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any of you think Japan
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2024-07-20 at 5:21 PM UTCcould have become an empire a world spannign empire like the britihs or the uk also being an island wihtin asia like england has been an island within europe had they not isolated themsleves during the epriod sof the shogun and samurai?
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2024-07-20 at 6:03 PM UTCYes. They are one of the current top 10 economies in the entire world with a very high population and historically speaking there is no reason China should exist right now. Both Japan and China kind of exist in this strange anomalous state ever since the fall of empires and this doesn't seem like it's gonna change anytime soon.
The idea that China and Russia are considered close allies these days when compared to all of history is pretty fucking wild and it's even more wild that Korea and Japan are aligned with a western power and don't seek nuclear weapons. We live in a very strange timeline culminated by a seemingly endless string of global scale black swan events -
2024-07-20 at 6:40 PM UTCYea they to me are and always have been more advanced nd disciplined than the British but the brish unlike them colonized half the world and both are islands both close to the countries that were colonized like India. I think they just had a diff mentality to the British plus they always had to deal with china unlike the British. china was always in their way to a true empire/
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2024-07-20 at 7:01 PM UTC
Originally posted by Warcry Yea they to me are and always have been more advanced nd disciplined
The dominant mode of medicine was basically witchdoctoring well into the 19th century and they couldn’t consolidate power within a tiny island nation without stimulus from the west. Japan is cool and all but I’m not seeing the “advanced and disciplined” thing -
2024-07-20 at 7:24 PM UTCMaybe I meant culture wise and militarily supposedly in a very short time span after being isolated foe centuries they took on industrial power nd steam engine and other tech guns and were able to start dominating Asia.
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2024-07-20 at 7:25 PM UTCI was watching this video and it made me start these threads today:
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2024-07-20 at 7:28 PM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny The dominant mode of medicine was basically witchdoctoring well into the 19th century and they couldn’t consolidate power within a tiny island nation without stimulus from the west. Japan is cool and all but I’m not seeing the “advanced and disciplined” thing
TCM is a legitimate form of medicine you brainwashed western capitalist!Abstract
The use of endangered animal products in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and other ethno-medicines is culturally widespread across many regions of Asia. In the present study, traditional efficacies of seven types of animal horn including antipyretic, sedative and procoagulant activities were evaluated. Shotgun proteomic analysis was performed on material from horns following separation into soluble and insoluble fractions. Over 200 proteins were identified in each sample using nano LC-MS/MS, and these were classified according to their molecular function and cellular component using principal component analysis (PCA). The results indicated that seven horns showed antipyretic, sedative and procoagulant effect. Proteomic analysis showed that YH and WBH were similar to RH in terms of protein profile, and GH was similar to SAH. In addition, YH and GH were similar to RH in their cellular component classification profile. PCA based on the composition of keratin and keratin-associated proteins showed that constituents of WBH and GH were similar to RH and SAH, respectively. This is the first analysis of the protein content of animal horns used in TCM, and it is effective to substitute the horn of endangered animals with sustainable alternatives from domestic animals. -
2024-07-20 at 7:31 PM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny The dominant mode of medicine was basically witchdoctoring well into the 19th century and they couldn’t consolidate power within a tiny island nation without stimulus from the west. Japan is cool and all but I’m not seeing the “advanced and disciplined” thing
They were basically the only country in Asia to industrialize in the 19th century. If not "advanced", the Meiji restoration shows a capacity for forward thinking far beyond that of their peers. Consider that Chinese people are still eating bird nests and drinking 3 penis wine for medicinal effects in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty four. As regressive and backwards as Japan may be, they are leagues ahead of their neighbors.
I don't know about "empire", but had they played their cards slightly differently during the second world war (ie "not done a cheeky sneak attack on pearl harbor and been nuked into submission for it"), there's a solid chance they'd have a few more holdings in the pacific. Might have even held onto a unified Korean peninsula.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-07-20 at 7:44 PM UTC
Originally posted by Elbow Consider that Chinese people are still eating bird nests and drinking 3 penis wine for medicinal effects in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty four.
Bird nest soup and shark fin soup make sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seitan
Japanese people use wheat gluten to basically get the same result. This proves Japan is more in touch with nature than China. -
2024-07-20 at 9:53 PM UTCThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2024-07-20 at 10:02 PM UTCI wanna dominate some imperial orifices
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2024-07-20 at 10:31 PM UTC
Originally posted by Elbow They were basically the only country in Asia to industrialize in the 19th century. If not "advanced", the Meiji restoration shows a capacity for forward thinking far beyond that of their peers. Consider that Chinese people are still eating bird nests and drinking 3 penis wine for medicinal effects in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty four. As regressive and backwards as Japan may be, they are leagues ahead of their neighbors.
