In August 1945 Japan's cities lay in ashes, millions were homeless and the country was occupied for the first time in its history. Within a generation it had become the world's second-largest economy. Its postwar story raises questions about how democracy can be planted, how growth is paid for and how a nation remembers its past.
The occupation
From 1945 to 1952 Japan was governed under the Allied occupation, run in practice by the Americans under General Douglas MacArthur. Its first aims were to disarm Japan and make it democratic. Women voted for the first time in April 1946 and elected 39 women to the Diet. The constitution that took effect in 1947, drafted largely by occupation staff and debated and amended by the Diet, placed sovereignty with the people of Japan and made the emperor "the symbol of the State." It guaranteed freedoms of speech, religion and assembly, and equality of the sexes in marriage, a clause drafted by Beate Sirota, a young American woman who had grown up in Tokyo. On New Year's Day 1946 Emperor Hirohito issued a rescript in which he denied that he was a living god. Labor unions were legalized, and a land reform transferred land from landlords to tenant farmers, sharply reducing tenancy. An international tribunal in Tokyo tried wartime leaders and sentenced seven to death, including the general and former prime minister Tojo Hideki. The emperor was not tried, a decision still debated. From 1947 American priorities shifted with the Cold War toward building Japan as an ally, and some reforms were scaled back.
Independence and alliance
The San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed in 1951, ended the occupation in April 1952, and a security treaty kept American bases in Japan. Okinawa, where some of the war's worst fighting had taken place, stayed apart: the United States administered Okinawa until 1972, and the island still hosts most US military facilities in the country. In 1955 conservative parties merged to form the Liberal Democratic Party, which governed almost continuously from 1955, losing power only briefly in 1993 and from 2009 to 2012. In 1960 huge crowds protested the renewal of the security treaty, but the treaty passed.
The economic miracle and its costs
From the mid-1950s to the early 1970s Japan's economy grew at around 10 percent a year. Government planners guided investment, companies offered lifetime employment to many male workers, and households saved heavily. Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato promised in 1960 to double incomes within a decade, a goal reached early. The first bullet train line opened in October 1964, just before Tokyo hosted the Olympics. Growth had victims. In the fishing town of Minamata, people and animals began suffering convulsions, numbness and death in the 1950s. Minamata disease was caused by mercury in a chemical plant's wastewater, which had poisoned fish in the bay. Similar disasters struck elsewhere, and in 1970 the Diet passed a burst of pollution laws.
Bubble and long slump
In the late 1980s land and share prices soared to dizzying heights. When the asset bubble burst around 1990, Japan suffered years of slow growth and falling prices, often called the lost decades, as banks sat on bad loans. Japan remained rich, safe and long-lived, but its population peaked around 2008 and has fallen since, while the share aged 65 and over rose to nearly 30 percent. On 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami left more than 18,000 people dead or missing in the northeast and caused meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. In October 2025 Takaichi Sanae became Japan's first woman prime minister.
Memory of the war
How Japan remembers its war remains contested. Prime ministers have issued apologies, notably Murayama Tomiichi in 1995, and courts and textbooks have argued over what students should learn. Neighbors object most to visits by politicians to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which honors Japan's war dead. Yasukuni is controversial because it honors convicted war criminals among the dead, including Tojo, enshrined there in 1978. Supporters say leaders should be free to mourn those who died for their country; critics say the visits signal approval of the war.
Worked example: Minamata and the right to be heard
The Chisso Corporation's factory had dumped mercury compounds into Minamata Bay for decades. By 1959 a university team had linked the disease to organic mercury, and the company's own doctor had produced the illness in a cat fed with factory waste, but the results were kept quiet and the dumping continued until 1968, when the government officially recognized the cause. Victims, many of them poor fishing families, faced stigma from neighbors who depended on Chisso jobs. Some sat in front of the company's headquarters demanding to be heard. Writers and photographers, including the American W. Eugene Smith, carried their story abroad. In 1973 a court found Chisso liable and ordered compensation. The case shows how growth measured in national statistics can hide harm to those with the least power, and how lawsuits, journalism and protest can force a society to count every person's health as equal. Arguments over who qualifies as a victim continue to this day.