raharris1973
Well-known member
Somebody elsewhere asked about colonizing Japan, instead of the usual question, about what other countries could have escaped colonialism by being all Japan-like.
The idea being Japan isn't worth anything it's just got people, rice, and it's pretty feisty. It just doesn't have any gold or tasty tropical goodies.
These characteristics are all somewhat true, but I think the argument is overstated.
I think that a Japan that royally, imperially, or shogunally screws up its early contacts and relations with western powers, especially as the latter industrialize into the steam age,certainly does have the potentially of attracting their acquisitive interest, losing its formal or practical sovereignty, losing its territorial activity, and being under a western boot, or boots for a full half century or maybe a little more before climbing out of that situation. I do not think it could be held down really any longer than that without nuclear, climate, spaceborne, or geologic disasters smacking it down as it is about to rise to sovereignty, but it could get held down considerably more than it was it was dealt worse cards in the mid-19th century or just played them really badly.
On lacking exploitable or desirable resources - I don't buy it. OK - no tropical cash crops, and no gold or diamonds. Those are important strikes against it being worth colonizing.
But the place wasn't valueless, western countries forced it open and refused to let it isolate itself entirely as it desired, because they'd be damned if they were not going to exploit the waters as close to its coast as they could for whales and fish. And while they were going to be there, they wanted to be to have some g d search and rescue services instead of torture and execution upon recovery of sailors, they wanted to be able replenish water and food supplies, and they wanted to replenish coal supplies. Japan had all three, and storage for all three and deep safe harbors for safety in bad sea states.
Westerners were not taking no for an answer in terms of getting use out of those.
Japan had decent amounts of silver, and silver mining. It was a substantial source of China's silver in the Ming dynasty,and continued to pay mainly silver for its continued imports from Qing dynasty China. Certainly, Mexican and other silver sources overtook Japanese silver for China, in increasing proportion over time, but I've got no indication that Japan was 'all mined out of silver' by 1800 or 1850.
Certainly, long beyond that, Japan was a copper miner and exporter. Copper had many uses, and increased in importance with the electrical age. Countries like Chile and Bolivia made a lot of export earnings over copper. Coups and nationalizations have been fought out over copper, in the late 19th and 20th century, Japan had plenty of it.
Japan had food and labor, and that's nothing to sneeze at. Western imperialist and colonialist operations in the Pacific, Oceania, the Indian Ocean and Caribbean were all pretty demanding of labor, and local Polynesian//Oceanian supply could not keep up with demand for fields as varied as sugar plantation operations and sex work.
Certainly, the reward and profit versus effort and difficulty of conquest were not going to match what the situation was in India, Indonesia, or Indochina, because ot its distance and non-tropicality, and the militant discipline and cohesion of its population, but at least parts of Japan could have ended up considered viable and valuable colonies if the difficulty level had been depressed a bit, and imperialist motivation kicked up a notch.
For instance, I could imagine, the largest and moast populous island, Honshu, might be unconquerable by foreign powers for anything more than a very short period of time, and any subordinate relationship with an imperial power would be as a protectorate, rather than an annexation or crown colony.
But the smaller Japanese islands, Kyushu, Shikoku, and certainly Hokkaido and little Okinawa, seem small enough to be 'edible' by imperialists to me. Now few of them would be 'digestible'. The culture and demography of Kyushu and Shikoku, no matter what political regime it is under would always have been Japanese with some outside flavors and spices added, and no real hybridization or replacement.
As for who could have been the viable colonialists? I think most of the European big boys could have done it, depending on when. In the early days, pre-Napoleonic, Portugal, Spain, or Netherlands could have colonized an island or two. In the later days, post-Napoleonic, Netherlands (in some good 19th century decades), Britain or France could have taken some islands. Russia could have gotten Hokkaido. Germany could have gotten an island.
I don't think Belgium or Italy (at least not the Italy we know, uniting in 1861) could have pulled anything like this off.
And, despite the USA being the world's 'Japan-opener', I do not think the USA, as it existed in Perry's time, the 1850s, was in *any* plausible condition to colonize any of the Japanese main islands for the next sixty years after the opening. By 1853, the USA was already just too path dependent as an undermilitarized, federal, noncentralized, low tax republic, with only a vanishingly small chance of escaping brutal civil war and its distractions, for whom any new territorial expansion was contentious and stressful, that territorial acquisition of hard-fighting Kyushu, Shikoku, or Hokkaido Japanese was just something the Americans were not going to fight for and pay for.
Now maybe if you went back several decades and you had multiple consecutive Hamiltonian Federalist Presidencies, and militarization and navalization and 'big government' since the 1790s, things would have been different. Like if the Quasi-War turned into a real war, the US expanded territorially from it, kept larger permanent results, discredited Jeffersonian Republican ideas, the the Hamiltonian path dug was popularized by jingoism and success. Maybe then a mid-19th century America would more Palmerstonian, Disraelian, Rhodesian in its global imperial approach, if Britain allows it. But that's only one extreme timeline branch. A declared quasi-war could easily become an embarassing failure or have excesses leading to a Republican and isolationist and anti-militarist and anti-standing army backlash for decades.
