Apart from preventing economic crises that could lead to chaos (averting starvation, for example), U.S. policy called for letting the Japanese stew in their own juices. At the same time, the post-Potsdam formulations explicitly mandated the promotion of policies “which permit a wide distribution of income and of the ownership of the means of production and trade.” To this end, planners in Washington called for “dissolution of the large industrial and banking combinations which have exercised control of a great part of Japan’s trade and industry.”
