In Japan, as in other chopstick-using countries, carving knives are used in the kitchen to cut up food to bite-size pieces before or after cooking, before being brought to the table.
A travios is useful on winding forest trails east of the Mississippi, but on the Great Plains the wheel is a natural invention, just as it was on the Asiatic steppes OTL.
In 1954 the vast majority of nuclear weapons were pure fission bombs with an explosive yield less than 50kt. Thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs were experimental prototypes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons
While Japan is located in a volcanic zone, much of the land was originally on the eastern edge of the Rodinia supercontinent. It was separated by plate tectonics, with plates being subducted under the archipelago. This subduction zone also gave rise to the many volcanoes of Japan. The western...
The early Industrial Revolution did not need coal or other resources in anything remotely like modern day usage. A typical late nineteenth-century ship was built with as much steel as had been produced worldwide up until 1850.
There are some drivers of technology advancement ITTL that were absent or less significant IOTL. These include the continued widespread use of firearms, increased foreign and domestic trade, and competition with and adoption of European commercial and military technology. These will push forward...
Russia did not have Vladivostok OTL during the conquest of Siberia. They were ejected by China from most of the Amur watershed, and they gave up that area to China by the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. It was not until 1858 that the Russians gained the Amur region, and in 1860 they gained the...