Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (52 page)

A similar story was played out at Imphal, where the Japanese besieged the British for two months. Unable to get their hands on enemy stores, they could only watch as American Dakotas flew in 40 tons of food and ammunition a day.
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Under orders from their new Supreme Allied Commander, Mountbatten, the British held on, despite the onset of the monsoon.
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In contrast, stuck in their ‘octopus holes’, up to their armpits in water, the Japanese ‘felt [they] had arrived at the very limit of [their] endurance’.
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Despite Lieutenant-General Mutaguchi’s repeated exhortations that the troops should continue fighting, Lieutenant Sato stated to Mutaguchi’s chief of staff that before his men could do anything else ‘first we must eat’ and he decided to withdraw.
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The retreat was a horror of mud and death. The medical orderlies constantly slipped and fell and the wounded on the stretchers groaned and complained. The path was littered with rain-sodden corpses, stinking of decomposition and crawling with maggots.
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Emaciated or crippled soldiers were given hand grenades and encouraged ‘to sort themselves out’.
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The survivors arriving in the field hospitals looked like ‘living skeletons’, in uniforms ‘worn to shreds’. Presented with rice in their mess tins they would pitifully ask Nurse Nagai Hideko, ‘May I eat all of this?’
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The ‘defeated stragglers’ felt great bitterness towards their commanders who, having issued orders for the men to fight on regardless of the fact that they had no ammunition or food, had either committed suicide or escaped.
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The fighting was vicious on both sides. At Kohima and Imphal 17,587 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded. The final death toll on the Japanese side was far higher. More than 60,000 Japanese died during this campaign but almost half of them did not die from injuries incurred in battle but from starvation and associated diseases.
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The key to success in battle in such under-developed areas was technical and logistical superiority. As they pressed on into Burma in 1945 the Allies were in a position to support their troops with 58,725 tons of airborne supplies, move 48,900 personnel into the area by air
and evacuate 11,580 casualties by plane.
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The Japanese were still relying on obsolete tactics such as rounding up draught cattle and attempting to capture enemy supplies. In a mirror image of the reversal of fortunes on the eastern front, the British, like the Soviets, were now well equipped and able to command superior logistical techniques. The Japanese, like the Germans, fought on bravely but were utterly lacking in the technical resources to secure victory.

Official figures for exactly how many Japanese soldiers died of starvation do not exist, but a Japanese scholar has produced estimates based on careful examination of the conditions in each battle theatre. He confirms Imamura’s estimate that 15,000 of the 20,000 who died on Guadalcanal starved to death. Only 6 per cent of the 157,646 troops sent to New Guinea survived. Almost all of those who died were killed by starvation and tropical diseases. In the Philippines, where the Japanese retreat was extremely disorganized, he estimates that 400,000 of the 498,000 Japanese deaths were caused by starvation. Altogether it would appear that 60 per cent, or more than 1 million, of the total 1.74 million Japanese military deaths between 1941 and 1945 were caused by starvation and diseases associated with malnutrition.
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The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal did not prosecute the Japanese war leader-ship for crimes against their own people. The men at Imperial Headquarters were never held to account for their decision to abandon the New Guinea garrison and a host of other Japanese soldiers to ‘self-sufficiency’, which by the end of the war had become a euphemism for leaving them to die of starvation.
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HUNGER ON THE HOME ISLANDS

