WI Japan had decided to come to terms with USA before WWII

Would it be possible for Japanese leaders tor realize that war with US was a folly and agree to withdraw their forces from China on the condition that Manchuko is recognized and Korea and the pacific islands remain under Japanese control. Would Roosevelt accept these terms. If so could the war in the pacific be avoided? Thoughts.. Also aside from this is their any other way?
 

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Would it be possible for Japanese leaders tor realize that war with US was a folly and agree to withdraw their forces from China on the condition that Manchuko is recognized and Korea and the pacific islands remain under Japanese control. Would Roosevelt accept these terms. If so could the war in the pacific be avoided? Thoughts.. Also aside from this is their any other way?
It's unlikely, but possible. Assuming it's a genuine gesture, as in, one that offers a reversion to the pre-MP Bridge Incident borders, I think the US would accept it.

FDR would be in a bind to refuse, that most is quite certain.
 
It certainly would be interesting, but I imagine it would be slightly difficult on the Japanese side, but thats mostly an impression, and on the US side should the offer appear sincere I belive that the US would under any realistic set of circumstances agree to it.
 
I think that this would be a better bet for Japan to create a large empire. WWII wouldnt be butterflied so French Indo-China would be able to fall into Japanese hands. continued Warlordism in China would be a good bet for Japan to again grab more land through 'peaceful' means.
 
Regarding China, the further Japan got in the harder it became, for various reasons, to get out. Even taking over Manchuria may have been the last straw that made war with China as a whole inevitable. It certainly made China feel a lot more need to unite and fight against the foreign invaders.

However, it is also doable to get Japan to stop with Manchuria. One way this could be done is if Zhang Xueliang (the local warlord) stands and fights, and does his damndest to make life difficult for the invaders. With this sort of unpleasant experience at China's front door, rational voices in the Japanese leadership (not everyone was bent on war, but I'm not sure which individuals*) could prevail and prevent more folly from happening. This would lead to Japan being limited to the Home Islands, Taiwan, Korea, and a rebellious Northeast China, and, if colonization efforts go well in Taiwan and Korea but not in Manchuria, they may as well give up on it as a lost cause, or decide to limit themselves to dealing with that mess only instead of trying to gobble up all of China.

*= Lack of knowledge about exactly who was doing what on the Japanese side is what is difficult for me when thinking about PoDs involving Japan.
 
There would be no reason for Roosevelt to not accept these terms really. Peace in the Pacific is plausible, highly, if this were to happen.

It would be interesting to see how the Army and Navy were dealt with.
 
I think that this would be a better bet for Japan to create a large empire. WWII wouldnt be butterflied so French Indo-China would be able to fall into Japanese hands. continued Warlordism in China would be a good bet for Japan to again grab more land through 'peaceful' means.

Their are only two ways Japan would get any of the European colonies of South-East Asia;

1. Join the Axis and invade what would become enemy or 'OK'd to attack neutral country' territory.

2. Join the Allies and 'liberate' them and then refuse to give them back after, thus pissing off its former allies and screwing itself over if it tries for anything big.
 
Could the US make a show of force to fool Japan into thinking it was a lot more powerful than it really was, say, sending one of the Battleship divisions and a couple of carriers to the Philippines and have Sumner Wells announce the embargo from there? Might scare the Japanese into thinking, "oh s***, they can send a force of that size out for that guy? How much have they got?"
 
I think the Japanese economy was depending on something happening from the outside. It was simply too vulnerable to make the type of concessions US demanded.

However, we couyld roll it back some years: Japan getting rather upset after the Washington Naval treaty discussions. The exclusion of japanese emmigration being another point.

So, let's see a 1925 Japan starting to arm, and invading south (like OTL), grabbing the oil, etc.

Then what?

Would it have been enough? did they then have to invade China as well?
 
