> At the same time, baby boomers are approaching retirement
It wouldn't have occurred to me that Japan had a baby boom. I suppose soldiers returning home in despair or in triumph are all looking for comfort and stability.
The last century of Japanese history looks a lot like that of the Western developed nations. (Probably because Japan made itself into a Western-style empire, then got involved in WW2 big time with the Western powers, then got a Western-style American occupation, so…)
The Allied Powers had seemingly learned the lessons of Versailles and didn't try to punish the losers (well, not as much), instead letting them grow. Thus why them not being victorious didn't matter, I guess.
Concerns about communism also led to them doing a 180 on keeping war criminals around and in them outright funding Japanese organized crime to violently suppress the Japanese left, as detailed in Kaplan and Dubro's Yakuza book. Japan still has echoes of this policy in that organized crime is entangled with legitimate government and business to a surprising degree.
America did try to punish the Germans. Millions starved as a result of deliberate Allied policy. It wasn't until the schism with the USSR that policies shifted. Eisenhower in particular wanted Germany to be an agrarian society.
As a German. I have never heard about these starved millions. The agrarian society plan was the Morgenthau plan which didn't get implemented from what I know.
My parents are WW2 generation. I have never heard any complaints from them or relatives about the American behavior after WW2.
Being German does not preclude you from being ignorant of post war German history. Google it. You can find lots of information on the Allied occupation of Germany. It wasn't until the Berlin airlift that feeding Germans became fashionable. My dad was in WW2 on the American side. He ended as a guard in a POW camp after the war. He'd have denied the starvation too but it did occur.
Eisenhower did want, initially, for Germany to be an agrarian society. He wasn't the only one with this view. Morganthau was not the only person with this idea.
The first years after the war were confusing for everybody. The country had been effectively destroyed,news about German crimes slowly came out, nobody knew how the Germans would respond to occupation. It's no wonder it took years to sort things out.
No matter what people in DC were planning I have never heard from people who lived then about Americans getting in the way of people trying to rebuild.
Because the Americans that people in Germany interacted with weren't making the decisions. Use Google. Research it. It's not a controversial topic in terms of historicity. Germans as a matter of deliberate policy were prevented from getting the food they needed.
Wait, i'm confused. I've always been told America poured tons of money into Germany via the Marshall Plan [0], which resulted in the "Wirtschaftswunder"[+] of the 50s and 60s. Former president Hoover went over and surveyed Germany almost directly after the war, in 1947.
Long story short: This wasn't the original plan. The original plan, which was in effect for a while, was a variant of the "Morgenthau plan" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan#JCS_1067 ). It took two years for them to realize that not only would they be starving Germans (intention), but also the rest of Europe (unintended), and more or less block any economic growth in Europe (+risk Europe falling under the sway of the Soviet Union). So, they reversed their plans and the rest is history (that history includes the Marshall plan).
The initial plan (Carried out between 1945 and 1947) was starving Germany - economically, and literally.
Once communism became the big boogieman, the US did a 180 on its occupation policy, and instead started dumping money and American goods into Germany via the Marshall plan.
> The Allied Powers had seemingly learned the lessons of Versailles and didn't try to punish the losers (well, not as much), instead letting them grow.
This was true for Germany but not for japan. Due to hard feelings over ww2 and of course racial animosity/hatred, our plan for japan was deindustrialization. We wanted japan to be at least a few decades behind the US and turn more of their nation into docile agrarian farmers. We also instituted starvation policy to thin out and subjugate the japanese. There was rampant starvation in japan in the first few years after ww2.
We had troops specifically assigned to destroy japanese industrial/engineering/science capacity. One of the most famous was the destruction of japan's cyclotron.
Keep in mind that we were an extremely racist nation 70 years ago and we had just nuked and firebombed japan into complete rubble. Whereas germans were "our white aryan brothers" ( it's absurd to think it now, but that's how the leaders of the US thought back then ) and we felt an obligation to rehabilitate them, the japanese were viewed as inferior asians with plenty of motive to attack the US again.
The only reason japan was allowed to reindustrialize was the soviet threat and the korean war. We needed japan to help seal off the soviets, chinese and north koreans.
It's fascinating stuff. If the communist threat didn't exist and the korean war never occurred, japan might be a more agrarian society today controlled by the US administrators.
There was a Japan faction and a China faction who each wanted their respective countries to be the center of US Asia policy and the China faction lost.
It's funny that nobody mentions the Spanish Flu. Unusually, that took out a lot of child-bearing age individuals around the world. And the flu, in particular, ravaged pregnant women.
It was a lot easier to move around the country and commute ranges were greater after WWII due to the enhanced infrastructure and greater number of personal automobiles. This and the improved economy after the war had some big effects on society.
It wouldn't have occurred to me that Japan had a baby boom. I suppose soldiers returning home in despair or in triumph are all looking for comfort and stability.