The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  On 15 May 1932 Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was assassinated by a group of young army and navy officers in an attempted coup. At their trial the assassins invoked the agrarian crisis to justify their actions. One of the soldiers stated that, while farmers made model soldiers, ‘it is extremely dangerous that … [they] should be worried about their starving families when they are at the front exposing themselves to death’. He went on to accuse big businessmen of making fat profits while ‘the young children of the impoverished farmers … attend school without breakfast, and their families subsist on rotten potatoes’.37 The men were treated with conspicuous leniency, and were allowed to use their trial to issue lengthy political statements, which the newspapers reported in full. The trials brought to public attention a number of issues which made up the pattern of crisis but which were not normally presented as part of a whole: ‘the rural crisis, political and ideological corruption, fears of military weakness, Japan’s international standing, and Manchuria’.38 Discussion of them as interlinked problems strengthened the right-wing position advocated by the military. Militaristic nationalism attacked absentee landlords, nouveaux riches businessmen, power-seeking politicians and individualistic youth as representatives of the corrupting westernization of Japanese society. The people were urged to return to a more Japanese austerity, greater obedience to the state and to revive the Japanese military and moral spirit.39

  While the extremists did not take over the government, more moderate exponents of their views did gain power. In 1932 parliamentary government was replaced by a cabinet of ‘national unity’ made up of military leaders and bureaucrats. The militaristic nature of Japanese government was reinforced by the fact that both the army and navy ministers in the cabinet were serving officers, and thus their allegiance was to the military rather than the government. In addition, they exercised rights of veto over the membership of the cabinet and could bring down any government which threatened to challenge the power of the military. Moreover, foreign policy was formed not within the cabinet but during Liaison Conferences where the prime minister, foreign, war, army and navy ministers met with the military chiefs of staff, whose power derived from the fact that they were directly answerable to the Emperor. The decision-making process at these conferences followed a distinctively Japanese pattern of lengthy discussion and debate, all carried on using an oblique language which meant that decisions appeared to arise out of the group rather than to emanate from a particular person. The decision was then ratified by a conference with the Emperor when it took on the appearance not only of consensus but of being sacrosanct.40

  Each terrorist attack further intimidated the traditional ruling class, and after each of the five attempted coups the government which re-formed was progressively more isolationist. In June 1936 Prince Konoe Fumimaro became prime minister and appointed Hirota Koki as his foreign minister. Profoundly opposed to free trade and industrialization, and aggressive advocates of imperialism, they took Japan down an isolationist path which made war with the west ever more likely.41 An ideological consensus began to emerge among the ruling elite which acknowledged that the only way to fulfil Japan’s destiny would be to slip free of western domination and gain power and influence over east Asia. While the Emperor provided spiritual focus, military expansion was presented as the only way forward.42

  Throughout the 1930s the military concentrated on building up a support base within rural society, conducting surveys of village health and addressing rural unemployment with public works schemes. Their concerns were less humanitarian than practical. Large numbers of applicants to the army were failing their physical examinations in the 1930s, and 500 of the soldiers dispatched to China to deal with the ‘Manchurian Incident’ had been pronounced unfit to fight within weeks of their arrival.43 The army wanted to ensure a good supply of healthy recruits and to increase rural productivity in preparation for a possible war. But, when it came to the crunch, the military were adamantly opposed to sacrificing their lion’s share of the budget to rural revitalization programmes. In fact, it was the villages which paid for most of the enormous military budget which the army secured in 1933.44 Militarist and nationalist groups exploited the agrarian crisis to press for policies which pushed Japan towards war.45 But it is unclear how much actual rural support for these groups and their policies there was. Real support was, however, relatively unimportant in securing their political position, given that Japanese politics consisted mainly of manoeuvres between small elite groups.

