Food rations in the Japanese forces

[Akira Takizawa]

In the late WWII, a man entered to Imperial Guards. The first day, rice mixed with red grains was served. He thought it was Sekihan* for celebrating recruits. However, it was not Sekihan, but rice mixed with Koryan (Kaoliang)**. After that, everyday meal was Koryan rice. He was much disappointed and unsatisfied with meal.

*Sekihan - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekihan
++ During the war, Kaoliang was used as substitute for rice. Koryan rice was very distasteful.

Taki

[Sewer King]

Thanks, Taki. To expect something high like sekihan and get something low like koryan instead would certainly be remembered.

So then, even the Imperial Guards had to dilute their rice toward the end of the war. This is in some contrast to the Navy, which was said to have only followed the rest of the country in reducing its rice ration some 10%, and only in August 1945.

(US Naval Technical Mission to Japan,“Data Relative to Life in the Jungle and on Sea Islands and Data on Composition of Insecticides,” Intelligence Targets Japan (DNI) of 4 Sept. 1945, Fascicle M-1, Targets M-01 and M-08, November 1945, pages 7-13)

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Koryan rice was very distasteful.

Kaoliang (sorghum grain) meal was long a part of Chinese PLA combat rations or travel rations, where it was mixed with soy meal, corn, and millet to be cooked in water for a porridge. (US Defense Intelligence Agency Handbook of the Chinese People's Liberation Army November 1984, page 52)

• In the American Civil War, some Southern civilians also resorted to sorghum as a wheat and corn substitute during food shortages in the Confederacy. It may have been eaten more by slaves before then, before the war drove down many peoples' diet as it often has. {Mary E. Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront (University of South Carolina Press, 1993), pages 68-69)
  
  In school I had first head of kaoliang from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's famous novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In it, Soviet prisoners in the gulag had to eat magara, a Chinese porridge made of it. This made kaoliang sound even more distasteful.

Probably few of us here have grown up eating sorghum regularly and often, so for everyone else it would be a drastic change as a staple food. Especially if it was part of larger crises like disaster and war, making it part of a bad memory.

• In modern US history the only nearest comparison might be that of the US home front during World War I. Use of wheat flour was ordered to be reduced by 20% and some tried alfalfa flour, but it made bread greenish and unappetizing. (Don Lawson, The United States in World War I (Scholastic Books, 1963), and Benedict Crowell, America's Munitions 1917-1918 (US Government Printing Office, 1921), page 437)

I imagine that in Japanese literature there must be many other mentions of coping with food substitutes and privations on Japan's home front, as there would be among her soldiers. But such references would be expected as widely scattered and, also, part of the war's larger suffering.

-- Alan

[Peter H]

Advertisement for crab meat.Such a luxury would appear to have been sent to the troops in the food packs sent from home in the early days of the China campaign

[Peter H]

Street kids in China selling alcohol?

[Peter H]

From: http://www.jacar.go.jp/shuhou/topics/topics03_02.html

Homefront

[Sewer King]

Advertisement for crab meat. Such a luxury would appear to have been sent to the troops in the food packs sent from home in the early days of the China campaign

Crab meat was among the seafoods that could be found in the full issue of garrison rations, as listed in the usual US War Department Handbook on Japanese Military Forces. But it does not seem an everyday item, and receiving more of it might still be much appreciated in the imonbukuro (cheering bags).

I imagine that canned crabmeat did become scarcer for ordinary soldiers' food as the war went on, by then in fact ending up more of a luxury than some other canned goods. The imonbukuro would also be expected to have become fewer as basic food rations themselves became shorter, and supply lines tighter.

At least during the early Pacific victories, were the gifts of cheering bags as common for IJA troops in the farthest islands they occupied? So far the photos we have seen of them look mainly from the China war, where the Japanese controlled enough of their overland supply lines in that theater. But that became less and less true for their longer, more vulnerable sea lanes to the outermost empire.

======================

Street kids in China selling alcohol?

It looks more like the soldier is giving the children something shaken out from a small can, such as sakuma fruit-flavored candy drops earlier pointed out by hisashi in the imonbukuro. If so, the bottles, whatever they are, might only be incidental to the photo.

