Although this post was inspired by reading the Onion article 'Japan Allies With White Supremacists In Well-Thought-Out Scheme' (and namely its last line and Aryan supermen wipe out the undesirable mud races one by one, your like will surely survive to be among the last to be exterminated.") it got me thinking about how the uneasy alliance would evolve following a victory by the Axis powers. Naturally, the plausibility of an Axis victory is a hotly contested subject on this board, so for the sake of discussion let's do the generic peace w/ Britain and Rump USSR in Europe scenario to fulfil the German part. Japan, obviously, is harder - lets just assume that greater US isolationism (which also causes the UK to be starved out) means that Japan gets away with a couple of naughty acquisitions and perhaps a push into Russia when it becomes clear that the time has come.
Now both countries have achieved their war aims (or at least in Japan's case, are surviving), the key cause for their alliance is void; after all, the Axis was, officially, an anti-Comintern pact. These friends of convenience have now lost their convenience. Once this has fallen apart, the problem of the huge differences between the two empires becomes clear. Over the short and long term, this leads to various possibilities:
- I guess in the short run there'd be joint parades and handshakes and stuff, and I can't imagine the pact would be formally broken, but what little co-operation that had occured during the war would stop as both sides try to consolidate their gains.
- Given the huge distance between the two powers, and their limited power projection, it would take some time before any possible flashpoints occured on shared borders - however, all sorts of contention could occur with regards to trade, or how each party carries itself in its occupied zones; given that the US (and to some extent, the British Empire) is still in the picture, the two might well stay together in a revitalised anti-Jewish or anti-Imperialist pact or whatever they want to call it.
- The biggest problem with this scenario comes with the unknown nature, rife with butterflies, of the Reich or Japan in the '50s and 60's - all sorts of different tangents might be taken - 'moderates' such as Bormann or Speer, for example, would probably be more likely to tolerate their 'subhuman' allies than rabid fanatics like Himmler or Heydrich; similarly, the more militaristic within Japan may now contract a fatal dose of victory disease and start pushing their luck (much as they did with America's 'sleeping giant' in our timeline) - in The Ultimate Solution (which presents a highly unrealistic Axis world domination), for example, Heydrich's 'Contraxists' eventually lead the world into nuclear war in the 1960s by striking a similarly nuclear Japan.
Of course, in this situation, all this may never happen - the great distances between the two, and the fact that they'd already pushed their luck massively, might mean that they get on relatively peacefully despite their obvious differences. Obviously, I'm no expert but I'd love to hear your ideas on how it'd go.