>>371
Well, that particular timeline diverged when the American atomic bomb project failed. So without a superweapon to end the war, the Japanese never officially surrendereed, though eventually their government and society collapsed. The Americans, and eventually the British and Russians, just kept mass-firebombing Japanese cities for years after 1945. They were running out of targets and bombing rural small villages by 1948 or so. Over 80% of Japan's civilian population died.

In 1952 the USSR pulled its occupying armies from what would have become North Korea for an invasion of Japan which experienced only modest resistance. They annexed the islands, and over the next generation tried to recreate Japanese society in their own image.

The Japanese Soviet Socialist Republic declared independence after the USSR collapsed in 1991, and is now this world's version of North Korea--isolated, backwards, run by a paranoid and ruthless personality-cult dictatorship whose official ideology is "Autarukiimarukusu shugi," or "Self-Sufficient Marxism." Japanese refugees give horrifying accounts of famine and brutality when they reach Korea or Taiwan.

There was never a North Korea in this timeline; the Korean peninsula is a unified, highly industrialized nation with its capital at Inchon, and every decade or so there is a fad for Korean cuisine in the English-speaking world.

>>373
What's it like in the parallel universe where time travelers from the 22nd Century accidentally ended up in 1969 and became advisors to the Nixon Administration?