Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (40 page)

By 1942 Japan had acquired an empire in China, south-east Asia and the Pacific. The Japanese military policy, like that of the Wehr-macht, was that troops should live off the land. Shipping space was too scarce and the domestic harvest too small to allow for food supplies to be sent to the armies overseas. The burden of feeding the occupying forces was therefore firmly placed on the shoulders of the farmers in the occupied territories. If there were insufficient supplies in one area, they were sent in from another part of the empire. Thus, the occupying forces in Manchuria were sent trainloads of food from Korea and the troops stationed on the Philippines were sent rice supplies from Indo-China and Siam (now Thailand), which remained independent but was allied to the Japanese. Burma, Malaya and Indo-China together represented the world’s largest rice-exporting area, but mismanagement of the rice trade led to a dramatic decline in production which combined with ruthless requisitioning of supplies to create widespread hunger and, in Burma and Indo-China, famine. As the Malayan schoolteacher Chin Kee Onn commented, ‘the much-publicised and rosily-painted “New Order” turned out to be the “New Disorder” and what was proclaimed to be the “Co-prosperity Sphere” was actually the “Co-poverty Fear”’.
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Throughout the wartime world it was women who made up the majority of the agricultural labour force and this was also the case in Japan. By 1944 more than half the Japanese rural labour force was made up of women.
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Returning from a lecture tour in Kyushu in May of that year, the journalist Kiyosawa Kiyoshi recorded in his diary: ‘when I looked out from the train, the people working in the fields were only women and children. Occasionally when I saw a man it was
a really old man.’
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It was not so much military conscription which depleted the agricultural workforce as the war industries. Even though half the population of Japan were peasants, they made up only 23 per cent of military draftees during the Pacific war. Having relied on the countryside for recruits during the early 1930s, for the war with China and America the military preferred to rely on skilled young men from the factories, who made up 43 per cent of the draft between 1937 and 1945.
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However, large numbers of fit and active young men and women left the countryside for the towns where better wages could be earned. When she left her village to work unloading coal from ships at the docks in Niigata, the family of fifteen-year-old Toshié was delighted with her wage of 5 yen a day.
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Between 1941 and 1945 the military and industry together swallowed up 4 million rural labourers.

One farm woman recalled how hard it was ‘keeping up with the work, with so many of the men away. We had a hop field and the weeds grew shoulder-high. You almost broke your sickle on the weeds.’
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To relieve some of the pressure on the hard-pressed women the joint labour schemes, which had been established by the rural revitalization programmes of the 1930s, expanded their activities. Not only were farm households encouraged to co-operate with each other to transplant, weed, harvest and thresh the rice, but 15,000 communal kitchens were set up to save everyone from having to cook for themselves and 30,000 nurseries freed up the children’s mothers for long hours of work in the fields.
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The government also exempted schoolchildren from their studies and sent them into the countryside to help. Altogether a million students laboured in the fields. But this was not a temporary holiday, as it was in Britain or California, but a permanent release from school. Tanaka Tetsuko, a student when the war began, recalled how ‘classes practically came to an end and our education became mostly volunteer work … It was very strenuous, physical labour.’ Tanaka took solace in the idea that ‘we were part of a divine country centred on the Emperor. The whole Japanese race was fighting a war.’
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So effective was the deployment of students that Japan, unlike Germany, Britain and America, barely used prisoners or forced labour in its fields.

Although the work was back-breakingly hard for those left in the countryside, Japan’s problem was not so much that it did not have
enough labour, but that the inefficiency of agriculture made it difficult to maximize the productivity of all the hard work.
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Increasing efficiency through mechanization was out of the question because of the pocket-handkerchief size of the paddy fields. In the whole of Japan there were only ninety-nine tractors during the war and these would have relied on an extremely limited petrol supply. As every scrap of metal was channelled into the armaments factories, even supplies of hand implements such as ploughs, rakes, pitchforks and sickles fell by half and they became valued and scarce possessions.
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Japanese soils are comparatively infertile but imports of materials to make artificial fertilizers, which before the war had come from Germany, France, Spain and the United States, all ceased. Although the Japanese navy captured the phosphate-mining islands of Nauru, Ocean and Christmas Island, thus depriving Australia of its main sources of raw materials for artificial fertilizers, Japanese farmers benefited little from these victories. The Allies destroyed the mines and equipment before they evacuated, and by the time the occupying Japanese had restored them the American blockade prevented most of the supplies from reaching Japan.
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Fertilizer imports dropped from over 1 million tons in 1941 to a mere 137,000 tons in 1945.
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Without artificial fertilizers the farmers relied on organic forms of manure, but fish and soya-bean-meal fertilizers disappeared as these were too precious as sources of human food, and the overworked labour force was obliged to invest large amounts of time and energy into collecting night soil.
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The government banned the cultivation of luxury crops and encouraged every farmer to grow potatoes, the ubiquitous crop of the Second World War. In the case of Japan these were sweet potatoes, which made sense as they contain 30 per cent more calories than rice and double the number of calories found in wheat. They are also less sensitive than rice to a lack of fertilizer.
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A Japanese woman from the village of Shinohata recalled how ‘we grew sweet potatoes in all the rice fields … as a winter crop. You cut them in strips and dried them and that was all we had for snacks.’
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By 1945 the yield of sweet potatoes had increased by one-quarter, but the yield of virtually all other foodstuffs had fallen.
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In particular the farmers lacked the spare capacity to cultivate fruit and vegetables, which became extremely scarce.