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Homefront

These pictorial magazine spreads look comparable to those in wartime Germany’s Signal magazine. They may not be exclusively military, although there are other pictorials for that too. But they generally say and show that everything is going well in the Reich and Festung Europa -- or in Dai Nippon and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. That applies to incidental matters of food as well.

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Some recent sectional illustrations of Imperial Japanese Navy cruisers show their food stores.

Heavy cruiser Takao’s food storage spaces aft:



Other spaces in the bow held more rice and wheat, and soybean oil as well.

(From Lacroix and Wells’ Japanese Cruisers of the Pacific War (Naval Institute Press, 1997), pages 346-347)

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Also food storage aboard the Mogami-class heavy cruisers:

• A great deal of these stores were lost on board the Mogami herself, when, as we have seen in another thread, about 20m of her badly bent bow had to be cut off at sea. This resulted from a fateful collision with sister Mikuma at the Battle of Midway. It contributed both to Mikuma’s loss and to her own heavy battle damage.

Mogami-class' other food stores aft:


(Lacroix and Wells, page 453)

Note also the shipboard production of lemonade here, which has some small interest in itself as a naval ration. From earlier in the thread:

Said to be Lemonade Bottle found on one of the midget subs at Sydney May 1942. From the AWM website. Obviously bottled water/lemonade was carried on these craft.

It is easy to understand this aboard submarines. However, aboard a surface ship I had wondered a little why Navy beverages were bottled. Glass was heavy, bulky, and breakable. It seems that aluminum kegs would be better used instead, with the men drinking from cups. We've seen and read earlier that IJN sailors' beer was also issued in bottle.

Were all Japanese capital ships equipped to make lemonade?

• Britain’s Royal Navy had made lemon juice mandatory issue to its crews shortly before the Napoleonic Wars -- and just in time, some say, to help win its victory at sea there. American seamen of the same time depended on cranberry juice; while Chinese sailors typically kept fresh ginger potted on board their junks. German sailors made use of rosehip juice.
  
  Later the RN switched from lemons to limes, because lemons came from the disputable Mediterranean while limes came from secure West Indies colonies. Thus, lemons and limes were to some extent a strategic supply for the old British empire. Is it possible that the rising new Japanese empire felt similarly?

Where did prewar Japan get lemons for her Navy? They would have been as important for vitamin C as barley was for vitamin B. The Japanese Navy apparently did not have to learn the hard way about vitamin C deficiency (scurvy) as western navies had before them, although it did so with vitamin B deficiency (beriberi).


– Alan

[Peter H]

Thanks Alan

From: http://yanesen-urouro.bakyung.com/2008/08/index_3.html

These appear to be replica lemonade bottles made by a Kure factory that started supplying the IJN from 1925.They may have sold both full and empty bottles to the fleet.Obviously smaller vessels didn't have a lemonade plant.

Appears a carry over from the Royal Navy,British sailors who didn't like rum were issued lemonade.

[Peter H]

IJN canteen on shore,from: http://bbs.tiexue.net/default.htm?ListU ... 6-0-1.html

[Peter H]

From: http://yossie.jp/senkanyamato/index.php ... F%DF%CB%BC

Aboard the Yamato

Photo One--cooking vats

Photo Two--mealtime

[Peter H]

Same source,Yamato relics.Look like beer or water bottles?

[Ron Sundby]

Alan, thanks for the illstrations.

As a retired USN cook I was quite interested to see how the storage was laid out on IJN ships. On US ships the food storage tends to be lower and more amidships with dry and refrigerated storage concentrated for ease of access. From the illustrations it looks like that would have been very difficult on IJN ships because of the way engine rooms and mgazines were sited. It means that whoever was in charge of storing food stuffs and then breaking them out for issue to the galley would be running all over the ship. A job I am very familiar with and would not enjoy on a ship where the storage spaces were so widely scattered.

