WI: Japanese-Ethiopian alliance in the 20s and 30s?

Yeah, no, Manchuria's way closer to home with much more obvious economic gains to be seen (better existing infrastructure, land and higher wages given to Japanese settlers, years of propaganda regarding the riches of Manchuria). Much safer, with the home islands and the military nearby, and much more integrated into the Japanese cultural psyche of the era due to its status as a gleaming jewel of the imperial era. The Japanese government also wanted Japanese people to colonize the region to bring it more fully into the Japanese Empire. Even if Japan does not take Manchuria, the majority of the Japanese who would've gone there would probably go to either Korea or Taiwan, colonies where the Japanese government was far more invested and that held a similar place in Imperial Japanese culture with Manchuria.
What do you think Japanese immigration to Ethiopia would look like? Even if it is limited.
 
Previously, I was talking with @von Adler about what a German Military Mission to Ethiopia could influence the Mahel Sefari (Central Army) and I was wondering if what I quoted from him (below) could work in the establishment of a Japanese-trained force that's relatively small but well-trained and well-equipped:

He could then reform the Kebur Zabagna, re-creating the Mahel Safari by making the Imperial Guardsmen NCOs in the new units. Ordering the nobility to field battalions of Chitet feudal levies to serve in the Mehal Safari brigades to be trained in modern warfare could then be done - but again, this gives potential internal enemies much stronger forces - which is something Tafari will not do until he is VERY secure in his position.

A Mehal Safari brigade might then look something like this in 1935:

5 Mahel Safari infantry battalions - each roughly 1 000 men, equipped with LMGs, bolt-action rifles, rifle grenades and hand grenades.
1 Mahel Safari support company - roughly 300 men equipped with 4x20mm AA guns and 4x80mm Brandt system mortars.
1 Mahel Safari artillery battalion - roughly 600 men equipped with 12x75mm mountain howitzers (perhaps Bofors, but Skoda or Schneider is fine too).
1 Mahel Safari MG company - roughly 300 men equipped with 12 watercooled HMGs.
2-4 Chitet infantry battalions - each roughly 1 000 men equipped with bolt-action rifles,
1 Chitet support company - roughly 300 men equipped with water- or aircooled older HMGs, 42mm Hotchkiss cannons, 65,3mm M1883 Russian mountain guns, 75mm M1885 Italian mountain guns, 37mm Revolver cannons or even old bronze muzzleloader artillery.

Could this work in a roughly semi-modern and/or smaller modern force?
 
You could see the same 500k Japanese who settled in Manchuria IOTL instead immigrate to Ethiopia.

No, I really can't see that. Taking over areas that way won't endear the Japanese to the Oromo and Amhara groups, as well as the dozens of smaller peoples. They didn't want to be displaced by Italians, why would Japanese Settlers get a pass?
 

Zachariah

Banned
What do you think Japanese immigration to Ethiopia would look like? Even if it is limited.
It'd most likely closely resemble the waves of Japanese immigration to Brazil and Chiapas (in the primarily rural, farming Japanese families which would be targeted by the imin-kaisha- who, let's remember, were private companies, not sponsored by the government- and the areas which they'd focus upon bringing them in from, primarily the Okinawa and Kagoshima Prefectures). And as in Mexico, but to an even greater extent, Japanese immigrants to Ethiopia would most likely be treated extremely favorably, with the Ethiopians in even greater need of additional skilled workers for modernization efforts than Mexico was at the time, and with far better, closer Japan-Ethiopia relations than Japan-Mexico relations. In Mexico, these first Japanese communities mostly consisted of farm workers and other laborers. Japanese authorities were interested in creating a coffee plantation in Chiapas, for export to Japan, and thus established the Sociedad Colonizadora Japón-México, recruiting Japanese farmers to migrate with government support to obtain land. Others went without government assistance and were called "free emigrants", able to buy land without obligation to the Japanese government. However, economic conditions in Chiapas forced many immigrants to abandon their contracts with the Japanese government ,and instead formed a new organization called the Sociedad Cooperativa Nichiboku Kyodo Gaisha, which allowed them to diversify their economic activities. The very first settlement was based on coffee production, but failed for various reasons, including the fact that not all of the colonists were farmers and many became sick with tropical diseases.

