AHC: Make Japan by the 21st Century a Spanish-speaking country.

I actually think that the POD would have to be somewhere doing the Sengoku period to destabilize Japan enough for long enough to get Spainish forces there and capture them completely enough for them to all but eradicate Japanese
 
Even during the Sengoku period it would be tough they would either have to base their rule on the word of Daimyo's or try to take it themselves. Either way anti christian sentiment will probably be much worse, as Christians would be seen as foreign collaborators.
 
It was many, many years ago, when the very first amphibian sprouted legs and crawled onto land. It took a deep breath of fine asian air and said, "esto parece un buen lugar para un stand enchilada"
 
The Tokugawa administration would need to be shuffled significantly. If the Jesuits are permitted to continue proselytization and their economic dominance continues, I could see them muscling out the other Europeans and perhaps making "Spanish-learning" a language of the elite that filters down to the masses. You'd need some serious butterflies or convenient replacements to make it happen though as several daimyos viewed the Spanish as a threat.
 
If all other things remain the same, then post WWII, USA's biggest victories will be against Spanish speaking opposition, Mexico, Spain and Japan.
 

scholar

Banned
Japanese has a number of loan words from Spanish and Portuguese. Assuming that the country remains divided, Spanish could become a trade language and be a popular second language allowing them to communicate with other Europeans through Spanish [since Spanish was borderline the language of choice for a while in most of the European influenced world]. Through Christianity a number of Daimyo may attempt to become Kings and Dukes (not Emperor, not Emperor...) through Catholicism and Spain. The Buddhists have a radical and violent backlash against this, but they fail this time around.

Christianity, Catholic Christianity, becomes the religion of choice.
Spanish likewise becomes the second language of choice.
 
So we need Spain, with a population between 5 and 8 million people during the 16th century, to completely subyugate Japan (at least in a cultural manner), with a population around 12 million in the same century, without "guns" (the Japanese were very apt and quick to adapt the European technology, as they had been only slightly behind) nor "germs". I am not even sure we could have outproduced Japan, unless we used the resources of the whole American empire for the task, so the "steel" is dubious.

I really don't see it.

I'd like to note that during the Spanish domination of America, Spanish was not the majority language. Each one of the viceroyalties had a normativized version of one of the native languages as coofficial. While there had been a growing adoption of Spanish by the natives, this process had been slow, and not enforced. This changed mostly with the independencies, where the creole minorities who had seized the power began to enforce the linguistic hispanization of the population.
Why is this relevant? Because even on the event of a Spanish conquest of Japan, Spaniards would not be set as daimyo lords nor as imperial bureucracy, due to the Japan and Spain being on very similar level of social/technological development. Not unless the native Japanese bureaucracy and nobility was exterminated, which was not the modus operandi of Spanish conquest, nor it would even be remotely feasible. And without a sizeable social group of Spaniards atop the government in Japan, there is not going to be a linguistic substitution, as there was in America.
 
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