, but still considerable, sourcing of arms from the Soviet Union - primarily produced by Vladivostok's relatively sizable arms industry and shipped illicitly across the Sea of Japan by Nippon Kyosanto members on behalf of the Jimin Gunjikaigi. However, with the outbreak of the October Revolution and rise of the People's Shogunate, sourcing from the Soviet Republic had exploded in scale while the rest of the international markets halted trade to the new revolutionary government. A major aim of the initial post-war reconstruction would thus prove to be the rebuilding of Japan's arms industry to the point of self-sufficiency and its adaptation to the new strategic and ideological considerations of the new regime. This would play out with a growing emphasis upon utility, interchangeability and ease-of-use in all aspects, such that the large masses of Red Guard veterans who had been called to duty on an ad-hoc basis could be easily rearmed when faced with a future crisis. In general, the People's Imperial Army was to emphasize the importance of esprit de corps by leaning heavily into the ideological constructions of Ikki Kita and what became the heavily idealized "People's Samurai" The People's Samurais would stand as guardians of the Revolution, serving as not only its vanguard abroad, aiding in the liberation of Asia from their colonial overlords, but also as a bulwark at home - the first and last defender of the Revolution. However, while the emphasis of the IPA was firmly on the massed might of soldiery, they would marry this with the creation of small, elite, units which they planned to use primarily as an offensive force, capable of not only training and leading revolutionary forces around the world, but also of acting as shock troops - airborne, armored or otherwise - in more conventional conflicts. Ultimately this change would see an overall reduction in investment into the Japanese Army as compared to the Imperial People's Navy. It was the Navy which was to enjoy the majority of the fruits of victory, having already gained immense glory with their successful defeat of the vaunted British Navy. With the many lessons learned from the war, and with a collection of immensely talented and innovative leaders at the head of the navy, it should come as little surprise that the IPN was to grow rapidly in strength and prestige in the post-Civil War period, recruiting heavily from amongst the most capable of young officer candidates and rapidly building up the capabilities of the IPNJ. Perhaps the most dramatic development of this period on the military front was to be the complete reimagining of the Navy's subsidiary wings as the Naval Ground Forces, who had played an important if often ignominious role during the Civil War, were rebuilt in their entirety - recruiting heavily from the fiercest and most talented of the demobilizing Red Guard regiments in order to create what swiftly became one of the most capable military forces available to the Shogunate. At the same time, the Navy Air Service expanded rapidly as it took control of almost all air duties in the Shogunate, almost entirely displacing the Army Air Force outside of direct battlefield support, while at the same time seeing massive investments into the Japanese air fleet - having come to be viewed as the most important factor for victory in future conflicts. Ultimately, the result was to see the continuance of the long and storied Japanese tradition for inter-service rivalries, as the comparatively neglected Army were left with pained envy at the immense resources available to their Navy counterparts (10).
The bubbling tensions provoked by the Red Terror in the lands of the Shogunate would result in numerous clashes within the ranks of the government. On one hand, there was a feeling that if the old rot was not exorcised from Japanese society, it would poison anything built atop it, while others felt that the increasingly extreme measures taken were of questionable ideological efficacy and undoubtedly poor morality. As the Terror continued and grew in scale through 1937 and 1938, this debate grew ever more intense, until finally reaching a climax in the Jeju Uprising. Having conquered the Korean island near the tail-end of the Civil War after a bitter stand by the Loyalist garrison, the island had largely been neglected outside of the use of Jeju City as a naval base to patrol the Chosun coastline during the initial period of peace. However, in mid-1938, with the Red Terror in the Home Isles well under way and attentions turning to the wider colonial empire inherited by the Shogunate, the decision was made to begin the implementation of the Red Terror in Jeju. At first the matter largely escaped the attentions of the native Korean population of the isles, who expected the purge to focus upon the small Japanese colonial population and saw little reason to involve themselves, however the appointment of the radical Korean Communist Park Hon-yong to sit upon the Jeju Revolutionary Tribunal was to prove of critical importance, for with this act the Shogunate's officials succeeded in drawing themselves into the bitter and bloody factional strife engulfing the Korean Independence Movement during this period. Jeju had always been amongst the most active regions in the Korean struggle for independence and a favored place of exile from the mainland when factional strife or colonial repression grew too fierce for comfort on the peninsula, with the island largely remaining peaceful despite the ideological and factional divides of the various exiles and natives who called it home. However, with the appointment of Park Hon-yong that peace was shattered with shocking abruptness, for he soon began to direct a massive campaign of repression targeting his Korean rivals and enemies while working to establish himself as the foremost Korean voice in service to the Shogunate. The persecutions, aided by the local representatives of the Shogunate, swiftly spun out of control and grew into large-scale persecutions and mass executions - which in turn provoked swift and fierce resistance from the local Korean population. In early November of 1938 this resistance was to flare up into an open revolt, as tribunal officers were lynched and Shogunate officers found themselves the target of assassinations and attacks by members of the local Jeju population. The response from the local forces was to intensify their efforts, which soon drew the attentions of the Loyalists in Chosun. Negotiating an agreement with elements of their own Korean populace, the Loyalists were able to begin the smuggling of arms and trainers across the strait to aid in