Developer Diary | Historical Japan

Kon'nichiwa! Hello and welcome to Japan’s proper Dev Diary where we, I, PDX_Danne, and D3vil, will be talking about what’s new for historical Japan in the upcoming DLC, No Compromise, No Surrender. We’ve already touched on a lot of this in our Dev Corner, but we’ll go a lot more in-depth this time around. Let’s get right into it, shall we?

Historical Recap

I think it’s worthwhile to start with a quick historical recap of where Japan found itself in early 1936, since this will inform a lot of our design decisions we’ll be discussing. Even though Japan had fought on the Allies’ side during WW1 and had received German territory throughout the Pacific, they never felt like they were treated as equals by the Western Great Powers. This, together with the lesson that wars could only be fought and won through total war, as well as the lack of natural resources in Japan, was part of the reason why a belief in militarism took hold and grew stronger in the nation. This would hit a boiling point in the 1930s and would lead to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, as well as the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, where part of the Japanese army invaded China on their own accord, and the civilian government couldn’t stop them from doing so. In fact, the army and navy were the ones coercing the government, and even assassinated ministers and prime ministers whenever these would become too inconvenient for the military. It’s safe to say that the political (and military) situation was a total and utter mess, because not only were the army and navy busy with pushing the civilian government around - they had a fierce rivalry going on between themselves too. This would lead to a lack of coordination, and both a waste of and a struggle for resources. Ok, that’s a lot of…. Lore dumping - but it hopefully provides you with a background check and an understanding of where Japan stands in 1936. Speaking of, let’s take a closer look at the 1936 Bookmark for Japan! So many new things! New Focuses, new National Spirits, a new Country Leader, and a different Ideology Well, that’s intriguing, isn’t it? Let’s find out what all of this means. The Political Situation in Japan 1936 The reason why Japan starts out as Non-aligned now is because they were actually a Democratic nation with free elections in early 1936, but they were rapidly pulled towards authoritarianism in the starting months and coming years. We considered having them start out as Democratic and then switch to Non-aligned, and then end up as Fascist as you progressed through the Focus Tree, but there wasn’t much to be gained game-mechanically by doing this. Therefore, they will adopt fascism as their national ideology with the formation of a true one-party state in the early 40s. Now, let’s move on to the new, shiny National Spirits! There is plenty to unpack here. As you might have noticed, the Imperial Army looks a bit different from other National Spirits as it’s kind of split in two parts: The Japanese Armor Doctrine at the top and the rest of the modifiers below. This kind of thing has been made possible with last year's DLC Götterdämmerung, and we’re using it here to differentiate armor -related modifiers from the rest of the army modifiers. The reason being that Japanese tanks had started to lag behind Western ones in terms of armor, firepower, and