Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (49 page)

The Japanese captured Rangoon in March 1942. Here they discovered storehouses crammed with whisky, canned food, coffee, cocoa, milk, butter, cheese, corned beef, jam and cigarettes.
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The Japanese enthusiasm for western rations did, however, lead to some unfortunate incidents. Second Lieutenant Yoshino Suichiro’s ‘gift ration from Mr Churchill’ contained an unpleasant surprise. Besides whisky and chocolate, each man in the lieutenant’s water-supply unit was issued with two packs of chewing gum. Before long all the soldiers were afflicted by diarrhoea. The chewing gum was ‘not a candy at all but a medicinal chewing gum for children containing a laxative!’
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Food shortages on the home islands meant that the idea that the army abroad should not become a drain on the homeland was a first principle for the Japanese, just as it was for the Germans. Like the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, the Japanese army requisitioned food from local farmers and indulged in wild and unofficial plunder. In China troops often raided granaries. Indeed, Kiyosawa Kiyoshi met a journalist who had worked in China and told him that the Chinese ‘attach the insect radical to the “Imperial” character in the phrase “Imperial Army”’, transforming it into the ‘locust army’.
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Where the imperial army differed from the Wehrmacht was in its application of the principle of self-sufficiency. If there was not enough local food the soldiers were supposed to grow it themselves. In Malaya the Grow More Food campaign was not just aimed at the indigenous population. Japanese officials in the administration, businessmen running the stock companies that arrived to extract south-east Asian raw materials, and the army of occupation, officers and men alike, were also expected to put several hours a week into growing vegetables.
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Those stationed in more remote areas were sent minimal supplies and expected to fend for themselves. It would have been impossible to send Allied troops into the jungles of south-east Asia and demand that they organize their own provisions. Firstly, this would have been seen by them as a dereliction of the army’s duty to supply them with food. Secondly, the soldiers of western countries had sophisticated tastes and (even if they were farmers) led civilian lives which meant that they
were unused to subsistence farming and foraging. Japanese soldiers had no such high expectations of their army commanders and had simple needs. They demonstrated great ingenuity in finding themselves something to eat.

Abe Hiroshi, supervising the building of the Burmese railway in the remote border area between Siam and Burma, recalled that the elephants which brought in their food would often fail to arrive. ‘When lunchtime approached, about ten men would be assigned to chase down lizards. They were real big and you caught them by hitting them on the head with a stick. The beautiful pink meat was delicious.’
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In Burma Sergeant Aihara Isawo’s company commander devised an ingenious means of catching fish. Each night the river was diverted so that it flowed on to the grasslands around the army camp. The next morning the water was drained away, leaving catfish and snakehead stranded. The soldiers would eat them fresh and then salt down the surplus. ‘Dried fish proved very useful later on our long march in the first Arakan operation, as our only source of protein.’
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If this strategy of living off the land, combined with self-sufficiency farming and foraging projects, was successful on mainland south-east Asia it was much more difficult to employ on the islands of the Pacific. In August 1941 the Vice-Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Tsukada Osamu, warned that the policy of dotting small numbers of troops about the Pacific on isolated islands was ‘like sowing salt in the sea’.
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But, with a characteristic determination to avoid unwelcome truths, the army command transferred him from his post just before the war got underway. Most of the Pacific islands which Japan occupied were populated by subsistence farmers who supplemented their small gardens with hunting and gathering. This was quite different from Burma’s or Indo-China’s rice-producing agricultural economies. It was unrealistic to expect islanders to produce large surpluses of food to feed armies of Japanese troops. To some extent the army command acknowledged this and made provision for supplies to be brought in from elsewhere. Rabaul on New Britain was chosen as a forward supply base for the south-west Pacific; here regular deliveries from Japan and south-east Asia were collected and then sent out to troops on other islands. It was planned to maintain stores on Rabaul at a level sufficient to supply three divisions (about 80,000 men) for two months.
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Initially things
went well. In September 1942, 180 tons of fresh vegetables, 60 tons of fresh meats, 25 tons of soya sauce, 9 tons of sugar, 100 tons of rice, 2 million cigarettes and bottles of soft drinks, 20,000 bottles of beer and about 5 tons of candy were unloaded from the refrigerated
Taiko Maru
.
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A number of self-sufficiency projects were set up, a bakery, a miso paste factory and a tobacco factory were constructed alongside a copra oil mill and two ice plants. Until 1943 Rabaul functioned as an effective, partly self-sufficient base for operations in the south-west Pacific but then the American blockade of Japanese shipping began to take effect and, after the successes of 1941–42, the Japanese campaign went into reverse.