  The countryside fed the growing isolationism and aggressive nationalism of 1930s Japan in a more diffuse way. In the 1930s a repressive ‘collectivist ethic’ dominated social relations and political thinking. Those who advocated democracy laid themselves open to charges of individualistic selfishness. Internationalism and the pursuit of open economic relations with the rest of the world could be dismissed as ‘traitorous self-seeking, disloyalty to the national polity’.46 Western liberalism was un-Japanese and therefore unworthy. This pattern of thought was particularly well entrenched in the villages where ‘families … bred into the personalities of their children a deference to all authoritarian demands to conform to the needs of the community as a whole’.47 Three-quarters of all politically active adults came from this conformist rural background.

  Conformism was strengthened by the Rural Revitalization campaign, the government’s remedy for agriculture. There was no question of the campaign embarking on the painful process of restructuring land-ownership and challenge the position of landlords. Instead, farmers were urged to work harder and achieve more with less. Peasants were provided with training and shown more efficient planning and farming techniques. Women were urged to use their time more effectively and to engage in book-keeping, cottage industries and economizing kitchen improvements. Every aspect of daily life was implicated not only in the recovery of the village, but according to the rhetoric, in the economic health of the nation as a whole. These messages were transmitted through a variety of agricultural associations, co-operatives, youth leagues and women’s organizations. Japan in the 1930s was supremely successful at making voluntary membership of an organization virtually compulsory. ‘No one was left out. Not only could everyone be involved in reconstructing the village, but bureaucrats, activists, and, increasingly, rural Japanese themselves, believed that they should be.’48 In this way the countryside was incorporated into a general process of spreading ultranationalism from above. Political parties, unions and religious organizations were either coerced into stating their support for the state or silenced by the police. Conformity was encouraged through education and ‘voluntary’ associations of which virtually everyone was a member. The citizen was redefined as a member of a family which owed its allegiance to the Emperor. Although there were certainly plenty of Japanese who did not share this view of themselves and the nation, to express dissent from this view became increasingly difficult and dangerous.49

  By 1937 the resurgence of the industrial economy and a corresponding rise in the price of rice and silk had brought the countryside out of the depths of depression. Now the understanding of the causes of the crisis facing the nation shifted. Withdrawal from the League of Nations over Japan’s annexation of Manchuria, the naval limitations conference of 1936 and the imposition of British and American protectionist trading tariffs in south-east Asia focused attention on Japan’s need to find new markets and develop new territory.50 The Japanese army were made wary by an alliance between Chinese Nationalists and communists against the Japanese in Manchuria. When a skirmish between Japanese and Chinese troops broke out in the small town of Wanping in July 1937 the Kwantung army took Japan into war with China. Thus, by the time Japan entered the wider international conflict in 1941 it had already been at war with China for four years.

  In the Japanese countryside the focus shifted from revitalization to mobilization. The message did not change. The farmers were still urged to work harder and produce more with less. But the peasants were now striving fo
r a stable home front rather than future prosperity. The agricultural associations and co-operatives of the Rural Revitalization campaign facilitated, and even made almost imperceptible, the deeper intrusion of the state into the lives of farmers. These organizations no longer made suggestions – they now determined which crops were grown, allocated fertilizer and collected the harvest for state distribution. The option to ignore or evade social control became less and less possible.51

  ONE MILLION HOUSEHOLDS IN MANCHURIA

  In the same year that Japan went to war in China, the Ministry of Agriculture adopted an agrarian emigration scheme under the characteristically long-winded title, ‘Plan for the Settlement of One Million Households over Twenty Years’. An increase in landlord–tenant disputes over unfair eviction had given contemporary observers the impression that the agrarian problem was not so much that the countryside could not produce enough food, but that there were too many farmers competing for too little land. Finally the government acknowledged that it was not that the farmers needed to work harder but that a viable farm was the key to agricultural success. A survey by the Ministry of Agriculture worked out that the ideal farm size was a relatively small 1.6 cho (4 acres). According to this calculation, in order to ensure that every farm in Japan was the optimum size, 31 per cent of the farming population would have to leave the land.52 Just as in Germany, the idea developed that the Japanese needed their own Lebensraum. This was to be in the puppet state of Manchukuo, which, like eastern Europe for Germany, was styled as Japan’s equivalent to the American west. Agrarian advocates of the plan argued that, ‘like the colonial days in American history, a new State is in the making, the vast virgin plains, unhampered by tradition, ready to welcome armies of fresh immigrants’.53 While German agronomists claimed that the indigenous Slavs had no right to eastern land as they did not farm it properly, the Japanese simply ignored the presence of Chinese and Korean farmers and projected an image of Manchuria as an empty land. One woman who went to Manchuria in 1931 imagined that it was ‘a limitless snowy plain containing only huts’.54

