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

by Lizzie Collingham

  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.170 Kiyosawa heard ‘that people like night-shift work in factories because they can have a meal at night’.171 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.172

  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.173 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.’174 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.175 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’.176 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’.177

  The desperation of the Japanese government can be measured by the misery they were prepared to inflict on the young. Tanaka Tetsuko, who had been helping the peasants in the fields, was sent to a factory where they manufactured one of the most ineffective weapons of the war. These were papier mâché balloons designed to carry anti-personnel bombs. The idea was to fill them with hydrogen and then release them into the jet stream over the Pacific. The Japanese hoped they would float over to the west coast of America and cause havoc. They are known to have caused only one set of fatalities, among a family picnicking on the American west coast.178

  Tanaka and her classmates worked twelve-hour shifts without a break. In the factory ‘the floor was muddy with the extra paste that always streamed off the drying boards. From above, steam condensed into water droplets fell on us. Each person was in charge of two drying boards. The paper dried very quickly, so you shuttled back and forth between them like a crab. If it got too dry it would crack and fail the quality test. That was unforgivable, so we ran barefoot across the pasty floor.’179 After their shift they had a meal of rice mixed with black, foul-smelling sweet potatoes, had a bath and went to bed shivering under one blanket. Sunday was their day off and they slept all day ‘like corpses’.180 They were all so hungry that when they were sent food by their families they could not bring themselves to share. ‘Girls would put their heads into the closet and start eating. You just stopped caring about other people.’181 Some of the girls thought the small white pills they were given were nourishment pills but in fact they were probably amphetamines, designed to keep pilots awake.

  On Christmas Day 1944 Kiyosawa observed that the dominant wartime topic was no longer food or farming but bombs and incendiaries. The American aerial bombing campaign now dominated urban life. Two days later he wrote of the enemy coming ‘in rows of silvery wings’ and in February 1945 he noticed that the B-29s had been joined by carrier-based planes, which he took as a sign that the ‘navy has been completely destroyed’.182 Tokyo was devastated. ‘What is unbearable to see is large numbers of old ladies and the sick … people carrying in one hand bedding left from the fire, people carrying buckets that have been scorched. These people hobble aimlessly down Ginza Street. The eyes of each and every one are reddened. It is probably because of the smoke and heat.’183 The government set up dining halls where workers received a thin porridge ‘garnished with potato fragments, a radish leaf, a bit of snail, or a few grains of rice’. The demand was enormous. In the Shinjuku district of Tokyo people began queuing as early as nine in the morning for the lunch at noon. If the dining halls were bombed, bags of dried biscuits were distributed as a substitute.184 Kiyosawa’s nephew and his family were left homeless. All the aid that they received was ‘a five-day ration of rice and soya sauce’ and a free train ride out of the city.185

  SURRENDER

  Long before August 1945 it was clear to the Japanese leadership that the country was defeated. During the summer of 1945 the Allied strategy against the home islands consisted of a mix of blockade and bombardment. The aerial bombing campaign had flattened Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Kobe and Kawasaki.186 The planes then went on to disable Korea’s rail network, shutting down supplies of raw materials for plane manufacture. The inter-island rail and sea connection between Honshu and Hokkaido was smashed in July.187 In order to reinforce the blockade the US air force had diverted a substantial number of B-29 bombers from the bombing campaign to lay extensive minefields around Japan’s shores. ‘Operation Starvation’, as the mining campaign was known, was an extremely cost-effective form of attack. At a loss of very few planes the mines sank over a million tons of shipping. By August half of the 1.5 million tons that remained of the merchant marine was damaged and the rest of the ships were marooned in their harbours, barely able to move due to the net of mines spread around Japan.188

  Japanese industry had ground to a halt for lack of raw materials.189 Hashimoto Yukio was working on a project to manufacture a special type of aluminium. ‘The quality of material used for airplanes had declined to the lowest level. The collection of pots and pans (which were melted down to make planes) was totally inadequate to meet our needs.’ When his team began to salvage materials from downed B-29 bombers he realized the odds which Japan was up against. ‘I had thought that since Japan was under such duress, the quality of American materials would naturally have suffered as well. But the components we analysed met the normal standards, and the surface of the propellers shone brightly like silver. I won’t forget the chill I felt at the strength of American production capabilities.’190 His team worked many long nights to get the metal ready in time to contribute to the war but were overtaken by Japan’s surrender. ‘When I saw the duraluminium, its material label still on, used for dustpans and ladles lined up in black markets right after the War’s end, I felt my energies seep from my body.’191

