The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food
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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.’16 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.17 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.’18 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.19 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.20 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.21 Fertilizer imports dropped from over 1 million tons in 1941 to a mere 137,000 tons in 1945.22 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.23
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.24 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.’25 By 1945 the yield of sweet potatoes had increased by one-quarter, but the yield of virtually all other foodstuffs had fallen.26 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.27
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.28 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.29 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.’30 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* 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.’31
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.32 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.33 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.34 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.35 In 1942 and 1943 three-quarters of the rice imported into Japan was coming from this area.36 But from 1943 on, the American blockade prevented meaningful quantities of supplies reaching the home islands and the po
ssession 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.37 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.38 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.39 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.40 The result was that the trade in rice was disrupted and most of the region’s people lost access to essential supplies of food.
The rice trade received a further blow with the massacre of somewhere between 6,000 and 50,000 Malayan Chinese between February and March 1942. The Japanese sinisterly referred to this as the sook ching, or purification of the area.41 Before the invasion of Malaya the Japanese military and civil authorities were aware that Chinese co-operation would be essential to the economic success of the occupation as they dominated the world of business and finance within the colony. However, the Chinese Malay community supported the Nationalist government fighting the Japanese in China and also the British colonial rulers: Chinese troops fought in the defence of Singapore. The Japanese military chiefs of staff, who had experienced great difficulties countering guerrilla actions in the war in China, pushed for a programme of suppression in order to eradicate potential opposition to their rule. There were many in the military and civil administration who opposed such a policy, but in the end General Yamashita Tomoyuki, in charge of the invasion, ordered an operation to root out hostile Chinese.42
In practice the sook ching resembled the actions of the German Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, which were initially supposed to root out political opposition but eventually became the main instruments of the extermination of Jewish men, women and children. The crucial difference was that orders for the SS to annihilate all the Jews came from above. In Malaya the Japanese administration did not deliberately engage in genocidal policies of extermination. The kempeitai (secret police) and the ordinary troops, who felt a deep-seated animosity towards the Chinese because of the brutality of the fighting they had experienced in China, took matters into their own hands and interpreted the order to root out opposition with ‘severe and prompt punishment’ as an excuse to wreak vengeance.43 During the operation they killed men, women and children simply because they were Chinese, but this was not part of a concerted plan to annihilate the Chinese community. The sook ching was characteristic of Japanese atrocities in the occupied territories which were borne out of the ethos of senseless brutality that saturated the Japanese army. However, this behaviour ran counter to an alternative philosophy also current in the Japanese administration, which argued that Japan should ‘show Asians that as an Asian power, she was a kind liberator and friend, who would treat them better than the European powers’.44
Those Chinese who survived the initial killing spree were ordered to collectively pay the occupation authorities $50 million, a clumsy attempt to claw revenue from the business community, which appeared to be a ransom for their lives.45 The vindictive racial persecution alienated the entire Malayan population and reinforced the breakdown of the region’s commercial networks. The conscription of labour for Japanese road-building projects, and work on the infamous Burma–Siam railway, where about 70,000 of the 200,000 indigenous slave labourers died, left the rice system without workers.46 Draught animals became scarce, irrigation works and rice mills broke down and were never repaired.47 Meanwhile, in the rice-producing areas of Burma and Indo-China the occupying authorities requisitioned huge quantities of rice, at a price well below its market value, in order to feed the troops and build up stores which could be shipped back to Japan.48 Deprived of their international and inter-regional export market, the peasants were unwilling to work hard only to receive derisory payment from the Japanese and they cut back on production. In addition they made every effort to hide as much of their surplus as possible and channel it on to the black market. By 1945 southern Burma, the largest south-east Asian rice-producing area before the war, was barely cultivating enough to meet subsistence requirements.49 Upper Burma, cut off from rice supplies from the south, succumbed to famine, but lack of documentation means that these victims of Japanese food policy have largely been forgotten, and there do not appear to be any figures for how many died.50
