Author John Prados (cited earlier) made only one passing mention of the tensions between Japanese troops desperate for food at Truk and the islanders they displaced for it.
There is much more about this in an interesting social and historical study by Lin Poyer, Suzanne Palgout, and Laurence Marshall Carucci,
The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences of the Pacific War (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001).
Allied campaigns to reduce or take Japanese bases across Micronesia are well-known. But the authors here look at life for the generations of islanders who lived first under the Japanese mandate, then the hardships and perils of the war, and the American administration afterwards. This is another of the largely unexamined sides of the Pacific war that modern scholarship looks to.
Much of the book is necessarily based on narratives from now-elderly Micronesians, and the authors account for these as such. By their telling the Japanese treated them as third-class subjects, somewhat after Koreans, Okinawans and Formosans -- but comparatively benevolently before the war. During the war Allied air attack and landings, reinforcement of the island garrisons, and above all supply shortages led the Japanese to treat the islanders more harshly. The latter were drafted for labor and farming, sometimes to the deprivation of their own food. However, they recalled instances where certain Japanese deliberately made sure to treat them fairly, or at least not violently.
Naturally food was a concern for the Japanese on these distant islands, at the farthest end of vulnerable supply routes. If a native population could live on their local foodstuffs in peacetime, how could it do so with large Japanese garrisons and under constant attack? From pages 171-75:
As the Japanese military prepared for siege, they took control not only of islanders’ land and buildings, but of all crops; in places they even managed wild foods and marine products. “This was the time that we felt hardships,” [a Kosrae native] said after the first American bombing … {Another] worked in a military mess, “but all the food was for the soldiers, we weren’t allowed to eat it.” So he says, “we would cook food every day for the soldiers – and steal some.”
Bypassed Marshall Islands
Though no large shipments reached the bypassed islands after January 1944, Imperial Headquarters had tried to supply its Micronesian garrisons with six months’ to a year’s worth of provisions, and three submarines reached Mili [Atoll] in the first months after American invasion. Rationing (begun as early as May 1943 on Jaluij) came in earnest when Kwajalein fell, disrupting the regional supply system. A [cook from Kiribati] who escaped from Mili in May 1944 reported that the food situation was fine, with soldiers receiving three meals a day … But this was not to remain the case. Not only did [American surveillance] block resupply, but constant air attacks napalmed gardens and prevented lagoon travel or use of marine resources. [Another islander said] “Well, things were different on account of food, but it was still okay. We ate coconut and fish, we fished every day. We ate breadfruit also. The Japanese on Maloelap had not yet begun to hate our eating as they did on the other atolls; we still ate breadfruit, we still made arrowroot, they did not hate us if we made these things. But we also made food for them. We helped the Japanese soldiers.”
Commanders of the vulnerable bases learned from Marshallese how to make local foods and accustomed their troops to the taste. (But the Japanese disliked pungent breadfruit: If there was preserved breadfruit they would say ‘What is it? Who brought all this shit?’) Such preparation paid off for the small garrison on Ronglap. Once imports stopped, Japanese there ate from their gardens, excelled at fishing, and learned to make and appreciate Marshallese foods such as arrowroot and coconut toddy (“Sometimes they were better at making coconut toddy than we were.”)
… at Pingelap islet in Jaluij … the garrison controlled food production, forwarding to the main base supplies of coconut toddy and toffee, pickled clams, salt fish, dried fish, ripe coconuts, breadfruit, and fish taken by dynamiting (much of the work was done by soldiers). Marshallese stretched their rations by scavenging [although] some work bosses shared the pot among Japanese and islanders .. but [they] could not harvest food except under supervision – “It was illegal for you, personally, to climb and harvest a breadfruit or throw down a drinking coconut; they would shoot you.” Eating was prohibited – “The Japanese hated it if we ate. They held onto the food and kept it from us, and there were many people who went hungry and died.” On Mili, food was considered Japanese property and was carefully allotted to islanders. [One recalled] “No one could say ‘eat.’ If you were caught [with something, it meant] you had stolen. You had to give everything to the Japanese.” Friday was food ration day. “But Monday and every other day, the foods were only for them, the Japanese. The Marshallese and the Koreans ate on Fridays, and then [we] would save things up for the other times.”
There is a bright spot among these accounts:
When [another islander] was called in to share a meal at military headquarters, he learned that the commander was eating the same poor food as the Marshallese. In fact, despite (or perhaps because of) the harsh discipline, Jaluij was the safest of these atolls on which to pass these perilous months. In dramatic contrast to the thousands of deaths from malnutrition and disease among troops and laborers on the other bypassed atolls, Jaluij had no starvation and adequate living conditions and medical care, largely due to effective leadership. The Japanese admiral in his dying statement “boasted that no one had starved on his atoll” – no small achievement (USSBS 1947a:50).
Elsewhere in Micronesia, from page 182-85:
[On Pohnpei], Pohnpeians in some areas were obliged to supply food to the military, including bananas, tobacco, tapioca, sweet potatoes, coconuts, yams, and breadfruit. “The Japanese soldiers really destroyed Pohnpei. They made the land their own and took their food. They dug up yams without asking; climbed breadfruit trees … they never asked permission for anything.” In some areas, soldiers destroyed resources (for example, felling palms to eat the hearts); some who had planted extra food in response to Japanese warnings [to do so] lost it all to soldiers when they moved inland to escape the air raids … The Japanese kept strict records of supplies such as chickens and pigs; to kill one’s own pigs amounted to theft. Soldiers also practiced unofficial confiscation … one couldn’t carry food from place to place … “If I wanted to go to Palikir, I couldn’t take anything because hungry soldiers would stop and take it from me.”
