Japanese food policy in Malaya

At the end of November 1943 the Japanese occupation authorities of the state of Penang issued Government Notification No. 41, which ordered families to grow vegetables and other food crops for their own use. According to the text quoted in war chronologies, families whose crops did well were to receive prizes, while those who failed to comply or left their vacant land unplanted were to be punished. The document was signed on 25 November “2603” by retired Major General Masakichi Itami, the Japanese governor (shū chōkan) of Penang. The date of 30 November, under which the notification appears in the chronologies, is probably the day it was published; it is not confirmed by other sources. Its scope should also be stated precisely: it was an order of the authorities of a single state, Penang, not of the whole of Malaya, although similar orders and campaigns were being issued throughout the country at the time.

The notification itself was a minor administrative act, but it illustrates well the situation in which Malaya found itself after less than two years of Japanese occupation. A country that before the war had been one of the richest colonial territories in Asia could not feed itself, and the occupier was shifting the burden of finding food onto the inhabitants themselves.

Malaya under Japanese administration

The Japanese conquered the Malay Peninsula in ten weeks, from the landing at Kota Bharu on 8 December 1941 to the surrender of Singapore on 15 February 1942. Penang itself they took without a fight on 19 December 1941, after the British had secretly evacuated the Europeans from the island and left its Asian inhabitants to fend for themselves. The port of George Town later became a base for Japanese submarines operating in the Indian Ocean, and from 1943 for German U-boats as well.

The occupiers abolished the British division into the Straits Settlements and the Federated and Unfederated Malay States. Singapore, renamed Syonan (“Light of the South”), became a separate municipality, and the rest of the country was divided into ten states (shū) headed by Japanese governors – usually retired generals or civilian officials. From April 1943 the military administration of Malaya was placed under a separate office (the Marai Gunseikanbu) in Singapore. Masakichi Itami, an infantry officer born in 1883 and transferred to the reserve in 1935, had been governor of Johor since March 1942 and took over Penang in April 1943; he held the post until July 1944.

The occupier also introduced its own reckoning of time. Documents of the occupation authorities were dated according to the kōki era of the Japanese calendar, counted from the legendary founding of Japan by Emperor Jimmu in 660 BC; 1943 was the year 2603. The inhabitants learned Japanese at school, had to bow to sentries and paid with Japanese occupation currency, which was nicknamed “banana money” after the design on the notes.

A country without rice

The economy of British Malaya rested on two export commodities: rubber and tin. Before the war Malaya supplied around 40 per cent of the world’s rubber and a large share of the world’s tin, but it produced too little food. Most of its rice, the staple of every group in the population, was imported: according to various estimates, imports from Burma, Siam and Indochina covered anything from over half to about two-thirds of its needs. Under British rule the arrangement worked, because the earnings from rubber and tin more than paid for the rice.

The war shattered it. Japan did not need as much rubber and tin as Malaya produced, and even what it did need it had no means of shipping out, because Allied submarines and aircraft were sinking more and more of its vessels. The plantations and mines laid off workers and the country’s income collapsed. Burma and Thailand had rice surpluses, but without shipping it could not be brought in. From then on rice was rationed: in Singapore the allowance began at 20 kati (about 12 kg) per person a month and by the end of the occupation had fallen to 8 kati for men, 6 for women and 4 for children – and even these amounts often could not be bought. The black market grew, and the authorities, printing money to cover their expenditure, set off an inflation that by the end of the war, according to the estimates cited, had raised prices in Malaya as much as roughly 11,000-fold.

People switched to cheaper crops that were easier to grow: cassava (ubi kayu), sweet potatoes and yams. Such a diet was filling but poor in protein and vitamins. Diseases of malnutrition spread, especially beriberi, as did malaria and dysentery, for which there were no medicines. Malaya did not suffer a famine on the scale of the one that was killing people in Bengal in 1943, but mortality rose markedly: according to figures cited by the National Library of Singapore, the number of deaths in the city more than doubled in 1942–1945.

“Grow More Food”

The occupation authorities’ answer was self-sufficiency. They ran campaigns under the slogan “Grow More Food”, which took on an increasingly compulsory character as the transport situation worsened in 1943. The authorities organised agricultural exhibitions, distributed seeds free or sold them cheaply, and the newspapers and radio gave detailed advice on cultivation. School playing fields were turned into vegetable gardens worked by the children; in Singapore even the famous Padang in front of the Municipal Building was planted with cassava. Town dwellers, often with no farming experience at all, were urged, and then compelled, to plant every scrap of vacant land or to move to the countryside. Owners of fallow land faced fines and confiscation. Against this background Penang’s Notification No. 41, which combined prizes with penalties, was a typical example of the occupier’s policy.

The Japanese administration also tried to increase rice production: it extended the area under paddy, tried to introduce new varieties of rice from Taiwan and promised the peasants assistance. The results were modest. Fertiliser, tools and draught animals were in short supply, and farmers had no reason to sell rice at official prices for money that lost value month by month.

