Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (48 page)

The propagation of the image of the ideal housewife feeding her family military-style meals was integral to the on-going militarization of daily life in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Propaganda emphasized that it was the responsibility of Japanese women to improve the physical strength and fighting-power of the nation. The Japanese government was far more willing to take on the responsibility for disseminating nutritional knowledge than the British government in the 1930s. However, in return, the Japanese were expected to make their best efforts to apply this information in their daily lives as part of their role as loyal subjects. This expectation was heightened by war when government propaganda ‘elevated … eating healthily at a low cost to the level of a patriotic virtue’.
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The war with China seriously undermined these reforming efforts within both the military and the civilian population. By the late 1930s the war with China was making it increasingly difficult for the state to supply sufficient good-quality food to Japan’s urban population. A labour shortage on Japan’s farms, as a result of conscription of rural workers into the armed forces to fight in China, as well as a drop in imports from Korea and Formosa, due to a war-related increase in domestic demand and a poor harvest, resulted in a rice shortage.
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Mary Kimoto Tomita was the daughter of Japanese immigrants to America. In 1939 she arrived in Tokyo to learn something of her parents’ culture. In November she wrote to her friend Miye, ‘Japan’s general population is just beginning to feel the pinch of war. Until this summer they said that everything was the same as before the war. But now rice is scarce and the price is the highest it has been since 1918. There is a scarcity of all materials … Everything is so expensive. I wonder how the poor people live.’
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Tokyoites particularly disliked eating the long-grained
gaimai
, or foreign rice, which the government imported from Korea and Formosa. A rice-saving campaign tried to persuade reluctant urbanites to eat noodles and barley.
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Despite the
oft-repeated claims that the patriotic Japanese were willing to make sacrifices for the ‘life-or-death struggle’ in China, Mary remarked that people actually complained heartily about the foreign rice and high prices.
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When a friend sent a parcel of American food she generously shared out the booty among her Japanese friends. ‘Food takes on so much importance in underfed Japan. Just to look around in a streetcar, one can readily see how true it is that Japan is an undernourished nation! And about half of the people have stomach trouble. Their everyday food is so frugal, so when they get a treat they soon overeat and … get indigestion.’
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The queues in front of the rice traders’ stores lengthened each week. In April 1941, even before the Japanese government declared war on the United States, rationing had to be introduced. The different foodstuffs on the ration card were sold in a variety of retail outlets and queuing for many hours a day became a feature of Japanese life. It could sometimes take one member of a family a whole five days queuing at shop after shop to procure enough food for a week.
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John Morris, a lecturer in English at Tokyo University between 1938 and 1941, recalled that in order to avoid the queues ‘those who could afford it [made] … even more frequent use of restaurants … The number of courses remained much the same … but the quality rapidly deteriorated. Beef, which in normal times is both plentiful and excellent in Japan, practically disappeared, its place on the menu being taken more often than not by whale meat … But quite often there would be no meat of any sort available, even in the better restaurants, for days at a time.’
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As Morris rightly noted, the disappearance of meat impacted mainly upon the wealthy. Despite the nutritional campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s meat consumption had not become established among the general population. In fact, for many the whale meat which they ate during the war was their first experience of affordable meat.
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When Morris returned to Britain in December 1941 he was struck by ‘the abundance of food. For months past I had been reading in the Japanese press about the terrible food shortage in England, so that it came as almost a shock, though an exceedingly pleasant one, to find how well we were being rationed.’
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Morris’s observation indicates just how tight Japan’s food situation was even before it entered the worldwide conflict. The diet provided by Japanese rations was austere. Each
person was allowed 330 grams of rice per day, which amounted to approximately 1,160 calories.
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This was adequate as long as different cereals such as barley, sweet potatoes and pumpkins were available to supplement the rice and make filling meals. Due to the concentration of all the farmers’ energies on the cultivation of staple crops, fruit and vegetables became extremely scarce. These were the main source of essential vitamins and minerals and their disappearance opened a serious nutritional gap in the diet.
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Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor the urban population was living close to the margins of adequate nutrition.

In order to address the problem of endless queues the government eventually placed food distribution in the hands of neighbourhood associations, which transferred the work of queuing from individual families to the head of the association. Senoh Kappa, a well-known stage-set designer, wrote a semi-fictional autobiography in which he told of his experiences as a boy, called ‘H’, during the war. His family were something of an oddity because they were Christian, and in an attempt to deflect criticism his mother took on the job of head of their neighbourhood association. ‘Even though she had expected the work to keep her very busy, Toshiko was astonished at the way it went on increasing from day to day … In the morning she would go to lectures on air raid drill, and in the afternoon she would gather the neighbours together to share with them what she’d learned; then the evenings would be occupied with the pick-up and distribution of rations.’
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She had to be very careful how she divided up the portions of dried fish and vegetables to avoid accusations of unfairness.