the revolt, which soon saw the rebellion grow out of the control of the local officials, who were forced to finally turn to the central government of the Shogunate for aid after a series of major setbacks saw the rebels secure effective control of most of the island outside of Jeju City itself. News of the chaos in Jeju proved of considerable concern to the Shogun Council and brought to a boil the ongoing discussion about the excesses of the Terror within the council itself. Over the course of a week of acrimonious debate, even as word of the continued bloodshed in Jeju and reports that sympathy demonstrations were being planned by the Korean population in the Home Isles continued to trickle in, the decision was eventually made to suspend the Terror. While the need to purge society had been considerable at the start of the Terror, Emperor Koji was able to argue persuasively that the goals of the effort in the Home Isles had largely been accomplished, while the extension of the Terror to the non-Japanese segments of the colonial empire threatened to undermine trust in the Shogunate amongst their revolutionary partners abroad - who looked upon the treatment of Japan's minorities as a weathervane for how the government might treat their foreign dependents. This was joined with an impassioned plea to protect the moral standing of the revolution, and a demand that the members of the Shogun Council consider the ramifications of their actions on an international stage. Once the decision had been made, it was not long before actions followed it. The government officials who had so gravely mismanaged the Terror in Jeju, including Park Hon-yong, saw themselves placed under arrest on charges of abuse of power and dereliction of duty, in a clear sign to the rebels that a new tune was being taken by the government. This was followed by the dispatch of Emperor Koji's old mentor, General Isobe Asaichi, to command the resolution of the crisis. In a series of deft military actions and diplomatic overtures, Isobe was able to push the rebels to the negotiating table - offering amnesty to those who surrendered while promising the end of repression in Jeju. While distrustful and uncertain of this new tone, the Jeju Uprising's leadership would eventually engage in negotiations with the general. The talks that followed, while tense, would prove a rousing success as Isobe wined and dined his counterparts, wooing them with promises of leniency and acceptance of their ideological deviations as long as they promised to abide by Shogunate law in Jeju. In return, the rebels saw the enshrining of the rights of the Jeju Koreans to maintain their independent movements under the auspices of the Shogunate and the establishment of a local Korean Council to serve as representative body to the Shogunate's administration in Jeju. This was to prove a wildly popular proposition which fundamentally undermined the violent Uprising and shattered any hope of a united front opposing the Shogunate. Ultimately, the final mop-up operations would see the capture and imprisonment of some 500 remaining rebels and the death of some 200 more in a series of skirmishes and raids in early 1939. During these actions, the Shogunate's forces would succeed in capturing a total of seven Loyalist trainers. This was to prove of monumental importance, for the discovery of Loyalist forces amongst the Jeju rebels would allow the Shogunate to portray the Jeju Rising as little more than a Loyalist plot to break trust in the Shogunate amongst the Jeju Koreans - allowing for a rapid reconciliation despite the blood shed the prior year, although memories in Jeju were long, and nothing would be forgotten (11).
While the Shogunate saw itself shunned and ostracized by large sections of the international community, particularly once the scope and scale of the Red Terror became clear, they would find themselves welcomed with open arms into the wider International Communist Revolutionary Movement. Embassies and delegations from the Soviet Republic, Red Italy, Mexico, Chile and half a hundred other Communist organizations and movements from around the world, all made their presence felt in Tokyo, seeking to either develop a relationship with the influential new regime or discredit another trying to do that exact thing. Of these new relationships, the most important would undoubtable be that of the Soviet Republic, for with their backing and support the new regime in Japan would be able to resolve many of the most pressing challenges which had previously plagued the Japanese Empire. However, there were complexities and uncertainties to the relationship with the Soviets, and a deep-seeded fear that Japan might simply trade the threat of imperialist domination from the West for an overbearing and arrogant Russian partner. Additionally, the presence, and even prominence, of Trotskyite exiles in various positions of middling power within the Shogunate's bureaucracy was to prove a constant strain upon the two Communist powers which had to be constantly managed. All of this was further worsened by the continued involvement of Emperor Koji in Japanese politics - a state of affairs which both disgusted and worried Soviet foreign policy experts, and which consistently caused troubles at events involving the Emperor. On the part of the Shogunate, the Soviets were viewed as busy-bodies who felt themselves superior to all other Communist movements for the fact that they were the first state to turn towards Communism. However, despite these sore feelings and ideological differences, both the Shogunate and the Soviets were clear upon the necessity of a united front in the face of the rest of the world. In a series of important, if secretive, meetings representatives from the Shogunate and Soviet Republic were able to hash out the details of their cooperation and joint goal of furthering the cause of Global Revolution. It was with this in mind that the Shogunate grew to become one of the most prominent safe havens for radicals and ideologues of varying anti-colonial flavor, providing a welter of resources with Soviet backing - from military training and equipment to propaganda channels, education for promising young revolutionaries and in some cases more direct interventionist aid. The most significant of these efforts was to be the rapid expansion of ties to the Indochinese Revolt, and particularly of the Jiaxing Communist exiles who had proven themselves amongst the most ardent soldiers in the Global Revolutionary Struggle. Already a favored destination of exile for revolutionaries and troublemakers of all sorts in Asia, the Shogunate was to embrace