International Economic Controls in Occupied Japan

1979 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 707-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leon Hollerman

The Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP) claimed credit for bringing democracy to Japan during the Occupation. With some exceptions, the predominant result of SCAP's activities in economic (as distinguished from political) affairs, was just the opposite. SCAP imposed comprehensive economic controls on Japan and suppressed the free market system. Its intervention was especially repressive on the international plane.Prior to mobilization for the Pacific War, Japan had never had a planned or controlled economy. As the occupation drew to a close, SCAP authorized the Diet to pass legislation for international economic controls to be employed by successor peacetime governments. An extensive Japanese government bureaucracy with a vested interest in the perpetuation of economic controls took charge of their implementation. The economic control laws, and the bureaucracy to which they gave rise, constituted an important part of SCAP's legacy to postwar Japan. This legacy became a primary conditioning factor in Japan's subsequent resistance to economic liberalization—a source of continuing friction in relations between the United States and Japan.

1990 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 29-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rice

Apart from the intrinsic value of understanding the fate of Japanese workers during the war, Japanese labor history in World War II also gives us a non-Western point of comparison for studies of wartime labor in the West. To facilitate that comparison, we should consider government policy, the response of the labor movement, and the conditions of workers during the war. In Japan, labor and economic history periodization of World War II does not conform to the European and American conceptions. For the Japanese, the war began with the outbreak of the “China incident” in 1937; Pearl Harbor, traumatic as it was for the United States, only marks the beginning of a new stage the Japanese call the “Pacific War.” It is not surprising, then, that Japanese labor history begins its wartime phase in 1937. In fact, to comprehend changes during the 1937–45 war, at least brief mention must be made of earlier developments.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-141
Author(s):  
Wu Lin-chun

This paper studies the activities of American enterprises, technology, and related business organizations and engineering groups in China from the outbreak of World War i to the Pacific War and explains how these activities helped establish connections between China and the world. It borrows the concept of “networks” from Professor Sherman Cochran’s extraordinary book titled Encountering Chinese Networks, but broadens the scope of the term to include activity at the level of management and competition, as well as placing Sino-American relations in transnational perspective. Using a multi-archival approach to examine China’s major attempts at internationalization, this article focuses on the cases of the American Asiatic Association, the American Chamber of Commerce of China, and the Association of Chinese and American Engineers to show how these networks played important roles in the development of Chinese-American relations. It also discusses the issues of standardization, “scientific management,” and professionalism of entrepreneurs and engineers in influencing network making.


1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-337
Author(s):  
Kurt Wilk

The war in the Pacific has focused attention on rubber as one of the key materials of peace and war economy. It has not only caused domestic adjustments in the United States as previously in other consuming countries, both allied and enemy, but has terminated an epoch in international rubber control. At the same time, it has accentuated the permanent international concern about basic materials—their location, accessibility, production, distribution, and utilization. Thus the international rubber régime, as it operated up to the disruption of trade-lanes and the invasion and devastation of producing areas, is of interest not only because of its effects in the period just ended but also as an approach to problems of international economic policy and administrative technique which are likely to continue into post-war world organization, no matter how different its political and strategical foundations may be.


2019 ◽  
pp. 177-182
Author(s):  
Wen-Qing Ngoei

This coda concludes the book by examining how the United States and its Southeast Asian allies responded to the fall of Saigon to communist forces in 1975. It shows that the regimes of the arc of containment did not proceed to topple like dominoes to communist factions at home, or bow to Chinese or Soviet power, but instead elected to reinforce their ties with Washington. Equally, U.S. policymakers discerned this “reverse domino effect” across Asia (or so they termed it) and unreservedly renewed American economic, political and military commitments to their allies in the region. Given that the arc of containment underpinned imperial transition and the rise of U.S. empire in Southeast Asia, the coda contends that reversals of the domino theory, not its fulfilment, were the true prevailing motif of American interference in the region’s fraught decolonization after the Pacific War.


2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory J. Kasza

The pacific war (1937–45) marked the most innovative period in the development of public welfare in Japan, comparable to the 1880s in Germany, the 1908–14 era in Britain, and the 1930s in the United States. Wartime welfare policy set precedents that shape many aspects of welfare provision in Japan to this day. It is a cruel paradox, but war, despite its immediate, catastrophic effects on human well-being, has played a major role in the evolution of the welfare state.


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