A Perry in reverse, General Douglas MacArthur last week opened the door for the resumption of foreign trade with Japan. But it would not be like the old days, when Japan did the world's fourth-largest export business (3,533 million yen, about $1 billion, in 1936), used its credits to build up vast stockpiles of war materials.
SCAP (Supreme Commander of the Allied powers in the Pacific) announced that Japanese trade would be on a noncompetitive barter basis. Maximum volume during 1946 is fixed at only about 25% of prewar levels, roughly $800,000,000 in...
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