alternatehistory.com

Hereditary monarchy generally doesn't produce the most dramatically effective leaders; the biggest conquerors and reformers and generally most effective people are usually those from the enormously larger population pool of people not in line from the throne who happen to be far enough above the mainstream in talent to seize power, and then apply their massive outlier skills to doing stuff while in power (not in any way reliably for the good, of course, but definitely in scale of effects this seems to be the pattern). But it doesn't always produce duds, there's going to be, say, an Edward III once in a while, a totally legitimate heir who ends up also being quite aggressive and effective. What happens to Imperial Japan if the Showa emperor had been such a person, instead of the relatively unremarkable person he actually was? It seems unlikely based on what little I know of his biography that Prince Chichibu would have been such a person, but he never had a chance. It's always at least possible that he would have shined if he'd gotten the opportunity, so Hirohito dying young could be a single PoD to get this alternate history going. Anyway, what happens if whoever holds the throne is someone who instead of merely riding the tide of anti-democratic sentiment to accumulate power and not doing much with it, actively used the trend to take and subsequently exert control? Could they have led the same level of expansion without the egregious mistakes, or were the conquests of the Kwantung army and the rest of the incredibly messy 1930s Japanese leadership inseparable from their self-destructive tendencies?
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