How did Japan a mountainous island nation with barely any natural resources manage to conquer the entire Southeast Asia...

How did Japan a mountainous island nation with barely any natural resources manage to conquer the entire Southeast Asia and half of China, a ridiculously vast area, and hold it until they surrendered, while Germany with rich natural resources and large population couldn't even take a quarter of Russia before all that land became too damn big to hold? How did they get all those boots on the ground?

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They used black warriors

They were the Anglos of Asia

The USSR was united and industrialized. China then was worse than sub saharab africa is today in relative terms. It was also disunited and the only major leader was a fucking retard to the point the allies consideres assassinating him.

China had no industrial base to speak of, and Russia did. Really, it's that simple. Their entire effective army was made up of faux-German troops trained by imported German advisors and imported German weapons. The only weapon the country could make enough of was rifles. When Hitler became a weeb the entire foundation of the Chinese military crashed and burned, because there was no other source of anything they were armed with. Chiang Kai-Shek threatened to execute any officer who lost an artillery piece. The Japanese then cut off all paths for foreign aid except the fucking Himalayas.

This, but also don't forget that China was also a political basket case. While the civil war between the KMT and the chi-coms is well known, you also have to remember that the KMT itself wasn't a unified "country" in the modern sense the way the Soviets were. You had a bunch of different local governments, each of which had their own private armies, at least claiming they helped the KMT (but often not), fighting their own separate wars against the Japanese and not really coordinating.

So it just became really easy to hold huge amounts of land with fewer soldiers and long supply lines because there was literally nothing there that could hurt them?

Isn't there a ludicrous huge population in China, if they could still produce rifles and arm them couldn't they still fight an effective guerilla campaign? But from what I've read the KMT just tried to fight a traditional war with a traditional army while the Communists did jack shit while pretending to fight a guerilla war.

Japan executed partisans which caused massive butthurt that persists till today

China hadn't industrialized and was largely still a fragmented clusterfuck that hadn't recovered from the collapse of the Qing dynasty.

They had negligible industrial base to speak of, and, although the Nationalists had raised a force of western-trained regulars, almost all of them were killed in Shanghai when war broke out in 1937. With its only modern forces annihilated and facing the vastly more experienced Japanese, both the Commies and Nationalists had to withdraw to inhospitable regions.

Japan was helped by the pre-existing political divisions in China. They established a puppet state under Wang Jingwei - a hero of the Nationalist era - allowing some semblance of control in the urban centers they held, and the two Chinese forces lacked either the will (as with the Commies) or capacity (as with the Nationalists) to truly fight back. The Nationalists had already resorted to blowing the dikes on the Yellow river to slow the Japanese, and the Commies seemed largely content to gather support in rural areas while they lay in wait.

As for why Japan held onto it for so long, that's because the Allied campaigns never really aimed at liberating China directly. The closest you had was the China-Burma-India campaign, and that was more focused on liberating British colonies and keeping supply lines open to Chongjing.

>So it just became really easy to hold huge amounts of land with fewer soldiers and long supply lines because there was literally nothing there that could hurt them?
Kind of. The Japanese would secure urban centers and transportation routes as the OP map shows, but the rural areas were pretty much ignored - hence all the blobs of Commies in the northern half.

There was a guerrilla campaign against the Japanese occupation, but you have to remember that such warfare requires a willing populace and adequate supplies. China at the time had plenty of other problems that made such efforts difficult. It was hard enough to get supplies to the Nationalists to keep them afloat, let alone sponsor a full-blown asymmetric campaign alongside their conventional efforts. The Commies may have had some support from the Soviets, but the Soviets had their own problems to worry about soon enough, and they had the leisure of being able to focus on the long term, so they spent much of their effort building their power base in the rural regions.

And then there's the issue of the will of the people. Throughout history, much of the Chinese population was less active participants and more just along for the ride, and the Sino-Japanese War was no exception. The war had brought ridiculous devastation - the Yellow River Flood killed at least half a million people and devastated the economies and agricultural base of the areas it affected, and in 1942 famine hit the Henan province, killing several million more. When the population's greatest concern is getting the bare necessities to stay alive, fighting an occupier becomes much less pressing.

The rest of East Asia was pretty backwards and had failed to modernize until it was too late or, in Korea's case, didn't seem to want to at all. The Japanese, meanwhile, were deeply shook by the opening of the country and things like the Brits fucking up Kagoshima, they saw what was happening and China and realized they didn't want that to happen to them.