The northern states handed to Thailand

Penang’s position was made worse still by a political decision taken a few weeks earlier. Japan rewarded its allies at the expense of the conquered lands: on 1 August 1943 it proclaimed the independence of Burma, a country it had occupied after the fall of Rangoon in March 1942, and it promised Thailand, which had declared war on the Allies in January 1942, the return of the territories lost to the British. In July 1943 Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō announced in Bangkok that Thailand would receive the four northern Malay states – Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Terengganu, which Siam had ceded to Britain in 1909 – as well as two principalities in Burma’s Shan State, including Kengtung. A treaty to this effect was signed in Bangkok on 20 August 1943, and from 18 October the Thais administered the annexed states as their own provinces. It was a success for Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram, even though Japanese troops remained stationed in the states and the Kempeitai continued to operate there.

For Penang this meant that Kedah and Perlis, the most important rice-growing areas on the west coast of the peninsula and its natural food hinterland, now lay beyond a new border. The island and Province Wellesley opposite it had from then on to rely even more heavily on what the inhabitants grew for themselves, which explains why at the end of November the state authorities resorted to orders and penalties.

Resettlement: Endau and Bahau

The most far-reaching form of this policy was the removal of people from the overcrowded towns to agricultural settlements. The largest number of hungry mouths was in Singapore, to which refugees from all over Malaya had flocked during the war; in 1943 a Japanese research office estimated its population at about 900,000. In August 1943 the military authorities ordered the city’s population to be reduced. The task was taken on by Mamoru Shinozaki, a Japanese municipal official who had earlier saved many Chinese from the Kempeitai. Together with the Japanese-controlled Overseas Chinese Association he founded the settlement of Endau in Johor, named New Syonan. The first settlers arrived there in September 1943; a year later the settlement had about 12,000 inhabitants, a school, a hospital and a sawmill, and was considered the most successful of these ventures.

A second settlement, named Fuji-gō in Japanese, was intended for Catholics, mainly Eurasians and Chinese, with whom Shinozaki reached an understanding through the Catholic Bishop of Singapore, Adrien Devals. It was laid out in the jungle near Bahau in the state of Negeri Sembilan, on land that both the Japanese military and the Chinese settlers had previously rejected for fear of malaria. The first settlers, among them the bishop himself, set out from Singapore at the end of December 1943. Bahau proved a disaster: the soil was barren, water was scarce and the townspeople did not know how to farm. Of the roughly 3,000 people resettled there, according to estimates by the historian Fiona Hodgkins, about 500 died in 1944–1945, among them Bishop Devals. The settlement was liberated by a British special unit only on 3 September 1945.

The Chinese under occupation

Food policy was not neutral towards the different groups in the population. The Chinese suffered most under the occupation, regarded by the Japanese as enemies because of the war in China and the support the Chinese diaspora had given the government in Chongqing before 1941. In February and March 1942, immediately after the surrender of Singapore, the Kempeitai and the army carried out the Sook Ching – a mass “purge” in which thousands of Chinese men were shot; after the war the Japanese command admitted to some 5,000–6,000 victims, while Singaporean and Chinese estimates speak of several tens of thousands. The Chinese communities were then forced to make the occupier a “gift” of 50 million Malayan dollars.

For many urban Chinese families, moving to the countryside was therefore not only a means of survival but also a way of escaping the eye of the Kempeitai. Thousands of people settled without any legal title on the jungle fringes, where they cleared land for cassava and vegetables. The same areas were the hinterland of the anti-Japanese guerrillas, made up mainly of the Malayan Communist Party; the guerrillas also attacked Endau until Shinozaki negotiated a truce with them in exchange for rice.

Place in the war

The Penang notification was one of thousands of similar acts, but it shows well what Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere looked like in practice at the end of 1943. Japan had conquered countries rich in raw materials but lacked the merchant fleet to bind them into a single economy. Each territory therefore had to feed itself, and the burden of this self-sufficiency fell on the inhabitants – in the form of orders to cultivate, penalties, resettlement and forced labour. According to estimates, some 73,000 labourers were taken from Malaya to build the Burma Railway, of whom about 25,000 died.

In 1944 and 1945 the situation grew worse still. American submarines and aircraft destroyed what was left of Japanese shipping, Allied aircraft began bombing targets in Malaya, including Penang, and food rations continued to shrink. The cultivation campaigns and settlements such as Endau and Bahau enabled part of the population to survive, but did not prevent malnutrition and disease. The occupation ended only with Japan’s surrender: the British returned to Penang at the beginning of September 1945, and on 12 September in Singapore they accepted the surrender of the Japanese forces in South-East Asia. Thailand had to give back the four Malay states, and rice shortages persisted for several years after the war.

The consequences of this policy reached far into the post-war period. Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Chinese, who had settled on the jungle fringes during the occupation remained there after the war as squatters with no right to the land. When the Malayan Communist Party took up arms against the British in 1948, it was these very settlements that became the guerrillas’ base of support, and the colonial authorities responded by moving their inhabitants into guarded “New Villages”. The hunger of the occupation years also remained in the memory of the generation that lived through it – in Singapore and Malaysia people still talk of the years of cassava and sweet potatoes.