Comments by "" (@johnshepherd8687) on "The Last Japanese Fleet Carriers - Unryu/Ikoma Class" video.

World War II did not start in 1939. That is simply Eurocentric. The war started in 1937 when the full scale Sino-Japanese War began. The scale of fighting from September 1939 through the beginning of May 1940 was nowhere near the scale of the war in China. Japan was at war almost as long before Pearl Harbor as after. Regardless of the fact that the Sino-Japanese War was almost exclusive an Air-Land war Japan was on a war footing. Therefore to say that Japanese naval plans were started in peacetime is a mistake.
4
@craigfazekas3923 I think another reason that even in retrospect Westerners date the start of war to September 1939 is that postwar mythology was designed to make the Japanese regime less repugnant than the Nazis so MacArthur could keep Hirohito on the throne. That would have been a harder sell if the start of WWII was set back two years. In a accident of history Hirihito outlived his WWII contemporaries by a wide margin. He died in early January of 1989.
2
@WALTERBROADDUS The Spanish Civil War would have been fought without a general European War. The Sino-Japanese War would have escalated to a general Pacific War without a war in Europe.
1
@WALTERBROADDUS But was isolated in one country with little possibility of going beyond its borders. To go further, there would have been a general Pacific War had Europe remained entirely peaceful.
1
@WALTERBROADDUS Superficially, but the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was an idea the predates the appointment of Hitler to the Chancellorship. The Japanese intent was to seize all the European colonial powers territories in Asia and expand into Siberia as well. They saw a war against the European powers as inevitable. China was just the first step.
1