these foreigners as their vehicles of change - taking up what had previously been a rather disunited and underwhelming internationalist cause, and pressing forward in the hopes of shaking the foundations of Imperialist power across the continent of Asia. By comparison, the relationships with Italy and Mexico would prove cordial but distant, while in Chile the ascension of Dávila and the rise of the Latin Pact along the northern rim of the continent were to prove a powerful impetus for the improvement of relations between the two states, punctuated by the signing of a series of joint-training agreements, trade agreements and the establishment of cultural exchange programmes. While its allies, dependents and supporters were of immense importance to the Shogunate, perhaps the single most significant international relationship of the state was to be the antagonistic one they had with the other half of Japanese society now consigned to rule over Chosun. It should not come as any surprise that the two sides would find themselves ever at each other's throats, constantly seeking to undermine one another and always watchful for the slightest sign of aggression or weakness. Espionage and sabotage, propaganda warfare and regular border incidents would pepper the years after the end of the Civil War, with the two sides on the verge of open warfare on more than one occasion. These efforts would result in a series of anti-Terror protests and uprisings in the Shogunate, most prominently the Jeju Uprising, while in Chosun the Shogunate proved an avid sponsor of the Korean Independence Movement - although this support was often greeted with wariness on the part of the Koreans. Ultimately, the failures of the Loyalists to exploit the Jeju Uprising and the exposure of their involvement in the affair, was to result in a shift in priorities and a gradual easing of tensions between the two Japanese states, as both found themselves distracted by matters elsewhere. Nevertheless, it did not take long for the Shogunate to find a new target for their activism, as the ever bloody Indochinese Revolt soon found itself the beneficiary of significant overt and covert support from the Shogunate. Given the Shogunate's considerable power and influence over the seas of Eastern Asia, it should come as little surprise that the Japanese were soon running blockade-running schemes, smuggling arms, trainers and weaponry into Tonkin, bursting through the French blockade while daring them to fire upon the proudly flying flag of the IPNJ ships escorting the smugglers. The sheer brazenness of these actions, and the obvious impact of this support for the rebels, drew outrage and horror from amongst the French leadership - both in Indochina and in the Metropole. However, while tensions between the blockading force and the blockade runners nearly spilled over into open conflict on several occasions, the French officers found themselves forced to back down time after time, well knowing that drawing the Shogunate into the conflict more directly would be a disaster for their fortunes in Indochina and Asia more generally. However, with this demonstration of the Shogunate's flagrant disregard for international norms, international opinions of the Shogunate calcified further and hostility towards the revolutionary government continued to rise unabated - particularly once anti-colonial movements elsewhere in Asia, inspired by the heroic struggle in Indochina, began to make moves towards overthrowing their oppressors as well (12).
The forced reinterpretation of the Loyalists as a state in exile was of considerable difficulty for the Keijo regime. Having started the Civil War in effective control of the Chrysanthemum Throne, possessing control of much of the Japanese Army and having succeeded in decapitating the disloyal Government in the initial hours of the war, the fact that the Loyalists had not just lost the war, but had in effect paved a path to supremacy for the hated Communists who now held power over their homeland could not have been a greater blow to the collective conscience. Bitterness and recriminations were the order of the day following the British failures in the East China Sea and subsequent forced ceasefire with the Shogunate - with Marshal-General Nagata Tetsuzan the first man in Emperor Genka's line of fire. While he had been able to accept the step-by-step losses of Japan's Chinese concessions in the interest of all-out victory in the Civil War, and the humiliations which begging for British aid represented, in the name of expediency - the Emperor found all of his compromises for naught. With Nagata having emerged as the most recent leading figure amongst the Loyalists by dint of his successes in Chosun, Emperor Genka had felt it necessary to accept the often overbearing General's course of action, but with the latest series of failures his trust in the Marshal-General proved greatly shaken. However, Genka was left at something of a loss as to how to deal with Nagata, for any feasible figure who might be put forward as a replacement outside of Nagata's influence belonged either to the disgraced Kodoha faction or had been in a position of leadership for the failed Home Islands Campaigns. It did not take long before Nagata began to sense the change in the Emperor's attitude and for him to make preparations to address the situation. He restarted a concerted charm offensive aimed at the Emperor, consulting him repeatedly on a range of different political and military matters, while working in increasingly close partnership with Genka's trusted Prime Minister Hiranuma Kiichiro to not only settle the relationship to the Emperor, but also to address the numerous challenges facing the truncated Loyalist regime in Chosun. Perhaps the single most outstanding challenge faced by the Chosun government was to be the absorption and settlement of the numerous successive waves of Japanese refugees who had fled for the peninsula over the course of the Civil War. While at first these refugees belonged primarily to the nobility and lower middle classes - who had formed the base of support for the Loyalists - and were thus relatively easily settled into the major cities of Chosun, they were soon joined by wave after wave of refugees, first those simply seeking to escape the active warfronts consuming the Home Isles, but later expanding drastically to include a variety of Loyalist sympathizers. However, it would be the last major wave of refugees, formed from the numerous Government Loyalists displaced by the October Revolution and subsequent Red Terror, which was to cause the most trouble for the government in Chosun. The