There's an account that Admiral Yamamoto, who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, told his higher-ups that he could guarantee six months where he could actually take home victories, and if the war went on past that, they were screwed. Six months to the day after Pearl Harbor, Japan lost four fleet carriers at the battle of Midway.

They were working off of the Russo-Japanese war experience - where Tsarist Russia stopped fighting after Mukden and Tsushima.

A lot of colonial subjects in Southeast Asia were cautiously optimistic about the Japanese invading and granting them independence, even if they were satellite states to the Japanese Empire. The quickly learned the unfortunate lesson that the Chinese and Koreans had learned in prior decades.

I'm very curious as to your reasoning on this. Being shitshow bastards to the Chinese was a pretty integral part of the reasoning behind invading China in the first place.

I highly doubt the Chinese would’ve willingly rolled over and accepted Japanese occupation. The Western colonial powers had been repeatedly humiliating them for a century, the British especially, pushing drugs on them so the British could sustain their local and national economy. The two Opium Wars were fought for this reason. And then Japan and China fight for Korea, which had always been in the Chinese sphere of influence, and when Japan won, the other nations began raping their country even more. The last Emperor lost his reign, a new leader became a tyrannical despot, warlords ruled the country and did their own thing, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong had their political and military battles, and most of Eastern China was a war-torn or corrupt mess. The Japanese just stepped in and played whoever would let them have their territorial conquests. Would the Chinese accept Japanese rule? Only at gunpoint, and only because the Japanese were strong enough and terrible enough to enforce it. Most of the Japanese war crimes were committed in this country because they adopted Western ideas of racism and applied it to the Chinese. It’s a complicated situation, and those Chinese that bowed to Japan did so for power, wealth, security, or because they had no choice, and Japan brutally oppressed them anyways.

Good point. Japan already had Manchuria set up as a puppet for themselves in 1936.

China got a lot of arms sent to them. If Japan hadn't been so ruthless, they probably would haven't been sent so many.

You can't separate Japanese culture and society from the way they treated conquered peoples.

Just because Poland keeps getting conquered doesn't mean they were rolling out the red carpet for Germany and Russia in 1939.