Reddit mentions of Juran's Quality Control Handbook

To offer a different perspective, what made Japan's recovery so amazing is that they had something to offer most other industrialized countries didn't have at the time: quality. Japan has been the world's leader in quality standards ever since the 1950's.

After world war II, Japan was the first country to say "Quality over quantity". They implemented quality management as the basis of their new economy. To achieve this, they hired quality contemporary "guru's" (for lack of a better term). Willam Edwards Deming probably being the most well-known of them.

There have been books written about quality management (and tons of books about Deming alone), so I'm not going to focus on his philosophy here. The main reason for Japan's economic recovery is quality management however. When the entire world was still focusing on mass-production, they started focusing on quality production.

Eventually the new philosophy started to produce results. In the 1970's, people simply began to realize Japanese products were way better in quality, and Western producers realized there was a competitive gap, and Deming's work finally began to receive recognition in the 80's.

Deming's focus wasn't only on product quality, but also on quality management. Continuously upgrading/testing/innovating the product became the new standard.

Other quality leaders were Genuchi Taguchi, Walter Shewart, and Joseph Juran

Some links on quality management:

Main Wikipedia page

Quality Function Deployment

Toyota Production Systm

Kaizen

Books on Quality Management:

Gemba Kaizen

William Edwards Deming

Juran's Quality Control Handbook published in 1951, Japanese scientists liked his work and invited him to implement his system

To summarize, Solow's growth model might provide a basis for the Japanese economic recovery, but the decision to focus on quality for products instead of quantity was way more important. The West only started to catch up in response to that in the 1980's (e.g. Motorola's Six Sigma programme). Yes, the help of the US did give Japan the ability to improve their economy, but their huge economic growth and how well they used that aid was due to