eli5 How did Japan become a technology superpower after WW2?
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So Japan was in a unique economic situation after the end of the war.
They were occupied by the allies until the early 50’s, and as a result the Japanese government and all its institutions were essentially turned into whatever the hell the Americans wanted. And the Americans in this case wanted something very specific.
Turns out, when you control a country that have entirely surrendered to you, you don’t have to worry too much about elections, protests, rights to consider you can make some pretty radical changes. You’ve already proven you have the bigger gun… or I guess… bomb. And radical changes were had. Basically all Japanese conglomerates where broken up, land was almost entirely redistributed, and a system was crafted to essentially make Japan a country that could take on the manufacturing slack that had been on America’s shoulders over the course of the war.
The US had a huge industrialization push during the war to keep up with the demands of it. All those people had to be re-specialized in a world that no longer needed supplies for war efforts. America had found itself the leader of a brave new world, and couldn’t have its valuable citizens toiling away in low value add work. This led the great American push for college attendance. But obviously, suddenly dropping this huge manufacturing base meant it would be a shock to the global economy, so the Americans wanted to shift that work to the Japanese, so they could handle the manufacturing side, and America and the west as a whole could get first dibs on Japanese trade. Japan would be an almost entirely export driven economy. And its purpose was to provide cheap goods to the west.
Japan was basically moulded into a productivity machine, and then pumped full of American money. And they got to work using their “Kaizen” approach. Japanese culture always had an emphasis on hard work and discipline, but up until now their traditionalist, colonialist economic model meant there was very little Japan could compete with on a global basis. But now, it could scale to heights it had never seen before. It was no longer a bellicose sea faring nation bullied by Americans and Europeans occasionally, it was a country that was rebuilt from the ground up to most efficiently take advantage of the new globalist system the Americans had set up.
They didn’t have to worry about a military. Didn’t have to worry about a navy. Didn’t have to worry about credit. Didn’t have to worry about shit. The Americans would handle it. This meant that the Japanese instead invested heavily in urbanization, research and development, and building their manufacturing base. And of course, as we know they built it to legendary proportions.
The Japanese however, were a victim of their own success. Of course, American money wouldn’t flow in forever, and once Japan had enough to stand on its own two feet, they kept growing, assets kept increasing in value, banking sector got monstrously large, reform was slow as they were afraid to deviate from the American made model, their demographics turned terminal real quick, and the eternal boogeyman deflation reared its ugly head.
The breakneck pace of the Japanese industrial buildout outpaced peoples ability to properly assess risk. As a result, people were overconfident on Japan. There was a time where people thought the size of the Japanese economy would overtake even the US. But there were also a lot of people that saw it for what it was. A bubble. The lost decade proved those sceptics right. And due to Japan’s demographic problems, they’ve never been able to deploy a workforce to outscale the problem like they had previously.
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