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Post-WW II Occupation - Rebuilding Japan

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In concluding his book on World War II in the Pacific, Eagle Against the Sun, Ronald H. Spector stated that, "The United States acquired a strong democratic ally in the new Japan which emerged from the wreckage of war."1 Following the Japanese surrender on September, 2, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP) in Japan, led the largely unilateral U.S. effort to rebuild Japan. The U.S. occupation and reconstruction met with varying degrees of political, social and economic success, but overall, the U.S. succeeded in developing Japan as a strong responsible power in the Pacific. Additionally, studying the whole-of-government methods for the U.S. post-war reconstruction in Japan renders historical …show more content…

At the end of the war, Japanese citizens occupied numerous countries in the Western Pacific, while countless Chinese and Koreans resided within Japan as slave labor. At the time Japan had no vessels or other manner in which to conduct the mass movement of these populations. Under U.S. supervision and with hundreds of ships borrowed from the U.S., six million Japanese returned to Japan within three years; and nearly one million Chinese and Koreans returned to their respective countries in the same timeframe.5 In the end the combined U.S. and Japanese social reconstruction efforts successfully resolved the challenges facing the population. The U.S. economic effort was not as widely successful in comparison to the political and social efforts, but there were several successes that ultimately set the conditions for Japan’s rise to a top world economy. The 1947 Land Reform Program, which essentially consisted of the government purchase and redesignation of land that was then resold to tenant farmers, “is seen as the single most important factor for quelling rural discontent and promoting political stability in the early postwar period.”6 Efforts to re-energize the natural resources successfully stabilized the coal mining and fishing industries. Coal mining suffered from a removal of inexpensive labor with the repatriation of Chinese and Korean slaves, but the introduction

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