Would it be possible for Japanese leaders tor realize that war with US was a folly and agree to withdraw their forces from China on the condition that Manchuko is recognized and Korea and the pacific islands remain under Japanese control. Would Roosevelt accept these terms. If so could the war in the pacific be avoided? Thoughts.. Also aside from this is their any other way?

It was absolutely possible.

All that it required was for the Japanese to withdraw COMPLETELY from China and French Indochina. I think the US would have been willing to accept the status quo in Manchuria, Korea, Formosa, and everywhere else. They would accept Japan as a regional power to help balance Soviet ambitions.

Now all you have to do is get the Japanese military and nationalists to agree to what they will see as a complete and cowardly surrender to the United States.

That's the problem. FDR didn't really want to negotiate with Japan. He wanted them out of China and to no longer be a threat to US interests there and in the Pacific. The whole point of the embargoes wasn't actually to put them in a position to bargain more effectively. It was to force the Japanese to agree to all the US terms.

The only way to avoid conflict with the US is to have japan basically accept being second rate power who will never challenge the US or British Empire.
 
It was absolutely possible.

All that it required was for the Japanese to withdraw COMPLETELY from China and French Indochina. I think the US would have been willing to accept the status quo in Manchuria, Korea, Formosa, and everywhere else. They would accept Japan as a regional power to help balance Soviet ambitions.

Now all you have to do is get the Japanese military and nationalists to agree to what they will see as a complete and cowardly surrender to the United States.

That's the problem. FDR didn't really want to negotiate with Japan. He wanted them out of China and to no longer be a threat to US interests there and in the Pacific. The whole point of the embargoes wasn't actually to put them in a position to bargain more effectively. It was to force the Japanese to agree to all the US terms.

The only way to avoid conflict with the US is to have japan basically accept being second rate power who will never challenge the US or British Empire.

If I may curveball this a little bit, in the event of WWII, if Japan has made this deal and stays out of it as a result, they may join into WWII on the Allied side, if Stalin agrees to not help the Chinese. (They don't have to worry about that once Barbarossa starts, but before then they do have to think about Stalin helping Mao.) One the war is on, Japan joins the allies, using their Navy to secure the Pacific allowing the USN to focus all of its resources on gutting the Kreigsmarine and then invading Germany.

After the war, Japan would probably get something out of it, particularly in China is still a mess or if Mao is winning.
 
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The trouble with all of these is they presume that the Japanese pre-WWII were rational. Basically it would take a POD pre-1900 to get much of a change in the lead up to WWII - okay maybe get Russia to win the Russo-Japaneses war, but that would be a major feat. The Japanese leadership as a whole had convinced themselves that they could do whatever they wanted and nobody could/would stop them. The whole leadership down to junior officers in the Army and Navy and the Policeman on the street had bought into the myth of Japanese inevitability. Even the "Peace" party were not a peace party as the west would think of it but more a try to get more out of them before war happens party. This was because for the 50 years prior to the start of the war anyone who spoke out against the state were arrested - if they were lucky, or killed if they weren't. So nobody spoke up against it.

Japan was the tightest Totalitarian state imaginable prior to the war and had been since the mid-1800s. With all of the side effect of this - group think at its worst. The leadership literally could not imagine loosing, even right up to the last days of the war half of the war council was sure that they could force the Allies into a settlement that left them in charge and Japan intact with all its existing social structures in place to rebuild its military. That was after 4 years of war, loosing their whole fleet, most of their air force, all of their merchant marine, having their industry bombed back to nothing, having two atomic bombs dropped on them and the USSR decoration of war and invasion of Manchuria. Still 50% of the ruling council was ready to continue the war - these are the people that have to somehow decide without the above pressures that it is a good idea to back off? :eek:
It is hugely unlikely at best.
 
