Could Japan have seized any Russian territory during revolution?

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What stopped the Japanese from taking, at the very least northern Sakhalin and other islands? Why didn't the Japanese take the opportunity to achieve hegemony in the region by taking Vladivostok?

What sort of armed forces were present that would have opposed the Japanese?

If history had happened as OTL until 1920, except that Japan occupied nearby islands and Russian Manchuria to the Amur, how would the upcoming decades be affected?
I think the issue here has to do with what kind of power Japan was. In the years leading up to WWII Japan was recognized as a strong military power. That strength however was the result of its Navy. The Japanese land forces were weak to average at best. There was a movement named Strike North in the Japanese leadership. Their argument was to attack north into Soviet territory. The fact that the Russians beat them back in the 1930's was the reason that argument lost out. Instead they made a big push south with their Navy.
 
What stopped the Japanese from taking, at the very least northern Sakhalin and other islands? Why didn't the Japanese take the opportunity to achieve hegemony in the region by taking Vladivostok?

What sort of armed forces were present that would have opposed the Japanese?

If history had happened as OTL until 1920, except that Japan occupied nearby islands and Russian Manchuria to the Amur, how would the upcoming decades be affected?

I think I know the answer to this. Prior to WWII Japan had a powerful military. That power however was concentrated mostly in their Navy. The land forces of Japan remained quite weak. The weakness of the Army land forces were a factor that limited what they could do as far as moving through Korea and into Vladivostok. During WWII there was a faction in the Japanese Command named the Strike North Group. They advocated for grabbing land from the Russian Far East. That group lost out to the commanders who wanted to go after the resources of SouthEast Asia. For that reason the Strike North never happened.
 
Thanks for the replies.

Why did the USA pressuring the Japanese to leave Siberia? They were not at all friendly with the USSR?

There was a Red Menace but there was also a Yellow Peril. Indeed, to many Americans, the latter was the greater threat (especially since it was widely thought that Bolshevism could not last long):

"As the Wilson era ended in 1920-1921, U.S.–Japan relations reached their nadir. As in 1906 and 1913, anti-Japanese moves by Californians provoked outrage in Japan and a war scare. This time, however, the situation was more dangerous. Washington and Tokyo were at loggerheads over Shantung, Siberia, and the Anglo–Japanese Alliance—which Americans saw as giving cover to Japanese aggression. Moreover, the two nations were now locked in a naval race. In 1916, the United States embarked on a massive naval building program, and three years later shifted much of its growing fleet to the Pacific. In 1920, Japan responded in kind by undertaking a naval buildup of its own.

"Heightened tensions with Japan gave rise to a new wave of Yellow Peril books such as Frederick McCormick's The Menace of Japan (1917) and Sidney Osborne's The New Japanese Peril (1921). These writers argued that Japan's growing military and naval power and ongoing absorption of China and Siberia made it even more dangerous, increasing the likelihood of a Pacific war and a Japanese invasion of Hawaii and the West Coast. Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon by releasing in 1917 the Hearst-financed film Patria, which depicted Japanese troops, aided by Mexicans and Japanese-American fifth columnists, overrunning California in an orgy of rape, murder, and looting.

"The Japan-as-Yellow Peril image was meanwhile updated. Rather than being seen merely as semi-Westernized warriors, they were now pictured as "Prussianized" ones. As a State Department official put it in 1919, "the spirit of Japan is that of Prussia, whom the Japanese leaders openly admire and whose government they chose for a model.". Valentine McClatchy, a prominent California exclusionist, helped to popularize this notion in his influential 1920 tract The Germany of Asia. McClatchy professed to admire the Japanese as a people. The problem, he claimed, was their adoption of "militaristic" German models and methods, which had led them to embark on a "relentless and implacable" campaign of imperial expansion at China's and America's expense. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was more blunt: Japan, he declared in 1919, was the "Prussia of the Far East" and the "coming danger of the world."" https://books.google.com/books?id=uN1XAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA46
 
While Northern Sakhalin would make sense, and could have been held, grabbing Kamchatka and keeping it, while possible really gains them nothing. Even now the only purpose this has served since WWII has been as a forward staging base for the navy out of Petropavlosk, as well as air defense capabilities based there. For a USSR facing the USA this makes sense, for the Japanese in 1920 there are no resources there, and it won't be a threat to them as the only way to get there is by sea and the IJN can prevent that any time it wants to. as far as keeping any of Eastern Siberia/Pacific Coast, this would involve a full scale war and unlike Sakhalin (and Kamchatka) where the Russian population is small, other than the whites who have no influence, the locals are going to be less happy being run by Japan than by other Russians.
 

raharris1973

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While it is possible that they could have held some land, if the Soviets wanted to take the land back, they certainty could have.

he occupation of Far-Eastern Russia was an huge economic investment, taking a massive % of Japan's postwar GDP. It simply wasn't economically feasible, for a nation with a lower GDP than Canada, to hold such a territory indefinitely. Also, for those proposing some sort of settler colonialism, keep in mind that Japan had still not even finished settling Hokkaido and Sakhalin at this point. Why would Japanese want to move to even less productive land?

The implication here that Japan was materially incapable of sustaining an occupation of Russian Far Eastern territory does not ring true to me.

The lack of political will was behind the Japanese abandoning the intervention.

