This is seriously off topic, but I will write a brief answer . . .
Jed, you're a historical scholar of sorts. And you know a lot about Japan. I'm curious, and I really don't know the answer to this question. In your opinion, do you think Japan would have stopped their expansionist plans after securing DEI?
I think the Japanese Empire was doomed long before they attacked Pearl Harbor. They were mired in an unwinnable war in China. It was like the U.S. war in Vietnam only about a hundred times worse. Sooner or later, the Chinese would have defeated them completely. It might have taken decades, but so did the Vietnam war.
The Russians survived the German invasion and were growing stronger by 1944. They started giving substantial military aid to the Chinese communists, who then began to beat the Japanese armies as well as the Chinese nationalists. Perhaps it would have taken another 10 years but they would eventually have overpowered the Japanese completely. Japan was no match for Russia. They fought a short war in Nomonhan in 1939. The Russians blew them out of the water. Eventually the Russians and Chinese would have gotten tired of the Japanese presence on the continent and pushed them out of Manchuria and Korea as well.
Superpowers -- especially totalitarian superpowers -- do not allow small nations to establish empires at their borders. That would be like 19th century U.S. allowing the Europeans to fight colonial wars in Central America. I am sure the Chinese and Russians would have enforced their version of the Monroe Doctrine. I am pretty sure that by the 1960s the Japanese empire would have been dead and gone, like the British empire.
- Jed
