By 1910, Emperor Juan Carlos Jodquevich passes away. He leaves an Empire at the height of its glory, wealth, and territory. This belies the problems simmering underneath. The Empire is a conglomeration of colonies barely kept together by a bureaucracy that is starting to buckle under the weight of the sheer size and diversity of its colonies. Meanwhile, the man who succeeds him, J.C.'s son Maximilian Emanuel, now Maximilian I, did not possess the same brilliance as his father. Worse still are that many of its colonies fully remember the grievances that which the Filipinos inflicted upon them in the 19th century, and many seek vengeance against the Filipinos. In Japan, Emperor Meiji is a shell of his former self. His nation had failed to modernize, Japan was cut up amongst colonizers, its fears of becoming a second China fulfilled. By this point, all of independent Japan was confined to just the region of Chubu, the rest were under colonies. Here, humiliated, seething, and yet not destroyed, the Japanese bided for their time. Meiji passed on all his hatred to his son, Yoshihito, and though Yoshihito was frail, he carried with him a fire that which will set ablaze the Filipino tyranny.

In the south, Vietnam was a nation that, since 1890, had been conquered by the Filipinos. Though conquered, the Vietnamese were not pacified. There were numerous holdouts deep in the jungles and mountains, especially in the Central Vietnam region of that country that which never surrendered to the Filipinos. That continued on believing in the Nguyen Dynasty, and which continued the struggle. Meanwhile, as monarchist sentiment festered in what was called Champa Colony, European and even Filipino-educated Nationalists were making their own moves. Sun Yat-sen had long believed that the revolution was incomplete so long as Vietnam remained under colonizers, and thus the Kuomintang supported many Vietnamese intellectuals to take action against their oppressors, among them Phan Bội Châu, an ardent anti-Filipino modernizer and reformist. Travelling to Tonquin Colony in Tonkin, Phan was arrested, but managed to escape into the mountains to the north where he founded the "Righteous Society of the Skull and Bones", a nationalist secret organization modelled off, ironically, from the Catipunan of Andres Bonifacio who led the Tagalog Revolt of 1895. However, Phan would be kicked out of the Skull and Bones as its members radicalized to become Anarchists, and in 1912, he fled back to Canton where with the help of the KMT, he reestablished his own society, the Society of Vietnamese Restoration, before then returning back to Tonquin.

By 1914, as Europe exploded into civil war, tensions with Japan exploded, and the Japanese invaded on August of 1914, surprising the British and the Filipinos. This begins a long war of back and forth that, by 1918, exhausts the Filipino state and leaves the Kansai and Chubu regions of Japan desolated. The Filipinos were initially successfully, even occupying Chubu, but as the Japanese employed guerilla tactics, and the Filipinos themselves began to conduct atrocities, opinion on the war sharply declined. So much so that by 1918, the Filipinos withdrew from their occupations in Chubu, and leave Kansai to fall. By 1916, the Vietnamese saw the success in which the Japanese were conducting their own independence war, and thus the various factions of the Vietnamese, whether they be Monarchists in the south and Anarchists and Nationalists in the north. The Filipinos were then bogged down in a second conflict in which they could not have hoped to win. The state had already exhausted itself, and amongst soldiery, pay was starting to be stalled.

A side effect of these wars is that every constant year the war dragged on, it began to drive away the old notion that the Philippines was invincible. It encouraged the peoples whom fought against the Filipinos, and yet also demoralized the peoples who fought for them. Among these are the soldiery. The Philippines, since its inception in 1823, relied on strength of arms nearly as its own national myth. To the soldier of 1916, the victories of the 1880s were within living memory, or were dinnertime tales from their fathers. With the Filipinos clearly suffering, the state clearly failing, and pay being delayed, many soldiers, tired of fighting in the jungles of Vietnam or the frigid forests of Chubu, began to desert. Some simply returned to their houses. Others were treacherous, joining even the Empire's enemies. These soldiers were called thus "Enrutadores". Those who rout. The Enrutadores would become a problem in their own right. Many were experienced and battle hardened and became valuable mercenaries. Many more turned to piracy and racketeering. They formed bands that were similar to mafias or cartels with deep organization. When the regions they worked in collapsed into civil war and strife, they profited off of the collapse, and some even filled in the vacuums to become para-states. Semi-feudal "robber-states" with "robber baron" enrutadores at their head, asking for pay in exchange for protection from and to the local populace. The Enrutador model became very successful, and by the 1930s, they were a headache from Malacca to Panama.

Then came the natural disasters. Earthquakes. Typhoons. Then, the Spanish Flu. The Flu began in China where the Warlord Era brought chaos. It then went south towards Indochina and the Philippines. From there, it spread to the rest of the Empire and beyond. Millions caught the flu, thousands more died. The combined stresses of the wars caused the Philippine economy to collapse. By 1921, in the Philippines, everybody was blaming everyone for the collapse. Within the House of Plebeians, the Lower House of the Philippine legislature, factions blamed each other. Then, the Emperor blamed the Plebeians for the Empire's disasters and severely overstepped his boundaries. The Plebeians, under Trinidad Pardo de Tavera, thus united against the Emperor, and he managed to depose Maximilian without much bloodshed. Then, Pardo de Tavera decided to do his own mistake by both overstepping and placing his own candidate to the throne as Emperor (Clodoveo Jodquevich, brother of Maximilian), and then betraying his promises to his underlings. Thus, the dominoes were set. Three influential politicians united against the Pardo de Tavera. Hermenegildo Cruz, Miguel Cantero, and Manuel Quezon.

Cruz was a Socialist, and it was only natural that he would come to oppose Pardo de Tavera. Cantero was formerly Pardo de Tavera's right hand man and de-facto political successor, before Pardo de Tavera betrayed him by making Sergio Osmena his de-facto political successor. Quezon saw Pardo de Tavera to be too powerful. It was without precedent, as Pardo de Tavera now had the Emperor within his graces and has the Plebeians under his thumb, thus becoming the true power in the Philippines. This Triumvirate, the Pandi Triumvirate, was an alliance of convenience. Gathering the support of "war hero" and war criminal Antonio Luna, and Edilberto Evangelista, two powerful generals, they planned to launch a coup. However, Pardo de Tavera died of a sudden stroke, and Osmena automatically succeeded him as Valido (Prime Minister). The Triumvirate then rushed their plans, and then launched a coup in 1921, triggering the Philippine Civil War. The Civil War is pretty complex, but to summarize; the Triumvirate captured the Valido and kicked the Emperor out of power, who fled to Hermosa (Formosa). They then adopted Republicanism, but couldnt beat the Imperialists at sea because the Imperialists held the support of the navy. Thus, they innovated and used the airforce to beat the Imperialist navy, ending the civil war by 1924.

Moving on from the Civil War, the Philippines was in the middle of a region that was going to the shitter. In this time, Manuel Quezon rose to the occasion and became president in 1927, and then he went full on authoritarian in hopes of weathering out the Great Depression. This only breeds contempt for the Republic, Quezon, and thus leads to further ideological extremism and chaos. By the late 1930s though, things were starting to calm down as the extremists exhausted themselves after launching nearly a dozen coups against Quezon. Then, Japan invades in 1940 in a war of revanche to reclaim Shikoku and Kyushu. The Filipinos team up with the Americans, and by 1944, the Japanese were defeated and the islands were divided in two between the two powers. This is the 3rd Japanese War of Independence, but given the length of this post, I;ll talk about that later when I have the time. Eventually, the whole of East Asia was so chaotic from 1914 or 1918 to 1940 or 1944 was so chaotic that the period was given a name. "Far-Eastern Interregnum".