Quote Originally Posted by ConjurerDragon View Post
And would be a diplomatic disaster as there are certainly some states who later joined WW2 on the allied side without providing any real support just for the show, that would think otherwise if the allies would ignore the status and borders of neutral states themselves repeatedly (the anglo-soviet invasion of Iran was a case were it historically happened already).



Because of admiration for England just like Germany
Most people might see that as just a stupid joke but historically William II. of Germany (the grandson of Queen Victoria who was at her funeral) took part in ship races in England and admired the british empire and it’s navy. That is one of the reasons that he saw the future of Germany with a set of colonies and a navy just like England while ignoring that both Prussia and later Germay had better concentrated on the continent.

The japanese after being woken up by Perry’s flotilla forcing them to open their ports for US trade quickly modernized and militarized in a scramble to not become the next India, Indochina, Indonesia or whatever other nation was a colony. And in doing so they at first looked admiringly to England. They took part in freeing the diplomats from Pekings diplomats quarter as one of the 8 powers just like the UK, they allied the UK as both wanted to contain Russian expansionism, the UK indirectly supported Japan in the 1905 war against Russia as France could not come to Russias aid lest it would provoke the UK into the war, Japan joined the UK in WW1 (thus gaining the former german colonies of Tsingtao as a foothold in China, the Marianas and Karolinas) - that is until the UK itself ended the anglo-japanese alliance in favour of closer ties to the US.

And about the japanese navy - one must not forget that the US itself at the time was an imperial power. They annexed the kingdom of Hawaii and the Phillipines (instead of letting them go free after defeating the spanish and so contradicting their own claims of being a former colonial nation itself that would seek no colonies) making them a direct neighbour of Japan and controlling the shipping lanes to the rubber and oil of southeastasia. So while the US navy was larger than the japanese navy (because the US wanted a navy on both oceans) the japanese built a navy with larger battleships than the Panama Canal would let through, so that 1:1 the japanese ships could defeat their US counterparts and the reinforcements that would first come through Panama (whose independance from Columbia was the result of the US intervention as Columbia would not allow the US to militarily control a channel through it’s territorry as nowaday few remember that Panam once was part of Columbia).
We were in the process of standing the Phillipines up on their own. After conquering the place, we were doing what we refuse to do now in places like Iraq and Afghanistan -- suppressing an insurgency and then taking the decades needed to build up institutions and education for a state to stand up on its own. They were independent as of 1935 (though obviously the apron strings were still there).