What People Ate While Rationing During WW2

According to Northern Illinois University, Japan was hit hard by food shortages, especially fish, fruits, and vegetables. In fact, Scientific American wrote that Japan was one of the hardest hit nations with respect to nutrition, which in extreme cases left them with a diet consisting of acorns and various rough grains.

For children, a common form of sustenance was gruel, which consisted of ingredients such as "tofu, wheat gluten, pumpkin squash, and eggplant." According to primary school student Ichiro Manabe, his gruel meals were "dry and tasteless" and sometimes consisted of no more than wheat gluten and scraps of seaweed. These small and insubstantial meals caused children to be shorter and lighter compared to children in the 1930s. Also, there was an increase in "dysentery, tuberculosis, beriberi, gastrointestinal disease, and typhoid fever."

According to the Intelligence Bulletin from May 1944, the Japanese military subsisted on a diet that was over 50% rice, which was complimented by servings of meat, fish, hard biscuits, and seasonings such as soy-bean sauce and miso paste. However, despite these provisions, nutrition became a fatal problem for Japanese troops. Scientific American found that of the 1.74 million troops who died, around 1 million of them succumbed to starvation.

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