by Masuji Ibuse
Kōtarō was a full decade older than Shigematsu. During the war, he had made it his business to hunt out extra food for the neighborhood. Twice his expeditions had taken him to Hiroshima, and on both occasions he had called at Shigematsu’s house with a present of salted cherry blossoms from the country. The first time, he had come to buy emulsion for use as soap substitute, and edible fat. The emulsion, a black market commodity that was not controlled by the ordinance controlling washing materials, was produced by some firms in defiance of the law. It was the sticky liquid produced on the way to making solid soap, and it came in a can. The fat was the fat cut off meat, before they canned it at the Provisions Depot. It was already seasoned and was available at about ten sen for a box about three inches square and four inches deep.
Kōtarō would wrap up these black market goods in an extra large wrapping cloth at Shigematsu’s house and carry them on his back all the way to the station. “Commercial traveling’s been in our family ever since my grandfather’s days,” he would declare. The second time he came, the only thing for him to buy was some edible fat in an old can, but he had been so pleased with it that, as a parting gesture to Shigematsu, he had set a trap for catching birds on a nearby stretch of open land where houses had been pulled down to create a firebreak.
For some time afterwards, going to look at the trap had been almost a daily routine for Shigematsu, but never once had he found a bird caught in it. It was on the same vacant site, he recalled, that his wife had so often picked pigweed shoots. They had eaten them, boiled in soy.
“Remember that trap old Kōtarō set for us in Hiroshima?” he said. “I wonder what became of it? On the vacant land that used to be grown all over with pigweed in the summer.”
“Actually,” said Shigeko, “Kōtarō’s traps never caught a single bird, did they? Perhaps he didn’t set them properly.”
Shigematsu could still remember Kōtarō grumbling to himself as he whittled down a piece of split bamboo for the trap. “This food shortage is something awful,” he’d said. “Even at the Provisions Depot, the people in the kitchens were in a state because they didn’t have enough bean paste to go round for the soup. They told me they’d no idea until the actual day whether they’d be making bean paste soup or ‘salt water soup.’ It seems they can’t plan the meals properly even if they want to.” In those days, everybody had been as short of food as the next man.
“Say, Shigeko—” Shigematsu called. “I’ve an idea! You must jot down some notes about our family’s meals during the war. A list of all menus for a week would be better still, but I don’t expect you can remember all of them. Just jot them down, will you?—tomorrow, if possible.”
“ ‘Menus,’ indeed! ‘Boiled chickweed with soy, wild leek with bean paste and vinegar’—that’s about all there is to write, isn’t it?”
“But that’s just what I mean—that you should write about the abominable kind of stuff we ate. ‘The unbelievably meager diet of the Shizuma family in wartime,’ you can call it. Then I can include it in my ‘Journal of the Bombing.’ Why didn’t I think of it before now?”
“If that’s how you feel, I’ve a suggestion,” she said. “Every year on the anniversary of the day the bomb fell, why don’t we have the same things for breakfast as we had that August 6? I can remember what we had that day all right. Very clearly, I can.”
“What was it, now? That morning….”
“Watery stock with clams, and soybeans with the oil extracted, in place of rice. That was all. Only six small clams for three people, mark you. Yasuko and I had dug them out of the sand under Miyuki Bridge the day before….”
Yes, he remembered them: skinny little clams, with a transparent look to the flesh. He had grumbled to Shigeko, in all seriousness, that even the clams were suffering from malnutrition nowadays.
“You know, Shigeko—what the family eats is really your affair, as mistress of the house. So get it down on paper, will you? Tomorrow, if you can. It doesn’t matter whether you write it as a kind of memo or in letter form….” He paused. “Anyway, I’ve had enough for today. I’m off to bed.”
The next day was a festival in the agricultural calendar, and Shigematsu set about putting the agricultural implements in order, as tradition required of the head of a farming household. He washed the spades, hoes, and crowbars, and hammered new wedges into the handles. The axes and sickles he sharpened. The saws he reset. He even sharpened the rice-reaping sickles, and coated them with rapeseed oil. He weeded around the family shrine that stood in one corner of the garden, and went to “pay homage” at the pond at Shōkichi’s for good measure. All this accounted for a full half day.
Yasuko, who had gone to the beauty salon in town for a permanent wave, came home around five exuding an unfamiliar air of glamor. By this time, Shigeko had finished writing her account of what she had called “Diet in Wartime Hiroshima.” It was done in brush and ink on handmade writing paper, and it ran as follows:
Diet in Wartime Hiroshima
What I’m really writing about here is the food situation in Hiroshima before the bomb, but first of all I must just say something about our everyday lives and the way people behaved.
Under the control ordinances in force at the time, rice, rice substitutes, fish, and vegetables were all rationed. Information about rationing, as well as other notices, was either put up on the district notice board or passed around from family to family on the local bulletin board. This bulletin board was particularly important, and served as a way of circulating official directives to every corner of society. The authorities must have attached a great deal of importance to it, and to get the system working really smoothly they used the movies and phonograph records to popularize a song about the spirit of the neighborhood association. I remember the first verse, it went—
Tap, tap, smartly at the door—
Now, whoever can it be?
