How did the United States cut off the Japanese resources?

Answer 1

The U.S. blockaded the Japanese islands with ships and the Russians, allies of the United States blocked land routes. This could cover two different areas - economic and military. I'll respond to both. First, before actually fighting between the USA and Japan, the USA organized with Britain and the Netherlands to freeze Japans assets in those three countries. The way world trade worked, you would open a bank in a nation from which you wished to buy goods, say petroleum or scrap metal. You would put funds in that bank account. You could then write checks for the goods being purchased. This could be done by private companies or by governments. These three nations conspired to destroy the Japanese economy by freezing all financial assets in their respective nations. Since these three represented the source of over 95% of Japan's oil supply, plus other vital supplies, Japan was forced to surrender her foreign policy or collapse. Why would they do this? The three western nations felt the Japanese were being too aggressive in their war with China. All three had themselves exploited China for years but they did not accept Japan's ability to do the same. Britain for example had fought a war with China only 40 years prior that enabled the Brits to keep selling narcotics in China, the so called "opium war". Britain also had colonial interests in China (Hong Kong, 'quarters' of various other cities) which they felt might be exposed by continued Japanese success. In any case, the British didn't feel the Japanese were entitled to do something similar to their own exploitation. The American's had recently crushed (1920's) an uprising in their own colony, the Philipines (about 200,000 Philipinos were killed by American troops during this campaign). The USA was fearful of Japan's growing influence in the Far East and how it might threaten their Philipino possession plus their own trade plans for China. The Netherlands had the most valuable colony of all - based in Java. The Dutch were incapable of defending it themselves so pretty well just went along with whatever their more militant partners asked. Thus, in order to protect their respective colonial possessions and to restrict Japan's growing influence, these three cut off most of the sources of rubber, tin, iron, petroleum, and other materials that the Japanese required for their economy. Second, this question could be answered from a military standpoint. During WWII, the Japanese imported almost all raw materials for their industry plus quite a lot of food. The USA organized a submarine fleet to destroy the Japanese merchant marine and thus cut off these supplies. Since the Japanese conquests were rather scattered it was hard for them to organize convoys and thus hard to protect the almost defenseless merchant ships. The American submarines destroyed huge amounts of Japanese shipping with relative ease, losses which the Japanese could not make up. By late 1944 Japan's leadership understood that the war could not go on much longer as industry after industry was shutting down for lack of raw materials. The population was near starving. The military was defenseless against American air attacks. At this time, had reasonable terms been offered, the war could have ended by December '44 or January '45. However, hard feelings on the American side required 'unconditional surrender'. This of course, could be interpretted by the Japanese as agreeing to be murdered en mass following surrender (note what the Soviets were doing in Germany). Obviously, no sane person/government would acceed to such terms. Eventually, by August 1945, it became certain that the USA was going to kill most of the Japanese population anyway, via bombing and starving campaigns. A tiny concession was wrangled out of the Americans, ie, to let the Japanese emperor survive, and the Japanese surrended immediately.