Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (41 page)

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 were 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

Townspeople moved into the countryside in order to find plots to cultivate and students stopped attending school and stayed at home to help in the family garden. Only eight or ten students out of forty continued to come to lessons at the Malim Nawar Malay School in Zaharah Hamzah. Those who did attend came in tattered clothing and showed signs of malnutrition and its associated diseases.
⁶⁴
In mid-1943 the Japanese began destroying rubber and coconut plantations in order to found agricultural settlements. The raw materials could no longer be transported to Japan because of lack of shipping and the American blockade. Chinese, Malay and Indian Associations were instructed to find recruits to farm these projects. Many went to escape being drafted for military labour. They were given all kinds of inducements: ‘rice and cloth rations; free vegetable seeds and manures; free medicines and medical services; cheap agricultural implements; subsidies and loans’.
⁶⁵
But the conditions on these agricultural settlements, populated by people with barely any agricultural knowledge or experience, were appalling. In the remaining rubber plantations, where it was difficult to grow food, the children starved. When the British finally reoccupied the country in August 1945, 35 per cent of schoolchildren in Malacca
were found to have anaemia and 30 per cent had vitamin deficiencies of various kinds.
⁶⁶

In Singapore tapioca noodles were substituted for the rice ration. Bread was made with a mixture of tapioca and soya flour. ‘It was just like rubber, you bite, you pull, the thing stretches. Terrible!’ The writer A. Samad Ismail described how an obsession with tapioca took over people’s lives. ‘These days everyone loves tapioca … nothing is talked about except tapioca; in the kitchen, in the tram, at wedding ceremonies – absorbed with tapioca, tapioca, tapioca; until dreams are sometimes about tapioca.’
⁶⁷
The problem was that while tapioca provided calories, it contained no vitamins. A resident of Singapore summed up the feeling created by living on tapioca, ‘We are full in tummy but we lack good substance.’
⁶⁸
Tropical ulcers became common, malaria, beriberi and tuberculosis claimed thousands.
⁶⁹
By 1946 the death rate in Malaya had risen to double the pre-war rate.
⁷⁰

In Indo-China the misguided agricultural policies of the Japanese and their ruthless requisitioning of rice caused one of the worst famines of the Second World War. Indo-China, nominally under French control, was designated the main supply base for the southern army operating in south-east Asia and the south Pacific.
⁷¹
The Japanese decided to use the northern area of Tonkin to compensate for jute and hemp shortages, needed for making rope and sacks. Tonkin had always been dependent on supplementary rice supplies from Cochin-China in the south but the re-allocation of land from rice to jute and hemp caused a fall in the harvest in 1943, which made the northerners more dependent than ever on southern rice imports.
⁷²
However, by 1944 there were only five ships operating the coastal trade between the north and south, and most of the junks which provided supplementary shipping had been requisitioned by the military.
⁷³
The region was cut off from its food imports.

Rice shortages throughout south-east Asia placed even greater pressure on Indo-China to produce rice and, even though the harvest was insufficient to feed the population, the French authorities continued to levy rice on behalf of the Japanese. To make matters worse, rather than going through the French, the Japanese army began to go out into the villages and requisition rice directly. Army representatives arrived in the village of Mieng-Ha in Ung-Hoa district with trucks. The people
of Mieng-Ha only cultivated 300 hectares. When the Japanese departed they took with them 200 tons of rice. The villagers were left with nothing. Villages all over Tonkin experienced such visits and, with their stores empty, they were forced to buy rice at the market in order to fulfil their quotas for the French authorities, who bought it back from them at one-third of the price they had paid.
⁷⁴