Just a neighbor’s well-known face
When we open up and see.
Pass the board on with a will—
News for you and news for me.
On ration days there was always a line of people in front of the rationing center well before time. No wonder, either, as the food shortage was really quite unspeakable. Sometimes a line of customers would even form in front of one of the ordinary shops, which because of the shortage of goods were “open, but not for business,” as they said. Sometimes, you’d hear someone at the back say to someone at the front, “By the way, what are they selling at this shop?” And the answer would be, “You know, I’m not certain. But I’m sure they’re selling something.” Everything was so scarce, you were glad to get hold of anything, whatever it might be. You couldn’t afford to waste even an ordinary piece of paper.
The value of money had gone down. Sometimes when I went to buy vegetables at farms just outside the town, they’d be unwilling to sell for money, and would ask for clothing instead. Naturally, middlemen and retailers began to dabble in undercover business to avoid the controls, and people used to refer to them contemptuously as “black marketeers.” If ever there was a typical product of war, that word “black marketeer” was it—a hateful word that I can never hear now without thinking of wartime austerity.
With the basic foods, rice and barley, the ration at first, as I remember it, was about 3.1 gō.1 Before long, though, quite a large part of the rice and barley came to be replaced by soybeans, then they began to dole out foreign rice and, worse still, those dreadful pressed-out soybeans. The quantity gradually went down, and in the end the ration was about 2.7 to 2.8 gō of those beans a day.
At first the ration rice was brown, unhulled rice, which was unpleasant to eat, so we used to put it in a bottle and pound it with a stick to make it into white rice. We would do the hulling at night. It would make extra work for us in the evening, and we used to complain about it all the time. The rice got less when it was hulled, and even when the ration was about 3.1 gō per person it ended up only a little over 2.5 gō.
I believ
e it was around that time that Mrs. Miyaji was summoned by the authorities for an official talking-to. She was going out to a farm to buy food one day when she said to someone in the next seat to her on the Kabe train, “Now the rice ration has gone down to three gō, they’ve altered some of the words in a textbook our boy uses at school.” It seems a line of verse in her child’s poetry book which had said “To each his four gō/Of unhulled rice a day” had been changed to “To each his three gō/Of unhulled rice a day,” so as to make it fit in with the actual amount of the ration. According to what she told me later, the poem is one of the most famous pieces by a poet called Kenji Miyazawa, a fine piece with a kind of austere beauty that gets over wonderfully the hardships of the farmer’s life.
“To change ‘four gō of rice a day’ to ‘three gō’ is an insult to learning,” Mrs. Miyaji said. “Whatever would happen if the child got to hear about it? Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if he even started getting ideas about the Japanese history they learn at school. It would be different, now, if Kenji Miyazawa came to life again and rewrote it himself….”
The fact remained, though, that the textbook was a government one compiled in accordance with major policies of state, and it seems the authorities told her to “keep a curb on her irresponsible talk.” “We know quite well you’ve been going to buy black market goods,” they said. “Such people have no business making impertinent remarks about textbooks. Irresponsible talk in wartime is a matter that’s too serious for the ordinary civil or criminal code.” The way they spoke, it was almost as though they were suggesting it was a breach of the National General Mobilization Law, which was a capital offense, of course. By that time, everybody was taking care what they said in front of others.
In our family, my husband and Yasuko had their lunch at work. They bought their meals there, without taking any of their own food, which meant that we saved on two meals a day. Besides that, I made do with potatoes for my own lunch, so that altogether we gained three meals a day, which made things a bit easier. Then we had a way of getting rationed buckwheat noodles that sometimes got onto the black market, so that altogether, I suppose, we had the equivalent of three or four gō of rice or barley.
Besides this there was sometimes a ration of very poor quality dried bread, about thirty or forty grams to each household. There was a ration of about one bundle of noodles per person three or four times every month, but the rice or barley ration was always cut down correspondingly.
Sometimes the ration rice had soybeans mixed in with it. The trouble was that if you cooked it in the usual way with the beans in it, they gave it an unpleasant taste, so we used to pick out the beans—more than one gō of them—and soak them overnight in water. Then the next morning we’d mash them, strain the liquid through a piece of cotton, and use it for things like bean paste soup or soy sauce soup. Sometimes, too, we would use it by itself as a drink, with a certain amount of sweetening added. Occasionally we would cook the remains of the soybeans in soy sauce and eat them with our rice or rice substitute.
The bread that took the place of rice was a valuable means of stretching the ration. We toasted it and ate it with bean paste on it, or spread it with bean paste before toasting. Whenever we had bread, we missed the taste of butter and corned beef dreadfully. All the same, it gradually made us realize that where the traditional Oriental flavorings were concerned, bean paste was at least far more substantial than salt or soy sauce. Here is a list of one day’s rations of foodstuffs, apart from the basic rice or rice substitute. Actually, this was the ration for the eleven families in our neighborhood association, thirty-two people altogether, so many of the items were difficult to split up, and we used to divide them up among two or three families at a time:
One cake of bean curd
One sardine or small horse-mackerel
Two Chinese cabbages
Five or six carrots, giant radishes, leeks,
burdock roots, bundles of spinach, or
marrows
Four or five eggplants
Half a pumpkin
Once the air raid warnings started, the food situation began to get worse and worse. Almost every day, I used to go to the place where houses had been cleared away to pick pigweed, trefoil, and other leafy plants. At other times I would go to collect clams under Miyuki Bridge or, when the tide was out, would take an old writing-brush and trowel and go to catch squillas. At first, I would get about five gō of clams and from ten to twenty squillas. But they both got scarcer and scarcer, and by the end of the war I was only getting about ten clams and no squillas at all.