Pohnpeians, however, assisted Japanese civilians and their families made refugees by bombing, and who had been unable to be evacuated from the island. The islanders did not resent them as they did the soldiers, and the civilians were grateful in return. So much so, in fact, that they remained in contact with them long after the war, sending gifts and even revisiting.
Yap, like Pohnpei and Kosrae, saw its abundant food supply stressed but not exceeded by a large military population. In some areas, soldiers dug up and destroyed taro patches, but other commanders were more careful and ordered Yapese to supply taro. Since “the Japanese did not know how to tend the taro patches,” Yapese … exerted some control over food. As the Japanese consumed their stores and resupply failed, Yapese planted sweet potatoes and did other agricultural work under military control, and the military tagged and guarded food sources.
Sweet potatoes, though fast growing, had to be harvested before ripe, and even marginal food such as small coconuts were exploited. Soldiers would steal cooked food that Yapese had prepared in the morning and left in their cooking pots when they went to unassigned labor. [One] recalled cooking for the soldiers, gathering sprouted coconuts and sweet potato tips and mixing them with fish or meat in huge pots. To fill [their own] subsistence gap, Yapese women stole from their own taro gardens, and men stole fish. They also stole tobacco, sweet potato, and tapioca leaves from Japanese gardens … Stealing on Yap also took an additional form when the military commander of a village would send people out to forage for food – that is, to steal – from areas under another military unit. In this case the Yapese stole from each other, and from other Japanese, for the Japanese.
Of the two strongly garrisoned Carolinian atolls, Satewan and Woleai, the latter suffered the greatest food stress. The seven thousand troops that arrived in April 1944 to defend Woleai airfield lived a military epic of suffering. Fifteen months of bombing destroyed installations, but it was disease and starvation that killed most; fewer than sixteen hundred survived to be evacuated in September 1945 … Woleai people lived on resources from the small ungarrisoned islets, with men staying on even the tiniest islets to protect them from Japanese foraging … the Japanese would sometimes walk to other islets at low tide and steal food, or sometimes people would give them food, knowing that they were suffering. Higher-ranking Japanese traded hoarded rice and other imports for local foods; soldiers secretly bartered with blankets and sheets.
Mortlockese actively supported the large Satewan base. As in the bypassed Marshalls, some Mortlock islands supplied taro, copra, coconut, fish, and breadfruit to the eight hundred-man garrison after supply lines were cut. From April to October 1945 … at least ten tons of taro [were sent] to Satewan every three weeks; [it was told that] each island in the Mortlocks was assigned quotas [of food] …
The Japanese base at Pulewat sent military parties to Pulap where the malnourished soldiers could regain strength and grow food, which they then dispatched to Pulewat; Pulapese were detailed to feed these soldiers and work in the gardens. The Japanese used canoes to bring the vegetables they grew – and a quota of taro from the Pulapese – to Pulewat.
[One native] recalled the Japanese commander at Pulap as “a good man” who controlled his troops. And he recalled the condition of those who arrived from Pulewat: “They were so skinny … they would lie flat, and we had to carry them on a stretcher. They were like dogs – they would lie there, and if a fly came by their mouths, they would snap at it … We would feed them, and then when they were better, they would go back to Pulewat and more would come.”
On Palau, food was also in short supply as in the Marshalls and at Truk, and just as subject to commandeering. From page 185:
Palau
… Japanese soldiers and civilians and Palauans faced food shortages and tight security regulations. Agricultural and fishing projects were initiated to meet the increased demand [of the garrisons], but more than two thousand troops died of starvation and disease.
Eventually, Japanese resorted to violence to obtain food, and Palauans took to the woods to forage. Japanese reportedly ate their horses and dogs, then turned to lizards and snakes. Kyota Dengogi, who worked as a military messenger, described seeing food thieves imprisoned, put in wire cages, and exposed outside. As he moved around Palau, he saw Japanese, Okinawans, and Koreans dying from wounds, starvation, and disease. On his way, to Ngival one day, he passed [such] a group awaiting transportation, some lying down, others leaning on trees … some already dead …
The authors do mention the reported instances of Japanese cannibalism in Micronesia:
The desperate scarcity [in the bypassed Marshalls] gave rise to frightening stories from [one islander]: “Well, we do not know because we had distanced ourselves from [the Japanese soldiers], but we heard that they ate people. They ate the Koreans, they killed the Koreans and consumed them, that’s how far it went; their food supplies were exhausted.” Such rumors were not unfounded. The US Strategic Bombing Survey (1947a: 49-50) reports that on Wotje, Maloelap, and Mili, where almost four thousand soldiers and laborers died of malnutrition, the desperate turned to eating rats, grave robbing, and cannibalism.
Finally, the authors add the same reported instance of cannibalism at Truk cited by William Stewart in the "Starvation" chapter of his
Ghost Fleet of the Truk Lagoon. In
The Typhoon of War this is told differently, in some awful detail. Here it was said to be a deliberate experiment on the use of human meat. Whatever the truth about these incidents in Micronesia, the very idea of cannibalism seems so un-Japanese, even where isolated examples were confirmed elsewhere.
Now back to comparatively pleasant matters about food in the Japanese forces. It is well known that many garrisons were cut off and their provisions failing. But the depths to which it drove some of the Japanese, still some others among them resisting such, are not as well known as these authors have it. Or even as I excerpted them here.
-- Alan
