If World War 2 doesn't happen, how long would Japan have held onto Korea and Taiwan?

I remember some AH book where koreans ended up as second-class citizens of the empire, due to a slightly more liberal japan managing to hold the empire together

quite depessing for an average korean
 
Maybe a conquest of Manchuria, but I think the invasion of China got Japan's ball rolling into World War 2 which would mean you'd need to avoid the whole fiasco to keep Japan out of the war and holding onto its colonies.

Isn't the premises "no ww2" rather than "Japan doesn't involved in ww2"? If so a war with China could still happen.
 
Japanese Colonialism was pretty brutal. I would see civil war in the 1950s.
Such an agreement was made in the past, where Japan surrendered Sakhalin (karafuto) in exchange for the whole of the Kuril islands (chishima), but southern Sakhalin was taken after the Russo Japanese war. Thus, it makes zero sense for Japan to trade off the Kuril islands.
For a long while already it seems I have already on thought disconnected from it and preoccupying real life prevents me from online participation.... so I do not foresee me joining this discussion.
If ww2 did not happen, the USSR would have still been powerful as a center of global communism. The USSR and Japan could still fight on the border for the claim. Maybe the Soviet would support the Kim family when the decolonization movement would happen. Given the brutality of Japanese Colonialism, the movement would escalate to a border conflict between the USSR and Japan. Then Japan would lose the fighting (reference to the Nomohan Incident) and give up Northern Kurils in exchange for the whole sakhalin island; in other words, giving control of the choking point of voyage into and out of Russian Arctic and Subarctic Far East around the Sea of Oktohsk. The USSR would gain its own control of geopolitics in around the Sea and the respective region.
 
Something like 95% of all factories in Korea were Japanese owned and something like 50% of all arable farmland in Korea was Japanese owned by the start of the second world war..
And these conditions were enormously popular with Koreans - I don't think.

How do you suppose so much Korean farmland passed into Japanese ownership? Could it be that the legal and financial system was rigged to deprive Korean landowners of their property so it could be turned over to Japanese? And what became of all the Koreans who lived on that land? Were they killed off, herded into bantustans, or forced into emigration, to make room for Japanese settlers? Or were they reduced to landlesss laborers for Japanese landowners? I rather suspect the latter, as I doubt there were many Japanese interested in becoming peasant farmers in Korea.

Short of mass extermination of Koreans, or exceptionally brutal repression, there is no long term-way for Japan to "own" Korea - and neither of those methods would be possible if Japan itself was a free society.
 
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