  The metal for Japanese fighter planes was so inferior that Hashimoto heard that the engines cracked if they were flown at full throttle. This was rapidly becoming irrelevant as the country ran out of aviation fuel. Despite having rebuilt the oil industry in the Dutch East Indies the Japanese could not take advantage of their success as the shipping blockade had cut them off from their supplies. ‘No [oil] tanker reached Japan afte
r March 1945.’192

  In May the government abandoned the attempt to bring in raw materials for the war industry and concentrated on importing food. By now between half and three-quarters of the rice ration was distributed in the form of sweet potatoes and soya beans.193 The government had never officially acknowledged that the progressive substitution of other foods for rice amounted to a reduction in the ration, but in July it finally admitted that it could not fill the ration quotas and the cabinet issued a statement announcing a 10 per cent reduction in the staple ration. The loss of imports meant that the level of salt in the urban population’s diet was close to the minimum for survival.194 Piles of Manchurian soya beans, millet, peanut oil and salt lay rotting on the quays of the Korean ports but there was too little shipping to bring much across the mine-strewn Sea of Japan. Even those few ships that ran the blockade did so in vain. Coastal transport within Japan had been brought to a halt by the American mines and this placed intense pressure on the inadequate rail system. This and a lack of labour at the docks meant that the food ended up rotting in the holds of the ships and on Japanese quays instead. Fearful that localized famines would develop which would lead to civil disorder, in characteristic fashion the government called on farmers ‘to double production by assuming the “special attack spirit”’.195

  Nutritionists were still trying to find ways of feeding the urban population with substitute foods and these became increasingly bizarre. At some point in 1945 a substitute flour was distributed, suspiciously named the ‘pulverized diet’. It contained a powder of acorns, sweet potato vines and mulberry leaves and was not only revolting but potentially damaging to human health. Suto Ryosaku recalled that her mother made dumplings with this flour but the children in the family simply could not eat them. ‘Even when we told them to shut their eyes and eat, it was no good.’196 In Osaka a broadcast explained to the civilians that used tea-leaves, the blossoms and leaves of roses, silkworm cocoons, worms, grasshoppers, mice, rats, moles, snails, snakes, and a powder made of the dried blood of cows, horses and pigs, made useful supplementary foods. The Osakan authorities even claimed that a fermenting agent could be used to break down sawdust and render it edible.197

  The Americans were unaware of the full impact of Operation Starvation. In June a US assessment of the situation asserted that the country would not experience a ‘serious overall food shortage in 1945’.198 Certainly, the Japanese were not yet dying of starvation in large numbers but average calorie consumption in the cities had fallen to 1,680 and was thus hovering around the starvation level. Kiyosawa was one of the early victims of the blockade. He died in May 1945, aged fifty-six, of pneumonia, brought on by his malnourished and emaciated condition. The urban population was steadily losing weight and around a quarter of townspeople were suffering from malnutrition. Tuberculosis, beriberi, digestive, skin and vitamin-deficiency diseases were rife. The birth-rate had fallen and infant mortality had risen. Post-war studies of children’s heights show that the growth of the youth of Japan was seriously stunted.199

  In the summer of 1945 Japan’s fate lay in the hands of just eight men: the six members of the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Marquis Kido Koichi, and the Emperor.200 Three representatives of the military within the council – Army Minister Anami Korechika, Army Chief of Staff Umezu Yoshijiro and Navy Chief of Staff Toyoda Soemu – maintained a firm line, right up until 6 August and the dropping of the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima, that Japan should never surrender. In July 1944 Kiyosawa noted in his diary that no matter how unrealistic, the Japanese military seemed to hope against hope that they would be able to lure the American battleships closer and closer and then ‘deliver a devastating blow when the enemy approaches’.201 When, in August 1944, it became apparent that the government were preparing for an American invasion of the home islands he concluded that they still believed ‘in a final divine wind and that the war will end with a great victory’.202

  Kiyosawa’s assessment of the militarists’ thinking was correct. Their plan was to continue to inflict devastating casualties on the Americans until they were forced to negotiate. After Germany’s unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945 they correctly assessed that the American public and soldiers had little stomach for yet more fighting and bloodshed, and were eager to bring the war to a speedy end. What the Japanese leadership failed to grasp was that the Allies would never accept the terms on which the militarists wished to surrender, which included that there should be no change in the government, no occupation of the Japanese home islands, that Japanese troops should be allowed to disarm themselves, and that any war crimes trials would be conducted by the Japanese.203 The Allies were fully committed to achieving an unconditional surrender. They saw the final defeat of the German and Japanese armies, and the imposition of social reforms during a period of occupation, as essential to achieving a lasting peace.204 On 26 July 1945 the Allied leaders held out an olive branch in the form of the Potsdam Declaration, which specified that they were looking for the unconditional surrender of the armed forces (rather than the entire nation) and that the Japanese would eventually be allowed to set up their own government.205

