Korea & Taiwan in a Japanese Empire that stayed small

To chip in for my area of expertise: a surviving tsarist empire might (might: unlikely in the event of revolution, which is certainly possible without WW1) put Ukrainian in a condition analogous to Scots, but it wouldn't have any chance of changing the native language of, say, the Baltic people. Literacy and consciousness of these definitely non-Russkiy nations and nearly all others of any size west of the urals was growing because of the changes in society.
I think size has more influence then you think. Language death typically severally wounds nationalist aspirations and smaller languages are naturally in much more danger of death than larger ones. A lot more people speak Ukrainian then Estonian.
 
I think Korean becoming Gaelic is kind of naive since we are talking about 100 years compared to 500 years so some perspectives need to be considered.

Assuming the Japanese Empire remained small it implies less control of the army and the military in general so that should be factored in.

Korea would probably get some autonomy towards the end of the 20th Century and there'll be a strong call for independence movement but the country itself will be highly developed and modernised with strong Japanese overtones.
 
I think size has more influence then you think. Language death typically severally wounds nationalist aspirations and smaller languages are naturally in much more danger of death than larger ones. A lot more people speak Ukrainian then Estonian.

There's rather more to it than that. Maltese is in no danger and more people live in my town than speak Maltese. The Welsh language is secure and growing inside Wales; the Scots language has, I sadly admit, a dubious future even though most people in Scotland use bits and pieces of it, coming to a much larger number than the number of Cambrophones.

Ukrainian-speakers could come to regard Russian as their 'proper' language in a simialr fashion to English for Socts-speakers (Ukraine did have a more entrenched literary tradition generally and a region in which Ukrainian as the literary language was beyond threat, of course) and then we'd presumably see its usage grow and that of Ukrainian decline due to urban development and education; but what's going to happen to Estonian? Estonia's cities had already developed into Estonian cities, which they hadn't been before. The only thing that would threaten Estonia would be a majority of outside Russophones coming to live in the country, which is within the bounds of plausibility but wouldn't stop the natives speaking their own language.

I think Korean becoming Gaelic is kind of naive since we are talking about 100 years compared to 500 years so some perspectives need to be considered.

To add to this I'd point out that if Korean were to be Gaelic, Korea would have to export more than its natural population increase to non-Korean-speaking places. Why would this happen and where would they end up?
 
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What happens to Taiwan may in part be contingent on how events unfold in China. However, of the two areas specified, it is the likelier to be fully assimilated into Japan, along with Karafuto. Korea may end up a sort of Quebec within Japan if it's not integrated completely. Also, expect the South Seas Mandate to be fully assimilated too, thereby produing a potentially interesting eventuality for the U.S. territory Guam.
 
How integrated would they be, economically and culturally into the Empire?
For Taiwan it did pretty well economically in our timeline and culturally as others have mentioned it could be integrated to a fair extent. The two main Japanese cash crops on Taiwan were sugar and even more importantly rice, they also apparently used local hydroelectric power to produce aluminum. It got to the point where subsidies to the local government from Japan were able to be ended by 1904 and by 1922 it was sending tax money back to the Home Islands. Real GDP per person rose by roughly fifty percent between 1910 and 1940 and over half of the locals went to at least primary school, and as others have mentioned the Japanese can be quite good at indoctrination via education.
 
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