Eastern Asian nation occupying an island chain east of the Korean Peninsula.
Japan placed heavy restrictions on trade with Europe and the United States until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when the Meiji Emperor wrested control of Japan’s government from the weakened Shogunate rulers. Under the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese government reorganized and made attempts to modernize the Japanese nation. During the late nineteenth century, following the lead of the West, Japan built railroads and improved its industrial infrastructure. This initiative led to moderate economic growth throughout the early twentieth century; even the Great Depression had little effect on the Japanese economy. However, in the 1930s, Japan began a program of imperialist expansion throughout Asia and put much of its industrial wealth to military purposes.
Japan’s imperial expansion placed it on a collision course with its principal rival for influence in the Pacific, the United States. In an effort to stop Japanese expansion, the United States instituted an oil and scrap metal embargo against Japan in June 1941. Soon after, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, an action that resulted in the loss of 2,400 American lives and 200 naval ships and brought both Japan and the United States formally into World War II. Japan then took one island after another in the Pacific with little regard for prisoners of war or civilian lives. Six months after Pearl Harbor, the United States began to reclaim the islands in battles that caused extremely high death tolls for both sides. The United States was also striking the Japanese homeland by air, firebombing Tokyo and finally dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The two bombs killed more than 110,000 people and destroyed two industrial cities that had been producing war material. After the bombings, Japan surrendered.
The destruction caused by World War II devastated the Japanese economy—the cost of the war to the Japanese amounted to $562 billion in actual outlays and destruction of infrastructure. In comparison, the United States spent $341 billion on the entire war, and its industrial capacity expanded to provide the needed war equipment and supplies. After the war, the United States helped rebuild Japan’s crippled economy. The U.S. military occupied Japan from 1945 to 1952 and, with U.S. help Japan began to rebuild lost industrial capacity after the war. By the mid-1950s Japan’s industrial output matched prewar levels. The economic alliance between Japan and the United States came about because of U.S. fears of Soviet communism during the cold war, which began after World War II ended.
The revised Japanese constitution adopted after World War II forbade the creation of another military force. Without military expenditures, Japan developed a diverse economy with varied industrial output including heavy industry, chemicals, automobiles, and shipbuilding. The Japanese economy began to compete internationally by the mid-1960s and, in the 1970s and 1980s, Japan became a major producer in the manufacture of high-tech products including consumer electronic equipment. Many of Japan’s exports found their way into the American market, and although the United States developed a balance-of-payments deficit (in which imports exceed exports) in the late twentieth century, protectionist policies that restricted foreign manufacturers from selling in the Japanese market gave Japan a large balance-of-payments surplus (in which exports exceed imports). With a large number of Japanese automobiles being sold in the United States in the late 1970s, the U.S. trade deficit increased dramatically—primarily because Americans chose to buy these smaller, more efficient vehicles in response to the Arab oil embargoes. Despite recession in the 1990s, Japan’s economy is one of the world’s strongest, and Japan is one of the closest trading partners of the United States. In May 2003 the U.S.-Japanese market resulted in $4.46 billion in Japanese exports and $10.3 billion in imports, for a trade deficit of $5.83 billion. The Japanese government imported $48.42 billion dollars of U.S. products from January through May 2003.
