u/roon_bismarck

I guess it's not a stretch to say that among all the major combatants of WW2, the Soviets likely had the worst navy.

But was this in any way inevitable, is there anything Stalin could have done to speed up the USSR's naval capacity development, or is it not possible to gain meaningful ground there due to time and money/expertise constraints?

So something like this. Humanity at some point in the future tens of thousands of years later is fighting an alien species/otherwise in trouble. Someone floats the idea of sending an agent (or multiple) back in time and accelerating technological and social development so that by the time of first contact, humanity is a century or two more advanced than they had been.

I sometimes do wonder what one guy with a lot of hindsight would have been able to do had he been sent back in time to make the world a better place. Are there any novels that go over topics like this, perhaps with the starting point in the 20th century? Personal ideas are also welcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan%E2%80%93South\_Korea\_trade\_dispute

So in 2019, this happened.

TL;DR Then prime minister Shinzo Abe (RIP) had a seemingly (according to his autobiography) deeply personal issue with then Korean president Moon Jae-In over some historical issues. This led to Japan restricting the sales of certain semiconductor related products to Korea. Korea attempted to mitigate said issue by trying to localize production and saw some success.

Either case the issue was pretty soon overshadowed by the Covid fiasco, Shinzo Abe leaving office, and Korea had a new president. The new leaders quietly dropped the issue since it was clearly helping nobody. Both sides claimed victory.

Overall it wasn't the biggest dispute, but had it not been disrupted by COVID, I wonder if Japan and Korea had the ability to seriously damage each others economies. What was the worst case scenario here?

At the Tehran conference and the later Yalta conference, it was decided the USSR would enter the Pacific War and fight the Japanese in Manchuria some time after Germany was put down.

To go to another war after having pretty much exhausted your manpower, and half the country in famine conditions is a pretty hefty demand, and it wouldn't have been too surprising had Stalin simply refused. He already had his foot in Asia via rebels in Xinjiang and the CCP, so it isn't like he had no other means of asserting influence in the region. Considering the personalities of people involved (Stalin), had I been completely unaware of what happened, I'd have imagined Stalin asking for a lot of concessions before agreeing to join the fight against Japan.

In a way, this is kind of what happened, but I'm kind of wondering why he didn't ask for even more. South Sakhalin used to be Russian territory, so regaining it wouldn't really have felt like a true "gain." How much of the Kurile Islands the USSR could get was never determined (it's an island chain almost the size of northern Ireland in total size, and over 1000 kilometers long...), and since the US was supposed to do the heavy lifting with the navy, etc, it would have been completely possible, and even likely, the Soviet occupation zone be tiny.

So far I can think of a few reasons why Stalin didn't ask for more, perhaps he *was* asking for more but Roosevelt talked him out of it? Though I haven't found good literature on the topic.

I feel like most indicators are at least somewhat misleading. For instance you'd think Cambodia's economy is booming with its sub-1% unemployment rate, but Cambodia's economy only grew around 5% last year. Which is not bad, but also not great for a developing country.

This got me thinking after looking at Japan's political system, and more interestingly, Luxembourg.

Japan's 55-year system is well known as a "one party dominant" system where, despite elections known to be relatively free and fair, the Liberal Democratic Party won election after election in dominant fashion due to a combination of factors.

Luxembourg's post-WW2 prime ministers, with the exception of two, have all been members of the same party (CSV).

Italy, similar to Japan, had a dominant party (the Christian democrat party) rule for decades either alone or in a coalition.

In such conditions, can the foundations of democracy, checks and balances of power, pluralism, freedom of the press, etc etc, remain intact? Or does the dominant party always, at some point, realize they could stay in power permanently by dismantling such foundations and that the opposition can't do much about it?

The hysteria(?) around US debt made me think about this. Japan is the 2nd most indebted nation on the planet on a debt-to-GDP ratio perspective. Usually, if spending is so out of the window as to destroy the government's balance sheet so much, newspapers will start to criticize, politicians will raise a stink about it, etc etc, all of which makes it hard for the government to just keep spending money. Hence the only country with a balance sheet so destroyed is *Sudan,* a country whose political process is nonexistent.

Japan is, obviously, nowhere near as dysfunctional as Sudan. In the contrary most political scientists will rate Japan's government as quite functional, though a bit lacking in political pluralism.

Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio was only around 50% in 1990, right after the bubble collapse. Over the next 30 years, it ballooned to over 200 percent. During those years Japan went through two opposition governments that shaked their political system to the core, over 10 prime ministers, two of which were some of the most influential men in its history (Koizumi and Abe). Yet *for some reason* no one seems to have really attempted to curb spending... why? What kind of economic theory were they following when they let their debt issue reach such extreme levels, and simply looked at it saying "this is okay?"

Title.

For instance, the Dai Ichi life insurance economics institute. It publishes weekly reports on economics as well as forecasts, but typically, are these think tanks reliable?

Recent discussion on electoral fraud in the US as well as constant conspiracy theories in my country (Korea) got me wondering.

To what extent can electoral fraud be kept secret from internal and external observers?

For instance, it's clear as day a lot of Russian elections are rigged from the start. This is noted by both local and foreign observers. Plenty of other elections that were rigged don't go too far before some information comes out.

Is there ever an election that was considered legitimate at the time, but uncovered as a rigged one decades later? How well can electoral fraud be hidden from the public and media?

So, I wondered what would have happened had the Soviets somehow managed to occupy Hokkaido in WW2 (ignoring the fact that they likely didn't have the logistical chain to pull it off anytime soon...).

The boring answer would be that Japan would likely be split between North Japan and South Japan like Korea was.

The more interesting answer... Hokkaido is a major breadbasket for Japan. Still is today, was the same 80 years ago. Its climate is relatively poor for growing staple foods like rice, but there's a lot of flat terrain there, which isn't exactly common in this part of Asia.

Had Hokkaido been separated from Japan, it is very likely that the rest of the Japanese archipelago would have suffered an incurable food deficit issue. This is more or less what happened in Korea after it was split down the 38th parallel, the South being cut off from the North's resources and vice versa, which took years upon years to deal with. Even today, Korea is some of the least food self-sufficient developed countries out there.

Let's say the USSR starts its operations against Japan about a month earlier. It could have been possible had Germany fought worse in the war and capitulated earlier than it did, maybe 1~2 months. This gives Stalin a chance to overrun more of the Korean Peninsula (though it's very unlikely to be a complete Soviet occupation all the way down to Busan, as Japanese resistance would be stiff) and perhaps attempt a land grab in Japan. The latter is really sketchy, but let's just say Stalin took the gamble, and due to some miracle, it was pulled off.

Thus, by the time the war ends, Korea is split, not down the 38th parallel, but slightly lower than that, putting Seoul and the Han River areas under Soviet control. This is absolutely catastrophic for this "South Korea." The Han River region is the most populated region in the entire country, by far. It had been that way for centuries. Having it under Soviet control pretty much guarantees South Korea will be less powerful than the North for a long, long time.

Hokkaido is partially or completely overrun. Which not only causes the food deficit issue, but this is the FIRST time a Japanese island was ever, ever conquered by a foreign power. It will be an absolutely MASSIVE shock.

This puts the rest of Korea and Japan in a very, very precarious condition that would become more and more of a pressing reality as US-Soviet negotiations for a more permanent border inevitably fail.

US-Soviet relations might take an earlier dive as the US attempts to create some sort of sustainable border solution that the USSR will inevitably reject.

So, in this case, it might be politically feasible or even unavoidable for this South Korea and "South Japan" to form a close alliance. Colonial grudges will remain for a while, but it will likely be pushed aside and forgotten/fade away as the REAL and CURRENT issue of their countries being split/Soviet Union bearing down on them becomes a more pressing concern, perhaps even allowing the region to become a EU-like entity. This is also a time when a lot of Koreans knew how to speak Japanese (due to colonial ties) and traditional Chinese characters were much more common in daily lives, so there is even some language compatibility.

The US also might encourage such a deal to keep the region stable and prosperous. Perhaps later Taiwan might join, since in such a scenario China is almost certainly falling to the communists, probably even faster due to increased Soviet help.

Any thoughts?

I believe, earlier authors like David Glantz praised Soviet performance in East Asia a lot. On paper they did manage to roll through the Kwantung army and capture everything down to Korea in a relatively short time. Some authors like Hasegawa even went on to say they could have captured Hokkaido.

Recently though at least based on the talks I had with various people this narrative seems to have changed. Quite dramatically in fact, that Soviet quick success was mostly due to their timing (Japan surrendering only a week or two into the fighting), and that, had Japan continued resisting, the Soviets wouldn't have achieved such smashing success.

I wonder if this has any basis on recent studies on said operation.