---
node: postwar_economic_miracle
type: event
slug: postwar_economic_miracle
title: "Postwar economic miracle"
lead: "From c. 1955 to 1973, Japan's economy grew at roughly 10% a year on average. By 1968 it was the world's second-largest capitalist economy by GNP."
published: 2026-07-09
updated: 2026-08-27
change: "Rewrote the opening body section so that it no longer restates the page's own lead."
previous_hash: "74e67cb306097594a91ed7735575aa47655a7b64deb98eff616ce634d9730aeb"
requester: internal
reason: "The section repeated the lead, so the first thing under the first heading was text the reader had already read in the search result."
image_file: postwar_economic_miracle.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Tokyo_Tower_by_Don_Ramey_Logan.jpg"
image_author: "Don Ramey Logan"
image_license: "CC BY-SA 3.0"
---

## What happened

Growth was engineered as much as it was earned. Procurement for the Korean War refilled the order books of firms that had nothing to make; the Ministry of International Trade and Industry rationed foreign exchange and technology licences to the industries it wanted built; households saved a fifth of their income into banks that lent it back to those same industries at controlled rates; and Ikeda's Income Doubling Plan of 1960 told the country the point of all of it. The symbols of the era were the "three sacred treasures" of home appliances, the Tokaido Shinkansen and the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, and Expo '70 in Osaka. The oil shock of 1973 ended it.

## Background

The Korean War procurement boom (1950–53) provided the initial spark. Growth was driven by postwar reforms, technology imports, extraordinary rates of saving and investment, an able workforce, industrial policy under MITI, and cheap oil.

## Consequences

Growth came at the cost of severe industrial pollution — the Minamata disease cases among them — forcing environmental legislation and a new Environment Agency in 1971. The 1973 oil shock closed the high-growth era, and stable growth followed; the period built the prosperous consumer society and infrastructure of modern Japan.