Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
POSTWAR RECONSTRUCTION & REVIVAL
Japan was occupied by Allied forces until 1952 under the command of General Douglas
MacArthur. The chief aim was a thorough reform of Japanese government through demilit-
arisation, the trial of war criminals and the weeding out of militarists and ultranationalists
from the government. A new constitution was introduced which denounced war and
banned a Japanese military, and also dismantled the political power of the emperor, who
stunned his subjects by publicly renouncing any claim to divine origins.
At the end of the war, the Japanese economy was in ruins and inflation was running
rampant. A programme of recovery provided loans, restricted imports and encouraged cap-
ital investment and personal saving. In 1945 the Kyoto Revival Plan was drafted and,
again, Kyoto was set for rebuilding. In 1949 physicist Hideki Yukawa was the first in a
long line of Nobel Prize winners from Kyoto University, and the city went on to become a
primary educational centre.
By the late '50s trade was flourishing and the Japanese economy continued to experience
rapid growth. From textiles and the manufacture of labour-intensive goods such as camer-
as, the Japanese 'economic miracle' had branched out into virtually every sector of society
and Kyoto increasingly became an international hub of business and culture.
Japan was now looking seriously towards tourism as a source of income, and foreign vis-
itors were steadily arriving on tours for both business and pleasure. By this time Kyoto had
further developed as a major university centre and during the 'Woodstock era' of the late
'60s, antiwar movements and Japanese flower power mirrored those of America and
brought student activism out into the streets. The year 1966 saw the enactment of a law to
preserve historical sites in the city and the opening of the Kyoto International Conference
Hall, where the Kyoto Protocol was drafted in 1997.
During the 1970s Japan faced an economic recession, with inflation surfacing in 1974
and 1980, mostly due to steep price hikes for the imported oil on which Japan is still
gravely dependent. By the early '80s, however, Japan had emerged as an economic super-
power, and Kyoto's high-tech companies, including Kyocera, OMRON and Nintendo, were
among those dominating fields such as electronics, robotics and computer technology. The
notorious 'bubble economy' that followed marked an unprecedented era of free spending
by Japan's nouveau riche. Shortly after the 1989 death of Emperor Shōwa and the start of
the Heisei period (with the accession of Emperor Akihito) the miracle bubble burst, launch-
ing Japan into a critical economic freefall from which it has not yet fully recovered.