We grew a few green vegetables on the vacant lots, and pumpkins in the garden, in line with the authorities’ slogan: “There’s always a place for a pumpkin.” When the stalks grew long, we would cut them off, peel them, and boil them for eating. In summer, the pumpkin plants would spread all over the garden so that you could hardly set foot in it, but we were disappointed at the number of actual pumpkins, a bare dozen or so each year. Sometimes, with our rice or rice substitute, we had dried shredded giant radish, dried fern, or bracken sprouts that were sent to us from my family who were living in the country.
On the day war was declared, December 8, 1941, I’d bought up a whole stock of matches and salt, so our family never went short of either, right up until the end of the war. I did this because my grandmother had told me as a child what happened at the time of the Russo-Japanese War. The salt came in very handy. I would make a substitute for soy sauce by adding table salt to a meat extract made by refining the broth from the Army Provisions Depot and canning factories. I can still remember how good cooked food or soup tasted with a spoonful of this substitute soy sauce in it. The only trouble with it was that unless you gave it a rest, after two weeks or so of continual use your stomach somehow just refused to take it.
We would cook the whole day’s rice or rice substitute in the morning, and make any leftovers from breakfast, along with that for the evening meal, into balls which we did up in a coarsely-woven wrapping cloth and hung up somewhere airy. This was so that we could take it with us when we went to the air raid shelter if the warning sounded. Along with the rice balls in the bundle, we always put some parched rice that my family in the country had sent us for use in an emergency, and also a document listing the names of our ancestors.
The only fish we felt free to broil as we pleased was what we got on the ration. We didn’t like to broil fish we had bought on the black market in case the smell got to the neighbors, so we boiled it or made soup with it instead.
We were not too badly off for sweet things as Yasuko bought some on the black market through somebody she worked with. The stuff was a kind of candy made by a farmer living in the hills behind Furuichi, who used starch got by soaking the roots of a plant related to liquorice. Yasuko’s friend used to buy it from this farmer, and would let her have some of it. We only used it for sweetening things a few times, though. Most of it we sucked as it was, to stave off hunger, though we felt it was an awful waste. As for saké, the same thing happened in our neighborhood association as everywhere else—once it went on the ration, people who had never touched it before the war started drinking. A peculiar thing to happen.
Besides the cigarette ration, someone at the works would let us have a share of leaf tobacco he bought on the black market. We would hang it under the floorboards for a while to moisten it, shred it with cloth shears, and wrap it in the thin, fine paper from an English dictionary—“Indian paper,” I was told it’s called. In the years before and after the end of the war we smoked a whole pocket dictionary in our house.
In the last years of the war every household in our neighborhood association was supplementing its food with wild plants. In families with small children they would wait till the shoots of various kinds of brambles had grown a bit, then collect them, peel off the skin, and give them to the children for their afternoon between-meals. In some families they gave them knotweed shoots. You could find these plants on the banks of the Ōta
River, on the outskirts of the city, and some families who went out to work would ask people commuting from outside the city to gather the plants for them. In every home, parched beans made up ninety percent of such snacks for the children, and the wild plants made a kind of change.
You could get sorrel if you asked someone commuting from outside the city. We used to leave it in brine overnight and use it instead of pickles, or as a main dish with our rice substitute.
Reed root, chickweed, pigweed, tugwort, and barweed (these may not be the scientific names) we used to parboil and serve with soy sauce, or fry for use as a side dish. Vegetables such as carrots and burdock stem were considered a real luxury. Children who were undernourished or prone to bed-wetting were given the grubs found in figs or the fruit of a certain shrub, broiled in soy. Actually, these grubs are the young of the long-horned beetle. In the summer when I was a child in the country, there was a woodcutter who used to come selling them, and sometimes I was given them to prevent worms. I remember them as savory and rather nice.
The wife of one of the neighbors who suffered from headaches because of the change of life used to take a couple of ant-lions in a cupful of cold saké. She said they were remarkably effective.
Actually, I had intended to write out our family’s actual wartime menus for a week at least, but since I was doing the same kind of thing in the kitchen every day, everything’s mixed up in my mind, and I can’t recall things accurately. I wonder if even the cooks in the leading hotels up in Tokyo—in the Imperial Hotel, say—can remember exactly their menus on the day the war ended! They say that around that time the envoys of the countries of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and members of the various organizations connected with the Foreign Ministry were staying at the Imperial Hotel. I wonder what they had to eat? Either way, sixty or seventy per cent of our diet in Hiroshima during the last years of the war was rice with soybeans, and pressed-out soybeans boiled down in soy sauce, without sugar.