sudden and violent overturning of the Machida Government during the October Revolution had unleashed a flood of exiles and refugees, many of whom ended up seeking refuge in Chosun - despite the dangers of retaliation. Led by the elderly and increasingly frail Inukai Tsuyoshi, these recently arrived exiles soon began to form a conservative opposition to Prime Minister Hiranuma's leadership while adopting what amounted to a slavish dedication to Emperor Genka which was both patently infuriating to many long-time Loyalists and quite obviously fake. Declaring that they had always been utterly loyal to the Emperor, and simply been dragged along in the wake of the disgraced Rikken Minseito, these new arrivals sought to muscle their way into positions of power and authority in the new regime with shameless vigor. Had the Loyalist camp been more united, this effort could well have failed miserably, but with adept political intriguers at their head and an understanding of exactly how precarious their situation was at present, the newcomers were able to exploit the weaknesses amongst the Loyalists to the fullest. However, while pleased by the rather shameless bootlicking he was receiving, Emperor Genka was initially inclined towards ridding himself of these desperate opportunists. Had it not been for the intervention of his mother, the Empress-Dowager Sadako, who now began to involve herself in the political intrigues swirling about her family, Inukai and his supporters might well have been removed - one way or the other. Fearful of the future, the Empress-Dowager stressed to Emperor Genka the benefits of maintaining multiple factions in power, such that he might play them off against each other for the benefit of their family. However, while Emperor Genka eventually accepted his mother's suggestions, her remained distrustful of her - for while what she had stated was the truth, he had not missed the potential ramifications for his own position in the restoration of the Rikken Seiyukai as a political force in Chosun. Long affiliated with the military and having personally helped in the formation of the Kokumin Domei, Genka could not expect complete loyalty from the newcomers, who he had long viewed as a threat to his regime and repeated clashed with even during the pre-Civil War years. By contrast, Genka's younger brother Nobuhito, who just so happened to be their mother's obvious favorite child, had spent years in the Navy and was well liked in the upper circles of Japanese society prior to the Civil War. In fact, Nobuhito had spent almost the entire war under effective house arrest precisely out of Genka's fears that the Government might well elevate him to the throne in his place. Thus, by allowing the Rikken Seiyukai back into Chosun politics, the Emperor risked establishing a powerbase for the most urgent threat to his throne - his heir, Nobuhito. Under these circumstances, one might wonder why in the world the Emperor would allow such a threat to his own power back into Chosun. The reason lay entirely with the need for a swift and expansive industrial development to match that underway in Shogunate Japan. The Loyalists had never held all that great of a sway with the Japanese economic elite, and as such lacked many of the competencies and educational foundations necessary for driving forward the large-scale economic redevelopment which Chosun required - an expertise and competence which Rikken Seiyukai and their supporters possessed in abundance. While a significant portion of the industrial assets in central Japan had been stripped and transported across the sea to Chosun, far more had needed to be left behind - left broken and smoldering to prevent the Shogunate from utilizing it. Now, with the bare-bones industry already present in Chosun and the considerable, but still insufficient, seed of Japanese industry to build from, the Seiyukai supporters were recruited en masse to help in the staffing of what would grow into a large state-dominated industrial state. While private industry would still occur, and in time see the formation of incipient zaibatsus with state-backing, the majority of the Chosun economy would find its driving force come from publicly-owned industries directed from the top and managed by pre-war educated economists and business managers formerly of Government affiliation who had either worked as government economists or bureaucrats if not as businessmen in the employ of zaibatsus like Mistubishi, Mitsui or Nakajima. Furthermore, it would be from these new arrivals that the new educational system which emerged in Chosun originated, bringing with them the educational capabilities which had helped make Japan one of the best educated societies in Asia prior to the Civil War (13).
While the influence, power and diversity of the Japanese in Chosun had grown dramatically since the annexation of the Empire of Korea, the Korean populace continued to far outnumber their Japanese overlords within the Korean peninsula, presenting a formidable threat to continued Japanese dominance of Chosun if not for their own bitter internal divisions. These divides stretched back to the decades of gradual societal breakdown and struggle for power prior to the Japanese annexation, and the subsequent emergence of countless factions striving for the liberation of Korea from the Japanese yoke in the aftermath of the bloody Sam-il Rebellion. If there had been even a figment of unity in the aftermath of the Sam-il Rebellion, it was gone by the middle of the 1920s and as the Korean independence movement fell ever further into infighting amongst a variety of exiled and active groups and factions, the wider Korean populace settled in to their positions as subordinate peoples to the Japanese. Former Yangban aristocrats and wealthier merchants sent their children to Japan for education, married into Japanese families in hopes of securing a path forward under the new regime and peopled the various extractive industries which the Japanese put into motion in Chosun, while seeking to integrate themselves into Japanese society - some adopting Japanese names, taking to the use of the Japanese language in public and looked to the Japanese for inspiration in cultural and societal matters. The process of gradual cultural assimilation was underway. However, resistance to these efforts came from many parts of society - Hangul experienced a resurgence in many circles, despite colonial and aristocratic efforts at suppressing or modifying the alphabet, singers such as Yun Sim-deok, Park Chae-seon and Lee Ryu-saek popularized new songs in written and sung in Korean, playwrights including Na Woon-gyu