A classic field cooking scene, but does the caption suggest the date? The soldiers are wearing what look like the
khaki field uniforms.
I have not yet seen a photo of a Japanese soldier carrying one of these teapots on the march. It would seem important equipment. In some earlier photos here, they look mostly to be this size. Were they issue items, maybe one per squad?
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Peter H wrote:From the “Tsingtao 1914” thread: Rice ball
Most seem to be eating rice balls from their hands, a handy meal that is, because it is like fast-food ... Earlier we have seen that in Imperial times, many Japanese had not eaten rice every day until they went into the military. Was there always
umeboshi or something else inside a rice ball meal, or could they be just plain rice also?
Unfortunately, someone here seems to have dropped his on the ground.
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This looks like a barn or stables, to guess from the straw or hay storage behind the soldiers. To eat their meal standing up, they probably moved the table outdoors.
At another meal, a
long, fine-looking wooden chest used as an outdoor mess table also looks “borrowed” from indoors. Is there a Chinese guest at far right? If so, he might have been consciously included in the photo.
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If it is
mochitsuki, the setting is a little different from earlier photos we have seen of this tradition, because the rubble in the background looks like that of recent fighting. The men making the cakes look cheerful enough, but the background suggests a New Year during the long China war –- or the Pacific War’s opening victories, early in 1942.
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Peter H wrote:The problem of food logistics is mentioned by Edward Drea in his
Japan's Imperial Army
China 1942 ... a neglect of logistics, shortages of food, ammunition, and transportation left hungry Japanese soldiers mired in the mud during the heaviest rainy season in sixty years …[page 227]
This sounds akin to the struggle of German troops in the snows (and mud also) of Russia. The worst snows or rains in decades sometimes seem to coincide with great military offensives in history. It almost seems as If war sometimes has some connection to the weather, at least in the defender’s favor.
There are specialized studies of German Army logistics on the Eastern Front, published by the US Army among others. Does anyone know of similar studies about Japanese Army supply in China or the Pacific? I don't expect there are many, unless maybe in Japanese.
Transportation was naturally the weakest link in the IJA's logistic chain, but I am not sure that it was a matter of neglect, as Drea put it. Imperial Japanese strategy depended on swift victory –- even though its materiel needs were less, and its soldiers' lives spartan enough.
... Logistics support was poor in all theaters and collapsed completely in some. The late military historian Fujiwara Akira asserted that a majority of Japanese military deaths during the Asia-Pacific War resulted from starvation, not hostile action. Put differently, the army's incompetence killed more Japanese soldiers than did the Allies. In China, where Fujiwara served, logistics were left to his infantry battalion rather than specialised construction and transportation units. Although a more conservative recent analysis lowers Fujiwara's percentages, it generally concurs with his estimates. [
Drea, page 238]
- Footnote: Fujiwara Akira, Uejini shita eiyutachi [Starving Heroes] 2001 (Hata Ikuhiko, ]Dai niji seikai no Nihonjin senbotsusha zo [An image of Japanese war dead in the second world war], 2006..]
In her cultural history
Modern Japanese Cuisine (London: Reaktion Press, 2006) widely cited here to date, Katarzyna J. Cwiertka mentions the same harsh statistic:
… Half of the troops that the Imperial Japanese Army lost between 1937 and 1945 died not on the battlefield but from starvation and malnutrition-related diseases …
There seems to be some broad agreement with this assertion and its high figure. I single it out here because it is staggering. It is closer to the mortality figures of Western armies in 19th century wars. Cwiertka, too, cited it from Fujiwara Akira, but from another work
Ueijini shito eireitachi (Tokyo, 2001), page 3. She immediately added:
… These figures do not necessarily discredit the military catering system and military nutritional policies. They simply imply that the logistical capacities of the Japanese armed forces were unable to catch up with the expansionist ambitions of their leaders. The food supply at home deteriorated hand in hand with the losses at the front lines …
As with Drea, this too might be qualified further. Japan’s Pacific strategy was based on fast, decisive victory followed by negotiated settlement. This did not provide for defending long and vulnerable supply lines across vast ocean, which the expansion depended on.
- A soldier can be trained for survival, but not for actual starvation. It is unlike –- and in addition to -- the stresses of combat and isolation. No soldier anywhere expects to die that way, however bravely Japanese troops accepted the likelihood of death in battle.
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Oil, rubber, strategic metals, and minerals were shipped home from the occupied Asia-Pacific. But, how much or how little were foodstuffs also sent back to Japan? Didn’t the occupying Japanese armies usually eat foods from their operating areas? While the home islands were fed from their own lands as well as Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan?
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Some illustrations of Army soldiers in barracks show them eating on their bunks, as here, while we have seen other photos (and comics) showing the use of
a mess table set up between the rows of bunks. Other comics show what looks like messhall dining, but hisashi explained this was
eating at a PX (or the older term, at a canteen).
-- Alan