WI no Kanto quake

Anderman

Donor
What would be the implication on WW2 if the Kanto quake did not happened?
How strong was the damage of the quake on Japans industrial capacity ?

And yes i know Japan will not match the US of A!
 
Well one intriguing aspect of no Kanto earthquake is that it would significantly weaken the militarist right wing in Japanese politics, perhaps enough to make democracy endure there.
In OTL the military and rightist "allies" persecuted ethnic Koreans, unionists, leftists and many others in the grim aftermath of the Kanto quake.
 
What would be the implication on WW2 if the Kanto quake did not happened?
How strong was the damage of the quake on Japans industrial capacity ?

And yes i know Japan will not match the US of A!

AFAIK the effects were more on the financial system than directly on the industrial capacity. Japanese growth after the 1927 bank crash was very slow until 1931-2 when a policy of quantitative easing was adopted. Japanese growth over 1931-7 was rather fast averaging 4.9% p/a. One problem for predicting consequences is to separate out the effects of the bursting of the WW1 bubble from the effects of the earthquake. My guess is that without the earthquake there will be an earlier bank crash, because the banks will not receive earthquake related support, and perhaps an earlier recovery but clearly that will depend on policies. It is possible that Japan will initially be able to grow by exporting to the USA, the British Empire and Europe before that route is cut off by the Smoot-Hawley and British Empire Preference tariffs. OTL growth depended on exports to China and heavy industry exported heavily to Manchuria during the 30s. Books such as "Lever of Empire:The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan" by Mark Metzler or "The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy: Development and Technology in Asia from 1540 to the Pacific War" by Christopher Howe may give some clues. There is also "Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire That Helped Forge the Path to World War II" by Joshua Hammerman on the earthquake itself, which describes both the massacres of Korean immigrants and the lose of the large Western community of Yokohama. There have been some earlier threads mentioning this including https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?p=2780959#post2780959 and https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=14667.
 
The hull of the uncompleted battlecruiser Amagi isn't severely damaged so that it is rebuilt and commissioned as an aircraft carrier in the Imperial Japanese Navy. The hull of the battleship Kaga is sunk as a target or scrapped.
 

Bearcat

Banned
Tokyo's fire department remains even more wretched, primitive and ineffective. Which matters only incrementally when B-San arrives in 1945.
 
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