Post war in Japan

After the Second World War, the U.S.’ Marshall Plan provided aid to rebuild Japan’s economy. Meanwhile, two countries’ improving relationship created an opportunity for Japan to export manufactured products to the increasingly-affluent United States.

Japanese industry have enough competitive to Western countries due to copying Western products. They improve their products’ quality and sell the products back to the West for cheaper prices. In Japan, it has lack of natural resources. Thus, Japanese companies made their effort on developing innovative and efficient manufacturing methods, which created their products in high value, for instance cars and electronics. Japanese industry started to use of assembly-line robots in automobile manufacturing in the late 1970s. This made human error nonexistent and boosted overall quality, while the U.S. industry was still assembling products by hand. 

Japan extended its domination to the global electronics industry as it produced the majority of the world’s consumer electronics products between the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, it introduced innovative and revolutionary new products, for example pocket transistor radio and Sony Walkman. Japanese electronics producers also manufactured computer hardware industry which included semiconductor chips, circuit boards and other computer components. However, the CPU chip production was still dominated by American companies. In the 1980s, many people believed that Japanese companies will become “King of the Global Electronics Industry”.

Aforementioned cases, it was just part of successful industry in Japan at that time. In short, we can say that Japan developed significantly on their economics after Second World War. This economic miracle caused Japan standard of living to soar to among the highest in the world. By the 1980s, Japan became the world’s largest creditor nation and the GDP surpassed many Western countries.