Misunderstanding the nature of the trade in food between deficit and surplus regions, the Japanese made a virtue out of the fact that inter-regional food trade had disintegrated, and introduced the catastrophic policy of ‘regional autarky’, banning the movement of commodities (including rice) across national and regional borders from mid-1943. Each region, they argued, should strive for self-sufficiency, supporting its own population and the Japanese troops stationed there, on food grown within its own borders.51
Malaya was reliant on imports for two-thirds of its food and in order to compensate for their virtual disappearance the Japanese administration launched a ‘Grow More Food Campaign’. Food officers tried to introduce agricultural reforms into the countryside. In particular they introduced Formosan paddy. The Japanese not only preferred the taste but it ripened much faster, allowing double-cropping in one year. The Malayan response was mixed. In the 1990s student researchers from Singapore University interviewed farmers who could remember the occupation. They were surprised to find some who claimed that the new Japanese techniques had been a great success. The men in one village described how the governor, Lieutenant-General Sukegawa, taught them how to introduce double-cropping by first giving a speech of encouragement and then joining the villagers in the paddy fields.52 They felt certain that no English officer of such high rank would have contemplated wading about in the rice fields with the villagers. One even went so far as to say that it was a pity that the Japanese had not stayed longer. ‘They could have taught us much more. They were not stingy like the whites … the British could not care less for our village.’53
However, the overall impression among the peasantry seems to have been that the Japanese were even worse masters than the British and, following the pattern of disillusioned peasants the world over, rather than increasing production they reduced their cultivation to subsistence levels. The officer in charge of the Kedah Agriculture Department wrote: ‘I hear unpleasant rumours that many paddy planters have made up their minds to plant only sufficient for themselves and no more, and that in Kubang Pasu large areas of tenanted bendang (rice fields) have been returned to their owners, because cultivators were unwilling to go on with the land on account of loss of interest.’54 When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, 42,650 acres of bendang had been left abandoned.55
To the immense frustration of their new masters the Malayan urban population were equally unenthusiastic about growing their own food. Home gardening exhibitions and competitions did nothing to stimulate their interest. The teacher Mohd Nazir Naim and his pupils were expected to garden every morning before lessons. The songs they we
re expected to sing while working might well have expressed such laudable sentiments as ‘Peasants are honourable people, who are loved and obey orders, forward, forward’, but they failed to transform the teacher and his pupils into patriotic and dedicated farmers.56 The Japanese administration was exasperated because the Malays seemed unaware that unless they showed more enthusiasm, when the Allies eventually imposed a blockade on Malaya they would starve.57 The Japanese governors warned district officers that if the Malayans continued to garden with such ‘an undisguised half-heartedness’ their rations would be removed.58 The Japanese governor of Pahang admonished, ‘Distribution of daily necessities … should not be given to useless people.’59 The schoolteacher Chin Kee Onn thought that the 1943 ration cuts of rice, sugar, salt and coconut oil were in retaliation for this lackadais-ical attitude.60
Eventually the Malayans were forced to grow their own food in order to survive. Internal food production fell to dismal levels and when the British recaptured Burma in 1944 the trickle of rice coming in from the north ceased. Legal imports of Siamese rice came to an end and the only source of food imports was the black market with Siam. Chinese traders would load up junks and lorries with ‘rice, brown sugar, onions and garlic, dried chillies’, but the prices of Siamese goods were exorbitant.61 Inflation within Malaya was fuelled by the competition between the army, navy, air force and stock companies for scarce goods, made worse by the Japanese military’s practice of paying for goods with scrip (certificates which stated that the holder was entitled to a certain amount of money), which they printed indiscriminately, thus rendering them worthless.62 Speculators and hoarders took full advantage of the situation and those who suffered were the less wealthy, who could not afford a tin of coconut oil which before the war would have cost $2.40, but by August 1944 might cost as much as $85, or $315 by February 1945.63