Why don't we know as much about Imperial Japan's post war plans as we do about Nazi Germany's plans?

Why isn't there as much information available about Imperial Japan's post war plans in Asia as there is about Nazi Germany's plans in Europe?
 
Because one, no understands or cares to understand that Japan only wanted access to resources from China be it by peace or force as a last resort, and even then a major strike like Pearl Harbour was never on the table until Japan needed resources just to keep up its war effort for China and that's it. The Second Sino-Japanese was unintentional at least in the sense of its scale, on the Japanese end, in that yes they let provocation happen, but a full on invasion of China and subsequent actions that lead to their involvement was never what Japan was intending.

Even then the idea of Japanese Empire in the Pacific was more a necessity of the Oil Embargo and the Sino-Japanese war than a long term plan, basically, in order to cut Chinese supplies Japan occupied northern Indochina and manage to negotiate the closing of the Burma Road with Great Britain, which the U.S responded by freezing Japanese assets. All of this happened because the Second Sino-Japanese became a quagmire The Oil Embargo came after the Japanese occupied the rest of Indochina. After the Oil Embargo, and failure of negotiations with the U.S the Japanese war goals were one, to strike the U.S navy to buy Japan some time, two Japan would seize resource rich areas and three, consolidate them to provided resources so Japanese could win in China. After that Japan would try and make peace, what would happen to occupied areas is that they could go the Man and Mengchukuo routes of puppet governments, but that was hardly the plan from the start.
 
Japan never really had a coherent plan for the post-war. Nazi Germany was extremely centralized, meaning there could be official policies that the German government could then elaborate on. Japan, on the other hand, was a mess of feuding officers, each with their own vision of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere; Tojo never had the authority over his subordinates that Hitler did (case in point: Tojo was eventually forced to resign in 1944, whereas Hitler was still in control until after the Soviets were actually in Berlin).

So what you had were a bunch of somewhat vague plans, none of which had any official imprimatur, and thus never got developed beyond the hand-waving stage.

As the war started to go bad, there was some more thought put into what acceptable peace terms would look like (although even there they were fairly delusional, with many holding out for essentially a white peace in 1945), but event then there were some fairly sharp divisions within the government.

The entire Japanese WWII experience was basically a long lesson in why you should never allow short-term tactics to dominate over long-term strategy, and the dangers of the sunk-cost fallacy. The entire Second Sino-Japanese War is basically a series of ever-increasing Japanese escalations, each one justified by the need to protect previous gains (each of which had been originally justified to protect the gains before that), until "let's start a war with multiple superpowers, either one of whom could defeat us alone" was seen as the logical alternative to "you know, maybe we should just pull out of China; it's a giant bloody quagmire that we've been trying to end for over 4 years." It didn't help that anyone who did suggest option #2 had an excellent chance of getting assassinated.
 
The Nazis at least had some form of goal, despite how insane they could be.

The Japanese did not have a goal except "don't be second rate" and "find a proper place in the world order".
 
The Nazis were an actual dictatorship; Japan was an officers' oligarchy, and so it's harder to figure out whose opinion really matters. They had no Hitler equivalent.
 
Japan never really had a coherent plan for the post-war. Nazi Germany was extremely centralized, meaning there could be official policies that the German government could then elaborate on. Japan, on the other hand, was a mess of feuding officers, each with their own vision of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere; Tojo never had the authority over his subordinates that Hitler did (case in point: Tojo was eventually forced to resign in 1944, whereas Hitler was still in control until after the Soviets were actually in Berlin).

So what you had were a bunch of somewhat vague plans, none of which had any official imprimatur, and thus never got developed beyond the hand-waving stage.

As the war started to go bad, there was some more thought put into what acceptable peace terms would look like (although even there they were fairly delusional, with many holding out for essentially a white peace in 1945), but event then there were some fairly sharp divisions within the government.

The entire Japanese WWII experience was basically a long lesson in why you should never allow short-term tactics to dominate over long-term strategy, and the dangers of the sunk-cost fallacy. The entire Second Sino-Japanese War is basically a series of ever-increasing Japanese escalations, each one justified by the need to protect previous gains (each of which had been originally justified to protect the gains before that), until "let's start a war with multiple superpowers, either one of whom could defeat us alone" was seen as the logical alternative to "you know, maybe we should just pull out of China; it's a giant bloody quagmire that we've been trying to end for over 4 years." It didn't help that anyone who did suggest option #2 had an excellent chance of getting assassinated.

The sunk cost fallacy might just be the best explanation I have seen on why Japan went to war with the West.
 
The Empire of Japan had a goal: To commit seppuku.

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Because there was no Japanese version of the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" to give the regime a degree of ideological coherence?
 
3 factors:

1. Eurocentrism
2. Japanese victory was even less likely than German victory, so it's considered less.
3. As others have stated, the Japanese leadership didn't have a particularly coherent plan besides "conquer stuff, hold on to it by making it too difficult to liberate".
 
Harder to read Japanese and the Army and Navy did a lot of the deciding. Saying they would liberate East Asia seems pretty straight forward, though one should muse over how some considered Europe to be West Asia. Though there was also the issue of how the Japanese apparently didn't plan to give Malaysia or Indonesia independence. For everyone else, I imagine it would be the GEACPS, with the Japanese having bases everywhere, the Monarchs being puppets, the president's and prime ministers being supported by different Japanese factions, and all the raw materials go to Japan.
 
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