An officer in MacArthur's new administration walked into the Mitsui office in Tokyo in September 1945. 'There it is,' a manager said, pointing to a map of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere - Japan's prewar plan for the region. 'We tried. See what you can do with it.' The Americans hesitated. Washington was at that moment more inclined to retribution than recovery. And the power of zaibatsu like Mitsui, huge family-owned conglomerates which had invested in Japan and its imperial territories in North-East Asia, produced matériel for the war, and come to control much of the country's heavy industry and financial business, was incompatible with the 'economic democracy' the American administration wished to introduce. It started to dismantle them.

LRB 6 December 1990 | PDF Download