Peter H. wrote: Aboard the Yamato/Photo One--cooking vats

These vats (normally refered to as 'coppers' in the Navy or 'steam jacketed kettles' more formaly ) are very similar to the ones still used. Note the rim with the heavy bolts and the piping and valves under them. The coppers have a double hull on the bottom half into which low preassure steam is piped to provide the required heat. These look like about 50 gallon coppers (189 liters), but I have seen them range anywhere from 5 up to 100 gallon sizes.

Also look at the shelves. This is obviously in port, otherwise there would be some kind of detachable battens running parralel and slightly above the shelving to keep items from falling of the shelves .

Ron

[Sewer King]

From: http://yanesen-urouro.bakyung.com/2008/08/index_3.html

These appear to be replica lemonade bottles made by a Kure factory that started supplying the IJN from 1925. They may have sold both full and empty bottles to the fleet. Obviously smaller vessels didn't have a lemonade plant.

Ramune, the Japanese carbonated soft drink of many flavors, has gained some popularity among young Americans (including my daughter) who have been introduced to things of Japanese popular culture through manga and anime. The original lemon drink reportedly began with Scotsman Alexander Cameron Sim, a long-time resident at Kure throughout the Meiji era.

• Bottles of it at the back of the basket have a 19th-century British Codd patent stopper. These have a free-falling glass bead in its stopper that must be popped down into the shaped neck to drink the drink. Largely forgotten in Western popular memory, the Codd stopper survives in Japan's Ramune bottles which young Americans might well think is a distinct Japanese design. If these are replicas, then the Ramune bottle's modern form outlived the classic glass Coke bottle.
  
  Today it is ordinarily available here in Asian food markets (particularly Korean ones). I had not known that its name comes from a Japanization of the word “lemonade.” Like curry rice (kare raisu) it apparently has a strong naval connection, if not necessarily a naval origin. Modern Ramune bottle labels I have seen to date (for export market?) do not hint at this, unlike the ones in our photo here with the anchor motif.

Ramune was said to be popular in the IJN, but this might be no different from Coke's popularity with US soldiers in both World Wars. Actual production of lemonade aboard Japanese warships, in dedicated compartments, would seem more medicinal and concentrated for juice than what we might expect of a commercially-bottled soft drink.

Appears a carry over from the Royal Navy. British sailors who didn't like rum were issued lemonade.

I would have expected the rum ration to be liked more than disliked. In the old US Army unit commissary approach, there was some provision for commuting rations or beverages not drawn by the soldiers or sailors. Men sometimes agreed to trade part of their rations to others for some personal debt or favor they owed.

Lemon or lime juice was supposed to be mandatory for everyone in the old RN. Wasn't it also tied to the rum ration because sailors would reasonably be sure to turn out for that, and because it was regular?

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From: http://yossie.jp/senkanyamato/index.php ... F%DF%CB%BC

Aboard the Yamato/Photo One--cooking vats

These vats (normally referred to as 'coppers' in the Navy (or 'steam jacketed kettles' more formally) are very similar to the ones still used. Note the rim with the heavy bolts and the piping and valves under them ... These look like about 50 gallon coppers (189 liters) ...

I guess you’ve seen this earlier photo of an IJN galley ashore, with its coppers and a stern-looking petty officer. From their cap bands, hisashi identified for us the men cutting renkon (lotus root vegetable) as members of a naval aviation unit.

• What size do those kettles look to be?
  
  They seem to have pull-cord handles hanging down, which I guess are for pulleys that hoist up the pot lids? This differs from the coppers aboard Yamato, which have hinged lids, and maybe were spring-assisted to open them?
  
  Are the handwheels for tilting the kettle? Would there be some kind of lock-out that prevents turning the wheel while a kettle is running?

Are there similar steam kettles at rear left in this earlier photo from here, of an Army garrison kitchen? However, I don't see any steam piping or gauges for it as in the Navy galley.

Use of coppered steam kettles in army rolling field kitchens seems to have been pioneered by the Imperial Russian army around the end of the 19th century. Other armies soon followed, and the general type was common enough by World War I. Cited earlier here, a US Army attaché covered the subject in the aftermath of the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He noted that this type of cooker was especially suited for the soups and steamed groats (kasha] that were mainstays of Russian Army food. That would likewise be true for the rice-based ration of the Japanese, who would later adopt a comparable rolling kitchen of their own.