and Shim Hun spread subtle subversive pro-Korean messages while illegal schools, teaching Korean-oriented curricula, proliferated across the peninsula. The rule of Governor-General Saito Makoto during these years was to be at once welcomed and feared by many Koreans, for while violence and oppression targeting the Korean population was reduced significantly, his conciliatory governance policies were to create a significant degree of support for the Japanese occupation and inculcate a degree of pro-Japanese sentiment amongst particularly the Korean upper classes. Further efforts to subvert the Korean elite would come in the form of a marriage between Korean Crown Prince Lee Un - the heir to his brother, the former Emperor Sunjong of Korea - and Princess Masako Nashimoto - a maternal first cousin to Empress Setsuko and a paternal cousin to Crown Prince Hirohito's widow, Princess Nagako. However, the collapse of Japanese unity and the outbreak of the Japanese Civil War was to fundamentally alter the circumstances of the Koreans in Chosun. In little more than a year, the Koreans went from a subdued colonial peoples to the clear majority population forcibly held below a fearful and repressive Japanese minority elite (14). The relatively sedate and conciliatory government of Saito Makoto was quite suddenly replaced by an angry Loyalist regime determined to throw everything into the struggle for command of the Japanese Empire. For the Korean populace of Chosun it was a shocking disruption to the status quo which saw the forceful imposition of conscription of Korean peasants to the Chosun-gun, the arrival of millions of Japanese refugees eager to displace the Korean locals in search of a comfortable exile, widespread requisitions of food stock and other materials of war and the imposition of harsh martial law - including the violent suppression of any hint of the Korean Independence Movement and the banning of Hangul. Thousands of young Korean men were forced from their homes and into the Chosun-gun wherefrom many of them would come to serve in the horrific Siege of Busan, culminating in the sack of the city by Japanese elite troops spearheading the final assault on the city, while hundreds of young Korean women were tricked or kidnapped into service in military brothels, the Loyalist forces in Chosun having lost access to the traditional source of staffing for their brothels - Japanese prostitutes. The arrival of Japanese refugees would further add to the horrors experienced by the Korean populace, who found themselves subjected to confiscations and evictions aimed at providing comfortable homes to the newly arrived refugees, while tens of thousands were pressed into service in the logistical work of preparing for a Loyalist invasion of the Home Isles which was never realized. While discontent roiled amongst the Koreans, and several revolts broke out, all resistance was met with horrific levels of violence - entire villages burnt to the ground with their inhabitants killed to the last child - and active efforts to identify and purge fifth columnists resulted in an entire complex of torture and interrogation developing from which few emerged alive. The abrupt end to the Japanese Civil War was to bring with it shock and relief for the hard-pressed Korean population, who hoped that this would allow for a return to the pre-Civil War policies. The Koreans could not help but find what they received instead a disappointment. While war-time martial law was discontinued, conscription ended and demobilization begun, the conscripts returning home were to find their country fundamentally changed. Many found their families evicted, their lands confiscated, with their fathers and mothers forced to till the lands of newly arrived Japanese settlers. The old Yangban, who had tried so desperately to ingratiate themselves with the Japanese occupiers, found themselves tossed aside - their posts in the colonial bureaucracy filled by Japanese loyalists and their property rights contested at every turn - threatening the very foundations of their prosperity. The initial dislocation was to provoke intense anger amongst the Korean populace, with prominent Yangban now leading the calls for resistance to the Japanese occupation. The Chungnam and Gangwon Uprisings were to be the direct result of these tensions, breaking out in an orgy of violence in mid-1937. Led by local former Yangban and formed from recently returned conscript soldiers, the uprisings would see several massacres of recently arrived Japanese settlers and the destruction of government properties, culminating in the rebels' capture of the city of Chuncheon in Chungnam in August of 1937. However, the Japanese military forces were swift to act, bringing to bear considerable military resources to crush the rebels in a series of one-sided battles and skirmishes where the Japanese superiority in arms and training made the difference, before Chuncheon was placed under siege beginning in October of 1937. It was at this moment that one of the darkest moments of Korea's time under Japanese occupation occurred, with the deployment of Surgeon General Ishii Shiro's Togo Unit to the front, wherefrom they would plan and execute the use of phosgene gas against the city's inhabitants and the rebels. As the bombardment intensified and the situation within the city deteriorated rapidly, any effort at surrender or escape was met with violence, culminating in a final advance on the city which saw thousands killed out of hand, an example to all Koreans of the cost of resistance. In the aftermath of the Suppression of Chuncheon, active resistance to the Japanese occupiers would collapse while government policies once more shifted away from harsh repression and towards conciliation - the need for a settled Korean populace trumping the need to suppress them, considering the considerable need for manpower in the planned Chosun industrial buildup. Easing restrictions on the use of Hangul, opening up new positions in the emerging Chosun state bureaucracy to Koreans once more and welcoming select segments of the Korean elite back into Chosun upper society would go some way to settling the tense situation - but there was little the Chosun government could do to resolve the bitter resentment deeply seeded throughout Korean society given the circumstances (15)
