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144 C H A P T E R 5 StructuralIllsand GrowthCures M any postwar advocates of the ideal of full employment in Japan had drawn, as we have seen, on mid-century Keynesian economic ideas. They were able to point to a new international consensus, expressed in postwar multilateral organizations and in the capitals of the victorious Allied powers, on the need to craft full-employment solutions in nations—winners and losers alike—across the world that were struggling to make the transition from war to a transformed peacetime system . In Japan, a sense of the importance of somehow crafting a new regime to address the employment question was intensified by the massive military demobilization that took place after surrender and by the hundreds of thousands of civilian returnees from the former empire who would come streaming back to Japan over the course of the first several postwar years. There was yet one additional social factor in Japan, however, that underscored the case made by early proponents of the ideal of full employment: the soaring rate of natural increase in the population of the country. The perceived dilemma of “surplus population” had long vexed national leaders and ideologues during the modern period. But the swiftness and magnitude of its return in the straitened circumstances of the immediate postwar years seemed to portend a menace on a new scale to the well-being of the nation. The most calamitous fears of social collapse and mass starvation immediately after the war thankfully never came to pass. Yet even so, long after the worst of the early emergencies of immediate postwar recovery seemed to have been weathered, anxiety about population and employment returned once again a decade later, in the mid-1950s. Now, influential commentators redefined the old problem of population for the new post-recovery, post-Occupation age more explicitly, and with greater analytical rigor, in terms of the structural deficiencies that they believed distinguished Japanese capitalism from that of the leading economies of the West and held the nation in semi-back- Structural Ills and Growth Cures 145 ward status. By the second half of the 1950s, public economists dealt with their renewed fears about the “population problem” using assumptions and concepts taken from the new economics to argue, not in the rather more narrow language of full-employment policy that had governed discourse in the postwar 1940s, but rather in terms of a more expansive goal of rapid “economic growth” as the means at long last to achieve an internal reformation deferred by the errors of Japan’s modern past. Population Anxiety Although the devastation that the war had wreaked upon the economy would increase the magnitude of the “population problem,” anxiety over the number of people living in Japan had, in fact, been a perennial theme of the modern period. Official campaigns to encourage what were considered excessive numbers to move elsewhere began soon after the founding of the Meiji state, and efforts to promote emigration, especially from the countryside, were a continuing response of officials and reform groups in the decades that followed. The internal colonization of Hokkaidö involved the resettlement of ethnically Japanese immigrants from the southern home islands, so that by the end of the nineteenth century the indigenous Ainu people constituted less than a quarter of the population of that northern territory. After overseas emigration was legalized in 1884, Japanese were exhorted to relocate to Hawaii and the west coasts of the United States and Canada as well as to New Zealand, Australia, and South America. Official perception that there were more people than could be accommodated on the archipelago grew particularly strong as the hardships of the countryside in the 1910s and 1920s gave rise to potentially destabilizing political movements for tenants’ rights. Emigration was increasingly frustrated, however, by racially motivated barriers to Japanese immigrants erected by destination countries. The discourse on “surplus population” and the remedy of emigration were inextricably bound up with the pursuit of empire by the 1930s. The idea that the countryside could not support the numbers who sought to make their livings there created the perception of a land crisis for which empire was increasingly offered as the solution. With the rise of a form of imperial agrarianism,LouiseYoungdemonstrates,empirewas“rendered...asspace,” an outlet for surplus population, “lebensraum for Japan’s overcrowded and socially conflicted villages.” In 1936, the government instituted a Millions to Manchuria program. A vast migration machine comprised of national, prefectural, and community-level organizations eventually...

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