• It would be interesting to many of us to see a good history of US Navy cookery. There are a number of books that cover it, but none that I know are dedicated to it as a subject in itself There is a lot of wry kitchen humor about food in naval history, but it has little of the misfortune and starvation found in some extremities of the army histories – such as the WW2 Japanese Army in particular.
  
  I've tried unsuccessfully to look up some specialized history of the kitchen steam kettle itself,.apart from the better-known pressure cooker which dates back to 17th century Britain. The need to regularly feed large groups of men – like various other technical advances – would seem to have begun with the army and navy, late in the Industrial Revolution, and maybe with the British. And while the army could or would have used steam kettles in garrison, the navy would likely have needed them more with the advent of ever-larger and longer-ranging steel warships. But without any references as of yet, this remains conjecture.

Same source, Yamato relics.Look like beer or water bottles?

Glass bottles through history almost have their own field of study, inside of other fields like cooking, brewing, medicine, and archeology. Probably this is as true In Japan as anywhere else? These ones look a little large for beer at least. The bowls look like ones in use at at mealtime on the mess deck.

Might the remnant of blue & white hexagon tile flooring be from one of the ships' baths? A grim account of crewmen's baths on board Yamato is cited in this other thread.

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… As a retired USN cook I was quite interested to see how the storage was laid out on IJN ships. On US ships the food storage tends to be lower and more amidships with dry and refrigerated storage concentrated for ease of access. From the illustrations it looks like that would have been very difficult on IJN ships because of the way engine rooms and magazines were sited. It means that whoever was in charge of storing food stuffs and then breaking them out for issue to the galley would be running all over the ship. A job I am very familiar with and would not enjoy on a ship where the storage spaces were so widely scattered.

Aboard IJN cruisers, at least, it almost certainly implies the frequent run of heavily-laden carts along the passageways.

I am very glad that an ex-military cook has weighed in at this thread! There will be some more to come about IJN food at sea. I only wish more was available from original sailors' memoirs and postwar study in Japanese, but it is likely to be a lot of work to gather it from such widely-scattered sources.


Here are the only diagrams I could find of Yamato's food storage and galley spaces. Aboard her, at least, cold storage was close by and inboard of the galley on the upper deck. But it' was also apparently two decks further below. I found no specific mention of bulk storage for rice, cooking oil, and pickled vegetables as aboard the cruisers. However, there were other spaces annotated here simply as “stores” near the galley in this elevation:




In the following plan view of the upper deck, the galley is annotated and highlighted. It was surrounded by ship's boat stowage aft of it, and trade shops inboard of it:



(Janusz Skulski's excellent technical history The Battleship Yamato, a volume in the “Anatomy of the Ship” series (Conway Maritime Press, 1988), pages 38-40.).


A close-up detailed plan of the galley is given below, annotated in Japanese. This had to be excerpted from drawings of sister battleship Musashi, presumed to be very similar in this matter.


This detail is located against the broader plan drawing above by the dotted red line. Although in Skulski's book many other details are drawn to scale, this one was not, unfortunately for us here.

Note the slant of the galley's overhead in our photo of the coppers. Might that be due to the raft stowage spaces aft of the galley?

(Yoshimura Akira, Battleship Musashi: the Making and Sinking of the World's Biggest Battleship translated by Vincent Murray (Kodansha International Ltd, 1999; originally Senkan Musashi (Shinchosa Ltd)), appendix, page 192)

Also look at the shelves [in the Yamato's cooking vats photo]. This is obviously in port, otherwise there would be some kind of detachable battens running parallel and slightly above the shelving to keep items from falling of the shelves.

I had wondered a little about that, having seen railings for pantry shelves and cooking ranges aboard U-boats and recreational boats.. The shelves, I thought, might have had some kind of pull-up or pull-down battens built into their frontages. Unfortunately, we don’t have this level of surviving detail for furnishings as might be found for Allied or even German warships.

