What does it take to Wank the japanese?

back to it ...

A different ending of the Warring States period might do the trick, say maybe with Oda Nobunaga winning since he was quite a scholar off the field, being both a philantropic lover of arts (including architecture and gardens) and a good businessman.
 
What about that time in the 1500 when they made plans to conquer Korea and China

Both would have been essentially impossible due to numerous reasons. Korea failed because of logistics in the form of widespread localized resistance across the peninsula, which were mostly financed by the navy under Yi Sun-shin, not to mention that by the time that the Chinese intervened in late 1592 in order to aid its closest vassal, plausibility was out of the window. Even if Japan had somehow managed to pull off an impossible occupation, sporadic resistance would still continue to occur across the peninsula, tying up Japanese forces, while an incursion into China would have bankrupted the Japanese treasury, and may well have led to Japan's complete devastation by an invasion from China.

The main issue with Japanese expansion in any scenario is that although it was somewhat geographically close to Korea, China, and the Ryukyus, allowing it to establish stable trading relations for more than a millennia, it would have been virtually impossible to consistently supply a significant amount of troops invading the mainland, although this also meant that foreigners invading the archipelago wouldn't fare any better either. For similar reasons, it would be extremely unlikely for Japan to expand into and retain islands across the Pacific, as it would come into contact with European colonial powers, so it would be more profitable to trade with them indirectly through the Ryukyus, as it did IOTL.
 
Infinite PoD? Hmm, Japan doesn't go isolationist ever, and starts buiding its colonial empire since the 1500s. By 1600 it controls most of the pacific and California.

The isolation under Tokugawa never happens, and the japanese use their muskets and modern ships to take and settle Taiwan earlier, and use those tools and much shorter supply lines to take the Philippines from Spain.

200 years later, Taiwan is another of the Home Islands, and Luzon is approaching that. And Japan has trading posts all up and down the pacific coast of north america.
 
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