WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

How was the United States—conventionally not a major power in East Asia—able to consolidate new regional hegemony after 1945 rapidly and smoothly? How did Korean and Japanese people come to accept U.S. Occupation as legitimate, even though it effectively negated Korea’s independence and, in Japan, imposed rule by a former archenemy? This paper addresses these questions through a political-economic lens, focusing on trade disruption, food crisis, and U.S. aid. In postwar East Asia, dissolution of the Japanese Empire also meant breakdown of long-standing trade networks. In 1936, Korea exported half of its rice production to Japan, and Japan relied on its colonies for one-fourth of total grain consumption. This highly interdependent economic bloc collapsed in 1945, as the United States forbade Japan’s import of food from former colonies in order to build independent national economies. Predictably, this policy generated food crisis and economic chaos; paradoxically, the United States also became the main solver. U.S. military governments and U.S.-led international food institutions compensated for disrupted trade in Korea and Japan by providing massive aid of flour and fertilizers produced at home. In 1949, for instance, Japan imported 1.45 million tons of flour—enough to feed 20 million people for a year—solely from the United States, for which Japanese statesmen frequently expressed gratitude in the National Diet. In Korea, where people had suffered population pressure throughout the colonial period, postwar U.S. aid was described as “incomprehensibly generous,” and U.S. efforts to sever Korea’s rice exports to Japan were also broadly appreciated. In this way, the Japanese Empire was recast as an American empire in postwar East Asia, through U.S. agricultural production that refilled East Asia’s empty granaries with flour from American Great Plains.