  The suggestion that the social problem of poor tenant farmers could be solved by exporting them to the colonies had been on the political agenda since 1900. In 1904 the Japanese cabinet pronounced that ‘If large numbers of emigrants from our country … can penetrate the [Korean] interior … we will acquire at a single stroke an emigration colony for our excess population and sufficient supplies of foodstuffs.’55 In 1908 the Oriental Development Company was created with the purpose of subsidizing 10,000 Japanese annually to settle in Korea. The plan was not a success. Few farmers signed up for the project and those that did move to Korea often suffered from malnutrition to the point that they were too physically debilitated to work.56 The only settlers who succeeded did so because they acted as landlords and moneylenders, renting out their land to Korean tenants. Korea was a profitable place for entrepreneurs, clerks, shopkeepers and others providing a service to the urban Japanese population but the peninsula was never going to be covered in prosperous Japanese smallholdings.57 Ideas for Japanese settlement in Formosa were equally unrealistic. Japanese sugar companies had little interest in diverting land to settlers when they were making such a good profit using Formosan labourers. Both Korea and Formosa were far more successful as suppliers of food and as markets for Japanese goods.58

  These failed attempts to create Japanese farming communities in the colonies did nothing to dampen the fervour for the plan to settle Manchuria in certain sections of Japanese political, military and academic circles. When campaigners managed to persuade the ministry to accept the scheme it was planned to move 1 million farmers, or one-fifth of the 1936 farming population, to China. Those who were targeted to leave were the very poor tenant farmers. If the poor left the villages and their land was redistributed, all Japanese farmers could be transformed into middle-class farmers and social inequalities in the rural areas could be ironed out without affecting the wealthy landlords. Thus, Japanese agriculture would be rehabilitated without disturbing the social order.59

  Just as the German General Plan for the East envisaged the creation of a modern but idyllic version of German society, Japan’s plan for Manchuria imagined an idealized agrarian version of Japanese society. The pioneers would live in a network of communities where each peasant would be allocated an equal holding with the same number of livestock. The entire village would work together as a co-operative using the most up-to-date farming techniques. By the end of the twenty years it would take to implement the scheme, 10 per cent of the population of Manchuria would be Japanese. Thus, the colony would have been assimilated into the Japanese polity. At the same time the farmers would double as ‘mainland warriors of the plough’, providing ‘a shield for the nation’ in the face of a possible attack by the Soviets.60

  The Japanese plan did not go so far as the German one, in that it did not envisage wholesale extermination of the indigenous population. But the reality that lay behind the idyll was equally brutal and the impact on the Chinese farmers was comparable. The usual Japanese method of obtaining land for the settlers was simply to misclassify it as uncultivated, ignoring the Chinese and Korean peasants’ farms. The farmers were evicted or coerced into ‘selling’ their land for artificially low prices. In 1941 many of them were still waiting for their payments.61 Tsukui Shin’ya, an official who organized forcible land purchases in 1938, later recognized that he had participated in a crime: ‘We trampled underfoot the wishes of farmers who held fast to the land and, choking off their entreaties full of lamentations and kneeling, forced them to sell it. When we thrust on them a dirt-cheap selling price, even if the colonization group resettled the terrain, I was saddened that we would be leaving them to a future of calamity, and I felt that we had committed a crime by our actions.’62 The Chinese twisted the name of the colonial office (kaituoju) and renamed it the ‘office of murders’ (kaidaoju).63