Ordinary Japanese civilians never received clear information about the events of the war. They had to piece together a picture of what was really going on from rumour and obscure and incomplete references in the newspapers and on the radio. Reports of ‘brilliant continental [Chinese] campaigns unknown in the history of war’ were a sure indication that the conflict in the Pacific was going badly. But rumours did filter through to Japan that the blockade was having a terrible impact on the troops fighting on the Pacific islands. In May 1943 the secret
diarist Kiyosawa attended a lecture at the Japan Club given by a Commander Akiyama where the fighting on the island of Attu was discussed. He reported that the commander described the Japanese army as ‘falling into isolated helplessness … it is a fact that the destruction en route by submarines is considerable, and the soldiers occupying the island have only the military equipment they brought at the beginning. I sympathize with the desperateness of their fight.’
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In November 1944 Kiyosawa heard ‘a story at the barbershop’ that the soldiers ‘did not have food and ate human flesh … they killed prisoners of war. It is said they were placed in a large cauldron, the oil was skimmed, and they were eaten … They were probably exaggerating, but I think to a certain extent it might be true.’
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While rumours reached the home islands of the hungry plight of the soldiers, for urban civilians the discomforts of war turned into privation. In March 1944 Kiyosawa noted that ‘everywhere one goes, the core of discussion is the inadequacy of food supplies’.
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At his daughter’s school the girls no longer warmed their lunches on the stove. ‘This is because they were immediately stolen.’
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Visiting Hokkaido, he was told by his guide that his family of seven children had nothing to eat but gruel and they had all lost between 6 and 9 kilograms in weight.
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Kiyosawa noted that ‘of late everybody is extremely emaciated. When I encountered Ohata of the Foreign Ministry after an absence of one month, he was completely emaciated. When I met my neighbour Koike on the street he was so thin I didn’t recognize him. It seems that everybody is like this.’
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Between the spring and summer of 1944 Kiyosawa himself lost more than 5 kilograms.
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The Japanese government placed an inordinate amount of faith in food science as a way of overcoming food shortages. During the war ten new training establishments for dieticians were founded, where the students were taught how to maintain a healthy diet despite food shortages. The knowledge was then passed on to the neighbourhood associations.
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However, there were limits to what inventive cookery could achieve without ingredients. The Provisions Friends’ Association which had begun life in the 1920s, spreading the benefits of the cheap and nutritious western dishes advocated by the military, was reduced to publishing posters and pamphlets advertising the benefits of chewing rice more carefully. It also devised a variety of chemical dietary
supplements and a sinister-sounding cooking activator, which was advertised as softening fibres and disguising bad smells and thus appeared to promote the consumption of stale and indigestible foods.
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Indeed, many of the substitute foods which the government’s nutritionists invented were fairly indigestible. In
A Boy Called H
, Senoh Kappa described how a series of articles began appearing in the newspapers in 1943, entitled ‘How to Make Do on “Decisive Battle” Food’. Although H and his schoolfriends were so hungry they ‘manfully tried anything that seemed remotely edible’, they were irritated by the way in which the propaganda tried to divert attention away from the shortcomings of the government. Slogans which declared, ‘Shortages of foodstuffs mean shortage of ingenuity!’ seemed to imply that the fault lay with the general population’s lack of initiative. The cheerful exhortation, ‘Let’s get by on “decisive battle” food!’ encapsulated the government’s helpless response to a failing strategy: the Japanese must try harder. One such article recommended a variety of ‘nourishing’ edible insects, in particular the grubs of bees, dobsonflies, dragonflies and long-horned beetles. It suggested boiling them in soya sauce or roasting them in a little oil. Another set of suggestions gave substitutes for rice such as the skins of sweet potatoes, pumpkins or mandarin oranges, dried and then ground to make a flour out of which dumplings could be made. The same article emphasized that the straw of the rice plant was also edible and when ground and mixed with powdered
hijiki
(a type of seaweed) and flour and kneaded into a dough was said to make excellent noodles. ‘H had eaten bee grubs and locusts, but resolved on no account to eat rice straw.’
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Matsumoto Nakako recalled that these
kai somen
(sea treasure noodles) were on sale in the markets at a very cheap price when she was living in rural Hakata in 1946. At the time there was nothing much else to eat except pumpkin, and her family ate the
kai somen
in order to ‘feel full’. Her memory of them was of ‘a wonderful food’. In 1970, when she became a professor of food and nutrition, she met a man who had worked as an expert for the government in the wartime agricultural department. He told her they had been made from seaweed mixed with rice straw. They made some for themselves and tried them, and she realized how very hungry she must have been as a child. They tasted horrible.
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By the end of 1944 Kiyosawa reported that the dominant topic of conversation in the cities was no longer food but ‘amateur farming. Everybody is doing this.’
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Government advisers instructed the neighbourhood associations on the cultivation of vegetables, and gardening tips were broadcast on the radio.
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‘The newspapers talk of nothing but vegetables.’ As usual the government promoted strategies without providing the means to employ them. Kiyosawa was frustrated. ‘We we are told to plant leeks, even I searched everywhere for leek seeds, but in vain. I merely planted what was given to me by a neighbour.’
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He reported the appearance of posters saying ‘Plant more pumpkins at any cost’ but he despaired that this was only propaganda and ‘nothing is done … From this one probably understands how unproductive bureaucratism is.’
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The food shortages adversely affected the productivity of workers in the war industries. In 1943 rations for industrial workers provided a spare 2,000 calories for men and 1,474 calories for women. The food intake of Japanese workers was therefore comparable to that of Soviet workers in the early years of the war. The government made an effort to boost productivity by delivering extra rations to industrial plants. Male heavy manual workers received an extra 730 grams of food, women doing the same work an extra 560 grams. Many factory mana-gers bought food on the black market to distribute to their employees.
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Kiyosawa heard ‘that people like night-shift work in factories because they can have a meal at night’.
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There were signs of hunger and desperation as workers went absent from their factories more and more frequently. They travelled into the countryside to barter with the peasants for food. By 1945 the process of progressively stripping away one’s clothes, jewellery and other valuables in return for food was referred to as
takenoko seikatsu
or the ‘bamboo-shoot existence’, as bamboo shoots peel away in layers, much like onions. In the countryside a new breed of criminal appeared. The ‘vegetable thief’ crept into the fields at night and stole the food before it could be harvested. In 1944 nearly half the economic crimes committed in the Osaka prefecture involved food.
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In the last half of 1944 the Japanese made one last effort to sustain the war effort and substantially increased the production of war goods, using up stocks of raw materials in the process and employing all
available labour.
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On 4 July 1944 Kiyosawa heard with despair that ‘those in middle school and above the third year level in elementary school are sent to munitions factories and made to work … with this, Japanese scholarship will be completely eliminated … If Japan goes on just as it is, it will plunge into darkness.’
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By October of that year nearly 2 million students over the age of ten had been put to work in Japanese industry. By February 1945 the ranks of student workers had swelled to 3 million, two-thirds of all children of that age.
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Kiyosawa’s daughter Eiko went to work at the Japan Steel Pipe factory. The one advantage was that she was given a lunch of ‘rice and soup in which two or three pieces of vegetables have been added’.
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For H, lunchtime was the highlight of his day working at the school factory. The students were given bread rolls which tasted as though they were made with sawdust, or rice-balls leavened with sorghum, which gave them an unappealing ‘pinkish hue … the sorghum rice didn’t just taste unpleasant, it had a dreadful smell too, which combined with the smell of the bakelite container so that when you took the lid off you were overcome by a stale, warm odour’. There might also be a stew of dried herrings or a pickled radish leaf. It all tasted awful but they ‘devoured the stuff ravenously even while they complained’.
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