In 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, heavy industrial production had increased by fivefold in a dozen years. Seventeen percent of the Japanese economy was devoted to war production, as compared to 2.6 percent of the U.S. economy.5 Munitions production rose sharply as a share of Japanese GDP after 1941, approaching 50 percent in 1944. At that stage, Japan’s civilian population was more or less immiserated, and most of the remaining (nonmunitions) share of the economy involved agriculture and food production.
