Admittedly, relations between East Africa and Japan had always been frigid, with hostility lurking beneath the surface on both sides. But the Japanese Government and military clearly understood that Japan lacked the capital to confront a global power like East Africa head-on.
Therefore, Japan's strategic approach toward East Africa had never been one of all-out confrontation. Instead, it sought to achieve "denial" and "anti-intervention" through indirect means or localized wars.
That meant comprehensively employing military and non-military means to prevent East African military forces from entering designated areas, such as disputed waters, airspace, or land, or to drastically raise the costs and risks of East African intervention. It meant restricting East Africa's military freedom of maneuver, narrowing the technological gap between the two countries, and establishing defensive "buffer zones" in disputed regions to prevent a superpower like East Africa from projecting its military power.
And the "buffer" region lying between Japan and East Africa's spheres of influence was precisely the Pacific Ocean.
Japan itself was an island nation, embraced on all sides by the Pacific Ocean, while East Africa likewise possessed numerous overseas bases, colonial strongholds, and spheres of influence in the Pacific.
Moreover, these East African "nails" driven into the Pacific happened to have a considerable impact on Japan's geopolitical strategy.
To Japan's north lay East Africa's overseas territory of Alaska. This was one of East Africa's more important overseas colonies. Even without considering East Africa, Alaska, judged by global standards in population, economy, and other fields, could be considered a small country.
Objectively speaking, although Alaska had the scale of a "small" country, its population of two million was not particularly large among Pacific nations.
In the Pacific region of the 1930s, there were more than ten countries and colonies with populations exceeding ten million. Among those ten,