This is the first chapter of a new parallel play between @isnochys and me! This time we have decided to play as Japan in Victoria 2 while we wait for the shiny new HoI4 expansion! *** This is the state of the world as it stands in 1836, its pretty different from the current landscape but its a world ripe for the taking and ready to be conquered nonetheless! Nations are being born and the only real rising superpowers right now are the UK and the USA!

But our beginnings are humble, we are nothing more than a small clan lead by the Tokugawa clan on the small island of Japan, which is still broken by warring periods but the winds of conquest are true and the island is ready to be conquered and unified by a strong shogun!

We will make our economy as closed as possible to protect it from good from other countries and focus on our own growth for a while.





I will our country focus to recluit soldiers in Kanto to be able to expand our army!



I will start the construction of 10 transport ships, these will be used to move our troops from the home islands into the mainland!



My first conquest will be the small but perfectly placed Island of Japan, it will serve as a base of operations for the pacific and taking it right now in 1837 will prevent an attack on a certain harbor for pearls in 100 years :^) WINK WINK WINK

The Island offers to resistance, its merely habitated by less than 25k people and I sent 23k soldiers to take control over it.... so no resistance at all!





Our next move will be to annex the Guanwei region of Manchuria, they are a substate of the Qing Empire so we will have to go to war with them to be able to annex this region, I'm mostly taking it just to not allow the Russians to take it first and because its really a nice place to start our expansion into China!

And We have our new territory, full of resources ready for the taking and its almost, if not bigger than the whole of the home islands, the trick to winning this war is to not attack first, keep your fleets in the docks and allow the chinese to invade your lands and your allies, eventually they will run out of troops and it will be your time to strike! There's no need to use your naval transports because your troops can walk from Hokkaido into Karafuto and then into Manchuria!

While our truce with China ends, I've decided to secure the territories of Annam and Conchinchina from Vietnam, this is a part of our plan to prevent the European powers from interfering in Indochina and forcing China into a 2 front war in our future conflicts.

I've gathered enough research points to move a bit forward westernization and the first thing I'm going to take will be Foreign Weapons, This will allow us to upgrade troops from basic militia troops into real infantry with military training and better guns. We are 55% towards westernization!

Vietnam barely put up a fight and now we are in control of 2/3 of the country, this puts us really close into the infamy limit and we don't want to go over it, so there will be no aggressive wars for a few years, we will focus on growing the country and integrating our newly adquired territories before another spree of conquest!

It's time to embrace an Ideal for our nation and I've chosen to embrace the Ideal of productivity, if we want to remain competitive we must grown not only in military power but in economic and industrial power too, this is the key to making a prosperous Japanese nation!

I will stop here for now, here's the state of the world in 1850, 14 years into the 100 years campaign! Japan is still divided but we will unify as soon as we manage to westernize, the western powers are making some moves but nothing big yet other than France taking control of Algeria.

One of the things I love about Victoria 2 is demographics and migration, this is the current population division in the country, the country is not 100% Japanese anymore due to us owning colonies and the country is still pretty rural with most of our workforce being farmers.





There's also this very interesting demographic move, with a few people from our colonies moving to a different colony instead of the home islands here in hawaii, as you can see a huge amount of people from the Vietnam territories and some people from the Manchurian territories have already moved to the islands of Hawaii!