This seems to be the explanation. The Japanese were allowed to question military policies at this time, without getting assassinated. If Japan of 1920-1921 had the internal political climate of 1931-1941 and commitment to external aggression of that time, Japan could and would have been able to make an occupation of the Soviet Far East, at least east of the Amur and north Sakhalin, and if they wished, Kamchatka, stick until the end of the end of the 1930s before the Soviets could throw them out. A consequence would be a smaller navy, but they could do it.

Likewise, if Japan had allowed genuine diversity of thought and debate over the wisdom of military adventurism overseas in the 1930s, it wouldn't have stuck with the China war for 8 years, started the Pacific war and stuck with the Pacific war till the bitter end of August 1945.

"As the Wilson era ended in 1920-1921, U.S.–Japan relations reached their nadir. As in 1906 and 1913, anti-Japanese moves by Californians provoked outrage in Japan and a war scare. This time, however, the situation was more dangerous. Washington and Tokyo were at loggerheads over Shantung, Siberia, and the Anglo–Japanese Alliance—which Americans saw as giving cover to Japanese aggression. Moreover, the two nations were now locked in a naval race. In 1916, the United States embarked on a massive naval building program, and three years later shifted much of its growing fleet to the Pacific. In 1920, Japan responded in kind by undertaking a naval buildup of its own.

"Heightened tensions with Japan gave rise to a new wave of Yellow Peril books such as Frederick McCormick's The Menace of Japan (1917) and Sidney Osborne's The New Japanese Peril (1921). These writers argued that Japan's growing military and naval power and ongoing absorption of China and Siberia made it even more dangerous, increasing the likelihood of a Pacific war and a Japanese invasion of Hawaii and the West Coast. Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon by releasing in 1917 the Hearst-financed film Patria, which depicted Japanese troops, aided by Mexicans and Japanese-American fifth columnists, overrunning California in an orgy of rape, murder, and looting.

Anybody know why Hearst and his media empire was so into Japanese war scares between 1906 and the early 1920s, yet when Japan actually did attack Manchuria (31), Shanghai (32) and China (37) the Hearst media empire did not give a damn?
 
The implication here that Japan was materially incapable of sustaining an occupation of Russian Far Eastern territory does not ring true to me.



This seems to be the explanation. The Japanese were allowed to question military policies at this time, without getting assassinated. If Japan of 1920-1921 had the internal political climate of 1931-1941 and commitment to external aggression of that time, Japan could and would have been able to make an occupation of the Soviet Far East, at least east of the Amur and north Sakhalin, and if they wished, Kamchatka, stick until the end of the end of the 1930s before the Soviets could throw them out. A consequence would be a smaller navy, but they could do it.

Likewise, if Japan had allowed genuine diversity of thought and debate over the wisdom of military adventurism overseas in the 1930s, it wouldn't have stuck with the China war for 8 years, started the Pacific war and stuck with the Pacific war till the bitter end of August 1945.



Anybody know why Hearst and his media empire was so into Japanese war scares between 1906 and the early 1920s, yet when Japan actually did attack Manchuria (31), Shanghai (32) and China (37) the Hearst media empire did not give a damn?

The civil-military relationship in the halls of power in Japan was complicated in this period, and the military had autonomy that it jealously guarded. The balance of power was not yet tipped to their side enough to allow it to defy pressure, though.

In regards to the Hearst media group, the 30s were full of lurid tales about the eevvviiilll war profiteers who benefited from WW1. There were hearings in the Senate on the role of weapons manufacturers and financial interests in bringing America into the war (the truth was far less interesting, of course, but it made for good headlines). Agitating for conflict was not going anywhere.

Now, it should be said, that with the sinking of the Panay and the Allison incident, its not like there was no anti-Japanese sentiment in Hearst West Coast press. But there was no push for a war over Manchukuo or anything like that, true.
 
The only way I could see Japan maybe making it stick would be if they set up a sort of proto-Taiwan "Republic of Russia" in northern Sakhalin, run by Russian Whites as a government-in-exile that naturally offered generous terms to Japan for resource extraction. I'm not sure they could have gotten any of the real movers and shakers in the White faction to go for it, as they seem to have preferred to spend their exile in the salons of Europe, and Imperial Japan never really distinguished itself with deft diplomatic maneuvers, but it's at least possible it would have worked.

Otherwise, yeah, western nations weren't endorsing any more Japanese land grabs, and Japan still harbored ambitions of an equal place at the table of civilized powers back then.
 
It could have ben a bit more 'fun' if Russia had sold its American possessions to Japan in 1847.

After all, Russia had Alaska and a part of California down to Fort Ross, Sonoma County.

With Japan as the 'owner' of that stretch of American Pacific North, it might have meant a different emigration pattern. Japan was also somehow in on the Kingdom of Hawaii.

Fascinating thought that California could have been a major Japanese hub prior to 1941.
 
Most of the Entente powers had financial claims on Russia, loans, partial ownership of industrial facilities etc, that all went down the drain when the Bolsheviks took over - all debts were repudiated and concerns nationalized. As I mentioned in an earlier post, by themselves the Japanese simply can't hold on the the Pacific Coast/Vladivostok with the Whites collapsing and other foreign powers pulling out. Sakhalin is easy, they can claim that the 1905 settlement has been abrogated by the Bolsheviks and/or this is compensation for lost loans/assets. I doubt anybody would force them to give it up nor a need for some "Free Russia". A puppet Mongolia run by Japan, not the USSR is possible. Kamchatka and Petropavlosk could be seized by Japan and/or become the "Free Russia" being as the only way to get there is by sea which Japan controls. Whether owned by Japan or the "Free Russia" this would be expensive as pretty much everything except snow and ice has to be brought there.
 
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