Pax Melmacia wrote:Simon K wrote:Filipino cuisine sounds quite interesting BTW Alan. Glad the Filipino nation still upholds the great canned corned beef.
Funny thing about that. There was a time cans of the stuff were
de rigeur in every middle-class kitchen here. But now the real stuff is so expensive we have to depend on relatives abroad to send them to us in bulk. The local stuff has so much Textured Vegetable Protein that it's practically approved eating during Lent.
As a Filipino I am sorry to say this, but our cuisine, though interesting and hearty enough, is not highly distinguished on the world's plate. There are certainly a great many fine Filipino cooks, but they often cook other cuisines; there are good eateries where Filipinos go, but not many fine restaurants that showcase our cuisine for others.
Not having returned to the RP in many years, I sometimes get taken aback by what I hear or read from there. I, too, grew up with corned beef in ordinary meals and now the real thing is scarce? And the Philippines, the best place in the world to grow rice, has to
import rice from Japan, which diverted it from livestock feed??
That's like the old Soviet joke that if north Africa became Communist, it would soon have to import
sand.
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Here is a reference to some research and development (R&D) for Japanese Army rations, from the following report of:
- US Naval Technical Mission to Japan: “References from the Committee for the Technical and Scientific Survey of Japanese Activities in Medical Sciences,” Intelligence Targets Japan (DNI) of 4 Sept 1945, Fascicle M1, Addendum M-AB, Attachments A and B, December 1945, pages 98-100:
- ENCLOSURE (B)
RESEARCH PROJECTS AND FINDINGS
OF THE ARMY MEDICAL COLLEGE, TOKYO
Part One
STUDIES REGARDING SANITATION AND HYGIENE
… II.
Study of Supplies.
1.
Actual conditions of supplies.
Purpose. In war time our supplies were decreasing gradually. We tried to know its actual conditions and to contribute to their development.
Procedure. We gathered menus which extended over one week or ten days in different regions and examined the supplied calories and articles of food.
Results.
2.
Study of reaction to reduced diet on the physical condition.
The aim of this study is to know the source of depreciation of our physical ability by reduced diet.
Methods. We observed the change of weight and working ability of a subject who was taking 300gm. of rice, 6gm. of sugar and 30gm. of powdered “miso” per day and was working as hard as an ordinary soldier.
Results. After a month continuance we find that the weight was decreased by 10%, the running time of 200 meters with a 40 kilogram mud-bag prolonged by 13 seconds (from 60 to 73 seconds) and lifting ability of a 25 kilogram mud-bag decreases from 17 times to 14 times. Afterwards he took the same food with sufficient supplies of vitamins and salts for a month without any decrease of working ability, although his weight reduced by 17% in comparison with the original one.
3.
Elements contained in the food supplies.
We examined the elements contained in our foods by means of spectro-photography.
Results. We found that beans contain comparatively many kinds of salts, but the intention of further study was interrupted with the termination of the war.
4.
Study of physiological value of protein.
We measured the physiological value of protein contained in rice, sardines, and soya-beans.
Method and results. After taking these proteins we compared the absorbed nitrogen within urine excreted one [
sic]. As to each protein it is the same results with generally convinced [
sic], but the physiological value of proteins combined with each other is above the original one.
5.
Study of the value of hulled rice from the utility view point.
From the economical and nutritious view point we examined the former results and made an experiment of absorption of hulled rice and polished rice.
Results:
- (1) If we pay particular attention on cooking methods and mastication, etc., there is no particular injury in the hulled rice diet.
(2) The hulled rice diet has no value from the economical and nutritious view point, if we can supply sufficient subsidiary articles of diet.
It might sound biased from today’s viewpoint, but the above experiments sound too simple to me. There may have been more studies that were not in the Technical Mission report. The Army Medical College was destroyed in the Tokyo fire raid of April 1945, although some of its records apparently survived [cf. Williams & Wallace, below, page 87]. Whether further ration research was done there or elsewhere, looking it up today might be a specialized subject.
For its part, the Japanese Army Air Forces did some research on food as a separate field. They assigned it to their Seventh Research Institute for Army Aeronautical Technology, along with clothing and other areas of troop support. [cf. Grunden, below, page 209]
These undated food studies seem surprisingly late in the war, since concern for food shortages would have become urgent well before then. That is not so obvious at it first sounds. A staff officer has to worry about food shortages well
ahead of the general officer, while the common soldier is more concerned with what he has to eat this day and the next. This kind of research is more likely to arise when staffers actually get their generals to worry about the problem.
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I do not mean to take this too far into the subject of war crimes, but some of the same concern for the Japanese Army’s food supply apparently led in that direction.
The Army Medical College in Tokyo was involved with biological warfare (BW) research under the infamous General Ishii Shiro. Ishii had once been an instructor there, where he had also begun some of his early BW work. He was known to have divided that into what he called type “B” work, which could be openly conducted at home in Japan -- and type “A” work, which secretly carried out unrestricted human experiments in remote parts of the Empire. [Harris, Sheldon H.