  A group had emerged within the Japanese government which was in favour of negotiating a peace, and the civilian members of the council, Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori and Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro, welcomed the Potsdam Declaration, at least as a basis for further negotiations. During a post-war interview with members of the US Strategic Bombing Survey a former Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoe Fumimaro acknowledged that the upper-class members of the council and the Marquis Kido Koichi were afraid of ‘a sort of communistic revolution’.206 Unlike the militarists, who saw foreign occupation as the worst possible fate that could befall Japan, the noble elite were afraid that the destruction of Japan’s cities and its economy would undermine the social fabric of the nation to the extent that the masses would rise up in protest against the suffering and trigger a social revolution which would undermine the Imperial institution and bring the feudal structure of Japanese society tumbling down. After the dropping of the atomic bombs, one of the reasons the Emperor gave for his decision to surrender was the fear of domestic upheaval.207

  It is impossible now to tell whether this would have happened. The food situation after the surrender in August gives some indication of the extent to which the situation would have worsened if Japan had continued fighting and the American blockade had continued. The harvest of 1945 was affected by wet, cold weather followed by typhoons and floods in the autumn. In November the government calculated that they only had enough food to provide a ration of 1,325 calories per person, and the inefficiencies of the delivery system meant that the ration sometimes provided only one-third of the calories needed to survive.208 The government began a campaign to redistribute more effectively what little food was available. This staved off a serious food crisis until mid-1946. However, this would almost certainly have been impossible to achieve if the war had still been going on. Japan would not have been able to use shipping to move food between the islands and the Americans were planning to begin the systematic destruction of the Japanese rail network in August. This would have immobilized the Japanese transport system. If the war had continued, famine would almost certainly have occurred in Japan’s major cities and many thousands of Japanese would have starved to death, beginning with infants, children, the elderly and the infirm.209 There were protests over the incompetence of the government’s food policy in 1946 and, while they were never likely to lead to revolution while the Americans were occupying the country, it is possible that if the war had continued the increasingly desperate urban population might well have risen up to demand peace.

  After the war, Paul Nitze of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) team argued that Japan was already on its knees in August 1945 and that surrender would only have been a matter of time. Nitze confidently gave a date when Japan would have been ready to accept defeat: 1 N
ovember 1945.210 What Nitze failed to take into account was that the military leadership was prepared to sacrifice any number of Japanese civilians in the final battle. Prince Konoe Fumimaro, along with most of the other Japanese leadership interviewed by the USSBS, pointed out that although Japan was ‘of course … nearing the limit … the army would not admit it. They wouldn’t admit they were near the end … The army had dug themselves caves in the mountains and their idea of fighting on was fighting from every little hole or rock in the mountains.’211 In March 1945 the government began to organize the civilian population into a Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps.212 Young boys were issued with bamboo spears, and H was described as being filled with dread when he read an article in the newspaper in 1945 which spoke of ‘officers and men of the Imperial forces … throwing themselves into the fray with no concern for themselves, standing in the vanguard of their one hundred million compatriots’.213 It was clear that the military applied its own principles to the civilian population and expected them to die fighting rather than surrender.

  In late July 1945 Emperor Hirohito, with whom lay the final decision to surrender, and the ‘peace party’ within the government were still wavering. They thought that there was some merit in the militarists’ argument that Japan would be able to force the Allies into a negotiated peace settlement superior to that offered at Potsdam if the Japanese first inflicted thousands of casualties on an American invasion force. In any case, even if they had wanted to surrender immediately, they were unable to prevail over the fixed determination of the militarists to continue fighting. To persuade these men of the need to surrender unconditionally, and to strengthen their position against the entrenched ‘war party’, would require a dramatic display of American power. A number of possible strategies were open to the United States, none of them particularly appealing. They could continue the bombardment and mass destruction of Japanese cities and the nation’s infrastructure and combine this with the continuation of the blockade in order to starve the Japanese people into submission. They could launch an invasion of Japan and take the country by force, or they could use their new weapon, the atomic bomb, and demonstrate the overwhelming force which the United States was prepared to use in order to bring the war to an end.