Past Unreal Conditional

Question

After my first question was answered so beautifully, I would like to ask some more. :D

I wanted to know how to use conditionals for events in the past, like: "If I had saved my money, I would be rich now.", or: "If he hadn't eaten that many sweets, he wouldn't have become fat."

I did a google search, but somehow, all of the sites I found had different answers which contradicted each other, as each of them claimed their answer to be the only correct one.
I also found something on this site. In an answer here: Differences among -たら、なら、-んだったら、-えば, etc, there's the example:

あのとき右に曲がれば、どうなっただろう。
If I had turned right back then, I wonder what would have happened.

So it seems like "-ba" is the right conditional to use in this case, but because I have read so many different answers already, I am still unsure and would like a longer explanation about which conditional(s?) can be used to build a correct sentence of the type: "If X had happened (but it didn't), then Y."

Answer 1

Strictly speaking, the Japanese sentence:

「あのとき[右]{みぎ}に[曲]{ま}がれば、どうなっただろう。」

does not correspond to the English sentence:

"If I had turned right back then, I wonder what would have happened."

in the sense that, while the English sentence is perfect by any standard with its verb tense choices, the Japanese sentence sounds "only colloquially acceptable".

If you gave that Japanese sentence as your translation of that English sentence in a Japanese high school or college, you would surely be corrected.

The problem is with both 「曲がれば」 and 「なった」. Informally, as I stated above, we sometimes actually form this sentence with those casual-sounding tense choices. "Officially", however, the sentence would need to be formed as:

「あのとき右に曲がっていたのなら（ば）、どうなっていた（の）だろう(or のであろう)。」 or

「あのとき右に曲がっていれば(or いたら)、どうなっていた（の）だろう(or のであろう)。」

Answer 2

In a short story by Inoue Yasushi (満月), one will find the following passage:

影林が実業の不振の理由に、大株主総会に於いて、社長の席から引退するように強要されたのは［昭和］三十年の秋であった。これは明らかに社の内部と外部が連絡して企んだ謀策であったが、それに対抗する手段はなかった。叩けば多少の埃はでた。

The interesting item of syntax is the last sentence, a past, hypothetical (unreal) conditional. Takubo, (Conditionals in Japanese, in Handbook of Japanese Semantics and Pragmatics Eds. Wesley Jacobsen and Yukinori Takubo) says that the hypothetical meaning is made apparent by the addtion of a ‘modal’, such as darō, but one can see that that isn’t necessarily the case, presumably because there is context. The problem of interpretation comes about when conditionals are quoted in isolation.