The trouble with all of these is they presume that the Japanese pre-WWII were rational. Basically it would take a POD pre-1900 to get much of a change in the lead up to WWII - okay maybe get Russia to win the Russo-Japaneses war, but that would be a major feat. The Japanese leadership as a whole had convinced themselves that they could do whatever they wanted and nobody could/would stop them. The whole leadership down to junior officers in the Army and Navy and the Policeman on the street had bought into the myth of Japanese inevitability. Even the "Peace" party were not a peace party as the west would think of it but more a try to get more out of them before war happens party. This was because for the 50 years prior to the start of the war anyone who spoke out against the state were arrested - if they were lucky, or killed if they weren't. So nobody spoke up against it.

Japan was the tightest Totalitarian state imaginable prior to the war and had been since the mid-1800s. With all of the side effect of this - group think at its worst. The leadership literally could not imagine loosing, even right up to the last days of the war half of the war council was sure that they could force the Allies into a settlement that left them in charge and Japan intact with all its existing social structures in place to rebuild its military. That was after 4 years of war, loosing their whole fleet, most of their air force, all of their merchant marine, having their industry bombed back to nothing, having two atomic bombs dropped on them and the USSR decoration of war and invasion of Manchuria. Still 50% of the ruling council was ready to continue the war - these are the people that have to somehow decide without the above pressures that it is a good idea to back off? :eek:
It is hugely unlikely at best.
No, it's even worse than that. It was tight Totalitarianism mixed with total anarchism.

Any time a high government official said anything rational militarily (like pulling out of China), some low ranking officer(s) would assassinate him. And get off scot free.:confused::eek::mad:

I mean what kind of wacko system allows that to happen?

But seriously, Yamamoto was shuffled off to sea precisely because his life expectancy if he stayed in Japan was months.

No way, no how, would Japan have pulled out of China. If they tried, the first 10 ministers to suggest it would have been shot, and the idea would be scrapped. Which is why the idea was never considered in the first place.
 
No, it's even worse than that. It was tight Totalitarianism mixed with total anarchism.

Any time a high government official said anything rational militarily (like pulling out of China), some low ranking officer(s) would assassinate him. And get off scot free.:confused::eek::mad:

I mean what kind of wacko system allows that to happen?

But seriously, Yamamoto was shuffled off to sea precisely because his life expectancy if he stayed in Japan was months.

No way, no how, would Japan have pulled out of China. If they tried, the first 10 ministers to suggest it would have been shot, and the idea would be scrapped. Which is why the idea was never considered in the first place.

Part of that was because the low ranking officers were protected by the same high ranking people that disagreed with the people saying "sane things". I put "sane" in quotes because some of these sane things were basically "we should slow down just a bit" and that was enough to get the person saying that killed.
 
No way, no how, would Japan have pulled out of China. If they tried, the first 10 ministers to suggest it would have been shot, and the idea would be scrapped. Which is why the idea was never considered in the first place.
This is why you can't have Japan get into China in the first place, or at the least get themselves bloodied in Manchuria and decide to leave or just hold the line there.
 
Japan was the tightest Totalitarian state imaginable prior to the war and had been since the mid-1800s.
A totalitarian state since the mid-1800s? That's nonsense. I'm not even sure it's possible to be totalitarian with that tech level. Japan had a fatal flaw in the Meiji Constitution, that allowed (after 1914) the military to force a dissolution of the cabinet. Despite this, Japan had an elected Diet, with civilian governments, effective and active political parties, a free press, and more. Things only started to go downhill after the passage of the so-called Peace Preservation Law in 1925. That was the first time Japanese law criminalized political thought (namely, socialisim and communism). Before that, Japan was at least as free as, say, the Kaiser's Germany. The Empire of Japan cannot be reasonably called a police state, much less a totalitarian one, until the 1930's.
This is why you can't have Japan get into China in the first place, or at the least get themselves bloodied in Manchuria and decide to leave or just hold the line there.
I think this is the most likely option. For all of the presumed insanity of the Japanese militarists, after their forces got smashed by the Red Army, they didn't try to clash with the USSR again. A few people still championed the idea, but the Japanese leadership was rational enough not to tangle with a force clearly better than their own. (They were willing to challange the European powers and the US because they thought they would mostly be fighting scratch colonial forces. They wouldn't have tried it had Europe not been at war, and able to committ their full attention.)