Subsequently, in Mexico, a large number of Japanese immigrants were brought over as workers, contracted to companies doing business in the country which needed skilled labor. This was first in the mining and sugar cane industries, then later in construction and railroads. However, the hard labor of the mines and sugar cane fields proved too much for many of these immigrants, and combined with the lure of the USA 's riches just across the border, prompted them to abandon their contracts and head to California. In 1908, Japan and Mexico informally agreed to end immigration by contract, but a trickle of a few hundred free emigrants continued to come. Legal skilled laborers after 1917 often worked in the health fields, along with those Japanese invited by the Japanese community in Mexico. Most of these were in Baja California where the economic development was greatest. A number of other Japanese came to the country illegally from the United States, after being rejected by this country, coming to Mexico hoping to enter the U.S. again. These were mostly concentrated in the north of Mexico, and those who could not re-enter the United States stayed in Mexico permanently. By the start of WW2, most worked in fishing and agriculture followed by non-professional workers, commerce, professionals and technicians. To this point, the treatment of the Japanese in Mexico, and of their descendants, had been favorable; the Japanese were relatively free from discrimination in Mexico, unlike the United States, Brazil and other countries in the Americas. One reason for this was that the work that they did, which included the construction of factories, bridges and other infrastructure in Mexico, was viewed favorably. The Japanese were not considered to be foreign exploiters, but rather as partners in Mexico’s development because of their technical skills in fields such as medicine and engineering.

So, then, as in Mexico (but even more certain, given that they'd have a pact), you'd expect to see both the Japanese and Ethiopian authorities co-operating to establish a Japan-Ethiopia Colonization Society, and the initial wave of settlement to consist primarily of farmers. IOTL, the Japanese trade missions which were arranged to Ethiopia, and which were the most enthusiastic about encouraging Japanese emigration to Ethiopia, were organized by agricultural companies, who found it fairly easy to secure 5,000 sq. km of land for their proposed cotton and coffee plantations; it'd be even easier ITTL, surely? At this stage, going into the 1920s, a cap has already been imposed upon Japanese immigration to the coffee plantations in Brazil, and their already dire working conditions, the heavy racial prejudice they'd face there and their forced assimilation by the Brazilian authorities would only get worse. In the mid to late 1920s, when the Japanese started drinking iced coffee, and continuing into the 1930s, with Japan's cafe culture taking off, coffeehouses booming, and the commodity of coffee beans commanding greater value in Japan than anywhere else in the world, more Japanese than ever headed out to emigrate to Brazil, in the hopes of getting rich quick on the coffee plantations- almost 150,000, between 1926 and 1941. This, in spite of the fact that Japan-Brazil relations were extremely poor and worsening all the time, on account of "the attitude of Brazil toward the immigration of Japanese laborers", and the fact that Brazil had imposed a racial cap on Asian immigration, making most of these illegal immigrants.

ITTL though, Ethiopia's coffee plantations (of which a far higher proportion would be Japanese-owned, making it even more enticing as a destination for Japanese emigrants) would offer an ideal alternative to Brazil- not only that, but one which would be officially sanctioned and encouraged by the authorities of both Japan and Ethiopia. One with far lower land costs, making it far easier for these Japanese to buy their own land and become farmers themselves; and one markedly closer to home than Brazil too, which would also reduce shipping costs. I think it'd be entirely plausible and realistic for more than half of the Japanese immigrants to Brazil IOTL to elect for the officially approved option of emigrating to Ethiopia instead ITTL, and the greater ease of access to entice at least as many Japanese to emigrate to Ethiopia ITTL as those who emigrated to Brazil IOTL; at least 150,000, potentially as many as 300,000. And you'd also expect to see a far higher percentage of interracial relationships for these Japanese immigrants than for Japanese immigrants anywhere else, especially once Amha Selassie's marriage to a Japanese princess is announced, establishing a high-profile precedent to emulate; thus rapidly establishing a large and fast-growing population of Japanese (and mixed-race half-Japanese) children in Ethiopia. You wouldn't see the same 500k Japanese who settled in Manchuria IOTL immigrate to Ethiopia instead; but IMHO, it'd still be very plausible for the number of Japanese in Ethiopia ITTL to reach 500k by the mid 1930s.

