Abstract:

We often read that Japan is a country poor in natural resources, with insufficient domestic food, energy, and raw material supplies to support its affluent population and industrial economy. Although a reliance on trade is a requirement for any modern economy, contemporary Japanese elites continually anguish over their country's declining resource self-sufficiency.

This dissertation examines discourses of the "resources problem" in Japan from the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s. It scrutinizes the economic, geographic, demographic, and conservationist ideas that shaped Japanese discussions of the resources problem in the middle twentieth century. Three interrelated themes emerge from this trans-World War II perspective on the resources problem: how transwar commentators proposed scientific and technocratic policies to maximize domestic resource supplies; how transwar Japan's rising dependence on imports triggered anxieties about overseas trade and national security; and how transwar discussions linked population trends and natural resource vulnerabilities.

Contemporary attitudes toward resources are products of Japanese struggles with economic interdependence before, during, and after World War II. The second industrial revolution spurred economic and population growth to newfound heights and extended food and raw material requirements beyond national boundaries. However, the zero-sum worldview ascendant in Japan after the Great Depression asserted that dependence on the outside world for resources equaled strategic vulnerability. Japan's quest for autarky from 1931 to 1945 essentially represented a failed attempt to overcome economic interdependence. Fears of an uncertain Cold War trading environment and excessive reliance on the United States motivated many in postwar Japan to maximize domestic resource development. Early postwar enthusiasm for hydroelectric and atomic energy signaled the high tide of a transwar belief that advanced technology in the hands of broad-minded state officials would work wonders in minimizing Japan's dependence on imports. Yet by the 1950s, it became clear that the country's reengagement with the outside world, not expensive domestic development, was the key to high economic growth. In the end, Japan sacrificed self-sufficiency in resources for the unprecedented levels of wealth and industrial might it gained through accepting interdependence.