  Reality did not, of course, live up to the ideal. Those Japanese settlers who were persuaded by their fellow villagers in Japan to make the journey to China were not pursuing some planner’s dream of an ideal collective society. The idea that the Japanese settlements should function in self-sufficient isolation from Chinese society would have condemned the settlers to wearing home-made woollen clothes, and eating a basic diet of rice mixed with millet, local game and vegetables.64 Instead, they chose to hire Chinese labour to farm the large plots and they grew rice and soya beans as cash crops so that they could pay farmhands and buy in household goods. For the majority of settlers life in Manchuria was unhappy and alienated. The army’s plan that the Japanese settlements should be located in the strategically vulnerable north and east meant that farming was hard and life was brutal. The Japanese villages were surrounded by hostile Chinese and frequently subject to attack by ‘bandits’.65

  If the scheme was not an unqualified success in Manchuria, it did little to solve rural problems on the mainland. Settlers tended to come, not from the areas where overpopulation was a problem, but rather from those silk-producing areas which had been worst hit by the Depression.66 By the time the emigration movement was in full swing, industrial expansion was absorbing labour from the farms and, in conjunction with increased conscription due to the war in China, villages were suffering from the new problem of a lack of labour. Urban youths, members of the Patriotic Farm Labour Brigades, had to be brought in to help with planting and harvesting. Increasingly, the pioneer settlers were recruited not from the farms but from youth brigades such as the Volunteer Army of Young Colonists.67 Brides were found for them from among a variety of training institutes which taught young women how to be good wives. Those who hoped to escape from the exigencies of wartime Japan were fed the rhetoric that they would be a comfort and help to their pioneer husbands, while nurturing the future generation of Japanese Manchurians. The reality of life in an isolated village, detested by the indigenous inhabitants, was harsh.68

  The eventual fate of the Japanese settlers was tragic. The
army made no plans to evacuate them as the Soviet army advanced across Manchuria in August 1945. Many of the men formed a scarecrow contingent of soldiers while the women and children fled, ‘hiding in the mountains during the day, running for their lives at night, carrying small children on their backs, feeding on whatever they could pick in the field, or aided by those Manchurians who remained humane.’69 Kuramoto Kazuko, whose family fled from Manchuria to the house of an aunt in Dairen, recalled that winter of 1945 as ‘a winter of death. It claimed hundreds of lives among the homeless Japanese refugees. They died of cold, hunger, and lack of sanitation … Many hung themselves in the parks … The hills behind the evergreen forest in the Central Park … were now covered by piles of abandoned bodies. Wild dogs fed on them and multiplied fast.’70 Of the 220,000 farmer settlers, around 80,000 died. About 11,000 of them met a violent end at the hands of the avenging Chinese, some committed suicide, and about 67,000 starved to death. The remaining 140,000 traumatized survivors were eventually repatriated to Japan.71

  FROM NANJING TO PEARL HARBOR

  While the settlement of Japanese farmers in Manchuria was under way, the conflict, which the Japanese called the ‘China Incident’ and the Chinese the ‘War of Resistance against Japan’, degenerated into a war of attrition. Japan’s dogged determination to win the war in China placed it in opposition to the western powers of America, Britain and the Netherlands, whose interests were bound up with the fate of the Nationalists, whom they supported.72 In response to Japan’s war on China the Americans had given financial aid to the Nationalist government, hoping that it would be able to at least weaken, if not defeat, the Japanese. The Japanese army’s orgy of rape and massacre in Nanjing in the winter of 1937–38 had severely damaged Japanese relations with the United States. However, the war in China also perversely made Japan even more dependent upon trade with the United States. By 1938 the Japanese were running out of weapons and, more importantly, their stocks of fuel were virtually exhausted. If the United States were not placated by a peace deal in China they might well place an embargo on the scrap metal and oil imports that Japan so badly needed to maintain the war effort.73 However, 62,000 Japanese soldiers had already lost their lives in China and the Japanese military command felt that to withdraw would betray their sacrifice.74