At the start of the Pacific War the Japanese government distributed an air-defense manual to households, which were expected to fight fires, practice drills and organize through neighborhood associations. A surviving photograph shows neighbors cultivating a field on Shōwa-dōri, a major Tokyo street. Another, from August 1944, shows schoolchildren setting out for evacuation. Each records a way the war took over ordinary places: a city street became a food plot, and a school class became a traveling household.

A long war from 1937

For Japanese families the war did not begin at Pearl Harbor. Full-scale war with China followed the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 1937, and the National General Mobilization Law of 1938 gave the government power over labor, prices, materials, the press and much of civilian life. Sons were conscripted for China years before the Pacific War. Shortages of cotton, leather, metals and fuel appeared early, and in 1940 campaigns against luxury urged women to give up permanent waves and elaborate kimono. By December 1941 Japanese households had already lived through four years of mobilization.

The state reached households through neighborhood associations, usually called tonarigumi, groups of about ten to fifteen families that from 1940 became the lowest unit of wartime administration. They distributed rations, circulated official notices, organized air-raid drills and bucket brigades, collected savings and metal, and saw off departing soldiers. A neighbor could be the person who helped a family secure food and also the local face of government demands. Women’s mobilization had a public structure too: the National Diet Library reports that the National Defense Women’s Association had about 10 million members by 1942, when it was absorbed into a single Greater Japan Women’s Association.

Japan’s home front also extended to its colonies. Taiwan and Korea supplied rice, sugar, coal and manpower to the home islands, and colonial subjects were pressed to adopt Japanese names, worship at Shinto shrines and speak Japanese. Research on Hashima, the Mitsubishi coal-mining island near Nagasaki, documents Koreans brought there under coercion. Bringing the mines into the story changes who is visible in an account of the Japanese home front: the coal and metal that kept factories running depended in part on people who had been made to leave their own homes.

What a ration card could buy

From 1941 the state set the standard rice ration for an ordinary adult consumer at 330 grams a day. Historian Sheldon Garon estimates that this supplied about 1,158 calories, with other foods needed to complete the diet. Over time the “rice” ration became an allowance for a mixture of staples, including barley, wheat, soybeans and sweet potatoes, and allocations differed by age and the heaviness of a person’s work. As shipping losses mounted, imports from the colonies and occupied territories fell and the supply of fish declined. City families traveled to the countryside to buy food from farmers, often trading kimono and other possessions, and the black market grew despite police efforts.

Garon’s research shows a system that guaranteed a minimum share on paper while leaving many families short in practice, especially in 1944 and 1945. Schoolyards, roadsides and vacant lots were planted with vegetables, and official and newspaper advice promoted substitute foods. Undernourishment weakened resistance to disease, and the food crisis did not end with the war; the hungriest months for many urban families came in 1945–46, after surrender, when the harvest failed and the colonies were gone.

Children apart, students at work

In June 1944, with American bombers expected from new bases in the Marianas, the cabinet decided to evacuate children in grades three through six from threatened cities. Children with relatives in the countryside were encouraged to go to them. Families without that option could apply for group evacuation, which placed classes with their teachers in inns, temples and other centers. Japan’s Ministry of Education records about 360,000 children sent to more than 7,000 group centers in the first phase, a figure for the organized centers rather than every child who left. It records about 200,000 children from the Tokyo area, 70,000 from Osaka and 35,000 from Nagoya. Eligibility was extended to younger grades in March 1945.

Evacuees remembered hunger, homesickness, lice and strict discipline as well as kindness from rural hosts. Some children evacuated from Tokyo lost their entire families in the raids of March 1945 and became orphans in the countryside. Older pupils were sent to work instead. Student mobilization, expanded in 1944, put secondary-school boys and girls into factories, arsenals and offices, and the education ministry records that normal classes above the elementary level were generally suspended from April 1945. Young unmarried women were also organized into volunteer labor corps for factory work.

In Hiroshima, thirteen-year-old Setsuko Thurlow was part of the student mobilization program. On 6 August 1945 she was at an army headquarters, where mobilized girls were decoding messages, when the atomic bomb exploded. Trapped beneath the collapsed building, she was pulled out by a rescuer. In later testimony she spoke of the classmates who died around her and of the death of her four-year-old nephew, Eiji. In 2017 she helped deliver the Nobel lecture of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. The making of the bomb is described in this site’s Manhattan Project collection.