THE AMERICAN BLOCKADE

One of the fatal flaws in the Japanese military command’s conduct of the war was their woefully inadequate preparation for anti-submarine warfare. Given that Japan’s war economy was absolutely dependent on merchant shipping, this was utterly irresponsible. On the home islands Japan’s war industries were unable to function without imports of steel, aluminium, iron ore and oil.
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The arms and equipment then had to be shipped out to the soldiers throughout the empire. Japan’s cities were dependent on rice imports from abroad, and even the internal distribution of the domestic rice crop was dependent on shipping. A large proportion of the urban population lived on the island of Honshu, while much of Japan’s food was grown on the islands of Hokkaido and Kyushu. Shipping was needed to take the rice from one island to another. The mountainous terrain of Japan’s islands meant that even if the rice crop was destined to remain on the island where it was grown, it was easier to transport it by rail to the nearest port and then ship it around the coast to the cities. Japan’s sea communications were steadily eroded throughout the war. Even by November 1942, before the American submarine campaign had reached its full force, Japanese shipping capacity had been severely reduced with the sinking of 285 merchant ships.
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The concentration on building battleships for the chimerical decisive battle with the United States meant that Japan had neither sufficient shipping nor enough escort vessels to withstand the
onslaught when it began in earnest in 1943. Japan’s merchant marine could not have been expected to withstand a concerted attack, even if there had been an efficient allocation of resources and no incompetence. From 1943 Japan’s shipping capacity melted away, leaving its troops stranded across the Pacific, and the home islands shut off from essential supplies.