They sent embassies out on great tours of the west to learn about modern governmental systems, education, militaries, etc. And these weren't nobodies, these were guys like Yukichi Fukuzawa and Arinori Mori who were big parts of the creation and running of the Meiji state. They brought in advisors on military affairs, education and governance. When it came time to start getting out of the unequal treaties they made a point to buddy up with the Brits, the biggest dog on the block, before anyone else. They did a great job of forging a Japanese identity and engaging in mercantilist practices to strengthen their economy and industry.

They were just very smart about what the issues facing their country were, their position in the world and what they needed to do to avoid the fate of China. By the time the 1880s and 1890s rolled around, Japan decided it needed an empire in the Orient to protect itself (and the Orient) against European aggression and by that time there wasn't really shit the horribly backwards Qing or Joseon could really do.

It wasn't easy, they lost alot of troops, had insurgents to fight, but you're never going to have as much trouble fighting insurgents compared to an actual nation state that is churning out guns, tanks and fighter planes

Also as I said, china was basically maybe 20 years behind the USSR if not more in terms of industrialization. The KMT's logistics was a literal nightmare, comparable to the logistical pattern of ISIS today, where much of their battlefield needs came from captured equipment, foreign imports of eclectic calibres and different standards, and some homegrown production

Shut the fuck up.

China

>giant rural decentralised empire composed of feuding fiefdoms, civil warring factions, no dominant central government

Japan
>industrialised empire in concentrated strip of land
>huge steelworks industry and navy
>rapid marine forces and ridiculous firepower

Throughout China's history, it was basically always various regions either in loose harmony with each other or fighting each other. There was never a central government that had direct authority over all of mainland china until mao zedong.

>barely any natural resources

Are you butthurt?

Japan did have natural resources, namely coal and very productive agriculture such as that in the Kanto plain. However its advantage over China was being a relatively more stable densely populated island, the amount of bloodshed between Perry's arrival and the Meiji restoration (bakumatsu era) was far less than China experienced from the opium wars to the Taiping rebellion and onwards. It also meant most of Japan was immediately accessible to trade.

Japan was ideal as an industrial hub for the region and as imports flooded into the country the economy rapidly transformed, a process expedited somewhat by "unfair treaties" that limited tariffs and insubordinate Daimyo like the Satsuma. It was not long before Japan could implement nearly all western technology and import high tech equipment its new industries could not yet manufacture using its trade connections with competing European powers. This allowed Japan to establish an oppressive central state once again, however so much had changed in 15 years there was no going back.

>Throughout China's history, it was basically always various regions either in loose harmony with each other or fighting each other.
t. guy that know nothing of Chinese legalist structure or history.
Ffs the Chinese dynasties was the most centralised in the world, infact ther system was the precurser and infuenced modern beurocracy in the west.

>perfidious Yamato

Japan historically had really shitty iron. That's why their katanas had to be folded over 10000 times, it was the only way to get the impurities out of iron sand enough to get usable steel.

That's perfidious Wa to you.

Have you ever heard the idiom "heaven is high and the emperor is far away"?

>So it just became really easy to hold huge amounts of land with fewer soldiers and long supply lines
Half of these lands in China were only occupied at the end of war, and they couldn't really held them too long either aside from Manchuria. Perhaps you should study more before you keep spouting shit.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ichi-Go

>sub par quality iron
>Limited coal quality
>Virtually no oil
Yes, barely any, though it should be noted the Empire had access to Korean coal and iron and Manchurian synthetic oil which alleviated it somewhat

>And then there's the issue of the will of the people. Throughout history, much of the Chinese population was less active participants and more just along for the ride

>Chinese populace owned weapons and often policed themselves during the days of the Empire since the Army Garrison can't wander too far from troop concentrations.
>nth Dynasty collapses due to a peasant uprising.
k

>5000 THOUSAND YEARS OF UNBROKEN DYNASTIC HISTORY
t. Bao Baolong

And Korea is Ireland?

They industrialized first.

Its not that its unbroken but most dynasties went through phases of high centralization later moving on to decentralization and then collapse

Basically what happened was that in China and Southeast asia it was a bunch of sandnigger like villages with people who had no idea what the fuck was electricity.

Japan being an industrialized nation with a whole armory easily conquered a bunch of village numbnuts who probably only had swords against japanese who were armed with FRIGGIN RIFLES.

Kind of funny because on the eve of the first Sino-Japanese War, western observers thought the Japanese were outmatched and the Chinese would absolutely destroy them. Instead the opposite happened.

It's not like the Chinese and the SEAs didn't have rifles. However Japanese had tanks.