I’ve been watching a number of WW2 films and I realized that Japan is such a tiny country, so it baffles me how they had so many troops. Did they require all the males healthy or not to join the war?
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Japan had about 70 million citizens in Japan.
In addition, they controlled a large part of what is present day China (Taiwan + Japanese manchuria or Manchuoko or a bunch of other terms for it) and Korea, give or take that’s 70-80 million imperial subjects close at hand. Within a couple of years of the start of the war they occupied a couple of hundred million chinese people.
Back then, countries (including Japan) also tended to have population pyramids rather than more modern poles or whatever shape you want to describe, so they had much wider available pools of young men to conscript as a fraction of the population.
Also, the Japanese, partially due to imperialism and partially due to their plan to attack China and eventually the British, French and Americans had a huge fraction of their economy devoted to the military. A large part of that was to keep machuria/manchuoko in line and the soviets out, but then also enough people to attack China and then everyone else.
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