So what you need is a Chinese army that can inflict a Khalhin Gol-level defeat on the IJA. The problem with that is the number of PoDs required for a such a China. You don't just need a unified China, you need one that can field something better than half-trained militias. The famed German-trained divisions were able to hold the line in Shanghai, but not much more. Japanese armies were poorly equiped with trucks, tanks, and artillery. The Chinese armies basically did without. China did not have the industry to equip modern armies for a long war, and everyone knew it.

The bottom line is this: despite the huge and unmanagable costs of the war in China, the militarists were able to argue for continuing because it seemed like they were winning. They couldn't extinguish Chinese resistance, but they won every battle on the ground. Why leave when the Chinese are far too weak to drive you out? Why leave when it seems like you are always seemingly on the verge of winning?

The only way to get the Japanese army out of China is to have a China strong enough to deal defeats to Japanese armies. If that happens consistently, you won't need US pressue, Japan will simply leave on her own.
 
The USA was unwilling to admit a challenge into a China it had considered its own imperial sphere, Japan was unwilling to accept that it should not be allowed imperial opportunities equal to those of the other powers (as it saw this concept in terms of meaning, not necessarily what it was in reality at all). Neither side can or will give with politics resembling those of OTL, if in this area they do not resemble OTL's it will be because China's greater strength renders the views of the USA and Japan alike in this regard irrelevant.
 
The trouble with all of these is they presume that the Japanese pre-WWII were rational. Basically it would take a POD pre-1900 to get much of a change in the lead up to WWII - okay maybe get Russia to win the Russo-Japaneses war, but that would be a major feat. The Japanese leadership as a whole had convinced themselves that they could do whatever they wanted and nobody could/would stop them. The whole leadership down to junior officers in the Army and Navy and the Policeman on the street had bought into the myth of Japanese inevitability. Even the "Peace" party were not a peace party as the west would think of it but more a try to get more out of them before war happens party. This was because for the 50 years prior to the start of the war anyone who spoke out against the state were arrested - if they were lucky, or killed if they weren't. So nobody spoke up against it.

Japan was the tightest Totalitarian state imaginable prior to the war and had been since the mid-1800s. With all of the side effect of this - group think at its worst. The leadership literally could not imagine loosing, even right up to the last days of the war half of the war council was sure that they could force the Allies into a settlement that left them in charge and Japan intact with all its existing social structures in place to rebuild its military. That was after 4 years of war, loosing their whole fleet, most of their air force, all of their merchant marine, having their industry bombed back to nothing, having two atomic bombs dropped on them and the USSR decoration of war and invasion of Manchuria. Still 50% of the ruling council was ready to continue the war - these are the people that have to somehow decide without the above pressures that it is a good idea to back off? :eek:
It is hugely unlikely at best.

Japan's leaders were perfectly rational, they just made a number of mistakes that they could not adequately resolve and leave the military in a monopoly on power. The Rape of Nanking permanently ensured no kind of political solution was ever going to happen, while Japan didn't have the financial strength to perpetually occupy China, in addition to the Japanese facing a US policy of "war-avoidance" that was itself both incompetent and wound up working directly contrary to its own purposes.
 
If I remember The Rising Sun correctly, Japanese actually considered retreating from China in 1940, but then France has fallen and the entire international situation changed. Also, there was, IIRC, fundamental misubderstanding between US and Japan on the notion of China. At one point Japanese were willing to retreat from China, but got the impression that US wants them to retreat from Manchuria also, while US did not. Also a series of cultural misunderstandings occured.

Probably Japanese would find it hard to reign in the army even in case an agreement was achieved.
 
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