While active resistance to the Chosun government largely settled down after the Supression of Chuncheon, the active and lively Korean Independence Movement found itself galvanized towards more unified action - collectively having been shocked out of their complacency by the harshness of the new regime. However, even in exile Korean independence movement was to face challenges, as the Chosun regime began to work in concert with the Fengtian Dynasty to suppress the use of China as a potential place of exile for Korean activists. This was to occur most dramatically in a series of police actions in Shanghai which ultimately saw the capture and arrest of a whole string of prominent independence leaders including Rhee Syngman, An Chang-ho, Yeo Un-hyung, Kim Kyu-sik and Hong Jin, all of whom were captured and extradited to Chosun while hundreds of their supporters were killed, scattered or imprisoned. It would be the right-wing of the Independence movement which would experience the greatest losses during this period given their rather prominent presence in China, most of the leftist Korean activists having long-since moved their base of operations to Vladivostok where they could enjoy the benefits of Soviet protection and support. It was from his base in Vladivostok that Kim Won-bong would lead a campaign of bloody terror against the Chosun leadership, directing his Heroic Corps in a series of increasingly spectacular terrorist actions, including bombings, assassinations, sabotage and raids across Chosun after absorbing the remnants of the Korean Patriotic Corps which had fallen into disarray in the aftermath of the handover of their leader Kim Gu to the Chosun authorities. Over the course of the late 1930s Kim Won-bong and his Heroic Corps would emerge as the single-most influential force in the independence movement in partnership with the Korean communist leader Pak Hon-yong, able to call upon an ever growing cohort of fanatical supporters willing to commit any deed so long as it furthered the cause of Korean independence and struck a blow against the Japanese tyranny. However, Kim Won-bong would find his command of the Independence Movement on the left far from monolithic, with particularly the self-aggrandizing but suicidally bold Kim Il-Sung proving a potent rival equally willing to launch attacks upon Chosun interests wherever they might be found and far more willing to listen to the directives of foreign Communist leaders than either Kim Won-bong or Pak Hon-yong. The bitter rivalry which emerged between the two factions during these years would gradually shift in Kim Sung-Il's favor once he began to work more directly with the intelligence apparatus of the People's Shogunate, gaining access to the military and intelligence resources of the Shogunate in his war upon the Chosun regime. By contrast, the Heroic Corps would struggle to secure support from the Soviets due to their resistance to outside interference in their activities. Increasingly convinced of the need for a more formal construction to resist the Japanese, and unwilling to join the Korean Communist Party following Kim Il-Sung's cooptation of the party, Kim Bong-won would work together with Pak Hon-yong and Jo So-ang to establish the Second Korean Provisional Government and with it the Korean National Revolutionary Party to direct the political side of their activities, with the Heroic Corps serving as the military wing of this new Provisional Government. In Chosun proper, the Suppression of Chuncheon had given way to a series of attempted reconciliation efforts on the part of the government and active engagement with prominent Korean leaders to develop some sort of working partnership between the two major population groupings in Chosun. However, this was to prove a short-lived affair which culminated in the failures of the Jeju Uprising. Angered and seemingly betrayed by their Korean subordinates at the tail-end of the Uprising, the Chosun government would launch a new series of crackdowns aimed at punishing the Koreans for their lack of loyalty to the regime, with mass arrests seeing the disappearance of a surprising number of prisoners in transfers to the Togo Unit (16). In general, the relationship between Chosun and the Fengtian Dynasty would prove tempestuous and ever on the edge, as the government of Chosun was forced to toe a very careful line between accepting the "guidance" of the Chinese and avoiding the Shogunate smear that they were little better than Chinese lapdogs, willing to do anything to please their masters. Imperious Chinese emissaries would regularly come to make the trip across the Sino-Korean border in order to place one onerous demand or another upon the Chosun government - quite clearly seeking to cow the Japanese leadership into the traditional subordinate role held by Korea in the Sino-centric view of the world. Heavily reliant upon Chinese backing, there was little the Chosun regime could do other than make way when pressed while exploiting any sign of disinterest or weakness on the part of the Chinese to strengthen their own positions within the relationship. More friendly, if vastly less useful, was the continued friendly relationship which the Rikken Seiyukai were able to provide to the British. Having failed to turn the tide of the Civil War in Loyalist favor and subsequently rushed the signing of a bitter peace treaty with the Shogunate, the British were not necessarily viewed by the Chosun leadership as any strong reed upon which to rely on, but their active military aid was nevertheless appreciated and the wider links to the Imperial powers which the British provided were viewed positively by Nagata Tetsuzan and his supporters. Of far more interest to the Emperor in particular would be the inquiries made by Latin Pact ambassadors soon after the Suppression of Chuncheon. In a series of cordial audiences, Spanish Ambassador to Chosun, Raimundo Fernández-Cuesta y Merelo would establish the ground work for a much closer relationship to the Latin Pact. Having already been much inspired by the accomplishments of King Alfonso of Spain, Emperor Genka leapt at the opportunity, pushing forward with a series of negotiations which would see the signing of a treaty of amicability between Spain and Chosun, the establishment of a cultural exchange programme and the dispatch of Portuguese economic advisors to aid in Chosun's economic reconstruction. Further ties would be developed with the French following the rise of the January Monarchy, with the dispatch of Volunteer Regiments for service in Indochina, where they would come into direct conflict with Shogunate-trained forces following soon after. As Chosun moved towards the tail end of the decade, it found itself gradually able to find its footing in the world, struggling to avoid vassalization by the Fengtian Dynasty while ever plotting for a way to secure the restoration of the Japanese Empire under its rightful rulers (17).
