ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some aspects of postwar Japan's suddenly 'primitive state', as it was called by economic planner Okita Saburo, who perceived a calorific crisis happening simultaneously at the level of individual bodies, households, and entire industrial systems. Okita's energy-centred vision of economics brings these different levels into a single focus. The chapter also describes how Japan was poised, even before the war, at a number of resource frontiers. Production of textiles and many other consumer goods had been declining since the beginning of the China War in 1937, as the military effort bored more and more deeply into the Japanese civilian economy. Japan had the world's third-largest merchant fleet before the war, and in 1939, Japanese merchant ships imported a total of 21.6 million tons of material of all kinds. Several aspects of Japan's postwar 'experiment' now seem significant in different ways than they did to members of the generation who actually carried it out.
