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Baking bread from American flour, 1946.
for rice – a higher price was paid by the government to actual cultivators of
land and a lower price to the big landowners – led to the improvement of
the real income of farmers. All in all, as the war historian Bernd Martin
phrased it, ‘in the final years of the war the farmer actually had a better
income than ever before’ and ‘for the first time since the enforced industrialisation
of the Meiji era the Japanese peasant could make a decent living’. 43
It seems obvious that in such circumstances the consumption of rice, the
preferred staple, increased in the countryside. Accounts of the harsh reality
of rural existence in wartime are by no means false. 44 However, when
placed in the national perspective, the relative improvement is obvious, and
the levelling of living conditions in urban and rural areas during the 1940s
beyond dispute. The mass return of urbanites to their native villages
provides evidence that, as the Pacific War approached its end, city dwellers
became much worse off than the Japanese living in the countryside.
The wartime food rationing system had an enduring effect of singling
out rice as the national staple. The Food Management Law of 1942
granted all Japanese the right, even if only in theory, to a rice-centred diet.
For more than half a century, the production and distribution of rice in
Japan remained under state control, and it was only after 1995 that rice reentered
the free commodity market. The wartime rationing of rice provided
a firm foundation for the regional and social homogenization of Japanese
cuisine during the 1950s and ’60s. 45
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