The Battle of Okinawa (March–June 1945) is known as the only ground invasion of Japan’s home islands during World War II. The fighting engulfed the population of Okinawa’s largest island, where the Imperial Japanese Army, instead of protecting Okinawan residents drove many to their deaths. Today, the battle is represented in the public memory by forcibly induced “group suicides” and the army’s reputation as “more to be feared than the enemy.” But there is another Battle of Okinawa, where some of the smaller islands, sidestepped by American and British Commonwealth forces, were spared the agony of a land war but also lived under harsh military rule in fear of imminent death.
My research focuses on the case of Miyako Island in the southernmost part of Okinawa Prefecture. Allied combat teams did not invade Miyako during the battle. War casualties were relatively few, and there were no mass suicides. During the Okinawan war, some 30,000 Japanese troops were stationed on the island, exercising military control over 52,000 residents. In September 1945, following Japan’ surrender on August 15, the soldiers were disarmed but most remained on Miyako. They were not detained and forced into U.S. internment camps, as POWs had been on the major islands. Japanese supply ships no longer reached the island, which was now cut off from the outside world. The demobilization and repatriation of the Japanese garrison would not be completed until February 1946.
Until recently, it has been held that since Miyako was not invaded and there were no collective suicides, it avoided, relatively speaking, the devastation that afflicted Okinawans on the main island. Here, however, I turn to the utter isolation into which Miyako was plunged after the defeat. My focus is on how, during the roughly seven months between defeat and repatriation, the Japanese army transformed its defensive military operations into a different but in some ways equally severe struggle, the battle against hunger. That fight, I believe, illustrates vividly an important yet often neglected aspect of the nature of war.
Since Miyako was never invaded, many Japanese army records pertaining to the food situation immediately after the war have remained intact. I discovered many of those materials in the Center for Military History at the National Institute for Defense Studies, and in the Okinawa War Materials Reading Room in the Cabinet Office’s Okinawa Development and Promotion Bureau. These documents were hand-written on flimsy, ultrathin paper as the food crisis and lack of other vital supplies threatened the army’s physical survival, and deciphering them today requires a considerable investment of time and effort.
I analyze the records of these so-called food self-sufficiency operations from the following angles. First, what kind of planning for self-sustaining food production did the Japanese military initiate in the isolated conditions prior to Japan’s defeat? Secondly, how did the army manage to maintain military discipline during these campaigns? Finally, the army had been disarmed at the battle’s end. What conditions allowed it to preserve its organizational integrity while concentrating all energies on intensive food-growing and scavenging activities?
The data presented here are significant for understanding similar self-sufficiency policies that Japanese forces in other isolated Asian countries deployed as they struggled to feed themselves in the months after the surrender. At the same time, these materials will help clarify the social and psychological impacts of wartime occupations on the people subjected to military rule.
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