The Russo-Japanese War

Timeframe: 1904-1905.
Theater: Both sides of the Strait of Tartary.
Belligerents: The Russian Empire (under Evgeny the Old) vs. the Greater Japanese Empire.
Outcome: No official resolution; de facto Japanese victory due to the collapse of the Russian government.

In 1904, Russia and Japan get into a war with each other, and historians declare it "the Russo-Japanese War." After that point, the details start getting very different fast.

I'm still very, very tentative about the way the Russo-Japanese War plays out, because it involves so many other things - Korean-Manchurian relations, for instance, or the state of Korea itself.

The Russo-Japanese War in outline

In theory, at least, the Russo-Japanese War was about diaspora politics. Pretty much as soon as the Japanese Empire had its own universities, the same nationalist politics that led to the reforming of the Japanese language led to a discussion of what, exactly, "Japanese people" were. This in turn (well, this and "Japanese" being defined much more broadly than IRL) led to the realization that there were lots of small Japonic peoples scattered around the Pacific Rim - not least the Meammosiran Cossacks (an open secret, to be sure, but no less scandalous.) So of course the Japanese oligarchy would start fretting about the treatment of "our brothers in Yakutsk" and such. If nothing else, it'd stop people from fretting about their southern Catholic overlords.

In practice, it was about everything else. Evgeny IV wasn't the most popular of tsars, and his foreign policy probably left some to be desired; a short, easy war would bolster his image at home, tweak some Anglo-Scottish noses abroad, and help him consolidate Russia's position as a power in the north Pacific. (Possibly with an eye to expanding south, too.)

• The Meammosirsk Cossack rebellion
• The Battle of Karafuto
• Japanese espionage in 1905: Karafuto was just this side of Pyrrhic for the Japanese. Their response was a turn to espionage. A few thousand rubles slipped here, a bit of assistance there... small stuff, but a fair bit of the winter war effort was devoted to trying to open a second front in Europe. Anything that would prevent Evgeny IV from bringing the full weight of the Russian Army to bear on him.
• The Easter Revolt: A month or so after the Japanese had basically given up hope, their winter espionage pays off beyond their wildest dreams: the Easter Revolt happens in Tver, causing a number of eastbound regiments to abort and turn west to secure the state. (This heats up fast, but the Russian Civil War lasts much longer than the Russo-Japanese one, and will be discussed at length on its own page.)
• Russian command and control fractures as the European theater heats up. The Japanese use the opportunity to absolutely screw with Russian communications, allowing them to defeat at least one army group in detail.

This is a stub. It will be expanded upon further.

Consequences of the Russo-Japanese War

The first consequence of the Russo-Japanese War was the Japanese Empire's sudden promotion to great-power status. A nation barely 40 years old simply does not fight Russia to a standstill, much less collapse it. That simply could not happen - and by pulling it off, Japan replaced Korea as the wunderkind of Asia.

• Triggering a civil war in Russia won the Japanese their war; it also set the stage for the rise of Great Russia, whose rise triggered another fifteen years of Russian warfare. Without Karafuto there would be no Stockholm.
• The performance of the Japanese Imperial Navy forced navies the world over to reevaluate their blind faith in the meaningfulness of the broadside as final measurement of naval power. Never mind the tech differences between the Russian and Japanese fleets, never mind the seas, never mind the strategy, never mind the dumb luck that characterized some of Japan's triumph; the fact was that naval experts the world over had smugly and surely bet based primarily on the broadside, and had roundly placed their bets wrong.
• Korea was thrown for a hell of a loop. Even moreso than the West, Korea had their bets hedged on a Russian victory, and the humiliating defeat of Russia challenged Korea's everything - not least its confidence in its future. It also didn't help that Korea chose the very worst possible time to get involved in the Russo-Japanese War; the very unequal peace treaty they were forced to sign late in 1905, and the ensuing crackdowns on public displeasure, did more than anything else to create an international Korean diaspora.

This post is a stub. It will be expanded on in the future.