Factories and the neighborhoods beside them

Mitsubishi designed the A6M Zero, and Nakajima built even more of them; the Smithsonian estimates that nearly 10,500 Zeros were produced in all. Aircraft plants spread into smaller towns such as Handa, south of Nagoya, where Nakajima assembled aircraft in 1944. The first B-29 raid of the sustained campaign from the Marianas, in November 1944, targeted the Nakajima engine works near Tokyo, and in December the bombers struck Mitsubishi’s aircraft-engine plant in Nagoya. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey counted 21 attacks on Nagoya and attributed about 71 percent of the bomb tonnage there to attacks on urban areas rather than on specific plants.

Scarcity reached the factory floor. Toyota’s Model KC truck, which went into production in November 1943, was built with wooden panels in place of much of the steel cab and a single headlamp, according to the company’s own history. Households were asked to hand over metal pots, temple bells and railings for scrap. As raids began, the government demolished whole blocks of houses to create firebreaks. The Strategic Bombing Survey counted 615,000 buildings torn down for firebreaks in addition to 2,510,000 destroyed by the attacks themselves, so many families lost their homes to their own government before the bombers arrived.

The fire raids

Japanese cities were built largely of wood and paper, closely packed, and lightly defended against air attack. In early 1945 the Twentieth Air Force under Curtis LeMay switched from high-altitude precision bombing to low-level night attacks with incendiaries. On the night of 9–10 March 1945, B-29s burned out about sixteen square miles of eastern Tokyo. The Truman Library’s teaching materials cite estimates of about 100,000 people killed and about a million made homeless; the Strategic Bombing Survey counted about 185,000 casualties in that one attack. Haruyo Nihei, then eight, later recalled an ordinary family evening that ended with her neighborhood engulfed in fire. The air campaign is described from the attackers’ side in the Army Air Forces collection.

The raids continued until August, against Tokyo again in April and May, and against Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama and then dozens of smaller cities. The Survey concluded that some 40 percent of the built-up area of the 66 cities attacked was destroyed, that about 30 percent of Japan’s urban population lost their homes, and that roughly a quarter of all people in cities fled or were evacuated. It estimated total civilian casualties from nine months of air attack, including the atomic bombs, at about 806,000, of whom about 330,000 were killed. Later Japanese counts differ, and much of the record burned with the cities.

Ishikawa Kōyō, a photographer for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, was one of the few people allowed to photograph the aftermath, and his images of bodies in streets, canals and shelters were hidden from occupation authorities after the war. Newspapers had reported the raids within limits set by the authorities, and the front pages of 1944 had still announced victories. On 15 August 1945 Emperor Hirohito’s recorded broadcast told his subjects that the war was over, the first time most of them had heard his voice. Japan signed the instrument of surrender aboard USS Missouri on 2 September.

After the surrender

Surrender brought the American-led occupation, which lasted until 1952, and a vast movement of people. More than six million Japanese soldiers and civilians overseas, in China, Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands, had to be brought home, while hundreds of thousands of Koreans and other colonial workers left Japan. Returning soldiers came back to burned cities, missing families and a black market that grew around the railway stations, where many war orphans lived. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers captured by the Soviet Union in Manchuria were held for years in labor camps in Siberia, and some families waited into the 1950s for news.

The occupation also changed the household itself. Women won the vote in December 1945 and first used it in April 1946; the 1947 constitution guaranteed equality of the sexes, and the revised Civil Code abolished the legal authority of the household head over adult family members. Schools dropped wartime ethics courses, and children used textbooks with militarist passages inked out by their teachers until new ones could be printed.

Obedience, faith and doubt

Many people organized drives and served in patriotic associations; others complied under pressure. The Peace Preservation Law gave the authorities broad power to suppress political and religious dissent, and the Special Higher Police watched for it. In 1943 the authorities arrested the educator Tsunesaburō Makiguchi, leader of a Nichiren Buddhist lay movement, after his religious convictions brought him into conflict with state Shinto. He died in prison in November 1944. His case shows one source of wartime dissent and the price of challenging state authority. Public behavior under such conditions is only a partial record of private opinion.

Entertainment carried official messages too. Mitsuyo Seo’s 1945 animated feature Momotarō, Sacred Sailors used the folk hero Momotarō and animal characters in a story of naval service aimed at children. Compare it with the education ministry’s record of children living far from their parents, or with the Ishikawa photographs, to see the distance between the war presented to children and the war they lived through. The previous chapter covers Japan’s European ally; the next chapter follows people in countries Japan and Germany occupied, from Shanghai and Manila to Amsterdam.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

Tokyo under the bombers

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