Factories of Death (London and New York: Routledge, revised edition 2002), page 23]
Besides more notorious BW atrocities, Ishii’s “Unit 731” laboratories in Manchuria also carried out malnutrition experiments on their prisoners. One of these was to see how long subjects could last on a diet solely of Army biscuits and water.
Malnutrition had appeared in units of the Kwantung Army fighting on the Xuzhou front in mid 1938. More than 1,000 troops of the Mixed Second Brigade and the 13th Brigade suffered from persistent diarrhea, and about half died … A number hospitalized at Tsitsihar Military Hospital, however, were recognized by the hospital’s commander Major Tokuyuki Okazaka to be suffering from malnutrition, something of an embarrassment to the glorious Japanese Army.
On November 11th and 12th, the Kwantung Army Medical Administration held a two-day conference on the subject. Present were Ishii and [his colleague] Kitano Masaji. Soon after, [the War Ministry’s Medical Bureau ordered corrective measures], but the problem was massive. For the next two years a research problem was carried out aimed as increasing nutrient absorption from food. Kitano, then at the Manchurian Medical College, carried out other studies using normal scientific procedures.
At Unit 731 a more drastic course was taken, as medical orderly Ishibayashi witnessed:
I saw the malnutrition experiments. They were conducted by the project team under the technician Yoshimura. He was a civilian member of Unit 731. The purpose of the experiments, I believe was to find out how long a human being could survive just with water and biscuits. Two marutas [“logs,” Unit 731’s term for its living human victims] were used for this experiment. They continuously circled a prescribed course within the grounds of the Unit carrying, approximately, a 20-kilogramme sandbag on their backs. One succumbed before the other, but they both ultimately died. The duration of the experiment was about two months. They only received Army biscuits to eat, and water to drink, so they would not have been able to survive for very long. They weren’t allowed a lot of sleep either.
Although not for BW, the food experiments at the Army Medical College fit Ishii‘s type “B” work by a short stretch, while the extreme experiments at Unit 731 fit his type “A.” This is only a circumstantial link for lack of detail, but General Ishii had a long and deep association with both of those research centers. The possibility of any distant link between these malnutrition experiments could even include Ishii himself, despite their apparent time difference. Presumably the College used Japanese subjects who were returned to full health afterwards, as opposed to the two presumably Chinese victims who died at Unit 731.
There is one broader note about these experiments. They were
entirely about endurance on minimal rations under hard conditions – and nothing else. Although there may have been some work on it, or elsewhere, there seems to be little report here of improving and testing any rations themselves. The Unit 731 tests, especially, imply a terrible interest in learning only how far the Japanese soldier himself can starve on his “iron rations” alone. A starving man ceases to be an effective soldier long before the extremes of these experiments From a war industry’s viewpoint, who would have done anything with these findings? What did they really help improve in army provisioning?
War crimes aside, I can’t easily see why malnutrition research would have taken two years after Xuzhou. Military-industrial research in wartime Japan was often long-delayed, disorganized, or hampered by various rivalries among or between companies, universities, and the armed forces themselves [Grunden, Walter E.,
Secret Weapons and World War II: Japan in the Shadow of Big Science (University Press of Kansas, 2005), pages 41-47]. It might well be that military medicine had similar problems. But army nutrition was already a long-established field, in Japan and elsewhere.
I am somewhat surprised at reports of malnutrition itself in the Kwantung Army in 1938. Certainly it had fought many small skirmishes with the Soviets through that time. Field conditions in the Manchurian borderlands were hard enough for both sides, but this was before Japan’s rout at the Battle of Nomonhan (Khalkin-Gol). At that time the Kwantung Army was reputedly a crack command, the cutting edge of the “Northward Advance” school of strategy against the Soviet Far East. I would have thought it was better supplied along its interior lines than to suffer malnutrition -– and then recognized only as late as told here.
In contrast, the Japanese Army had a good medical record on the battlefields of 1904 and 1914. But 1,000 disease casualties in 1938, with half fatal and partly from malnutrition, seems like a terrible turn. If that figure was not under-reported -– conceivably -- how does it compare to the number of those killed in action there up to then? If malnutrition was due mainly to failure of supply transport, then why were the Unit 731 experiments needed?
Incidentally, the US also carried out a
starvation experiment under
Dr. Ancel Keys in 1944-45, although these used willing volunteers and were well-documented.
The high number of its own disease casualties in the 1898 Spanish-American War encouraged the US Army to establish its Cooks and Bakers’ Schools soon afterwards – to improve the army’s food, and therefore its health. Soldiers’ rations in any army are often spartan to begin with. If their food is delivered late or spoiled, the officers may be slow to notice as long as their own mess plates are well-filled. But even the generals cannot ignore food and supply problems when enough of their men sicken or die from deficiency diseases.
What could have changed in IJA provisions or supply after Xuzhou, then? Might the later success of Japan’s “Southward Advance” in 1940-42 have deferred any such larger concerns for the material limits of her Army?
-- Alan
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