The U.S. had good reason to restore Japan after the war: it needed Japan as a bulwark against what it perceived as the Soviet menace to American hegemony in the Pacific. The answer to Japan’s prayers for economic revival came with the outbreak of the Korean War, which fattened the purses of countless entrepreneurs and business. The Cold War and its Korean conflagration set the pattern for a security relationship with the United States that allowed Japan to invest the money it might otherwise have expended on its own defense.
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