Hunger and Recovery: From Food Shortages to Bread

In the cafés and the grand dining halls of department stores, yoshoku had become a pleasure for ordinary people from the late Taisho into the early Showa years. But the brilliance we described in the previous episode did not last long. War would take from the Japanese table the very abundance it had won.

To eat is the foundation of being alive. There was a time when that foundation was shaken to its roots by state control and the scarcity of goods. People stood in ration lines, filled their stomachs with potatoes and suiton in place of rice, and after defeat found that even eating properly had become difficult. In this seventh episode, we trace the food shortages from wartime into the postwar years, and the story of the bread and milk that would so greatly transform how the Japanese ate. This is the shadowed part of food history, a story that cannot be told in light alone.

An Age When the Table Was Managed by the State

As the front lines spread from the Second Sino-Japanese War to the Pacific War, food became a strategic resource controlled by the state. The symbol of this was the rice rationing system.

In April 1941 (Showa 16), records show that a system using rice ration books and meal tickets began in six major cities including Tokyo and Osaka. Rice was no longer something to be bought freely; based on a book distributed to each household, only a fixed amount could be obtained. The initial standard is said to have been around 330 grams per person per day. The following year, in 1942, the Food Control Law was enacted, and such controls spread across the entire nation.

For those who ate out, meal tickets were prepared. People eating their staple food at workplaces or while traveling carried these tickets issued by government offices and handed them to a dining hall, and only then could they obtain a single bowl of rice. It was an age in which the very right to eat rice had been replaced by a slip of paper.

Yet rations alone could not fill an empty stomach. To stretch their rice, people relied on all kinds of substitute foods. There was ‘suiton,’ dumplings made by dissolving flour in water; there were potatoes, pumpkin, and rice gruel. Ingenuity to bulk out the rice was applied daily in home kitchens, it is said. The rich harmony of one soup and three dishes became a distant memory, and food merely for survival became the reality of the table.

Such rice-saving dishes were, it is said, eagerly introduced even in the newspapers and magazines of the day. How to make limited ingredients filling and nutritious was, for those who kept the kitchen, a pressing daily challenge. The leisure to enjoy seasonal vessels and refined flavors, which we described in earlier chapters, retreated entirely here. It was an age in which eating, before it could be culture or pleasure, was first dragged back to being an act of survival.

The True Hunger That Came After Defeat

The defeat of 1945 (Showa 20) made the food situation even harsher. Indeed, there is a view that the true famine arrived after the war.

That year’s rice harvest was a record failure, said to have reached only about sixty percent of an average year. On top of this, supplies from regions that had been importing rice were cut off, while repatriates and demobilized soldiers returned from overseas, sharply increasing the population. More mouths to feed, less to eat: supply and demand fell into their worst state. In the cities, it is said that people collapsed near stations and others died of malnutrition. People got by through ‘bamboo-shoot living,’ trading their kimono for food layer by layer, and by making buying trips to farming villages.

What sustained the country through this crisis was aid from overseas. In 1946, supplies from an American civilian relief organization, the so-called LARA supplies, arrived in Yokohama. These are said to have included donations from Japanese immigrants in the United States, and along with clothing and medicine, food was delivered to the people of Japan. In 1949, skim milk powder supported by UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, began to arrive, becoming a pillar that supported children’s nutrition. It has been pointed out that the aid advanced under the occupation had, alongside its humanitarian aspect, a side bound up with American strategy and agricultural policy, and its evaluation remains a matter of differing views even today.

Bread and Milk Changed the Table

The relief supplies that arrived in an age of hunger became, unexpectedly, a doorway that would transform how the Japanese ate for a long time to come. The stage for this was the school lunch.

Postwar school lunches restarted with such relief supplies as their foundation. From late 1946, lunches were attempted in major cities, and from the following year, 1947, milk lunches centered on skim milk powder dissolved in hot water came to be provided to many children, records show. Before long, bread made from donated wheat was incorporated into the lunches, and the combination of koppepan and milk from skim milk powder was etched into the memory of the postwar generation’s table.

This change in school lunches quietly influenced the table as a whole. Into the rice-centered staple food of the Japanese, the option of bread entered from early childhood. Children who grew familiar with bread and milk at school came in time to accept bread at home as well. Demand for dairy and wheat grew, and Western-style ingredients melted into everyday life. Whether to see this change, with its starting point in aid, as a loss of tradition or as a step toward greater diversity in food, is here too a matter on which opinions divide.

What the Memory of Hunger Left Behind

Wartime control and postwar famine left a deep mark on how the Japanese ate.

One was the sense of not wasting food. The memory of a generation that learned through their own bodies the weight of a single grain of rice, a single slice of bread, was long passed down even amid postwar abundance. Another was the awareness that stability of food is not a given. The experience that the table could be threatened by a single shift in climate or international affairs became part of the background for later food policy and for debates over how much food a nation could provide for itself.

And there was one more change that should not be overlooked: the fact that the door to Western-style ingredients and flavors was thrown wide open amid hunger. The meat-eating of the Meiji enlightenment, the birth of yoshoku, the flavors spread by the military and the schools — the encounters with the West we traced in earlier chapters were all relatively gradual. But postwar bread and milk were brought to the table almost all at once, under the pressing circumstances of aid. It is fair to say that the very structure of how the Japanese ate was greatly reorganized here.

Japan, rising from the ashes, would soon grow its economy at astonishing speed. Refrigerators entered the kitchen, new foods that could be eaten just by pouring hot water were born, and eating out became a family pleasure. The children of a generation that had known hunger would, in turn, come to color the table amid unprecedented abundance. A recovered Japan was about to meet an unprecedented revolution in food.