What if Japan were the People's Republic of Japan and it looked like this?
>>18448181it would be an oppressive third world shithole like all other communist countries
>>18448181Anime would not exist. The cultural conditions that birthed anime only came about as a result of American occupation. Without that, there is no anime
>>18448213>The worst part about japanese culture that directly results in infantile men who don't know how to talk to their own women would not exist>This is a bad thing for JapanWhat the fuck dude, some animes are really entertaining but anime as a whole has ruined japanese men so much that it isn't worth it to call it sometimes positive
then it'd be an Asian version of East Germany today. More or less the same as West Germany but somewhat poorer, with a shittier bureaucracy and mildly brutalist architecture from their Commie legacy
>>18448213>The cultural conditions that birthed anime only came about as a result of American occupationThat's the most insane misconnection I've ever heard.
>>18448181
>>18448181First country in the world with negative birth rates
>>18448181It would honesty have been the least repressive communist state during the Cold War. Japanese Communists, with the exception of some Maoists, have always been more liberal.
>>18448323What about Yugoslavia and post-war Vietnam?
>>18448181The thing is that Japan doesn't have any natural resources of its own, so it got good at trading. The soviet model is autarky and closed off trade under a planned system. Japan would be really poor if it was an independent communist state, if it was integrated with the USSR it would still probably be neglectedPlus the USSR kind of had a hateboner for East Asians it must be said
>>18448341What would be stopping them being an export economy for the Warsaw Pact instead of an export economy for the West like they were in real life?
>>18448181Disgusting
>>18448213Anime was created before ww2 but yeah anime couldn't exist in a communist system.
>>18448216Anime website, newfag. Don't like it then leave
>>18448181They'd be somewhere between North Korea and Vietnam, they'd be more of a hermit kingdom like North Korea but with less authoritarianism like modern Vietnam but also less of a shithole than Vietnam. The definition of middling. Shit like anime would still exist but like all commie nations they'd have zero cultural influence or soft power so anime in general would be way less relevant in this timeline too. In fact, weebs and 4chan itself might not even exist
>>18448481Anime would not exist in anything like the capacity it does now. There'd be no sexuality and very little violence allowed past the censors. Look at Chinese "cultural output" where they ban cleavage for God's sake.
>>18448213this
>>18448181This basically already exists. Look up the Sakhalin islands.
>>18448213>consoomer slop engineered for uncultured bitter losers would disappear under communism, prompting them to value higher forms of enjoyment, expect better life conditions and turning them into beings more sensitive to the world around them, ushering a new wave of bliss on earth, powered by the positive thoughts of redeemed serene humans
>>18448181>>18448280>>18448521yeah nah japan underwent westernization back in meiji even if it got sphered by either soviets or china the population would strive to break free of the shameful communism
>>18448181On par with, or exceeding East Germany. The societal/institutional situation (which we can separate from the economy) meant a high level of state capacity and developmental capacity, which turns into decent (by communist standards) outcomes. >>18448332>post-war VietnamWas not liberal in the slightest. They didn't begin Doi Moi until after Le Duan died in '86. Before that, it was bog standard Marxism-Leninism.>>18448419Comecon lacked the purchasing power (on the demand/market side) and the technological sophistication (on the supply side). Japan doesn't really kick its high-end manufactured goods exporting into gear until the late 1950s - early 1960s, and it can do that because it had already reconstituted its domestic economy in a way that produced companies that, if not globally competitive yet, were domestically competitive and on the ascendancy. Never getting the Korean War bump would hurt (and Japan might be expected to pitch in to help developments in the DPRK, which would have the entire peninsula in any scenario where the US does not control Japan). The Central Planning Committee/Commission/Ministry/Directorate/whatever would favor heavy industry, which would have severe consequences for the restoration of the light industrial sector (which had already suffered severely from the 1930s onward), which would, down the line, have severe consequences for the heavy industrial sector, where all the factors that kept it from being internationally competitive in the real-life Communist countries would affect it in Japan. Thus, Japan would be hard-pressed to establish the sort of advantage that it had IRL, and even if it did, and the Comecon countries were able/willing to run trade deficits with it, they already had shortfalls of hard currency, most of which was allocated by geographic necessity to trade with non-Communist Europe.
>>18448549cont. In the 1940s, the USSR itself is still reconstructing, and has many of the key resource discoveries and exploitations ahead of it, so the benefit of below-market resource access would be minimal, and even what benefit there is would come at the cost of firm discipline, which is one of the perverse advantages of being resource constrained, that one has to get good or die. And of course Japanese firms would have far less flexibility/freedom of maneuver, and would have social/leadership constraints that they lacked IRL. So the resource constraint would still be intensified, and they would be less suited to dealing with it, and would have less hard currency. Japan is at about 1/3 urbanization share in 1945, down from <40% before the war. The land reform problem would be acute, as would the food situation in the cities, and we can guess the Communists handle it in the usual way. Agricultural reform would not be as positive an economic force as it was IRL, yields would be lower, the ability to generate surplus capital for investment would be lower, the share of the population working in agriculture would be higher, which would impact the workforce available for labor-intensive industries, as well as the size and depth of the domestic market, which in turn affects the returns to scale and to investment. There wouldn't be an influx of American experts like W. Edwards Deming, nor would Japanese be able to study at Western institutions, or interface directly with Western expert/knowledge pools. That would place them closer to their pre-war industrial trajectory, which was largely not internationally competitive. Central planning historically and almost inherently favors extensive growth over intensive growth. That does not mesh well with a resource-constrained country, and creates a substantially lower growth ceiling.
>>18448181Would probably suck given that North Korea is seen as a bizarro laughing stock/poverty horror show even from China's POV (seriously it was so funny seeing the contrast between how actual Chinese students here in Berlin thought of NK versus how my European Tankies roommates talked about it)
>>18448224It's kinda true though, the mass flooding of American comics and Disney style artwork was a huge influence in Japanese media at the time.
>>18448213Anime would exist, but it would not exist in modern perverted and infantile style.Instead you will get war and political shows and series. maybe some drama