The government’s 1930s Rural Revitalization campaign and the Manchurian resettlement plan had both tried to solve Japan’s agricultural problems without impacting on the power and wealth of the rural landlords. But the circumstances of war created pressures which led the government to reform the social structure of the countryside by taking the radical – and inadvertently democratic – step of cutting landlords out of the food chain. Landlords were normally paid part of their tenants’ rent in kind, which allowed them to hoard stores of rice. In an effort to ensure that the government was able to collect as much of the harvest as possible, this practice was banned by the Food Control Act of 1942 and landlords were instructed to apply for ration cards. Instead, the government now bought rice directly from the cultivators, which enabled the government to provide them with an incentive to grow more food by paying them substantially more than had the landlords.
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Unfortunately, the tenant farmers were unable to reap the full benefits of this positive reform until peacetime. During the war a large share of their profits was creamed off by the forced savings campaigns run by village associations, which raised what were, in effect, forced loans for the government. In addition, inflation, which pushed the prices of farm equipment and consumer goods to absurd levels, meant that even though their incomes had increased, the farmers struggled to maintain their standard of living and felt that they gained very little despite their hard work.
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As the food situation in the cities became increasingly worrying, the government’s requisition quota targets became increasingly unrealistic and the exhortations to work harder became more insistent. In reaction farmers lost their enthusiasm.
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One farmer remarked bitterly: ‘They tell us “deliver, deliver”, so then they come and take away at a song the rice we sweated so hard to produce, to the point where it’s hard for us to eat. I can’t stand it.’
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He concluded that it would be better if he simply grew enough food for his family and joined the swelling ranks of industrial workers in the cities who were able to earn a decent living. Following a familiar pattern for under-developed agricultural economies, where there was simply too little incentive to produce for the market, more and more Japanese farmers withdrew into subsistence cultivation as the war progressed. Kiyosawa Kiyoshi noted that because of the ever fiercer requisitioning
of rice, tenants had returned almost 1,000
tsubo
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of rice fields to his parents. Rather than farm it themselves and thus make themselves liable for high delivery quotas, they had left it uncultivated. ‘Thus … farmland is steadily diminishing,’ concluded Kiyosawa, ‘and food become harder to obtain.’
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By the end of the war rice yields had fallen by half and barley yields were similarly poor. Whereas Japan’s farmers produced enough rice for each person to receive 336 grams per day in 1941, by 1945 the farmers could only provide 234 grams per person per day. However, the army, on a ration double that of an ordinary civilian, had grown substantially, and peasants were allocated a share of between 600 and 450 grams of rice for every member of their family. This clearly left far too small a surplus to feed the urban population in the cities.
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Without imports of rice from the occupied territories the Japanese cities would starve.

CHAOS AND HUNGER IN THE EMPIRE

Japan’s pre-war rice supply relied heavily on imports from Korea but already in 1939 Korean rice exports were failing to live up to Japanese expectations. The war in China had boosted the country’s industrial development, leading to rising food prices and farm incomes. The peasants could now afford to hold back more of their rice crop for their own consumption and Korea’s export surplus shrank. A drought in 1939 resulted in a poor harvest, virtually all of which was consumed by the Japanese troops stationed in the country. A further drought in 1942 brought Korean rice supplies to Japan to a halt.
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However, by mid-1942 the Japanese were the masters of south-east Asia, which had produced 67 per cent of the rice entering pre-war world trade.
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This should have been the answer to Japan’s rice shortage problems. By 1940 the Japanese had already begun to look to south-east Asia as an extra source of rice imports. In 1940–41 the area provided nearly 1.5 million tons for Japan, which were used to build up reserve stores on the mainland.
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In
1942 and 1943 three-quarters of the rice imported into Japan was coming from this area.
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But from 1943 on, the American blockade prevented meaningful quantities of supplies reaching the home islands and the possession of an empire did nothing to alleviate the food crisis developing within Japan.

While the Japanese government presided over an ever-worsening food situation at home, as the occupying power in south-east Asia it succeeded, in an astonishingly short space of time, in running down the entire region, pushing back the progress which had been made towards modernity and re-establishing its pre-colonial isolation, un-doing the process of urbanization and driving the hungry population back into the countryside to undertake subsistence farming.
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The Japanese lacked expertise and advisers who knew the region and much of the chaos was caused by mismanagement rather than a malicious, premeditated policy.
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In terms of managing the food supply the occupying administration’s greatest mistake was to allow the rice industry to disintegrate.

Although south-east Asia was one of the world’s most important rice-producing areas, the cultivation of rice was concentrated in just three areas – lower Burma, Siam and Cochin-China (the southern part of what is now Vietnam). The rest of the region – all the towns and cities, the dry northern zone of Burma, British Malaya, the Straits Settlements, the Philippines, British Borneo and the Dutch East Indies – was dependent on internal rice imports.
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As the Japanese moved in, the transport system in the region broke down as virtually all vehicles, trains and ships were requisitioned by the military and by the Japanese trading companies that followed in their wake, dealing in the raw materials Japan had been so eager to capture, such as rubber, tin and bauxite.
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The result was that the trade in rice was disrupted and most of the region’s people lost access to essential supplies of food.