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Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John Dower described the
conditions in urban Japan during the immediate post-war years:
Defeat did not merely sever Japan from the food supplies of
Asia. It also occurred in midsummer, when the previous year’s
rice harvest was running out. With the empire now cut off
and millions of exhausted civilians and demobilized soldiers
about to return, it was imperative that there be a bumper crop.
Instead, due to adverse weather, manpower shortages, insufficient
tools, and a fall-off in fertilizer production, 1945 saw
the most disastrous harvest since 1910, a shortfall of almost 40
percent from the normal yield. . . . For a quarter of the families,
gruel constituted the major part of all meals. Soups with
leafy vegetables were another mainstay of the daily diet, as
were homemade bread and dumplings along with steamed
sweet potatoes. Typical diets of desperation also included
acorns, orange peels, roots of the arrowroot plant, rice-bran
dumplings, and a kind of steamed bread made from a wheat
bran that in normal times was fed to horses and cattle. . . .
Many farmers engaged in a gratifying barter trade with oncecondescending
city folk who flocked to rural areas in search of
food. Kimonos as well as watches, jewelry, and other treasured
possessions were traded for food, giving rise to one of the
most famous phrases of the time: takenoko seikatsu, the ‘bamboo-shoot
existence.’ The edible bamboo shoot can be peeled
off in layers, and the takenoko seikatsu phenomenon referred to
city people stripping off their clothing, as well as other possessions,
for food. 49
There can be no doubt that the 1940s constituted the most tragic episode
in modern Japanese history. However, despite, or rather because of
wartime mobilization and food shortages, this decade bore witness to the
incredible progress in the implementation of nutritional knowledge in
Japan, a development that set the stage for considerable improvement in
public nutrition in the post-war era. For example, the Secondary School
Law of 1943 revolutionized the system of home economics education. It
divided the subject into four categories: home management, child-rearing,
health preservation and clothing. Cooking was included in the health
preservation category and, in contrast to the situation before the reform,
much time and effort were devoted to the transmission of practical skills.
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