No Pacific War

What circumstances or change in overall trends might have lead to Japan avoiding war with America and holding on to it's colonial gains among the Asian islands, only to suffer a series of "Vietnam" like situations in later decades with the US and European powers regaining their old colonial possessions economically rather than militarily, through corporate expansion each time there's a revolutionary republic or the empire has to allow the free market more freedom in order to prevent a revolution?

And what impact might this have on the sociopolitical development of Japan (specifically in relationship to a move towards, or perhaps more accurately back to, liberal democracy; if any; and if not what sort of cultural progression or countercultural movements might take place)?

I kind of have a sort of cyberpunk dystopia Japan of the 1980's in mind, with the usual cyberpunk threat of Japanese corporations replaced with Western corporations; though any more realistic or other interesting variations on this idea are things I'd definitely like to hear about.

Also, what sort of effect would the Cold War have on this rump Co-Prosperity Sphere? Western corporations undermining Japanese authority in the colonial islands on one hand, Soviets stirring up revolutionary sentiments on the other?
 
You would need to get rid of the event of Pearl Harbor. With no Pearl Harbor, there would be no war in the Pacific. The problem with that is then the question of how we get into the war.
 
Yeah I guess without Pearl Harbor the idea of a recognizable European Theater and normal US-Soviet cold war after is not to be taken for granted unless overly convenient patches are applied...
 
Leaving the US' entry, if any, into WWII aside for the moment; I think what I envisioned with this timeline (not knowing much about the history involved and thus not knowing that Japan invaded China first, before the "Southern Resource Area") was that instead of invading Manchuria the Japanese Empire invaded the islands of "the Southern Resource Area" to begin with - baiting a colonial war with various Western powers rather than a full on war with any one.

Saved from what would of been an eventual defeat by the onset of WWII in Europe, Japan is in no position to further bait the uninvolved-in-Europe USA by attempting to take over China, as the US has heavy interests in Chinese markets.

A US ship in a taskforce sent into this colonial "game" (a power play to contain the Japanese fleet and convince them that further expansion outside of the established area would be a /bad/ idea) ends up in a fatal encounter with a German vessel (ironically on a mission to secure an alliance with Japan). Thus the US has a pretense to get it's people willing to fight in the war against the fascists.

Japan is left to it's own devices, watched warily, consolidating it's colonial gains.


Alright, that's pretty convoluted. I guess the scenario I had in mind, while neat, was based on a misconception that Japan started the war by taking islands in the sphere of Western colonial influence instead of crazily invading much larger mainland countries that, in addition to their size, ALSO had vested western interests in them.
 
It would be hard to avoid a war between the US and Japan since they both had commercial and economic interests in the Far East. These nations were basically on a collision course.
 
well with a different president than FDR in office at the time the US might not have embargoed the Japanese, which was pretty much the entire reason for the attack on pearl harbor. Also without the need for the Japanese to get oil elsewhere there would probably have been no 1939 border dispute with the USSR which may have meant more troops that are available to fight the Germans at the start of WWII. There could be some interesting butterflies in this situation.
 
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