The Butterfly Effect
If you delight in senseless valor and make a display of violence, the world will in the end detest you and will look upon you as wild beasts. Of this you should take heed.-The Emperor Meiji, January 4, 1882
Now the flag of the Rising Sun is floating over Nanking, and the Imperial Way is shining forth in the area south of the Yangtze. The dawn of the renaissance of Eastern Asia is about to take place. On this occasion, it is my earnest hope that the 400 million people of China will reconsider.- General Iwane Matsui.
I've been moderately unhappy with the fate of Japan thus far in the timeline, and having finally gotten some decent books on Japan I can put my finger on it. Quite simply, it ignores the influences and motivations for Japan's leaders, to turn them into Kilrathi. So what's wrong, and what is a more plausible outcome?
Let's turn to OTL 1936, after the suppression of the February 26 incident. Perversely, this was the time when what you could call the Total War Faction, led by Colonel Ishiwara, was at its height. Ishiwara, a Nichiren Buddhist who was responsible for the entire Manchurian Incident, was opposed to further expansion in East Asia. Ishiwara and his supporters were, quite simply, scared shitless by the USSR. In 1932, the Soviets had four rifle divisions in the Far East; in 1936, they had fourteen. To combat the Soviet Union, Japan needed to develop the resources of Manchuria and embark on crash industrialization program, mixed it with radical reform.[1]
But to develop and industrialize, Japan required peace, and so Ishiwara moved to smooth ties with China. As the head of the Army's Operation Seciton, Ishiwara was unique in welcoming the Xian incident and the end to the Chinese Civil War, on the grounds that a strong China would discourage reckless expansionism. He moved to replace Kwantung Army officers who were recklessly causing incidents, and replcaed them with men of his own.
But once you let army officers decide to start incidents at will, things have a habit of snowballing. [2] As Sino-Japanese relations worsened [3], all it took was for a few shots to be fired for the Marco Polo Bridge Incident to escalate [4]. But the Imperial Japanese Army believed it would take three divisions, three months, and a mere hundred million yen to solve the Marco Polo Incident. But then a Japanese Liteuenant, Oyoama Toshio was shot in Shanghai on August 9; the Navy demanded that the army send three divisions to Shanghai, and things escalated. [5] By the middle of August the Japanese government planned to field fifteen divisions for at least six months. The Japanese Diet also passed a series of laws to regulate the Japanese eoconomy: the Synthetic Oil Industry Law, the Gold Industry Law, the Iron and Steel Industry Law, the Trade and Regulated Industries Law, etc. Japan girded itself for a protracted struggle with an unclear goal.
Even as the nation girded for war, Japan's own military shortfalls became apparent. For one thing, the invasion of China had diverted over half of Japan's manpower from Manchuria, where the (perceived) main threat lie. Munition stocks were exhausted by early 1938.
Things were so desperate that Lieutenant General Hayao, the army's vice-chief of staff, warned that if the USSR entered the war the situation would be disastrous. In response to these warnings, the Japanese government declared that Chiang did not lead the legitimate Chinese government, and there would be no negotiation with him.
Anyway, to war requires more guns; more machine tools; more oil; more steel. To pay for this, Japan was forced to ship abroad its half its gold reserves in 1937 to pay for military equipment and fuel in 1937 alone. By June of 1938 factories were ordered to use 37% less fuel, and Japan's fishing fleet was to revert entirely to coal or wind power. Instead of modernizing, the Japanese economy was regressing; in the words of Ishii Itaro, head of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian Bureau, "an octopus eating its own tentacles."
Oh, and the Soviets were still there. The Changkufeng Incident of July, 1938 illustrated that the Japanese army could not take on the Red Army; a shortage of heavy artillery and antitank shells convinced the Japanese General Staff that withdrawal was necessary. This led to proposals for a "moderate" peace with China modelled on Bismarck's treaty with Austria in 1866, but since this moderate peace proposal entailed Chiang stepping down and Japanese hegemony in northern China, nothing came of it.
Japan's problem was that the were stuck in a quagmire without an exit strategy, and that Japan couldn't afford the war in the long run. The Japanese assault on Hainan was delayed form July of 1938 to 1939 due to a shipping shortage. Things were so bad that the Army Generla Staff sent its Chief of Staff before the emperor to warn that the diversion on the continent would result in Japan being outfought and outgunned by the other powers, who hadn't been bleeding themselves to death for... North Chinese cotton? [6]
In response to this report, Japan planned to suspend further offensives in China in 1939, and adjusted its economy policy. Instead of starving civilizan industries, the government invested in a substantially reduced version of Ishiwara's five-year plan, and cut the military's modernization program. This only meant that the plan to defend Manchuria and Korea against the Soviets fell further behind, and the General Staff's initial audacious plan to thrust towards Lake Baikal was replaced with a siege of Vladistovok. And now things diverge wildly from OTL.
It was around this point that the army proposed an alliance with Nazi Germany, to balance out the USSR's superiority in the Far East. But there's no chance of anything like this in the ATL. Khalkin Ghol is, if anything, overdetermined. The incident began in mid-May when Soviet-backed Mongolians fired on Manchukuoan troops, and the Army ordered a limited counterattack. The Soviets responded on June 18 with a counterattack, and things escalated until the Kwantung Army was fighting desperately against Zhukov, firing 15,000 shells a day even as they got slaughtered. [7] Although a peace treaty was signed, in the Stresemannverse Stalin is quite able and willing to send forces to the Soviet Far East, meaning that in addition to being woefully outclassed, by the middle of 1940 the Japanese in Manchuria were outnumbered. And to cap it all off, Japan's economic problems continued. One illustration of this: Japan produced less steel in 1939 than 1938, even though demand for steel had increased.
Okay, turning back: Japan did not immediately declare war on the allies in 1939. Despite the war in Europe, Japan did not move into Indochina until after France fell, and did not do so lightly. It also did not move against Britain and America until December of 1941, after the Germans had invaded and distracted the USSR. The previous incarnation of this TL positied the Japanese leaping south with an unoccupied USSR on their northern border. I have little faith in the Japanese High Command, but this strains even my credulity.
To be utterly frank, Japan is in a desperate position and should be looking for a way out. What would an exit strategy look like? And can anyone propose one without fanatics trying to kidnap the emperor?
[1] The plan called for doubling Japan's iron and steel production over five years, quadrupling machine tool production, and increasing oil output, among other things. It's the 1930s. Even the Cylons probably had a functional plan at the time.
[2] Which is why so much of the map was colored pink in the 19th century.
[3] The Japanese were not happy that China was arming itself to resist further Japanese encroachment; the Chinese were unhappy about further Japanese encroachment.
[4] Indeed, shortly faster the Marco Polo Bridge incident Ishiwara repeatedly tried to stop escalation. After shots were fired on July 7, word reached Tokyo of a local ceasefire and agreement in north China, and Ishiwara tried to suspend mobilization on July 10. Ultimately, Ishiwara declared that he would rather withdraw all forces north of the Great Wall than risk an immediate war with China.
[5] The navy also was angling for glory so that it could demand an increase in modernization and expansion of the Japanese naval air force.
[6] Honestly, the mind reels. "So, we can't beat China, and we will lose any modern war because we are pissing men and mateiral away there. But we're gonna go attack America because the only hope to turn the tide against a Chinese warlord is pissing off the largest economy this planet has ever seen."
Okay, maybe the Kilrathi analogy makes sense.
[7] This was OTL.