In 1943 the food supply in Japan reached a critical turning-point. The 3.5 million servicemen stationed on the home islands were eating about half of the domestically grown rice crop.
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The peasants were allowed to keep back around 400–600 grams of rice a day for each member of the family before handing over the rest to the government.
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This left the urban population with a very small share of an ever-diminishing harvest, and then rice imports from south-east Asia more or less ceased. The government was forced to eke out the rice supply to the cities and towns with substitute foods. In 1943, between 10 and 20 per cent of the rice ration consisted of substitutes such as Manchurian wheat and barley. The ration rice became known as ‘Five Colour Rice’ because of its ‘mixture of white rice, yellow (old) rice, green beans, red grains and brown insects’.
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Once a week the urban population were issued with noodles. In his semi-fictional autobiography, Senoh Kappa’s alter ego, ‘H’, recalled some soldiers who came to train at his school, and at lunchtime sat and ate white rice while the boys contented themselves with ‘meals of “substitute rice” … pieces of pumpkin and sweet potato’.
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In the first year of the Pacific war it had been possible to supplement the ration rice with unrationed pumpkin and sweet potato. When the government began to monopolize these foodstuffs in order to distribute them instead of rice, it became much more difficult to find extra food and meals became increasingly inadequate. Meat ‘was almost unknown’ and fish was strictly limited and expensive. Milk was only available for the sick and for children. Even supplies of soya sauce and miso paste were running short.
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The amount of protein and calcium in the diet began to fall, while palatability was much reduced by the lack of sugar and edible oils.
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Each time Iida Momo returned home from his boarding school he could see ‘how the war was eating away at the vitality of Tokyo. One week the sake shop down the road was shuttered and silent: supplies of alcohol had dried up. The next week the nearby geisha house had
vanished, its occupants packed off to provide consolation to soldiers on the battle front.’
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The restaurants too began to close. Arakawa Hiroyo and her husband owned a bakery shop in Tokyo. They made
katsutera
, a sort of sponge cake made with flour, eggs and sugar. The decline of their business reflected the dwindling food supply in Japan. At first, as a food business, they were supplied with flour and sugar, and customers would bring them vegetables in exchange for
katsutera
.
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Eventually the supply of their ingredients declined and they were only able to bake every two or three days. Then the police would drop by. ‘Oh, today you’re baking?’ they would comment innocently. ‘This house sure smells good.’ And then Arakawa would have to give them some cakes. The grocers in her street suffered from the same problem. Police and soldiers would simply pocket the food and refuse to pay.
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Eggs were the first of their ingredients to disappear altogether. For a while they had a supply of powdered egg from Shanghai but eventually this became unavailable, as did sugar. Arakawa changed the business to making sandwiches, but even these they had to fill with whale ham because there was no pork to be had. Then bread and whale ham became unavailable. Undaunted they changed to making ‘cut bread’ for the army, which meant that supplies of the necessary ingredients were guaranteed. Cut bread was a dough filled with bean paste. Then the military laid claim to their bread-making machine for the iron and they had to close their business. By this time the air raids had become so bad in Tokyo that they were glad to leave and Arakawa and her son went to live in the countryside.
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The black market became rife in Japan, which, despite its outward appearance of social conformism, had its fair share of spivs who rejected the rules. Iida Momo’s father, Iida Toshifumi was one of them. As a young man Iida Toshifumi had eloped with a girl from his neighbourhood the night before her wedding (to another man). The couple travelled through Korea and Manchuria, eventually reaching Siberia, supporting themselves with a scam. Iida would pretend to sell his partner to the local brothel and then, having pocketed the money, help her to escape. He returned to Tokyo in the 1920s and lived by various dubious schemes until he set up a small company making ultraviolet lamps. During the war he converted to making valves for X-ray equipment to be used by the armed forces, and made good money selling a
portion of his raw materials on the black market to businesses without army contracts. Iida Momo recalled that his ‘father had absolutely no ideological feeling about the war whatsoever. His war was all about how to cheat war: how to get enough food for his family; how to keep his business going; how to prevent his son from being conscripted … He’d spent much of his life as a virtual outlaw, and he had learnt not to pay any attention to what the authorities told him.’
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By mid-1943 even generally law-abiding citizens were resorting to the black market in order to buy food. A survey of 2,000 urban families found that more than half regularly bought food on the black market. Even though they did not feel they could afford it, they felt they had little choice.
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This was a sure sign that the food supplied on the ration was insufficient. At this point in the war urban Japanese felt the lack of fruit and vegetables most keenly. A secret government inquiry into the rationing system in 1943 found that the number of vegetables actually distributed was 30 per cent below the amounts stated on the ration cards; fruit availability was 60 per cent less than the stated ration.
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Kiyosawa Kiyoshi was a journalist and historian who kept a wartime diary in which he frequently expressed his disgust with the hypocrisy and stupidity of the various governments which came and went throughout the conflict. The diary was kept at great danger to himself and his family. If the
kempeitai
had found it he would certainly have been accused of un-Japanese defeatism and faced imprisonment. Kiyosawa first began to comment on the lack of vegetables in December 1943, when only two (large white Japanese) radishes were available for each family in his neighbourhood association.
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By March 1944 ‘half a radish must last a family of four two days’. In April ‘the rationing of vegetables, of late it is said to be one sen a person for one day. But one sen is not worth one green onion.’
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Fruit was unobtainable in the towns, and when he visited Hakone in the spring of 1944 he was shocked to discover that persimmons were unaffordable even in the countryside.
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A report on food conditions in Japan based on information collected from enemy sources for the New Zealand intelligence department reported that the entire apple crop was ‘reserved for hospital patients and soldiers’.
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Kiyosawa heard that a nutritionist examining families in Hayama who were living entirely on the ration without any black market purchases found that they were suffering
from night-blindness (a symptom of vitamin A and B deficiencies).
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Thus, by the end of 1943 the declining ration was beginning to cause serious malnutrition among the Japanese population.