I'm not really sure how hundreds of thousands of civilians (possibly millions) slowly dying from starvation and malnutrition would have been any better or worse than hundreds of thousands of civilians being instantly vaporized or rapidly dying from radiation poisoning. However, the Americans did just that, but waited until April 1945 to start a full blockade of Japan. They used submarines with moderate effect against naval and merchant ships prior to 1945, but the joint American-British navy was unwilling to get too close to Japan, because Japan still had a navy as well, and the surrounding chains of islands were still in Japanese control. In April 1945, the Americans launched Operation Starvation, in which American heavy bombers airdropped naval mines in Japanese harbors, blockading the harbors and sinking hundreds of Japanese merchant ships in the course of a few months. Japanese merchant ships were willing to run the gauntlet of submarines to bring raw industrial supplies and food to Japan, but the mines kept them bottled up in harbors. By July, the Allied navy felt confident enough to operate off the shores of Japan. The Allies could have starved out the Japanese government, through a combination of naval blockade (through additional mines, submarines, and surface ships), heavy bomber raids on industry and agriculture, and naval aviation raids against military targets, but that would have taken about a year or more before a surrender. Americans were getting impatient, and war weariness was hitting the civilian population back home. A Chinese-occupied Japan could have remained Kuomintang, or it could have become Communist. There is no way of knowing. But you are right, people tend to look at history in a vacuum instead of seeing it as a cascading and interwoven chain of events. Thank you, Michael R . On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 7:40 AM, Randy Little <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > For example, no one ever talked about the idea that if the war had gone on > and we had done a blockade siege of Japan. We would have had to split > Japan up with China and Russia. How did that work out in the rest of the > world with Eastern Europe, Vietnam, Korea? How is it working out with > Russia already based on the events of the Japanese Soviet war and the > CURRENT occupation of Kuril. > > ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).