Can you provide some more information on General Ishii Yamanda, such as what year he was born and what he did before gaining power? I'd also be very intrigued to know how he is remembered by the world in general and in Japan.
Ishii Yamada was born in 1922. He was the son of Ishii Shiro, who, as in our world, eventually commanded the Unit 731, the notorious Imperial Japanese Army unit that engaged in chemical and biological weapons research, along with large numbers of atrocities.
Ishii Yamada attended the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, and graduated in 1944, at the end of the Second Great War. Ishii steadily rose in the ranks of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Japanese invasion of the Russian Empire in the late 1940s, and during the continued Japanese invasion of China in the 1950s. By 1960, Ishii had risen to a position of high command in the China Expeditionary Army, and had managed to secure political alliances within the highest levels of the military regime that governed the Japanese Empire that would eventually secure his appointment as Prime Minister in 1966.
During his time as a military commander in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Ishii became part of a faction of military officers known as the Universal Victory faction, whose adherents believed that the ultimate goal of the Japanese Empire would be world conquest, even at the cost of destructive war on a global scale.
Ishii, like other members of the Universal Victory faction, despised the United States, while dismissing the USA as a weak threat to the Japanese Empire because of its imagined internal divisions and instability stemming from the North American Wars. This kind of contempt for the USA was not limited to the Universal Victory faction within the highest ranks of the Japanese military. It was rooted in the outcomes of the previous wars between the Japanese Empire and the United States in the early 20th Century in which the Japanese had not suffered any serious territorial losses in spite of technically being on the losing side in the two Great Wars.
Ishii was a person with intense hatreds, which was compounded by a level of paranoia that would not have been out of place for Josef Stalin from OTL. Ishii, aside from his xenophobia for anyone who was not Japanese, hated those in the Japanese military and civilian government who disagreed with his beliefs on the necessity of world conquest. The leadership of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which by the 1960s had become skeptical of continuing the invasion of China and was opposed to actively pursuing war with the United States, was viewed by Ishii as a personal enemy.
Historians would later come to a consensus that General Ishii came to power in 1966 over other possible candidates as part of a larger power struggle between the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy for control over the Japanese government and the resources of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Ishii gained support from the Japanese army leadership as a preferred alternative to Admiral Okada Haruka, who did not support continuing the war in China or acting with aggression against the United States and the CDS.
The ultimate result of the rule of General Ishi Yamada was the Fourth Pacific War, which led to the collapse of the Japanese Empire.
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By 2024, Ishii Yamada is remembered in the United States with a level of popular loathing rivalled only by Jake Featherston and Clarence Potter.
Ishii is also remembered with high levels of popular loathing in the nations that suffered devastation during the Fourth Pacific War, especially in China.
In the Republic of Ezo and within the Japanese diaspora, Ishii is hated for his crimes and for bringing about the downfall of the Japanese Empire.
In the Japanese Worker’s Republic, Ishii was blamed for the falll of the Japanese Empire and its catastrophic effects on Japanese society. The Fourth Pacific War was remembered in the JWR as the “Ishii War,” as well as during the rule of the Ecological Union.
