The Greater Japanese Empire

At the start of Andalusada was GURPS Infinite Worlds, p. 118:

Other Muslim timelines include:

Andalus (Q4, current year 1930), in which the Muslims of Spain threw back the Reconquista and went on to discover America in 1484, achieving TL6 in rivalry with Japan...

Well, there you have it.

The Greater Japanese Empire 101

Why? should be obvious with an opening quote like that: because it's canon. Japan needs to be something that's genuinely

• Who? "The Japanese," for an eclectic definition of "Japanese" based on spurious ethnography to include as many peoples as is feasible. This includes, but is not limited to, Ryukyuans, the Okinawans, Takasagonese, Takasagonese aborigines, "Japonic diaspora isolates" scattered around the Pacific Rim, the Ezochi, the "Ezoic diaspora ethnicities" around the northern Pacific Rim as far as the Aleuts, and possibly (though with no guarantees) the Aleuts themselves. And the Cossacks.
• What? The world's first notable experiment with pan-nationalism, set up as a constitutional federal monarchy, and having a bit more trouble with the whole thing than is strictly necessary.
• Where? Oyashima, of necessity. But it also includes the Ryukyus, Okinawa, Takasago, Ezo, Karafuto, the Kuriles, a few claims on Yakutsk, and so forth. And the territory formerly claimed by Meammosirsk.
• When? The Greater Japanese Empire dates itself back to the day after Tanabata, 1870, and is still going as of the present day.

Why? is a chance for me to go on a tangent about my design philosophy, and in this case I had my concise answer written four months ago: "I want a distinctive Japan. A Japan that isn't obviously the only one it could only ever possibly evolve into being. And one that has cet certain je ne sais quoi that we associate with all things Japanese."
Once you've reached a certain point in alternate history, convergence is bad. Convergence is especially bad when it's caricatured: when countries always evolve into the Hollywood stereotype of themselves. The further east you go, the more this seems prone to happening, until eventually you get to East Asia - where China is inevitably Qing, and Japan inevitably Tokugawa (or worse, Showa), and Korea inevitably ignored.

A brief history of the Greater Japanese Empire

Before Daiwakoku was centralized, Oyashima was ruled by shoguns [who?] while its diaspora was scattered and, for the most part, irrelevant. (Some diasporas being more irrelevant than others.) This came to an end in the 1850s, when Europe had fought itself to a standstill and East Asia was disintegrating. These were some of the big issues that tied into the shakeup:

• The martyrdom of the Archbishop of Quanzhou: Historically, Takasago's major representative on the Asian continent was the Archbishop of Quanzhou, who was initially ambivalent about the Taiping Revolt. His death in the fighting [when?] soured Takasago on the Taiping; they were early and vocal opponents of the Taiping, and once the plague started to seriously run its course they realized that their days were numbered as an isolated island.
• Portuguese imperialism: The Portuguese Empire has never recovered from the loss of Cabralia, but they still controlled the Carolines in their entirety. Relations between Takasago and Portugal had always been ambivalent at best, and the rising tension was starting to be really worrying.
• The collapse of the shogunate: In the mid-1850s, around the same time that the Russo-Korean Alliance was starting to form, the last shogun [who?] was assassinated, plunging Oyashima into a new civil war. (Remarkably, this also marked the first time there was an Imperial faction; a messianic, plebeian Pure Land sect [who?] had consolidated around Kyoto.)

 The time to act had come, and Takasago moved fast.

• The Sankaku War (1860-1869): It took eight and a half years to establish a united Japan, with the majority of it either vassalized to the Emperor or directly annexed to him. Given its timing (it was fought the three inauspicious years of the Japanese calendar), it's remembered in historiography as the Sankaku War.
• The Shinryo era (1870-1889): The twenty years after the Sankaku Wars saw the newly-established Japanese Empire allying with England-Scotland against the Russo-Korean Alliance, and desperately trying to replicate the Korean Miracle.
• The Shinryo era also saw Japan desperately trying to establish a common identity it could rally around. Spiffy hats helped a little bit.
• The Russo-Japanese War (1904-5): This has been discussed at length elsewhere.

This is all very stubby. Expect more work on it as it goes.

The Greater Japanese Empire today

As of 1930, Daiwakoku looks something like this:

• Language: Imperial Standard Japanese is the language of the imperial government, taught in schools and used in newspapers, official records and ether communications.
• Less than half of the Greater Japanese Empire actually speaks anything mutually intelligible with ISJ as their native language. Most of the Hokka speak Russian as a lingua franca and only speak Ezoic languages at home; Portuguese is Takasago's auxiliary language; and English is the language of university education. Navigating the entire thing is rather complicated.
• Religion: The unofficial cult of the Greater Japanese Empire is that of Saint Sakura. Catholic and Kannagaran, Orthodox and Buddhist alike - she's become as distinctive a part of Japanese folklore as, say, Our Lady of Guadalupe is for Latin America IRL.
• Officially, though, the Empire clearly separates religion and state, if only to prevent the Takasagonese from making it into the Most Franciscan Kingdom.
• Zen is the Buddhism of Oyashima's threadbare provincial aristocracy (and, to a lesser extent, their kids scattered throughout the military.) The Buddhism of modern, urbanized Japan is some form of Pure Land.
• Government: A constitutional federal monarchy, with distinct ethnogeographic regions marked off as its "Dominions."
• Oyashima is particularly federal. While the territories conquered by the Imperialists during the Sankaku Wars were annexed directly to the Emperor himself, his vassals retained a certain amount of autonomy, and (usually) specific regional borders. This leaves Oyashima overrepresented in the Imperial Parliament - which the Takasagonese were willing to accept as a sop to the Home Islands.
• As per IRL, the Empire borrowed heavily from Europeans in the process of modernizing itself. Unlike IRL, Japan's imperial justice system drew extensively from Scotland, allowing for three verdicts: found guilty, found innocent, and found unproven.
• Economy: Still pulling itself up from the mess of the Russo-Japanese War.
• Japan's still as short of resources as ever. IRL, they handled this by becoming a major global buyer of scrap metal; in Andalusada, it's supplemented with ship breaking too.
• Foreign relations: Japan's foreign relations keep it facing firmly to its west: a nonaggression treaty with Great Russia, and no nonaggression treaty with Taiping China.
• Hawaii is nominally independent of Japan. Ever since one of the Japanese framers [who?] married onto the royal throne, though, nobody's had any illusions about where its loyalties lie.

This is a work in progress. It will be expanded upon.