Japan from a domestic point of view, the social capability for importing and adapting foreign technology was improved with the reforms in education and the fillip to competition given by the dissolution of the zaibatsu. Resolving tension between rural and urban Japan through land reform and the establishment of a rice price support program — that guaranteed farmers incomes comparable to blue collar industrial workers — also contributed to the social capacity to absorb foreign technology by suppressing the political divisions between metropolitan and hinterland Japan that plagued the nation during the interwar years.
The revamped international economic order contributed to the social capability of importing and adapting foreign technology. The instability of the 1920s and 1930s was replaced with a relatively predictable bipolar world in which the United States and the Soviet Union opposed each other in both geopolitical and ideological arenas.
The United States became an architect of multilateral architecture designed to encourage trade through its sponsorship of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the predecessor to the World Trade Organization).
Under the logic of building military alliances to contain Eurasian Communism, the United States brought Japan under its “nuclear umbrella” with a bilateral security treaty. American companies were encouraged to license technology to Japanese companies in the new international environment. Japan redirected its trade away from the areas that had been incorporated into the Japanese Empire before 1945, and towards the huge and expanding American market
Its infrastructure revitalized through the Occupation period reforms, its capacity to import and export enhanced by the new international economic order, and its access to American technology bolstered through its security pact with the United States, Japan experienced the dramatic “Miracle Growth” between 1953 and the early 1970s whose sources have been cogently analyzed by Denison and Chung (1976).
Especially striking in the Miracle Growth period was the remarkable increase in the rate of domestic fixed capital formation, the rise in the investment proportion being matched by a rising savings rate whose secular increase — especially that of private household savings – has been well documented and analyzed by Horioka (1991).
While Japan continued to close the gap in income per capita between itself and the United States after the early 1970s, most scholars believe that large Japanese manufacturing enterprises had by and large become internationally competitive by the early 1970s.
In this sense it can be said that Japan had completed its nine decade long convergence to international competitiveness through industrialization by the early 1970s.
There is little doubt that the social capacity to import and adapt foreign technology was vastly improved in the aftermath of the Pacific War. Creating social consensus with Land Reform and agricultural subsidies reduced political divisiveness, extending compulsory education and breaking up the zaibatsu had a positive impact.
Fashioning the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (M.I.T.I.) that took responsibility for overseeing industrial policy is also viewed as facilitating Japan’s social capability. There is no doubt that M.I.T.I. drove down the cost of securing foreign technology. By intervening between Japanese firms and foreign companies, it acted as a single buyer of technology, playing off competing American and European enterprises in order to reduce the royalties Japanese concerns had to pay on technology licenses. By keeping domestic patent periods short, M.I.T.I. encouraged rapid diffusion of technology.
