The Reality of the Home Front — What the People Lived Through

The story of war is often told as a story of the battlefield. But in the home front — the place of ordinary people’s lives behind the front lines — there was another war. It was a war in which no gunfire was heard, yet which steadily tightened its grip on daily life, from the dinner table, from the newspaper, from relationships within the neighborhood. Textbooks tend to settle it in a single line, ‘the people were forced into a life of austerity,’ but within that one line are packed all of it: the rationing queues, the surveillance of the neighborhood associations, the war-result announcements plastered over with lies, and the incendiary bombs that rained from overhead. What is difficult here is that one cannot declare the people of the home front to have been purely victims, nor perpetrators who willingly supported the war. Many lived both at once.

The War That Began at the Dinner Table — Control and Rationing

The home front’s war came first to the kitchen.

When the National Mobilization Law was promulgated in 1938, the government became able, for the sake of waging war, to control nearly every aspect of the people’s lives — goods, labor, prices, production. Before long, sugar and matches, clothing and fuel came under coupon and allocation systems, and by 1941, even rice, the staple food, shifted to a rationing system using ration books. The ordinary freedom of buying what you want, as much as you want, was gradually whittled away.

The amounts rationed shrank visibly as the war dragged on. Rice alone was not enough, and people made do with sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and even substitute foods, day after day. Mothers managed with limited ingredients, queued in lines, and racked their brains to fill their families’ bellies. To support such living, an organization called the neighborhood association was woven through each town. With around ten households as one unit, it was a system that took on roles such as distributing rations, air-defense drills, and relaying messages. While it had a mutual-aid side, it also became a device of mutual surveillance, in which neighbors watched one another for who was uncooperative or who let slip a complaint.

What we do not want to overlook here is that people did not simply accept such control grudgingly. The cause of ‘for the country’ and ‘for the soldiers at the front’ had the power to turn austerity into something meaningful. Endurance itself came to be a source of pride, as a contribution to the war. The life of the home front was, at the same time as it was oppressed, also a place where people willingly supported the war — this dual nature is the very starting point for understanding the home front.

When Lies Become Everyday — Imperial Headquarters Announcements and Press Control

The windows through which the people of the home front knew the world were the newspaper and the radio. And those very windows were warped.

What conveyed the war situation to the people were the announcements of the Imperial Headquarters, the military’s supreme organ. In the period soon after the war began, brilliant war results were reported against the backdrop of actual victories. But what is said to have changed the tide was the Battle of Midway in June 1942. Japan suffered a crushing defeat, losing four of its main aircraft carriers, yet the Imperial Headquarters announcement made the losses appear far smaller and exaggerated the results. From then on, reporting that dressed up defeats as victories and concealed losses became the norm. That the phrase ‘Imperial Headquarters announcement’ is still used today as a byword for ‘an official announcement with no substance behind it’ has its roots in this period.

Reporting was warped not only because the military manipulated information. Under the national mobilization system, strict controls were imposed on newspapers and radio, and the freedom to criticize the military or the government was lost. Fearing censorship and with their paper supply held in others’ hands, the media gradually changed into organs that simply relayed the government’s announcements as they were. At the same time, there was also a side in which the people themselves sought heroic war results. The heart that wished for bright tidings of victory over dark reality, and the reporting that answered it, supported each other. In this way, an everyday was created in which lies were hard to recognize as lies.

The bill for this would eventually come due. Without being told the true war situation, people went on enduring in the belief that ‘someday we will win.’ A society robbed of accurate information lost from its own hands even the judgment to turn back when it should have turned back.

The War of Children and Women, and the Shadow of Doing Harm

Total war erased the boundary between those who fought and those who did not. The home front was also a war in which women and children were directly drawn in.

As men were called up one after another, women were mobilized as factory hands and as bearers of household economy and production. Children were no exception. Mobilized as student labor, they were made to work in factories, and as the war situation worsened, the pupils of the cities’ national schools were sent away from their parents to evacuate in groups to the countryside. From 1944 on, hundreds of thousands of children were sent to unfamiliar lands to escape the air raids, and lived amid hunger and loneliness. Those who ought to have been protected were, entirely, built into the gears of the war.

And in speaking of the home front, to look only at the harm suffered is to leave the work half-done. What the labor and austerity of the home front supported was the military fighting at the front, and that military was also a party to occupation and the doing of harm across various places in Asia. When the home front rejoiced at the heroic war results the newspapers conveyed, what was happening in the shadow of those results was almost never made known. Many ordinary people were placed where it was hard to hold the awareness that they were linked to the doing of harm — yet that they were not told does not erase the responsibility of society as a whole. They were victims, and at the same time part of a vast system of doing harm. Not to turn one’s eyes away from this uncomfortable overlap is what it means to look the home front squarely in the face.

The Day the Sky Burned — When the Home Front Becomes a Battlefield

And in the war’s final stage, the last wall that had separated home front from battlefield came crashing down. The air raids.

As the war situation tilted and the islands of the Pacific were lost one after another, the Japanese mainland entered the operational range of American bombers. Above all, the Great Tokyo Air Raid in the predawn of March 10, 1945, burned the everyday of the home front to ashes in a single night. A mass of incendiary bombs was dropped on the densely housed downtown districts, and the flames swallowed the town in an instant. People who lost any place to flee perished one after another, and the victims are said to number around 100,000. Upon people who had queued in rationing lines, repeated air-defense drills in their neighborhood associations, and endured in the belief that they would win someday, death came down without waiting for that ‘someday.’ The air raids burned not only Tokyo but cities across the land, turning the home front itself into a battlefield.

What we should call to mind here is the fact that, under war-result announcements plastered over with lies, people were almost never told that this catastrophe was drawing near. A society robbed of the true war situation could not even correctly gauge the magnitude of its own crisis. The control of information, which was supposed to be a means of maintaining the will to fight, in the end robbed people even of the judgment to flee.

To tell the reality of the home front merely as the fine tale that ‘the people endured,’ or to dispose of it with the single phrase ‘deceived victims,’ are both one-sided. People endured, supported, at times watched one another, and were burned. Harm suffered and harm done, cooperation and sacrifice, overlapped within the same everyday — not to turn one’s eyes away from this complexity is what it means to look the home front squarely in the face. Rather than judging from afar the people who lived through that time, to keep asking: if I had been placed within the same control and air, what could I have done? It is precisely there that what we should learn from this everyday lies.

While the home front was being driven this far into a corner, at the front beyond the sea, yet another tragedy was unfolding. Next time, we venture into the reality of a battlefield where spiritual rhetoric papered over supply — the reality of soldiers who fell to hunger and disease.