Footnotes:
(8) While the Japanese Red Terror doesn't get quite as horrific as a lot of places IOTL, it is one of the worst Red Terrors ITTL and fundamentally changes a lot of perceptions about the repressive capabilities and potential of Communist states. While the Reds had rather terrible terrors ITTL as well, particularly in Russia, the Japanese Red Terror occurs with the entire world's eyes focused on them and as such ends up getting much more of a spotlight. It is a bit difficult to quite figure out the balance which the monarchist elements of the Shogunate bring to these developments, but for the most part the monarchy brings a hint of restraint to the proceedings. I also want to state that while there are plenty of killings and torture committed by the revolutionary tribunals, the vast majority of the punishments are some sort of confiscations, often followed by a period of prison labor and an extended course of indoctrination. Think more Chinese Communist style "reeducation" camps and less Russian-style gulag/mass murder.
(9) By comparison to most other reconstructions we have followed, the Japanese one is astonishingly effective. This is not only because of the much greater degree of control the government is able to exercise than occurred in the fractious Italy or vast Russia, but also because they are able to learn and build on the experiences of those two other Red states. We see Japan take its pre-existing educational advantage (being one of the most high-tech states in the region) and bolster it further, with an aim towards making high tech development of all sorts a key strength of the new regime. One thing to really take note of here is the way in which the Shogunate is partly building on the existing foundations, removing what parts they don't feel fit and adding their own interpretation to the developmental effects - this is in rather sharp contrast to the much more foundational rebuilding which occurred in both Japan and Italy as they created state institutions out of whole cloth and tore everything else down.
(10) I know this is probably a bit hard to parse out what specifically is happening, but basically the Shogunate is embracing a conscription-based, mass army model for the Imperial People's Army, with only a few standing regiments left of full-time professional soldiers. They try to make up for this through the creation of what amounts to an early attempt at special forces with paratrooper capabilities, but by and large the Army ends up neglected. Instead it is the Navy which ends up expanding massively, in effect becoming a military within the military through their redevelopment of the Naval Ground Forces and expansion of the Navy Air Service, to say nothing of the direct investments into the actual naval forces of Japan. Considering the geopolitical circumstances in which Japan finds itself, I hope that this makes sense to everyone. Nevertheless, one thing I wanted to emphasize here is that the Shogunate is leaning into the long and storied Samurai tradition in its ideological and propaganda efforts while trying to remove the concept's traditional aristocratic connotations. In effect, they are trying to instill the discipline, control and ferocity of the Samurai tradition without its classist elements.
(11) I started out writing about the foreign affairs of the Shogunate in this section, but ended up getting distracted by events in Jeju. Ultimately this section is meant to give an idea of how the excesses of the Terror eventually come to an end and the rather deft way in which the Shogunate is able to play off the misadventure. One thing to note here is that while the Jeju Rebels ostensibly back down without much of a fight, they will be remembering these events - memorializing their lost comrades and maintaining a healthy wariness of their Japanese overlords. However, the majority of the Jeju rebels have come to see the incitement of revolt in Chosun as the best path forward for their movement - a way of restoring Korean independence and escaping the grip of the Shogunate.
(12) One of the thoughts which has endlessly fascinated me is the sheer scale of the benefits which a Japanese-Russian alliance bring to both sides. With an alliance to Russia, the Japanese secure a near-endless supply of raw resources with which to power their more than capable industrial sector, which in turn greatly reduces Japanese thirst for raw resources (which was what IOTL pressed the Japanese into their Asia-wide conquests), while at the same time providing a massive shield for Russia's Far Eastern provinces and an ally capable of threatening the entire Pacific Seaboard in times of conflict for the Soviets. As for their more hostile relations internationally, the Shogunate is cocky beyond belief, having become certain of their supremacy within the seas of Eastern Asia, and as such are more than willing to spit in the face of the French as they support the Indochinese Revolt. However, one of the most important things to take note of in this section is the emboldening effect that the rise of the Shogunate has, as they provide inspiration and support for anti-Colonial movements across Asia proper, and the fact that the French actually back down.
(13) Chosun is in the rather unenviable position of trying to rebuild society in exile while seated atop a large and increasingly unhappy Korean subordinate population. At the same time, Chosun's political elite is riven with divisions and factional intrigues which complicate matters considerably. I hope that the explanation given for the acceptance of the Seiyukai is sufficient to convince people. One thing to bear in mind is that Chosun is not a democracy, and even the figments of democratic rule were removed during the transition. When I say that the Seiyukai are allowed into Chosun politics, what it means is that they are allowed to participate in court and bureaucratic affairs as determined by Emperor Genka and Prime Minister Hiranuma. In fact, the emerging political system in Chosun has a lot more in common to the old-style court bureacratic rule which was present in Joseon prior to the Japanese conquest than anything else (if with considerably stronger monarchical powers), than the Meiji system of rule. The Emperor rules in a consultative manner with both the Prime Minister and the Marshal-General. So in the end, you might say Genka got what he wanted in that regard.
(14) I wanted to take some time to show the circumstances for the Korean population of Chosun prior to the Japanese Civil War. There are a lot of similarities to OTL, in some ways it is actually better in that the average Korean enjoys a more enjoyable life with more opportunities and paths forward in life than IOTL, although it isn't anything really world-changing. We do see a somewhat more robust Korean culture emerge and the development of artists and thinkers who seek to emphasize the uniqueness of Korean culture from Chinese and Japanese culture during this period to a greater extent than IOTL. Of course, all of this changes with the Civil War.
