WI American-occupied Japan & Okinawa ISOT from Feb. 1, 1946 to Feb. 1, 1943?

Actually, the most convenient neutral location for senior delegations of the downtime Japanese military commands, especially ground forces in Manchuria, northern Korea, and China, and representatives of MacArthur's and Hodge's uptime occupation regimes in Japan and Korea, SCAP and AMGIK, and the uptime subordinate Japanese government representing the Diet and Emperor, would be Vladivostok in the Soviet Union. There the uptime Americans and Japanese would present proofs of the time travel and end results of the war, the downtime Soviet hosts and downtime Japanese would demonstrate their own subjective 1943 reality. To add maximum authenticity, I think the 1946 Americans would set up a radio link with the Emperor in Tokyo and his Lord Privy Seal, and if they can swing it with the equipment they have on hand in 1946 Japan in terms of cameras, sets and sufficiently powerful transmitting stations, they may try for a television link on one of those giant cabinet tiny screen TVs.

It is not a matter of trust, it is a matter of available venues for business and common interests. This method won’t be used if simple broadcasts or envoys under truce flags or Red Cross are working, but those last two sound like even more suicide missions. There is no one guidebook that tells you how evil people will behave in every situation.

The Academy Award Best Picture winning film of 1947 in this TL was an action-drama-romance called 'The Spare' - It was about 1946 American soldier who started a correspondence with her 1943 wife stateside that turned into an emotional affair that starting wracking the wife, played by Myrna Loy, with guilt. The romantic tension and competitive love triangle involving the 1943 and 1946 versions of the soldier husband, both played by Henry Fonda, end up resolved in a tragic yet bittersweet, yet oh too tidy manner with the death of the 1943 version of the husband in combat in Europe.

Among the nominees that year, this wasn't the only drama dealing with the 'doubling' effect, many critics and latter-day auteurs now argue that another Best Picture nominee 'The Ghost who Loves Me' starring Bette Davis, Cary Grant and Ronald Reagan was the better film. It was centered around the dilemmas of Davis's character, an 'uptime' occupation officer's accompanying formerly-widowed wife who returns with her 1946 husband (Grant) from Japan occupation duty right after the end of the of the war (consensus calendar), only to find that her originally deceased first husband (Reagan) survived the war (D-Day) this time,and won't let her go. The film did decently at the box office but some of the implied Davis-Reagan scenes and Davis's ultimate choices tested the Code censors and caused some controversy.


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ISOT'ed 1946 Occupied Japan will be in pickle in terms of requiring continuous emergency food deliveries to avoid starvation. American occupation authorities, the Japanese government under them, and the Japanese populace all have a common interest in getting everyone fed. But they stand at the edge of a precipice and panic with individuals, families, and communities fighting for food and survival. Those in a position to help, in proximity order, are other 1946 US occcupied Western Pacific territories like South Korea and the Philippines, on this margins of their own, and the 1943 Japanese occupied mainland and Southeast Asia, which isn't even certain to make up its mind to surrender or to not try to use the fleet to 'liberate' the Emperor and home islands' much less let US/western supply shipping go unimpeded or actively send supplies to Allied controlled areas. And the Allies don't want occupied peoples to suffer even more.

Then there's the 1943 Allied supply sources like North America, the Antipodes, and Latin America - they are rather committed to war right now. Then again the need for combat operations in the Pacific might, *might* evaporate soon, so there could be some fungibility between war shipping needs and humanitarian needs. 1943 Americans wants its boys in Japan and over there fed - although the idea of feeding the Japanese doesn't quite sit well with the average person.

Some of the US-Japanese face-to-face discussion in 1946 as people realize what is going in would be quite the sight to see and words to hear.
MacArthur and the Americans, with the genuine cooperative desire of most Japanese placed in government at the time, would want to go all in on securing surrender of the Japanese downtimers, not only for ending the war's sake, the occupied populations' sake, and recovery of POWs and civilian internees, but to protect the safety, stability, and flow of food to Japan, and make for peaceful safe shipping corridors from the Americas and Antipodes to Japan.

