Hispano-Japanese War
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The Hispano-Japanese War is a fictional conflict in Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 alternate history series. This is only a sideshow event, for which the author doesn't tell much about it.
After the victory of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War (1861–1862), the southern states became independent with the support of Great Britain and France. Then, they tried to expand their territories to the south, pressuring Spain into yielding her colony of Cuba. This little explained event finalized one year in the 1870s with the Confederacy acquisition of Cuba (which would become a new state of the Confederacy in the future). It is possible, though unlikely, that the purchase came after a short war lost by Spain. Nevertheless, Spain was able to retain the government of Puerto Rico and her other colonies.
Later, the weakening of the Spanish army and the confused politics in the country attracted the attention of Japan (which had just obtained Chosen and Formose from China) to the Spanish colonies located near her in the East Indies. This leads to a confrontation in the first years of 20th century (c. 1901-1905) between the two countries, that ends with Japanese victory and the occupation of the Philippines and Guam by Japan. Some time later, Spain sells her last colonies in the Pacific -Palau, Carolines and Mariana Islands- to Germany (like she did in our timeline).
The war is notorious for an event that occurred after the Japanese conquered Manila: the brutal treatment of Spanish prisoners that was witnessed by a U.S. writer named Richard Harding Davis, who later wrote an account of the atrocities that made his name famous across the USA.
Finally, the success of Japan convinced the Russian Empire to not discuss the Japanese influence above Korea and China, for which the Tsar's Army does not abandon its bases in the Baltic Sea, and the Russian-Japanese War of 1905 never occurs.
[edit] In other novels
The alternate history novel Fuego sobre San Juan (2000) of Spanish writers Pedro A. García Bilbao and Javier Fernández also describes a war in the Philippines between Spain and Japan, but not under this name. The situation is different than Turtledove's novel: in Fuego sobre San Juan, the action is set in 1912 and both Spanish-American War and Russian-Japanese War occurred, but Spain defeated the US (not divided in Union and Confederation like in Timeline-191) in 1898.
