Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (10 page)

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A quarter of a ton or eight bushels.

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Prussian landed aristocracy.

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The codename given to the invasion of the Soviet Union.

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Japan’s Quest for Empire

Our national state of affairs has reached an impasse. The critical problems of population and foodstuffs seem all without solution. The only avenue … is boldly to open up Manchuria and Mongolia.

(Kwantung army officer in 1931)
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The issue of the food supply was to prove every bit as incendiary in 1930s Japan as it was in National Socialist Germany. Military and right-wing groups used the need to secure the urban food supply and crisis in the Japanese countryside to justify ever more radical actions, beginning with the seizure of Manchuria in 1931 and culminating in the war against Nationalist China in 1937. Finally, the Japanese determination to hold China in the face of American disapproval set them upon a collision course with the United States.

Japan first developed imperial ambitions during the period of the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912) when a group of aristocratic modernizers removed the warrior aristocracy from power and ‘restored’ the rule of the Emperor. The Japanese set their sights on the resources of mainland China. Since defeat in the Opium Wars of 1839–42 China had been forced to allow foreigners (including Americans, French, Germans, British and the Japanese) special political and trading concessions in various inland cities and what were known as the treaty ports. After war with China in 1894–95 and Russia in 1904–05 Japan acquired first the island of Formosa (now Taiwan), then Korea and, under the conditions of extraterritoriality, whereby the trading concession areas were outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese government,
Japan stationed a substantial number of troops in China, and established various commercial interests, the most important of which was the leasehold of a stretch of railway in southern Manchuria.
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In 1911 the Qing dynasty collapsed and central government in China disintegrated to be replaced by regional warlords. During the First World War, Japan used the fact that the west was distracted to take advantage of the political instability and obtained ‘exclusive political and trading rights in large parts of China’.
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The German defeat in 1918 came as a shock to a number of Japanese army officers who realized that Germany had lost because it was dependent on outside sources for the resources required to wage total war. This set them thinking about the vulnerability of Japan, which lacked primary resources and needed to import virtually all industrial raw materials. Crucially, Japan was dependent on the United States for one-third of its imports, particularly scrap metal and oil. But Britain, which, like Japan, was an island nation with limited natural resources, had drawn on the resources of its empire in order to win the First World War. It seemed clear to this group of ‘total war officers’ that Japan needed a similar maritime empire which would allow it to establish itself as a powerful world player, independent of the west and the US in particular.
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However, after 1919 the United States tried to rein in Japanese expansionism. In 1921–22 the American government convened the Washington Conference in an effort to restrain Japanese naval expansion. At the Conference they also persuaded the Japanese government to continue to uphold the open-door policy in China, which allowed the western powers equal access to the Chinese treaty ports. In return, America recognized Japan’s special interest in Manchuria. But there was growing dissatisfaction among the Japanese military and political elite with the international status quo. The military were particularly bitter about the limitations the Conference placed on Japan’s ability to arm.
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The American refusal to integrate a racial equality clause into the charter of the League of Nations caused further disquiet, which was intensified by hostile American measures against Japanese immigration in 1924.
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Meanwhile in 1928 the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kaishek had established a government at Nanjing which claimed to rule all of China. While the Nationalists were friendly
towards the Americans, who provided them with funding, they became increasingly hostile towards the Japanese.
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In addition, a growing awareness of the problem of rural poverty and anxieties about the country’s ability to produce sufficient food to supply the growing industrial workforce in the towns contributed to a growing sense of national crisis.

