The Other Asian Superpower?

Honest question (since I struggle a lot with older Asian history), would it be possible at any point to make it so that Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the islands between them could be kept together as a unitary state? I'm basically curious as to whether China is always destined to be the biggest and most powerful nation of Asia or whether a union of other nations of Asia could change that.
 
India?

Honestly they are on their way now. If Partition didn't happen and you add Bangladesh and Pakistan to the mix they'd have been there for the last 5 years.

If east asia, maybe Indonesia that didn't go through multiple dictatorships and actually had been stable enough to see some proper growth in that post WWII-1980's period (lets say they experience growth like Korea and Japan). I'll add a bonus scenario that, after Malaysia kicks out Singapore, Indonesia offers it a lifeline, where it can be an autonomous region of Indonesia (not sure how but lets say Singapore say yes to this offer). a Stable Indonesia with Singapore (if it develops like it did in OTL), you would have a country worth some 10 trillion if the average wage is $40k per roughly. That i think qualifies (though that would mean the population would be 250 million, which is improbable if they were doing well economically).

Also keeping all those countries together, probably not. Too diverse and different, Japan and Korea are completely different culturally and honestly the way Korea was seized, its hard to see how, at least democratically that it could remain as is. Maybe some kind of union of sorts could occur where the three countries are separate sovereign entities but form part of this union (i'm thinking UK like) but instead of a central monarch (because that again, is asking for trouble, unless you get a situation where Japanese and Korean nobility marry each other to create some new family), maybe an elected president instead. I think their would be enough tension between the three that it falls apart though.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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The most likely second Asian superpower would be permanently separate north and south China.

As for the OP's ideas, going far enough back and with enough creativity you could probably engineer with a unitary state covering the territories you listed.

It would be a stronger competitor to China, but still not its peer when China is performing at peak capacity. But it could easily eclipse and "rank" above China when the latter is not at peak performance just as the Japanese empire did for 50 years.
 

raharris1973

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More likely than a unitary Pacific Rim state would be greater fragmentation of those territories listed. A never fully united Korean peninsula? A Japanese archipelago with different nation-states on different islands.
 
More likely than a unitary Pacific Rim state would be greater fragmentation of those territories listed. A never fully united Korean peninsula? A Japanese archipelago with different nation-states on different islands.

Well, Japan didn't (mostly, not including Hokkaido) fully unify until 1600 as I understand it, but Korea was a single state pretty continuously for almost a thousand years before that, so I think the long-term fragmented China seems more plausible than anything else, especially with a POD in the last five hundred years.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Honest question (since I struggle a lot with older Asian history), would it be possible at any point to make it so that Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the islands between them could be kept together as a unitary state? I'm basically curious as to whether China is always destined to be the biggest and most powerful nation of Asia or whether a union of other nations of Asia could change that.
Japan controlled Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria before World War 2. Without the world war Japan could hold onto all of that. Resistance to Japanese rule would still exist, but it could be mitigated if Japan dropped its racial supremacist policies or simply flooded all three of those areas with colonists.
Edit: Post below me explains one I'm trying to say in more detail.
 
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My father used to joke that Hitler was the one who did the most to liberate Korea because, without WWII, the USA and USSR didn't have that much interest nor reason to cut up the Japanese Empire (Koreans had tried getting independence at Versailles in accordance with the self-determination of the 14 Points but no one there actually cared about anything east of the Urals so that amounted to nil) and Korea wasn't getting independence on its own, not when Japan outnumbered and outgunned the peninsula. A less expansionistic Japan would've kept Korea for a couple more decades, at the very least. Then it comes down to Japan's colonial policies and whether or not Japan treats Korea as a buffer state/resource colony/headway into China.

Taiwan currently is quite fond of Japan, interestingly enough, as it was a model colony which was treated quite nicely in contrast to most other cases of colonial rule, apparently.

Invading Manchuria gets Japan on bad terms with most of the other Great Powers and makes for a rather long border with the USSR. But it does have a large resource base, which would help.

So that ends up with a Japan with a population perhaps 400 million by the present day (Japan with 120 million, both Koreas with 75 million (South with 50, North with 25), Taiwan with 25 million, Manchuria with 110 million) that avoids the ravages of WWII, the Korean War, Chinese Civil War. Seeing as Japan was behind only the USA in terms of nominal GDP for decades (surpassed in 2010 by China) and this would strip China of Manchuria and add onto Japan the economies of Korea and Taiwan (South Korea being 11th without North Korea's mineral resources and Taiwan being 22nd), Japan would still be top dog in Asia right now.
 
It depends on how long colonialism in the rest of the world lasts, but I dispute the meme that Japan could be the last bastion of empire after the Euros give it up. If worst comes to worst, the political and military arrangement collapses like Salazar's Portugal. The population imbalance is much worse than, say, French Algeria, where the French weren't exactly holding back.
 
Dear Bellagerant,
A properly-managed North Korea should be able to support the same population as South Korea.

In the long run, Japan does not need to conquer, colonize or govern these out-lying territories as long as they ship plenty of raw materials to Japan and buy plenty of made-in-Japan goods in return.

OTL Zabatsus are very good at that game today.
 
Dear Bellagerant,
A properly-managed North Korea should be able to support the same population as South Korea.

In the long run, Japan does not need to conquer, colonize or govern these out-lying territories as long as they ship plenty of raw materials to Japan and buy plenty of made-in-Japan goods in return.

OTL Zabatsus are very good at that game today.
Ah, those numbers are approximate current day population numbers (adding them all up does not result in 400 million but that's after all the nonsense OTL that killed millions over here).
 
Have all the Future militarist Leaders and their protegees attend a meeting in Tokyo to discuss the future of the Japanese military,just in time for the great Kento earthquake.
With the militarists and assorted dicks butterflied away a moderate civilian Japanese government might just be able to peacefully unify Japan Korea and Taiwan.
 
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