The photographer got low down, at eye-level just above the deck itself. I wasn't able to locate his photo in the triangular space of the galley as highlighted in the drawings. The originals are so small-scale that it might not be readable, and the steam kettles possibly covered over by the many fine annotations.

From earlier:

BB Yamato had six 108 liter rice-boiling cauldrons ...

If the IJN pioneered specialized rice cooking machines on board their warships it would seem a natural development. But these sound like more conventional cauldrons. I had often pictured that the Navy might have had large versions of the electric rice cookers of today.

For the same reasons as the steam kettles, I could not pick out the rice cauldrons in the detailed Plans drawing.

– Alan

[hisashi]

The last drawing in Alan's post has many interesting Japanese captions.

In the right below you see 菜釜６斗炊. This means 'cauldron for side dishes, 6 to capacity'. to (斗) is 18 liter in Japanese old measure system, so it was 108 liter. Yamato had two for side dishes, six for rice (maybe at the bottonm of the drawings, 同右 means 'same as indicated right'). They worked by the heat from Yamato's boilers.

A little left you see 茶湯製造器(約400l/時). It means 'Tea/hot water maker, 400 liter per hour'. 流場 (nagashiba) usually refer to 'water-using space'.

Now let us turn to the middle row. 食器格納棚 is dish rack. 消毒器 generally refers to disinfection apparatus, but here they were huge dish-washing machines.

万能烹炊器 means multi-purpose cooker, but here they were electric cooker. Perhaps something of hot plate but I cannot find the detail.

調理場 = kitchen, 配食台 = dish out table. 俎板 = chopping block. 合成調理機 in Yamato was an automatic slicer/mincer/potato peeler. The latest facility of the day.

菜棚 = side dish rack, 飯棚 = rice rack and 漬物棚 = salted vegetable rack. Perhaps those racks were for temporal stockyard for distributing meals all at once.

[Peter H]

From ebay,seller fightenirish35

Field cooking

[Ron Sundby]

Alan, thanks for those great illustrations of the Yamato. And thanks to Hisashi, as always, for the translations and insights; they add so much detail and are very appreciated.

Alan wrote: "hisashi wrote:BB Yamato had six 108 liter rice-boiling cauldrons" If the IJN pioneered specialized rice cooking machines on board their warships it would seem a natural development. But these sound like more conventional cauldrons. I had often pictured that the Navy might have had large versions of the electric rice cookers of today.For the same reasons as the steam kettles, I could not pick out the rice cauldrons in the detailed Plans drawing.

A cauldron is just a big pot and in this instance is exactly the same as what I have been referring to as a ‘copper’. It’s just semantics. The 108 litre size would equal approximately 30 gallons in US measure and would be a fairly standard size aboard a large ship. They are shown on the drawing as circles, but the way they are positioned on the drawing does not exactly correspond to the line of coppers shown in the picture Peter posted. I am guessing that the circles represent sets of coppers rather than individual units. Also the copper at the far end of the line in Peter’s looks smaller. It is probably one of the side dish coppers Hisashi mentions.

Hisashi wrote: 万能烹炊器 means multi-purpose cooker, but here they were electric cooker. Perhaps something of hot plate but I cannot find the detail.

Yes this would be a type of hot plate. Aboard ship I have used 2 types. In the officers mess it was a set of four arranged in a square just like the burners on a standard stove top, each about 12 inches or 30cm square, where the heat for each could be individually adjusted. In the main galley, as shown on the Yamato drawing, they were a series of larger plates about 30 inches or 75cm square. They can be very hard to use in heavy seas. Try this: Use one hand to hold on to the counter top next to the stove (electric cooker) so that you don't fall over as the ship rolls. Use the other hand to hold a pan on the stove. Now, without letting go with either hand, stir the contents of the pan.

Coppers are easier to use at sea. In heavy seas you simply do not fill them as full, the heavier the seas the less you put in, so as the ship rolls and the contents move inside of them the contents do not come up to the lip of the copper. That way you can continue to provide some kind of hot meal in all but the roughest seas. Copprs are also very versitile, as well as boiling and steaming they work very well as woks for frying.

Ron