Even more so than in Mexico, Brazil and Peru (though not to such a great extent as you might think), these Japanese would be far more educated and have a far higher literacy rate than all besides the top 2-3% of the general population in Ethiopia, and this would give them a massive advantage. In Brazil, Japanese children were banned from attending schools, and were thus educated in schools founded by the Japanese community; in Ethiopia, though, the anti-progressive, anti-immigration and anti-modernization faction is represented by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which still held a virtual monopoly over education in spite of Menelik II's efforts to start introducing secular public education (and re-asserted their total dominance after the Italian occupation led to the dissolution of the original Ethiopian public school system, maintaining it all the way into the 1980s). The Ethiopian traditional literati, known as the 'debteras', had wielded their power over the populace through their exclusive possession of and access to the word for several centuries. These debteras were believed (and are still believed in many parts of the country) to possess magical curative powers, and were often appealed to by many people for specific protection from the evil eye and other vices. They, therefore, saw no advantage in spreading literacy among the common people, since that would mean working against their own self-interest, i.e. power. Instead, they made sure that their prestige and power was protected through their uncontested and unshared possession of the skills of reading, and more importantly, writing, as the latter was often associated with witchcraft; traditional church school education in Ethiopia was exclusively in the by-then dead language of Ge'ez, and explicitly excluded anyone who wasn't a member of the aristocracy, as well as barring girls' education.

The Ethiopian “Japanizers”, progressive intellectuals who had been arguing that Japan was a good model, were the most vocal advocates of universal secular public education IOTL; and of expanding the Ethiopian education system. While the dominant Ethiopian educational establishments, the EOC schools run by the debteras, would be even more likely to bar children of Japanese heritage from attending its schools, this could well lead to a situation where, with the Japanizers leading the education reform movement in Ethiopia, instead of educating their children in schools founded and run by themselves, exclusively for the Japanese community, the Japanese community in Ethiopia would work together with the Japanizers to increase the proliferation of secular public primary and secondary schools throughout the country, as well as leading the education of children themselves in areas with significant Japanese immigration; thus greatly diminishing the commanding role of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in literary acquisition, and rapidly increasing Ethiopia's literacy rate. As well as greatly increasing the number of Japanese speakers and writers there, potentially to the extent where it could even rival Amharic as a lingua franca.

IOTL, there are only 131,000 people in the world who speak Japanese as a second language, even today; ITTL, the number of Ethiopian Japanese L2 speakers could easily surpass that in the space of a couple of years. In spite of their higher levels of racial admixture, this would also give the Japanese in Ethiopia a far greater chance, not only of maintaining most of their cultural identity in Ethiopia, but propagating several elements of it to the wider population. And even more so than they did in Mexico (which was an awful lot- even more so, when you consider just how small the Japanese Mexican community still was even then, and the brain drain of more skilled Japanese Mexicans to California), these Japanese immigrants would be invaluable skilled workers and entrepreneurs, playing a vital role in building up Ethiopia's industrial, commercial and military infrastructure. And if war does come, and Ethiopia is invaded, then the presence of so many Japanese people in Ethiopia (the largest Japanese diaspora in the world by this stage, with a larger Japanese population than that of Taiwan and more than half that of Korea), would force the Japanese government to declare war on the aggressor or face decapitation, just as an invasion of Taiwan by one of the European colonial powers at this stage would have done.
 
In regards to the outline above done by von Adler, could it be effectively replicated in the Ethiopian Army under a foreign Military Mission?
 

Deleted member 9338

Ethiopia annexes British Somaliland so perhaps the Japanese can be given basing rights as apart of a potential J-E Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (in creating an Ethiopian Navy)? London could see Japanese use of Zeila and a Japanese Military Mission to Ethiopia as a sort of compensation in regards to the non-renewable Anglo-Japanese accords.

With this POD, why not renew the Anglo-Japanese accords?
 
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