SESSION Vit , WARREN: Within less than that. HEMLER: Yes. 347 That's what I said. WARREN: I spent fifteen cents to buy a couple of frogs, which astounded the Japs. After that, the rumor went around that there were all kinds of things for sale. They expected us to take them and this little incident was almost a diplomatic event. We must have poured an awful lot into Japan ina relatively short time in just the fact that the civilians were paid for things that they did for the military occupying forces, HEMLER: Right. What l’m saying is, again taking the same scale here, the prologue, the logue, and epilogue, howfar down would Japan have gone? FREMONT-SMITH: How much further down? Did her economy continue to deteriorate after the war was over or did it start to came up right away because of what we brought in and what we sent? WARREN: I can't answer that because I didn't pay any attention to it particularly. AYRES: Jack Hershleifer ran a study (Reference 58) on this at RAND, and drawing on my memory of this work and not any personal knowledge, I think the situation deteriorated for a time. FREMONT-SMITH: You mean some months or what? AYRES: Possibly a couple of years. It's perfectly true, of course, that immediate starvation was avoided, but we're talking now about the economy. WARREN: Yes. AYRES: He believes that the Japanese did some very unwise things with regard to currency controls or something of that nature. [I'm not very clear on what happened or what he thought was wrong about it. But the actual recovery didn't start to really gain momentumfor about four or five years. EISexNBUD: Jack Schull can help us on that.