Bought Brought to you by the United States.

Thanks to US aid the Japanese economy is recovering quickly. Across the country the Japanese people have set to work repairing roads, bridges, airports, rail lines, and all other sorts of infrastructure with American material. Not only has this improved the economy, but it has allowed imports of food from America to efficiently move through out the country, removing Japan from the brink of famine.

Additionally, American aid had flowed into Japanese industry. Millions of dollars of American aid have been spent under the expert guidance of Hayato Ikeda’s Ministry of Industry. Not only that, America has graciously absorbed the cost of their occupation of Japan, opening hundreds of million more dollars for the government to put towards rebuilding Japan.

This growth has been so explosive that Japan’s GDP has increased from 14.5 billion dollars in 1945 to over 21 billion dollars in 1947. This has catapulted Japan past Italy and West Germany. In fact, behind the USSR, US, France, and the UK Japan is now the 5th largest economy in the world (depending on how you estimate China and Germany, and only because India is not a country).

[M]If you would like to see how I got to these numbers you can look at this spread sheet. I applied my aid from the US that is in excess of our timeline, combined with a conservative spending multiplier of 2(estimates for the Marshall Plan are as high as 4). Beyond that I simply used OTL GDP growth %. Estimates for occupation costs come from sources showing Japan spending as a percentage of GDP in the era before 1949 as 10% of GDP (As opposed to 20% after) combined with sources claiming 1/3rd of the Japanese budget in 1946 was spent repaying occupation costs. For years after 1946 I scaled it based on OTL troops. For example, in 1947 troops were reduced form 200k to 120k, so I assumed occupation costs were also multiplied by 0.6.