Title: How Japan and the U.S. Reconciled After Hiroshima, Nagasaki | Time
Headings: How the U.S. and Japan Became Allies Even After Hiroshima and Nagasaki
How the U.S. and Japan Became Allies Even After Hiroshima and Nagasaki
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Content: a third of its factories had been leveled by U.S. bombers; eight of every ten ships in its merchant fleet lay at the bottom of the ocean; its exhausted population faced starvation…
Yet Japan, going into the 1960s, has risen phoenix-like from the ashes. The Japanese people are 25% better off than they were before the war, even though 20 million more of them are crowded into an area 52% smaller than their old territory. Japan’s industrial growth has soared to its highest rate ever, enough to double the national income every ten years. Its tiny farms (average size: 2½ acres) are so intensely cultivated that they have one of the world’s highest yields. Nearly every Japanese family owns a radio, one in every four, a TV set; more newspapers are sold per capita than in the U.S. The people of Japan are incomparably the best fed, clothed and housed in all Asia…
Japan did not lift itself by its own sandal straps. Since the war U.S. aid has averaged $178 million a year;