We started this series on Japan talking about how they're the most western
eastern state. And really any measure of
society, economics, technology, culture,
they are very western. They look like the United States or other western European countries.
And how did that get to be that way given what we just talked about during the Japanese imperial
aggressive phase in Bad Blood,
where they pissed off everybody in the US and western Europe and the Asian neighborhood?
And by the end of World War Two they're in ruin,
utterly destroyed and incapacitated.
Two atomic bombs dropped on them.
How can we say that they got to the point of being as rich as the United States and the richest countries on Earth?
Great question. All of this happens in the
Post-War miracle Phase after the conclusion of World War Two. It's really the
formation of the Modern State of Japan, part two.
I mean really they industrialized and and advanced their technology and everything during that Meiji restoration.
And they had a bad war period and now they're going to rebuild into what you now know as Japan in today's world.
And here's how it happened.
They were completely and utterly
destroyed in 1945 not a bridge, building, or industry standing.
And you can really kind of look upon this
as a blank slate that they're going to get to rewrite once again
their history and future onto.
Now not only are they completely destroyed,
but they are for the first time ever occupied by a foreign power.
And that's pretty humiliating, embarrassing to the Japanese as well.
Who's the foreign power? Well that would be Uncle Sam of course.
Under the leadership of
General Douglas MacArthur,
who actually led the entire Pacific war effort during World War Two,
MacArthur comes in and
formally accepts the full Japanese surrender,
and really from 1945 to 1951 is
in control of the state of Japan.
Ah, yes, they still have the emperor.
MacArthur allows the emperor status to be kept,
but it's just a figurehead, but really the entire governments wiped out, okay.
Those are the guys that conducted the war. They're all gone fired, some of them
convicted of war crimes and killed.
And what MacArthur is then going to do is
oversee a complete redo of the society and again,
keep thinking back to that Meiji restoration. This is a very familiar story.
During the lead-up to the Meiji, the Japanese are behind,
they can either embrace the west or fight against the West
And you're really had the same thing here post-WWII.
They just fought this big war and they could continue to try to
push out the foreign devil dog US who's there and they
can try to rebuild and fight again or they can embrace the west and, just like during the Meiji,
they choose the embrace.
So they embrace the United States tutelage and under MacArthur, he oversees them redoing their economy,
restructuring their military,
even redoing their banking systems and educational systems all under American tutelage.
And the first thing they kind of do is say okay,
You know you guys need to redo a constitution too.
You can't have that old crap, that militaristic stuff you guys just lived through.
Here's our constitution in America. It's awesome. Check it out
Copy at will and make your own. The Japanese did with one important contingent that I do want to point out.
The Japanese, in their constitution, decided to ban themselves from having a military.
[indistinct mumuring]
What?
No military? What are you talking about?
They don't. They have a Japanese self-defense force. What the heck's that?
Well, it's something that looks like a military. It smells like a military.
It behaves like a military. It's got ships like a military.
Weapons like a military. Arms and missiles like a military.
But it's not a military
It is a self-defense force.
It's more like the US National Guard. The Japanese self-defense Force
would be there for times of emergency in the state, earthquakes or natural disasters, but also
it's mostly there to defend. Again, self-defense force.
So it has a state of the art, awesome thing that looks like a military.
But it's a self-defense force. It's actually never been engaged in an active battle since its creation.
Oh!
Except you have seen the Japanese self-defense force in action in every Godzilla movie you've ever seen.
You ever notice there's tanks and stuff moving around shooting at Godzilla?
Yeah, that's the Japanese self-defense force and look how successful they were at defending from Godzilla.
Not much. However, the reason I bring this up is that it's a very important aspect to understand
that Japan puts itself in a very unique position
adopting this stance on their military.
By the way,
MacArthur and everybody else did not want this. They said, "No don't do that!
We're gonna help you restructure your military, but don't take away your offensive capabilities."
Why would MacArthur and the US suggest that?
I mean they just had to fight a war against the Japanese military.
Why wouldn't they want it destroyed outright?
Because this puts Japan in a dependency mode of the United States.
Japan really is under the US military umbrella.
It was then, it still is to this day meaning, because they don't have an offensive capability,
it's a self-defense force, Japan can't help out the United States. It can't go invade anybody else
It really [can't] do much, and it hasn't done much.
So the US has to be there to continue to save the day if any aggression really were to happen against Japan.
The US has tens of thousands of troops already in Okinawa and lots of other bases across Japan.
And it's under this understanding that yes, they have this pseudo-military,
but it can't really do anything so we have to continue to protect you. Now here's why it's important for Japan.
It's actually awesome for Japan because in the
decades following WWII, this kind of frees them up to not have to worry about national defense.