In Japanese society, where membership of a ‘voluntary’ association was virtually compulsory, the neighbourhood associations were the urban equivalent of the Rural Revitalization associations in the countryside. Initially conceived as instruments of social indoctrination, during the war they became increasingly important as economic and organizational institutions. They set up air and fire defence groups, kept an eye out for thieves and illicit activities, and encouraged their members to put their money into savings.
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The workings of the associations reveal the double-sided nature of the Japanese state’s dealings with its citizens. On the one hand they provided an instrument by which the government could intrude into the private lives of ordinary
people. Government nutritionists used the associations to influence eating habits, often directing which meals people should cook by tailoring the rations so that they provided the ingredients for a specific meal, the recipe for which was provided along with the food. Nutritionists taught the association heads how to cook with unfamiliar foods and gave them tips on how to save food, all of which they were expected to pass on to the women in their associations. The associations were used to convey the government message to its citizens that it expected them to make the best of their frugal rations as part of their sacrifice for the war effort.
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By reinforcing social control and mutual surveillance, they deepened the repressive nature of Japanese society. But they also satisfied the Japanese preference for social harmony. Rather than dealing with a large, faceless, centralized institution, the ordinary civilian encountered an old-fashioned replacement for the extended family. Those urban citizens without relatives to turn to could admit their need for aid to the association. When they worked as intended, the associations provided urban inhabitants with an extended and supportive community in a time of need.
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Rice and food shortages also impacted on military rations. In 1929 army meals provided each soldier with 4,000 calories a day.
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This was nearly double the average civilian consumption of 2,200 calories and far richer in protein and fat.
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But in 1941 the military ration was halved. At 600 grams of rice a day it was still double that received by civilians but it meant that Japanese soldiers, who in the 1930s had been fed almost as well as US servicemen, now received a ration which equated to only half the food eaten by a GI.
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The army catering service continued to demonstrate high levels of innovation and expertise in their creation of sophisticated ration packs. Indeed, American ration-pack developers considered the emergency rations of Japanese airmen particularly good, and issued instructions on how to work out what was in the packs so that US soldiers could consume any they found.
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But the sophisticated mess menus of Chinese noodles, curries and western pork cutlets were abandoned out in the field.

Each Japanese infantryman carried his personal ration of 600 grams of rice per day in his own rucksack along with packs of miso powder or soya sauce. If he was fortunate he was also issued with some tinned or pickled vegetables, tea, salt and sugar. Rice was not an easy food to
use as a field ration. It tended to spoil in the humid heat of the Pacific islands and it had to be prepared before dawn or after sunset lest the smoke from the numerous cooking fires gave away the unit’s position. Unlike canned meat it could not be eaten raw in an emergency. But the men preferred it to bread or hard biscuits.
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If supplies were maintained and the rice was mixed with barley or wheat and supplemented by other ration components, it provided an adequate, if frugal, field ration.

Altogether the food in a Japanese soldier’s rucksack weighed about four pounds – two-thirds of the weight of a US infantryman’s ration pack – but often less, as rice was perennially short in the field.
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Each soldier boiled his own rice in his mess tin, allowing the army to dispense with field kitchens. The ideal ratio of service troops to fighting men was one to one compared to the American ratio in the Pacific of eighteen service troops for every combat soldier.
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CHURCHILL’S RATIONS

The imperial army’s policy that as little energy as possible should be spent on the logistics of food supply meant that Japanese commanders generally issued soldiers going into battle with only enough food for a few days. General Slim, Allied Commander-in-Chief of the defensive campaign in Burma, was astonished to find that the Japanese would provide only nine days’ supply for campaigns which were clearly likely to last for weeks. ‘If it was Heaven’s will that they would win then something would turn up – like the supply dumps of their enemies.’
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Indeed, rather than considering the capture of enemy stocks of food as a welcome bonus, Japanese commanders regarded this as integral to supply plans. In the early campaigns of 1941–42 in Malaya and Burma the Allied shock and lack of preparation for invasion worked to the advantage of the Japanese. However, the stunning success of these Japanese victories masked the weaknesses of Japanese logistics. The problems involved with feeding the troops were solved by Allied incompetence rather than by efficient Japanese organization.

In Malaya the Japanese surprised the British commanders by skirting round their carefully constructed road-blocks and driving their light tanks and bicycles right through the supposedly impenetrable
rubber-tree plantations. Japanese troops charging into the British rear areas, bayonets at the ready, created an unrealistic assessment among the Allies that the Japanese were spectacularly adept at jungle warfare.
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In the chaos and disorganization of the retreat, the Allies left behind them large quantities of abandoned supplies. At the aerodrome in Jitra, in northern Malaya, the Japanese found fuel and bombs which they then put to good use bombarding Allied positions. They nicknamed it the ‘Churchill airfield’. The food stores and boxes of rations the Allies left behind them became known as ‘Churchill’s rations’.
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Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, the author of the pamphlet
Read this alone
, which warned the troops not to rely on food supplies from the home country, later proudly recalled that ‘each man had been moved to the front with dry bread and rice sufficient for only a few days in accordance with the plan … Owing to the availability of Churchill supplies there was no necessity for us to transport even one bag of rice or tin of gasoline.’
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This was gleeful overstatement but it was certainly true that the Japanese relied heavily on British and Australian food dumps throughout the Malayan campaign. As the soldiers began to filter over on to Singapore island they had completely outrun their own supply lines.
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When he turned his attention to Burma, General Yamashita continued to implement the policy. The troops detailed to move across the Burmese border were told ‘if food is not enough, get it from the enemy’.
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Lance Corporal Kawamata Koji recalled that this was exactly what the troops did. As his infantry regiment fought its way into Burma on a meagre diet of boiled rice, thin miso soup and wild grasses, they discovered an abandoned gun emplacement stocked with boxes of food filled with tins of corned beef, cheese, butter, coffee and tea. The soldiers ‘grabbed the food and filled their stomachs’. Later that night they moved on towards the River Sitang, ‘refreshed by the present from Mr Churchill’.
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Corporal Nakai Buhachiro’s regiment was not as fortunate. Having sacrificed food in order to carry more ammunition, they crossed the Siam–Burmese border with only one week’s rations and two packets of biscuits as an emergency reserve. As they hauled their heavy horse-drawn guns through the jungle, struggling to keep up with the fast-moving infantry, their rice ran out. They made a porridge from the skin of the paddy they carried for the horses and eventually killed a pack-ox, only to discover that Siamese oxen were much tougher than
the Japanese variety. Nakai’s gums ached so badly from chewing on the meat that he was reduced to sipping ox soup.
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