There has been some concerned expressed here regarding the suffering currently being experienced by the Ukrainians.
I have read much about World War II but nothing like this regarding what daily life was like in Japan.
From this book:
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Japan’s wartime failures reverberated on the home front. Just beyond the gates of the immaculate palace grounds, garbage littered the streets, now empty of cars and buses with the exception of the occasional abandoned automobile. The few emergency vehicles puttered around on charcoal. Sanitation crews diverted as much as 30 percent of the capital’s sewage into Tokyo Bay. Desperate for metals and minerals, the government demanded that residents hand over everything from teapots and hibachis to watches, gold teeth, and even precious diamonds, which could be used to produce radios. Buddhist priests relinquished hanging bells and gongs from temples. Scrap drives robbed Tokyo of park benches and cemetery fences, lampposts, and even the handrails on bridges. Workers toppled columns for the metal grilles and pried up boilers and yanked radiators, heating pipes, and public telephones from walls, all of which scarred buildings and marred the streetscape. “Tokyo had never been a beautiful city, but it was now dirty as well as homely,” recalled French journalist Robert Guillain. “Every morning the capital awoke a little more sordid, as though stained by the sinister night into which it had just been plunged.”
The war had taxed Japan’s labor force, which was already at full employment at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. “This was a politician’s dream,” noted historian Thomas Havens, “but a mobilizer’s nightmare.” The government eliminated the twelve-hour workday restriction, marched prisoners into factories, and shuttered nonessential businesses, ranging from book and toy stores to art, dressmaking, and typing schools. Eleven thousand small shops closed just in Tokyo. In a hustle to round up more laborers, Japan barred men from working as barbers, sales clerks, and railway conductors. In June 1944, Okayama added tombstone cutters, tree surgeons, and gardeners to the list. Bars, restaurants, and kabuki theaters closed and authorities bolted the wooden doors on Tokyo’s more than three thousand teahouses, putting ten thousand geishas out of work. “A geisha out of her element is like a bird fallen from its nest,” Guillain wrote. “Many even let themselves be drafted into the labor service where hands trained to pour sake and arrange flowers learned to sew white-silk parachutes and fashion aluminum parts.”
One after the other, basic necessities had vanished, from sugar and soap, to thread, matches, and medicine, forcing the Japanese to scrounge for substitutes. Newspapers doubled as toilet paper while cowhide gave way to shark, salmon, and whale skin, creatively dubbed “sea leather.” Residents sipped sake made from acorns and sweet potatoes and smoked eggplant and persimmon leaf cigarettes. Engineers tried unsuccessfully to make gasoline from shale and sardines and extracted oil from pine roots, going so far as to build nearly forty thousand distilleries, including some on the fairways of Tokyo’s tony golf clubs. “Traveling through the country,” observed Japanese journalist Masuo Kato, “one could see evidence of the failure of the program in the many piles of pine roots abandoned and rotting by the roadside.” When charcoal became scarce, Tokyo bibliophiles burned home libraries for fuel. No one was exempt from sacrifice, including the deceased. “One borrows coffins for the dead but cannot buy them,” journalist Kiyoshi Kiyosawa noted in his diary. “They are used any number of times.”
As the war dragged on, wages plummeted and inflation soared. “Money,” said Kimi Tatebayashi, “was practically worthless.” Dwindling food allowances forced residents to haggle on the black market. “Everything was rationed,” recalled Ayako Koshino, a kimono maker. “Even a tiny mackerel had to be divided among ten families.” Others pilgrimaged to the countryside in search of vegetables, an experience Philippine diplomat León María Guerrero described in his diary. “The trains were packed full of grim housewives loaded down with knapsacks knobby with potatoes or redolent of radish,” Guerrero observed. “Fish blood dripped from the baggage racks.” Authorities tried to crack down, prompting women to bundle bags of rice to resemble babies. Seafood became a delicacy as the lack of fuel slashed in half the amount caught, robbing the population of an important source of protein. Residents foraged for greens in vacant lots and graveyards. Ishii Tominosuke, a librarian in Odwara, made soup from the dandelions he plucked from his stone wall. Others feasted on family pets. “Merely to subsist,” Kato wrote, “had become the goal of each Japanese.”
The government mobilized 3 million students aged ten and older to toil on farms and in factories, a figure that equaled almost one-tenth of the nation’s workforce. One of those laborers was twelve-year-old Katsumoto Saotome, from a poor working-class family in downtown Tokyo’s Mukojima ward, the son of an alcoholic father and a mother who worked as a seamstress. The slender youth, who was often ridiculed for his poor performances in his school sumo tournaments, worked seven days a week from eight a.m. until five p.m. at the Kubota Iron Works on the banks of the Sumida River, a factory that helped crank out tank engines. Every day, wearing his white kamikaze headband featuring a red rising sun, he piled scrap metal atop trolley carts. He and two other students then pushed the carts up to the furnace, his lunch tied to his waist to prevent someone from stealing it. Rain or snow, Katsumoto struggled amid the shower of sparks, his hands growing callused. “The hunger was the hardest for me,” he recalled. “The amount of rations got smaller and smaller day by day.”
In another blow to home life, authorities after the fall of Saipan broke up families, ordering the evacuation of more than 350,000 third- through sixth-graders from major cities and resettling them in more than two thousand rural resorts, inns, and temples spread across twelve prefectures. Yoneko Moriyama recounted the debate in her household. “Let’s all die together in Tokyo,” her grandmother insisted.
“Who says we’re going to die?” her mother replied.
“Let’s at least,” countered her father, “try to save the children.”
Moriyama remembered the last supper before she and her brother boarded the train. “Every good thing to eat that could be found in the house was put on the table,” she said, “around which we all sat with faces that seemed to prophesy the end of the world.”
Many children paid a heavy price for safety. Homesick youths ran away only to later be found wandering the train tracks that most seemed to think would deliver them home to Tokyo. Others wet their beds and grew despondent. Schoolteachers, who evacuated and cared for the students, monitored their letters home, afraid that mentioning hardships might worry parents. “Mother, as soon as this letter arrives, please come to see me that very day. Please, mother,” one sixth-grader wrote. “Mitsuko might die if you don’t come to see me.”
The evacuees likewise battled food shortages. Students bullied one another, and desperate teachers swiped food from the youths. Children resorted to eating snakes and stream crabs as well as tooth-cleaning powder, paint, and crayons. Only the lice grew fat. “On sunny days we stripped the children naked and boiled their clothes to kill the lice,” recalled Mitsuko Ôoka, a teacher. “The water would turn red from all the blood the lice had sucked.”
Life in the cities was just as hard. Fights broke out on trains, and worker absenteeism in factories spiked. Ill health plagued many, from weight loss and fatigue to chronic diarrhea. The infant mortality rate climbed, while older children suffered from rickets, a disease sparked by a prolonged vitamin D deficiency that causes soft and deformed bones. Mothers were often too malnourished to nurse, forcing hospitals to bottle-feed newborns radish and turnip juice, both rich in vitamin C. Kyoto resident Tamura Tsunejiro captured the struggle of many in his diary: “We simply are waiting to starve to death.” Desperate residents turned to thievery to survive. Food vanished through open windows and from community gardens. An Osaka University professor, arrested for stealing tomatoes, was sentenced to five years in prison. People swiped everything from overcoats and shoes from the entryways of homes to keys and doorknobs from inns. Passengers stripped trains of hanging straps and even the leather upholstery. “Japan,” journalist Kiyosawa lamented in his diary, “has become a nation of thieves.” French reporter Guillain agreed. “All that was pleasing in Japanese life had perished.”
