Was imperial Japan sustainable?

Anything is sustainable if you shove it down people's throats enough. See the guy in your image, for example.

this.
invading china was their first mistake. they got entangled and bogged down their and and had to keep attacking and fighting more nations to get out of it in a favorable way which eventually became completely unsustainable and resulted in total defeat.

if they had stuck to korea and taiwan it could've been sustainable though even then they would've had to try and build a positive relationship with their colonies instead of violently suppressing them and their cultures. maybe it could have worked if they had actually made true on their rhetoric of an asian co-prosperity sphere

Maaaaaybe if they hadn't joined the axis and were content with Manchuoko.

They probably would've been successful if it weren't for WW2. They controlled the entire north of china at their extent.

no, they only got into ww2 because of the american, british and french embargo against them which came as a result of the war in china. the pacific war cannot be separated from the sino-japanese war. they managed to temporarily conquer large territories in SEA but they only attacked dutch indonesia because they needed its natural resources to continue the war in china, which they again didn't have as a result of the embargo

I was kind of arguing as if Japan invades China with no repercussions from Europe or the USA. Japan would've conquered and occupied China without outside influence.

Why did America, France, and Britain care about China? Purely humanitarian interest or was there something else going on?

Colonies.

Could you explain why colonialism wasn't sustainable after the 19th century? You'd think that with the advances in technology nowadays would be the best time in history to have a bunch of land far away from each other.

Was it due to nationalistic movements rising up in the occupied territories?

Not him, but colonies were primarily colonized for two main reasons

1) Access to primary resources. You need coal, iron, tin, copper, whatever. If you want it, you try to set up a colony somewhere which has the resources, extract them, bring them to the home country.

2) Strategic force projection. Especially in the age of coal powered ships, you don't have that much operational range for a navy, which is your main means of projecting power far away from your home. You don't want to have to rely on someone else for coaling stations, so you need to have a string of friendly ports all over the place so that you can get your navy from point A in your homeland to point B far away

2 evaporated with superior technology that allowed for greater force projection without having all these coaling ports; so any colony that was economically unfeasible and acquired primarily for range immediately became obsolete. (A lot of the later African acquisitions fall into this category).

As for #1, the world's trade situation has notably freed up since the 17th-early 20th centuries. You don't need to physically and politically control a copper mine if you want copper, you can pretty easily buy it on the open market. A lot of this is due to a real world hegemon popping up and a decline of a world with multiple rival major powers. Furthermore, economies, especially the economies of the colonizing powers, have generally shifted away from manufacturing as the primary source of income to services as the primary source of income. Access to primary resources just isn't as necessary for smooth running as it used to be, so the need to sit on these things has lessened.

You can get a lot of the benefits, and ditch all the administration and occupation costs these days in ways that weren't really practical in the age of colonization.

Japanese imperialists pretty much undermined themselves constantly, so no.

Only if they devoted more resources to their largely under-funded army. Expect the navy to interfere with that.

That's a pretty good and easy to digest answer.

I studied economics and business for nearly 2 years and I still don't understand how the first world manages to sustain their economies almost entirely on services to themselves.

I've always wondered how much further they wanted to expand their empire.

Would they have been taken control of all of China?

Read "Visions of Victory" and "Japan's Colonialism and Indonesia"
It was basically the entire Pacific region.

So all of this?

Was there any way they could have done it?

Although they supported Indian independence against Britain and would have certainly invaded Australia if they had managed to knock the US out of the war somehow, It's quite unlikely. Same with conquering China and Mongolia, especially without the SU collapsing.
But yes, all of those regions were targeted for conquest.

It seems kind of absurd to imagine that they could have had enough soldiers to police that much territory.

They were hoping to use military contributions from their puppet states for that.

It's not much more absurd than the British Empire really.

Relevant

christian missionary lobby desu

Business interests (read: exploitation) and a growing hub for Christian missionaries. The Westerners thought China would be a good bulwark for the West against independent Asians like Japan is today against China.

Another thing worth mentioning is:
If we can take population densities in 2000 as indications of where major population centers were located half a century ago, the Japanese already controlled the vast majority of people in the region (outside of India)

>against independent Asians
i don't understand. you mean how the US controls Japan's foreign policy or Japan itself somehow imprisoning other asians economically?