I don't know about "empire", but had they played their cards slightly differently during the second world war (ie "not done a cheeky sneak attack on pearl harbor and been nuked into submission for it"), there's a solid chance they'd have a few more holdings in the pacific. Might have even held onto a unified Korean peninsula.
That's true, and it's impressive that Japan managed to rapidly go from a feudal society into an industrial one without the rampant corruption and general dysfunction that almost always comes along with exposure to western technological heroin. But remember that what we're being impressed by is that Japan went from feudal society to what Britain had already been for a hundred years, which they managed to do with the introduction of western ideas and science. That doesn't say "more disciplined and advanced (than Britain)" to me, since the very thing we're talking about is an act of catching up to English industrialization.
Originally posted by Warcry Maybe I meant culture wise and militarily supposedly in a very short time span after being isolated foe centuries they took on industrial power nd steam engine and other tech guns and were able to start dominating Asia.
Saying one group is more "culturally advanced" is pretty whack, but even if you really drink the western liberal democracy koolaid, Japan is still like half a century behind on the social trajectory the western world has followed. They may give amerifats a run for their money on the shiteating consumerism front, they're pretty advanced there in the same way stage 4 cancer is advanced, but I'd still say us yanks take it.
In terms of military... they have none, they're functionally a vassal state of the US. In WWII they did pretty good running over still-industrializing regional rivals, but got steamrolled by the US. American discourse around the bomb is pretty telling, then and now American victory in the pacific was assumed and the argument for splitting the atom on them was that a ground invasion would have a higher death toll than nuking a civilian population. There was never actually a military contest, just a matter of how expensive American victory was going to be.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2024-07-21 at 1:22 AM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny That's true, and it's impressive that Japan managed to rapidly go from a feudal society into an industrial one without the rampant corruption and general dysfunction that almost always comes along with exposure to western technological heroin. But remember that what we're being impressed by is that Japan went from feudal society to what Britain had already been for a hundred years, which they managed to do with the introduction of western ideas and science. That doesn't say "more disciplined and advanced (than Britain)" to me, since the very thing we're talking about is an act of catching up to English industrialization.
Oh. Certainly. They're only honorary Aryans, after all.
In all seriousness though, yeah, no, they were definitely far behind Europe and America until the 19th century. You could chalk that up to an astonishing innate capacity for Disciprine if you really want to hammer that point - "they knew za warudo was evolving around them and they remained steadfast in their efforts to rive traditionarry without undue influence from the outside warudo for hundreds of years 🎎" - but at the end of the day, they fucked up bigly and set themselves back like ~300 years technologically. That they were able to make up so much lost ground and beat their neighbors to industrialization is to their credit, but the fact that ground needed to be "made up" at all is undeniably damning.
Sakoku ended precisely because of how incredibly obvious it was to the Japanese themselves that they weren't nearly as sophisticated as the Europeans or Americans of the day. You are correct.
In our world, Japan was like 200 years late to the party at least if they were hoping for any New World or African colonies, and Wariat is talking about what would happen if sakoku had just never happened though I guess. And uhh... even in a world without sakoku, it was kinda hopeless for the Japanese to ever become more than the King of East Asia and the Pacific. When Tokugawa Ieyasu was born, the Spanish were already conquering and colonizing their way through the Americas. And even in a world where that somehow wasn't true, and the Tokugawa lineage hadn't pursued the gradual policies which formally and legally isolated Japan, I think they were probably still going to be late to the party, because the Tokugawas were still going to be preoccupied with looking inward. At best Japan might have caught up sooner, and laid more concrete historical claims to more pacific islands/mainland Asia. They were never going to span the globe. -
2024-07-21 at 1:28 AM UTCLike the period of isolation that set Japan back began 100 years after the Spanish discovered the New World. There's no world where sakoku is to blame for their lack of eastward expansion. They just... didn't know, and didn't care, at the time when it would have counted.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2024-07-21 at 1:41 AM UTCMaybe if like... a Meiji-like Anti-Tokugawa had risen in Japan, who brought Japan up to European levels of technology, and was as preoccupied with looking outward as the actual Tokugawa were with isolationist navel gazing... maybe they could have taken some land on the west coast of the southernmost parts of South America? Japanese Chile or something. But that's a very different question than just "what if Japan but no isolation".
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2024-07-21 at 1:47 AM UTCCrazy to think about a Spanish-Japanese war in South America, and the religious tone such a conflict would take on. Maybe the Anti-Tokugawa converts to Catholicism and tries to Christianize Japan to secure its footholds in the Americas. Alt-history is fun.