They don't have to worry about repercussions from Korea or China for all their wartime atrocities.
They don't have to worry about being invaded by the Russians or anybody else.
They have the United states there protecting them.
And this means they can spend all of their time and all of their effort getting richer.
Redoing their economy, working on their infrastructure,
refocusing and retooling all their industry and everything else.
And they do. And they do it to become the economic powerhouse we know today.
So for the first 20-30 years, they don't even have to worry about a military. That's actually a very big deal
because the military costs a lot of money to upgrade and keep up
and they ain't got to worry about it.
They can invest all their money in infrastructure, economy, industry, and everything else.
It's great for the Japanese.
Now, what industries are they redoing and retooling and making better? You know the answer to this already.
They focus all of their efforts from 1960s up to the 1980s in
consumer electronics and the auto industry.
And some other things as well. Information technologies, and I'm sure there's a host of other things.
But those are the two things that really --Kablammo-- make them big bucks.
And again, you take this for granted in today's world.
Wow, of course! Japan's got the most awesome cars, Toyota, Honda, and Mazda, and
Kawasaki, and everything else.
They make the best consumer electronics and DVD players, and phones, and Nintendos, and Wiis, of course.
That all started in the 60s and 80s under American Protection, under American Tutelage,
and with the help of American resources .
The United States invested millions and millions of dollars
into the Japanese economy to help them become this economic juggernaut.
Does that make sense?
And just like the Meiji restoration,
Japan--it's just like part to Meiji--Japan looks around the world and says
Okay, well we focused on military stuff
And we're not going to do that anymore. In fact, we don't even have a military, not an offensive one.
So what are we going to do to make money? Because we've lost all of our colonies,
we've lost all of our resources in Korea and China and Indonesia, so we're going to have to import
energy and steel and all this stuff. How are we going to make our money back if we have to buy all our stuff up?
What does the world need right now?
What are some high ticket items?
What is it that we can buy all the resources,
bring them here process them, and make really expensive stuff so that we are in
the plus when we sell it out to the rest of the world?
And that's where they came up with electronics and the auto industry.
And boy, oh boy, oh boy. Don't they do a fantabulous job on both of those things. And they've made
billions if not trillions.
And this, again, was with the help of the United States
who invested millions.
It's also a very concerted effort with the Japanese government
tying into Japanese industry and they've all been accused of
almost being semi-socialist, semi-communist because the
Japanese
government for its part during
the early decades after WWII and even up to this day,
plays a very heavy hand in industry, something that does not happen
in the US and other
Capitalist states where they would really help
develop that auto industry.
They really help Toyota and Honda, really helped out Nintendo in its inception years of their businesses
to make sure they would work.
And this kind of industry government combo,
again, with the US blanket-umbrella protection,
really just made a blossom and explode. That's why they're so rich.
They just do great products. They take the technologies from around the world,
just like Meiji, bring the back home, figure out how to do it better, bigger, faster, cheaper, and they've done it
exceptionally well.
They're now the model for other Asian states. Now, we might want to back it up and end on this.
Why did the US do all this? The US is
protecting Japan and did since the war,
the US invested millions, if not billions into Japan.
Why would the US have done this to a country that attacked them?
To a country that committed all these wartime atrocities that we despised and hated?
Good question. Here are the answers
First, the US is going to rebuild Japan much like the US helped rebuild Western Europe under the Marshall Plan
under the idea that you're going to want to rebuild these places
so that they become valuable allies and partners and trading partners.
And that brings up kind of the second point.
Why would you want western Europe and Japan as rich successful economies and trading partners?
Well, there's money, but most importantly number two is they're on your team during the Cold War.
That's right, so they won't be commies.
Just like the US's investment in western Europe
to save them from Communist aggression, the US saw Japan in the same light.
They said hey we have to rebuild the society that we've destroyed so that
Communist Russia won't come take it over.
Or then Communist China
which just turned in 1949, so they won't come take over Japan and of course,
you heard the bad blood episode.
You know that it was a very real possibility that China, in retribution,
would come take over Japan for all of its wartime atrocities
So the US want a strong, vibrant, rich Japan
so they would be a
source of trade.
Japan's going to buy a bunch of stuff from the US, and the US
is going to buy a bunch of stuff from Japan.
That is the fact still today. We're huge trading partners.
And they're on our side, a strong political ally during the Cold War.
They are still to this day of course.
See the Post-War Miracle unfold under US help, US tutelage, US dollars.
Japan becomes the second largest economy on Planet Earth
mostly due to focusing on consumer electronics and the auto industry and
becomes a very strong,
powerful,
Asian ally to the United States, a situation which exists to this day.