The first reply was the most common type of response to the idea of colonizing Japan, not that it is a very common question.
The idea being Japan isn't worth anything it's just got people, rice, and it's pretty feisty. It just doesn't have any gold or tasty tropical goodies.
These characteristics are all somewhat true, but I think the argument is overstated.
I think that a Japan that royally, imperially, or shogunally screws up its early contacts and relations with western powers, especially as the latter industrialize into the steam age,certainly does have the potentially of attracting their acquisitive interest, losing its formal or practical sovereignty, losing its territorial activity, and being under a western boot, or boots for a full half century or maybe a little more before climbing out of that situation. I do not think it could be held down really any longer than that without nuclear, climate, spaceborne, or geologic disasters smacking it down as it is about to rise to sovereignty, but it could get held down considerably more than it was it was dealt worse cards in the mid-19th century or just played them really badly.
On lacking exploitable or desirable resources - I don't buy it. OK - no tropical cash crops, and no gold or diamonds. Those are important strikes against it being worth colonizing.
But the place wasn't valueless, western countries forced it open and refused to let it isolate itself entirely as it desired, because they'd be damned if they were not going to exploit the waters as close to its coast as they could for whales and fish. And while they were going to be there, they wanted to be to have some g d search and rescue services instead of torture and execution upon recovery of sailors, they wanted to be able replenish water and food supplies, and they wanted to replenish coal supplies. Japan had all three, and storage for all three and deep safe harbors for safety in bad sea states.
Westerners were not taking no for an answer in terms of getting use out of those.
Japan had decent amounts of silver, and silver mining. It was a substantial source of China's silver in the Ming dynasty,and continued to pay mainly silver for its continued imports from Qing dynasty China. Certainly, Mexican and other silver sources overtook Japanese silver for China, in increasing proportion over time, but I've got no indication that Japan was 'all mined out of silver' by 1800 or 1850.
Certainly, long beyond that, Japan was a copper miner and exporter. Copper had many uses, and increased in importance with the electrical age. Countries like Chile and Bolivia made a lot of export earnings over copper. Coups and nationalizations have been fought out over copper, in the late 19th and 20th century, Japan had plenty of it.
Japan had food and labor, and that's nothing to sneeze at. Western imperialist and colonialist operations in the Pacific, Oceania, the Indian Ocean and Caribbean were all pretty demanding of labor, and local Polynesian//Oceanian supply could not keep up with demand for fields as varied as sugar plantation operations and sex work.
Certainly, the reward and profit versus effort and difficulty of conquest were not going to match what the situation was in India, Indonesia, or Indochina, because ot its distance and non-tropicality, and the militant discipline and cohesion of its population, but at least parts of Japan could have ended up considered viable and valuable colonies if the difficulty level had been depressed a bit, and imperialist motivation kicked up a notch.
For instance, I could imagine, the largest and moast populous island, Honshu, might be unconquerable by foreign powers for anything more than a very short period of time, and any subordinate relationship with an imperial power would be as a protectorate, rather than an annexation or crown colony.
But the smaller Japanese islands, Kyushu, Shikoku, and certainly Hokkaido and little Okinawa, seem small enough to be 'edible' by imperialists to me. Now few of them would be 'digestible'. The culture and demography of Kyushu and Shikoku, no matter what political regime it is under would always have been Japanese with some outside flavors and spices added, and no real hybridization or replacement.
As for who could have been the viable colonialists? I think most of the European big boys could have done it, depending on when. In the early days, pre-Napoleonic, Portugal, Spain, or Netherlands could have colonized an island or two. In the later days, post-Napoleonic, Netherlands (in some good 19th century decades), Britain or France could have taken some islands. Russia could have gotten Hokkaido. Germany could have gotten an island.
I don't think Belgium or Italy (at least not the Italy we know, uniting in 1861) could have pulled anything like this off.
And, despite the USA being the world's 'Japan-opener', I do not think the USA, as it existed in Perry's time, the 1850s, was in *any* plausible condition to colonize any of the Japanese main islands for the next sixty years after the opening. By 1853, the USA was already just too path dependent as an undermilitarized, federal, noncentralized, low tax republic, with only a vanishingly small chance of escaping brutal civil war and its distractions, for whom any new territorial expansion was contentious and stressful, that territorial acquisition of hard-fighting Kyushu, Shikoku, or Hokkaido Japanese was just something the Americans were not going to fight for and pay for.
Now maybe if you went back several decades and you had multiple consecutive Hamiltonian Federalist Presidencies, and militarization and navalization and 'big government' since the 1790s, things would have been different. Like if the Quasi-War turned into a real war, the US expanded territorially from it, kept larger permanent results, discredited Jeffersonian Republican ideas, the the Hamiltonian path dug was popularized by jingoism and success. Maybe then a mid-19th century America would more Palmerstonian, Disraelian, Rhodesian in its global imperial approach, if Britain allows it. But that's only one extreme timeline branch. A declared quasi-war could easily become an embarassing failure or have excesses leading to a Republican and isolationist and anti-militarist and anti-standing army backlash for decades.
