During the Soviet–Japanese War in August 1945, the Soviet Union made plans to invade Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four main home islands. Opposition from the United States and doubts within the Soviet high command caused the plans to be cancelled before the invasion could begin.
Russia did not invade Hokkaido during the Edo period because Hokkaido was not yet settled by the Japanese at that time. Hokkaido was a remote and sparsely populated corner of Japan. Russian Far East is an extremely remote and sparsely populated corner of Russia.
With the German invasion of France and the Low Countries and the subsequent expansion of the Axis Powers in Europe, the Soviet Union, anxious not to face two fronts at the same time and to safeguard its eastern border, signed the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact on 13 April 1941.
The Soviet Union could have invaded Japan in 1939 (as mentioned by Cheh Qi Yuan) but didn't because Stalin was more concerned about Germany and, we'll assume, not particularly interested in Manchukuo, and didn't have the logistics train necessary to sustain landing an invasion force on Hokkaido.
The Soviet–Japanese border conflicts, also known as the Soviet-Japanese Border War or the First Soviet-Japanese War, was a series of minor and major conflicts fought between the Soviet Union (led by Joseph Stalin), Mongolia (led by Khorloogiin Choibalsan) and Japan (led by Hirohito) in Northeast Asia from 1932 to 1939.
Nuclear weapons shocked Japan into surrendering at the end of World War II—except they didn't. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union entered the war. Japanese leaders said the bomb forced them to surrender because it was less embarrassing to say they had been defeated by a miracle weapon.
At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill discussed with Stalin the conditions under which the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan and all three agreed that, in exchange for potentially crucial Soviet participation in the Pacific theater, the Soviets would be granted a sphere of influence in Manchuria following ...
The Soviet Volunteer Group was the volunteer part of the Soviet Air Forces sent to support the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War between 1937 and 1941.
Although Japan concluded a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union in 1941 and played no part in the European war, it was an ally of Nazi Germany and a virulently anticommunist fascist state. It was, moreover, an expansionist one that threatened the Soviet Far East.
In early 1942, elements of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) proposed an invasion of mainland Australia. This proposal was opposed by the Imperial Japanese Army and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who regarded it as being unfeasible, given Australia's geography and the strength of the Allied defences.
Japan did not attack the Soviet Union along with Germany for several reasons: Japan and the Soviet Union signed a neutrality pact in April 1941 promising not to attack each other. The Tripartite Pact with Germany, Italy and Japan obliged Japan to come to Germany's aid if attacked but not if Germany did the attacking.
The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) insisted it needed to focus on operations in China and Southeast Asia and so refused to provide substantial support elsewhere. Because of a lack of co-operation between the services, the IJN never discussed the Hawaiian invasion proposal with the IJA.
During the Soviet–Japanese War in August 1945, the Soviet Union made plans to invade Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four main home islands. Opposition from the United States and doubts within the Soviet high command caused the plans to be cancelled before the invasion could begin.
From the mid-19th century, Japan began in earnest to imitate the imperial techniques that it had seen used by the Western imperial powers. In the decade following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan annexed both Ezo (1869, renamed Hokkaido) and the Ryukyu Kingdom (1879, renamed Okinawa).
During World War II, representatives from the Soviet Union and Japan sign a five-year neutrality agreement. Although traditional enemies, the nonaggression pact allowed both nations to free up large numbers of troops occupying disputed territory in Manchuria and Outer Mongolia to be used for more pressing purposes.
To be clear, China could not have won the war on its own. The defeat of Japan was dependent on western, and in particular, American finance, military support and supplies (although western ground troops did not fight in China).
One of Japan's main goals during World War II was to remove the United States as a Pacific power in order to gain territory in east Asia and the southwest Pacific islands.
When Japan was finally defeated in 1945, China was on the winning side, but lay devastated, having suffered some 15 million deaths, massive destruction of industrial infrastructure and agricultural production, and the shattering of the tentative modernization begun by the Nationalist government.
The Russian government was confused and unrealistic in its policy leading up to the war with Japan and, indeed, in the conduct of the war itself. This fact, combined with the ineffective leadership of its troops, was, more than any other factor, responsible for its defeat.
While the IMF would oversee the maintenance of this new global economic system, the United States and the dollar emerged as the economic standard bearers for the postwar world. The leading role occupied by the United States following World War II grew through the creation of the United Nations in 1945.
Starting in late 1946 the USSR began to repatriate the POWs, freeing 625,000 in the following year alone. The Stalin regime declared in the spring of 1949 that just 95,000 Japanese prisoners remained in Siberia and they would be sent home by year's end (many would not actually return until well into the 1950s.)
Though the Japanese bombed Darwin more times than Pearl Harbour, had they successfully landed they would have found invading Australia much more difficult than anticipated. Only one Japanese personnel landed on Australian soil and was promptly captured.
Japan's motives in the Siberian Intervention were complex and poorly articulated. Overtly, Japan (as with the United States and the other international coalition forces) was in Siberia to safeguard stockpiled military supplies and to rescue the Czechoslovak Legion.
At the most extreme, no attack on Pearl Harbor could have meant no US entering the war, no ships of soldiers pouring over the Atlantic, and no D-Day, all putting 'victory in Europe' in doubt.