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Japan's big issue in the 20th Century (among other issues) was that if China were to get its act together and consolidate, it'd be bigger and stronger than Japan. This was a big motivator for the Japanese moving from Manchuria into China proper.

My question is, could Japan have ever had the capacity to balance against China without some sort of war of expansion in the 30s and 40s?

Japan's Empire in 1940 was 105 million people.
China in 1940 had 520 million people.

Had the Japanese taken the Philippines from Spain (or Germany) rather than the US getting them, it'd have just been 121 to 520. The Imperial Japanese population would probably be larger if more farmers were settled in the Philippines and proceeded to have larger families I suppose.

Japan with better negotiation (or worse on the Russian side) could feasibly have gotten North Sakhalin in 1905. That's not much of a population boost, but I figure it's something. Plus there's oil, something Japan didn't have that much of OTL.

I proposed in another thread that Japan could have tried to cut a deal with China, trading Qingdao for Liaodong and Kando. That's maybe 20 million more people in 1939.

Japan looked at taking in 18,000 to 600,000 Jews during WWII and putting them in Manchuria and Shanghai. Perhaps this migration could go to a Japanese Philippines, as it seems the Japanese didn't want Jews going to the home islands, Korea, or Taiwan. Maybe round that to a full million?

The Russian Civil War would provide opportunities, but I think any Japanese expansion from that would put them in a worse position because Russia (White or Red) is going to want to take back whatever Japan took from them.


How from 1900 to 1940 could Japan's population and resources be larger without some sort of war at the expense of Britain, France, the Netherlands, or China?
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