A RADICAL ANSWER TO RURAL CRISIS

Until 1918 agriculture supported Japan’s industrial and economic growth. Agricultural exports generated the foreign exchange needed to finance the import of raw materials. Farmers also supported economic development by paying a heavy cash tax on their goods.
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But the Japanese countryside was plagued by a number of persistent problems which began seriously to hamper agricultural productivity in the 1920s. The concentration of property rights in the hands of a few rich landlords resulted in vast inequalities in wealth. Tenant farmers lacked the resources and motivation to modernize and for some their rent was so unreasonably high that it amounted to more than half their crop. For a sizeable minority, life in the countryside was marked by crippling poverty. Even the standard of living of middling farmers was well below that of the urban population and began to fall ever further behind.
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Modernization meant that Japanese eating habits were changing. Since the Meiji Restoration the government had been encouraging the consumption of milk and meat as a way of transforming Japanese bodies so that they could compete with the, supposedly superior, western physique. As part of the campaign, the public were told that the Emperor enjoyed eating beef.
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But it was not until the inter-war years that meat consumption began to rise, virtually doubling between 1919 and 1937. The annual consumption of 2 kilograms of beef or pork per person was still tiny in comparison with the 50 kilograms eaten by Europeans. But, along with a rise in the consumption of fish, it represented a marked increase in the amount of animal protein in the Japanese diet.
¹¹
Most importantly, urban Japanese began to eat more rice. By 1914 all Japanese were eating about a quarter more rice than
they had in the 1890s. Then, from 1920, a marked gap began to open up between rural and urban diets. By 1929 city dwellers were eating at least 25 per cent more rice than those living in the countryside.
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The rising demand for rice was augmented by a 30 per cent increase in the population during the inter-war period and Japan looked to its colonies to make up the food deficit.
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When Formosa became a Japanese colony in 1895 Japanese companies moved in and set up sugar plantations, farming organizations disseminated better farming techniques, improved irrigation and introduced Japanese rice varieties. Exports from Formosa to Japan of rice, sugar, tea, tobacco, pigs and poultry increased sixfold between 1897 and 1905.
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Korea also exported rice to Japan. In 1918 wartime inflation meant that the price of rice virtually doubled. When rice riots broke out across the country these were interpreted as a sign that Japan’s run-down agricultural sector simply could not provide enough food for the growing urban population.
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A ‘Rice Production Development Plan’ was implemented to turn the colonies into ‘reserve rice baskets’.
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Rice imports from the colonies which had equalled 5 per cent of the Japanese domestic rice crop in 1915, equalled 20 per cent by 1935.
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The problem of urban hunger had now been successfully exported to the peasants of Korea. Indeed, Japanese food officials and agricultural economists referred to the rice that Korea sent to Japan as ‘starvation exports’. In Korea rice was transformed into a cash crop and the farmers were forced to sell such a large share of their crop that each year ‘spring hunger’ held them in its grip as the food from the previous harvest ran out before the next harvest came in. They survived by gathering wild grasses for food.
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Fifty years later Ahn Juretsu, who grew up in Korea in the 1920s and 1930s, was still indignant. ‘Because we were farmers under Japanese government control, the conditions of our lives were so poor, you can’t imagine it. Just like beggars today.’
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If, to the satisfaction of its industrialists, Japan now had plenty of food with which to pacify its urban population, these measures only served to deepen the crisis in the countryside. Cheap colonial rice undercut the price of Japanese rice and further depressed domestic agricultural wages. In 1926, landlords, hit by a fall in the price of rice, began to demand that the imports be stopped.
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The flood of Formosan and Korean rice was followed by the Depression, which pushed down world food prices. By 1931 the value of a bushel of rice, which cost
between 20 and 23 yen to produce, had fallen from its 1925 price of 41 yen to 18 yen.
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In addition, the American demand for silk fell dramatically, which impacted adversely on a large number of Japanese farmers for whom sericulture was a vital secondary source of income. Most farmers struggled through the Depression by mixing more barley with their rice, giving up small luxuries such as shop-bought soap and sugar, and cutting back on farm repairs.
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But farm debt increased significantly. Even before the Depression, peasants were spending a worryingly high percentage of their income on food, ranging from 40 to 57 per cent.
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Once the Depression hit, an increasing number of farming families had to buy in food. In the village of Sekishiba, in the north-eastern prefecture of Fukushima, over half the households ran out of food supplies from their own crop in 1932–33. The price they paid for food on the open market was far higher than the price they had received when they sold their crop immediately after the harvest. The only way they could find the money was to borrow, usually from private moneylenders and at devastating rates of interest from 12 to 20 per cent. In 1932 the government came up with the worrying conclusion that the farming debt now amounted to 4.7 billion yen, more than double the value of farm production, or a third of the GNP.
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That farming communities were living on the edge was indicated by the increasing number of villagers who could no longer pay their taxes. Numerous villages fell into arrears with payment of their schoolteachers’ salaries. Farmers avoided attending funerals, or shamefacedly stuffed IOU notes into the hands of the bereaved, promising to make the customary payment ‘when I sell some cocoons, or when the economy gets better’.
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A government survey in July 1932 found that 200,000 children were turning up to school with nothing to eat for lunch.
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One disgruntled farmer commented on his dinner of rice mixed with wheat, chopped yam leaves, and
daikon
(white radish), ‘wealthy villagers and city people throw these things away, or else feed them to oxen or pigs’.
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In the northern provinces famine took hold. Cold, wet weather in 1934 in the north-eastern area of Tohoku resulted in crop failure. The farmers in the fields threw down their tools in despair as they realized that only a few bundles of grain could be collected from each paddy.
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A Hokkaido farm girl lamented, ‘It is really tragic that we farmers who grow rice are unable to eat it.’ Even the supplies of inferior grains such as millet dried
up. Her family survived by ‘eating dried potatoes and herring dregs, which are used for fertiliser’. She and her sister dug up bracken roots, others scraped the soft edible parts from tree bark.
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Infant mortality rates soared, around half a million died, and in order to relieve their families of the burden of feeding them, more than 11,000 girls were sold into prostitution, known as
musume jigoku
, ‘hell for young women’.
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By the early 1930s a sense of crisis pervaded Japan. The Depression and industrial unemployment, combined with the growing magnitude of the rural problem, fed a general sense of ‘stalemate, confusion and instability’.
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Among right-wing groups the Depression confirmed the need for greater independence from western capitalism. Having learned the lesson of Germany’s weakness during the First World War, the Army Minister Major-General Ugaki Kazunari, leader of the ‘total war officers’ within the armed forces, set up the Cabinet Resources Bureau. In 1931 it concluded that Japan’s economy was woefully inadequate in terms of producing the materials for modern warfare.
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At the same time Nationalist China began to protest at the level of Japanese influence in mainland China by boycotting Japanese goods. Two young officers in the Kwantung army (the Japanese army in China) took matters into their own hands in Manchuria. On the night of 18 September 1931 they planted a bomb on the Japanese-owned stretch of railway, which they then claimed was the work of bandits sponsored by the Chinese regional government. That night Japanese troops began their occupation of Manchuria, which resulted in the creation in 1932 of the puppet state of Manchukuo.
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International disapproval led to Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933. The army represented Manchuria as a treasure house of resources – gold, coal, livestock, soya beans, cotton. With Manchuria as part of Japan, they could withstand political isolation and the economic threat and military might of other powerful nations.
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A rather romantic 1920s notion of a Japanese empire made up of one national people, all faithful to the Japanese way of life, gave way to a more aggressive vision of an economic bloc, self-sufficient and independent from the increasingly hostile western powers, which was later summed up by the rather mystical idea of a pan-Asian brotherhood or a ‘New Order’ in the ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’.
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