They'll try their best. The Americans who would/should know, know they can't invoke invoke the threat of instant atomic destruction or an instant overwhelming Trans-Pacific American fleet push to intimidate either the 1946 or the 1943 Japanese [they won't share their specific weaknesses of course]. The 1946 Japanese may suspect as much. But both uptime and downtime Japanese can always be reminded that no matter what, the Americans are guaranteed to be producing atomic bombs within 30 months. Japan can't. It can only determine if it makes itself a target or not. And the Japanese can be given reminders of US chemical warfare capability.

MacArthur and co will be ready to work for the positive, survival and health of the population, peace, and this time around, if the 1946 Japanese can help get a surrender of the 1943 Japanese done, no Soviet grabbing Japanese territory or prisoners. MacArthur - because of his knowledge and distance will have a lot of autonomy from Roosevelt, and will be persuasive with Washington, even if FDR tries to send over some 'minders'.

But the dark parts and threats may be spoken out loud to the 1946 Japanese. SCAP expects total cooperation, expects all Japanese police and men in arms and members of the public to cooperate with SCAP forces to oppose and resist and help terminate any downtime invaders, infiltrators or 1946 insurgents against the occupation. Non-resistance to invasion-insurgency is insurgency and fatal. If, miracle or miracles, invaders/uprisers win, blunt indiscriminate destruction methods will be used sooner or later. The more they win, the more Japan loses.

The truth this conveys is that if any downtimer invasion or uptime native uprising or combination gets beyond local containment, the US plan is to consolidate its people and forces offshore, let the home islands starve, chem attack them, nuke them when ready, and rebuild Asia out of its pieces other than Japan.


Now if downtime 1943 Japanese forces are a problem in occupied lands but the 1946 Japanese people have nothing to do with it, they aren't going to be punished for it or shot as hostages. [just second order effects, IJN forces staying hostile and at large may end up making food less available for everyone by slowing deliveries]. And even MacArthur and co are probably willing to encourage Soviet involvement if Japanese forces Manchuria-Korea make themselves a truly lethal and determined threat to US forces South Korea or Japanese forces Kuriles-Sakhalin threaten to force costly operations.

Of course Stalin would only do what he thinks is good for Stalin ,but the fate of American garrisons in the Far East directly influences how much aid he gets against Germany. And he gets to keep whatever his folks march into.


As far as sources of information about uptime, in early 1946, the Soviets did not have much presence in occupied Japan. They withdrew their diplomats on declaring war, and the first meetings of the Allied Joint Council in Tokyo, on which they were represented, didn’t start happening until April 1946.

But they easily could have had some sort of lower level consular officer around by Feb 1946, or some lower-level liaison officer attached to MacArthur’s staff, or at a minimum, some sort or foreign intel illegal in the country.

Similar situation in southern Korea. Not sure if they had a consulate in 1946 Manila.

But even lacking that, 1946 Japan, southern Korea, and the Philippines didn’t lack for Communists, who were legally free now from prison and most police surveillance, many of whom may have desired contact with the Soviet Union, and some of whom may have had short-wave radios or radio transmission equipment.

So the bottom-line is that Stalin won’t be going too many weeks at least without hearing much ‘news from 1946’ from 1946 Soviet or at least Communist sources.

That is going to be the case, even if, for instance, if the 1946 Americans and 1946 meet the 1943 Japanese in Vladivostok for 1943 Soviet-hosted talks, the 1946 uptimers say nothing to the 1943 parties about the USSR’s eventual entry into the war, out of basic discretion and politeness. [It would be rude to rat out your hosts that they will sneak attack another party in the room in a couple years, and expose them to getting hit first].

