eli5 How did Japan become a technology superpower after WW2?
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The Americans turbo invested in japan like they did in Europe and it helped them innovate etc…
This video has a good explanation:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=96iJsdGkl44&pp=ygURc29ueSBjcmF6eSBwZW9wbGU%3D
From the movie Crazy People.
The same way Germany did. There wasn’t much left of Japan’s pre-war cities, considering they had all been firebombed, or, in some cases, nuked. Since they had to rebuild their cities from scratch anyway, they used the opportunity for massive modernization. Massively helped, of course, by the fact that the US viewed a strong capitalist Japan as a useful ally against any communist expansion in the region, and so they better get them on their side, and do so now.
Japan’s geography also plays a role here. Japan is relatively poor in natural resources and has little in the way of farmland. This is both a curse and a blessing, however, as, while Japan is naturally import dependent, this also means that those industries take up only a small part of their industry, meaning a larger part of the population can go into industrial and technological jobs.
It should also be noted that, while Japan wasn’t on the forefront of technology pre-WW2, Japan already was an industrialized, highly educated economy. Without WW2, Japan would have likely become a technology giant eventually.
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.
Also, they are leaders in six sigma quality standards. The CEO of GE lead the way for most mass production in Japan, leading to quality effoets at Toyota, Honda, samsunw, etc…
Here’s a good one as far as how they got into tech to begin with or rather the work put into it and how they had to kind of reinvent the machinery used for how to make a transistor in their homeland.
skip to 19:15 and on for a short info on how this effected the japanese specifically
[https://youtu.be/Pzy_KOBddRA](https://youtu.be/Pzy_KOBddRA)
Is part of the explanation is that they were no longer spending a ton of money on the military and the military industrial complex so they had more money to spend elsewhere?
Super ELI5: we kicked their ass, decimated their industrial capabilities, gave them a shitload of cash to rebuild and be democratic. The Japanese took the cash and did the smart thing. They got to rebuild with the newest and greatest technology (at the time) as well. They’ve just continued to ride the wave. Very smart on their part.
W. Edwards Deming. Mathematician and engineer, he taught the Japanese Union of Science and Engineering (JUSE) how to build manufacturing plants like America did during the war. He’s also responsible for America’s production during the war. Pretty much the unsung hero of WWII.
Demilitarizing pretty much forced the really smart people who would’ve been working in fields that create weapons of war went into fields that would eventually create things like the Nintendo.
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