(15) The Japanese Civil War is an absolute disaster for the Koreans, who find the relatively loose and conciliatory government policies of the preceding decade make way for harsh repression and subjugation to the Loyalist military machine, with conscriptions, confiscations, evictions and forced labor all making their presence felt. We see some elements of the horrors of OTL's Japanese Empire during WW2, but they are nowhere near as prominent as IOTL - they have more of a cameo than a lead role to put it another way. Just want to include here that while we do see the advent of something similar to the Comfort Women of OTL, it is nothing like the scale of WW2 and should instead be viewed as an extension of the pre-WW2 institution of military brothels having to replace their source of manpower (which were originally recruited from Japanese prostitutes) with Korean women than the horrific mass institution of WW2. Particularly the arrival of millions of Japanese refugees and settlers proves utterly devastating to the average Korean's way of life, as they are thrown off their lands and forced to labor under the direction of newly arrived Japanese. However, even with the end of the Civil War, the Koreans don't get to breath a sigh of relief as they follow directly on into a series of bitter uprisings which are put down with horrific violence. Here we see the first real deployment of the Togo Unit - what IOTL became the infamous Unit 731, although without command of Manchukuo the unit has developed somewhat differently, having not had quite the same degree of latitude to experiment with biological weaponry - leading to the majority of their research instead focusing on chemical weapons instead. It is important here to stress that Nagata Tetsuzan was acknowledged IOTL as one of the fiercest proponents of Ishii Shiro and the wider bio-chemical experimentation undertaken by the Japanese Military. ITTL his survival and prominent position in the Loyalist leadership have allowed the Togo Unit to secure considerable state support, which will continue into the future. I should mention here that the Togo Unit is top secret, as are most other such programmes, and as such public knowledge of their activities are heavily censored and leaks are punished heavily - so it is only a select section of the political and military leadership who actually know about the Unit and its activities in any detail. This was a really grim topic to write about, and I think I need to bleach my brain after reading the wikipage on Unit 731, but I think it is important that the situation from a Korean perspective in Chosun is clarified and explored. One thing to note is that public knowledge of events in Chuncheon are highly restricted, and not really known to the international media, allowing them to avoid the worst of the public stink.
(16) The key thing to draw from all of this is that despite their initial efforts at reconciliation, the Chosun government once again falls into its repressive tendencies, and that the Korean Independence Movement outside of the left and far-left has been crippled. The liberal and nationalist republican wings of the Independence Movement have been absolutely savaged by the Chinese crackdown, with the result that the active independence movement has largely been boiled down to various leftist factions, most prominently the Korean Communist Party under Kim Il-Sung (The old Korean Communist Party was destroyed during an earlier Chinese crackdown on Communist organizations in China, leaving its legacy available for a young and dynamic Kim Il-Sung to exploit) and the Korean National Revolutionary Party which forms around Kim Won-bong. It is worth noting that most of the leaders mentioned as having been caught by the Chinese authorities are handed over to the Chosun government as part of their emergent partnership and are subsequently executed. That means that a whole generation of Korean Independence Movement leaders are done away with in a single sudden crackdown. The executions of several prominent Korean independence leaders does spur protests in some parts of the world, particularly the United States, where the small but active migrant community and their lobby in Washington lead to rumbles of discontent, but nothing close to sufficient to provoke a change in policy.
(17) The last sentence just about says it all, but in general what I am trying to convey is the careful balance which the Chosun leadership have to strike in order to stay on the Fengtian regime's good side without becoming their out-and-out puppets. It is a hard balance to find, and there are more than a few miscues and failures on both sides, but ultimately the tense situation seems to be holding. While Chosun maintains its links to Great Britain, it is the arrival of Latin Pact embassies which really prove of interest, and while Chosun is not formally part of the Latin Pact, the two sides are developing ties which could in time lead in that direction, all else remaining equal. Another important thing to note is that Genka has been given what might seem like a rather surprising degree of power in the new power constellation of Chosun, it is worth stressing the fact that the lack of resistance can be attributed to the immense sense of discombobulation and uncertainty which the rather dramatic events of the last few years have brought - resulting in a lack of institutional solidity and a resultant inability on the part of what might otherwise have been checks on Genka's power to keep him in check.
End Note:
This update is hopefully intriguing, even with its rather grim subject matter. It was a weird experience trying to work out how a state like the Shogunate would go about perpetrating something like the Red Terror, and working out what the resultant society and economy look like was a quite interesting task.
By contrast, Chosun is honestly just rather depressing to write about. I have a rather soft spot for Korea, but I really didn't feel like this was a situation where it would be working out in their favor for the most part. I found exploring the pre-Civil War Chosun in greater detail a fun task, figuring out how the Koreans sought to resist the gradual pull of the Japanese occupation while portraying the complex divisions within the subordinated society. Trying to portray the impact of repeated waves of Japanese refugees and the courtly struggles were also quite fun, but then I had to get into the whole repressive segment.
I really hope people find this an interesting series of developments, particularly since the Shogunate and Chosun are probably some of the most unique states I have created in this particular timeline.