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He was stupid enough to let Communist/Stalinist Japanese and Koreans out of prisons and participate as political actors, through 1948 in Korea, and about 1950 in Japan. Willoughby talked a good game and started saying badass things and ordering surveillance and taking notes fairly early on but didn't do much hardcore anticommunist stuff until later, he maximized his anticommunist actions when he was on the talking circuit with American politicians *after* MacArthur was fired. He called various New Dealers from the occupation time all sorts of commie pinko names but never undid their land reform policy.





Huh - so possibly a combined assault force - with uptime and downtime American elements (or at least commands, the two Macs) doing a coastal landing against Japanese-held Korea, an Inchon so-to-speak, but probably against the east coast northern Korea instead of its west coast, and possibly in conjunction with supporting Soviet operations from just across the border in Vladivostok Primorskiy?

Interesting. If it works, good. If not, yuck. Denying those northeastern Korean ports of Chongjin, Hungnam and Wonsan to the Japanese, and sinking anything the Japanese have afloat there, pronto, is nice though - securing the Sea of Japan reduces the possible avenues of attack by downtime Japanese forces trying to invade or infiltrate not just southern Korea but the home islands.

While messaging surrender demands, in the military sphere it is safer to go almost immediately on the attack against coastal Korea hard and try to spur trouble behind Japanese lines (try to spur Korean uprisings) than to be militarily inert, passive, immobile or defensive in South Korea.

As long as these individuals were cleared of war crimes.

Even the JSDF took officers with experience from the time these personnel were IJA or IJN.

One of them is Minoru Genda, a naval aviator who planned one of the Pearl Harbor attacks and was present in Midway. As the JASDF Chief of Staff, Genda would later advocate for greater cooperation with the United States in the Cold War to ensure Japan's national security. 

From this article: Pointing to General Genda (sadly a dead link by now)
Remembering Genda

Memoir Summary

Further reading: Genda Speaks to the Naval Institute

Yes: for either of two possibilities: 
a. to link up with the 1943 Russians and use their assets to save US Forces in Korea.
b. to block Russian incursion into North Korea if US forces proved able to push the Kwandung army out of northern Korea.


That would be 1946 MacArthur thinking. 

One of the things about the "stage actor" was that he could do the unpredictable and outrageous, be absolutely brilliant, but blame a subordinate, and "skate through mud" spotless when things went sometimes Confederate. He got away with that record of mistakes on his charm, blaming (Properly for his imbecile of an air force commander should have been sent to the rock-pile for criminal stupidity, just for waking up in the morning. M. ), Lewis Brereton for losing 1/5 of the entire USAAF (85% of the USAFFE in the Philippine islands) on 8-11 December 1941 when Clark Field and its surrounding air complexes were annihilated, with hundreds of American aircraft destroyed, he blamed Wainwright (Properly for Wainwqright went on a bender and was drunk for those two critical days.), for the botched counterattack of the Japanese Lingayen Gulf beachheads, the loss of the US (Filipino) 26th Cavalry on (Clinton Pierce) its Filipino troops whose fault it was most certainly not for that was ALL MacArthur, the debacle at Buna Gona in New Guinea on the Australians, and most of WWII that did not go his way on Blamey and John Curtin (An underrated Allied war leader who did far better for his country than the pre war gangs of idiots in Washington and wartime incompetents in Moscow, did for theirs.). With good subordinates, who bucked him, like Walter Krueger and Robert Eichelberger, and George Kenney, he could be "brilliant". 

Do you see the problem? 

MacArthur lacked "character", was a narcissist and could not read people. (Charles Willoughby and Richard Sutherland). He was essentially "evil" in that he lacked a learned or intuitive sense of right and wrong; unless people around him pointed the obvious wrong out to him. He did not choose to surround himself with such people.

Long written answer to tell you that MacArthur would land in northeast Korea with both ideas in mind simultaneously and then blame the Russians when it went sideways and take all the credit when it went brilliantly at the end for fantastic stupid reasons based on his "phenomenal luck", and that all at the same time.