In order to rebuild Japan’s basic industries after the war, the Allied Occupation directly financed the reconstruction of the steel and coal industries. By the early 1950s, direct financial assistance to the two key industries was replaced with tax exemptions and government loans. The goal was to rationalize production in coal and steel so that the industries come become internationally competitive. Instead, the coal policies became the forerunners of plans to help a wide range of depressed industries reduce production in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 1960s the government subsidized the cost of using domestic coal in order to maintain the coal industry. After the 1973 Oil Shock there was a demand for coal, but both the steel industry and the electric power industry refused to pay premium prices for domestic coal when they could import cheaper coal from other countries. By the mid-1980s, the United States was also pressing Japan to import cheaper American coal. The Japanese government finally decided to phase out the domestic coal industry rather than continuing to prop it up.