Japan's economy is infamously not doing very well. It was converging to Western labor productivity levels until 1990, but since then has been stuck at two-thirds the US level. It's about as rich as France, both with about 70% the US's GDP per capita, but France has very short working hours, whereas Japan is comparable to the US.
My question is, can you come up with a good TL with a POD after August 1945 in which Japan manages to converge to the wage rates of the US, France, and Germany? The rule is that you can't do this exclusively by screwing the West so that Japan has less ground to make up - Japan needs to have the wealth level that the US and the richer European countries have in OTL today.