Need, greed, and protest in Japan's black narket, 1938-1949

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2002 by Owen Griffiths

Early one sunny April morning in 1947, Shukan Asahi journalist Akiyama Yoshinori boarded a black market train (yami ressha) in Chiba City to examine firsthand life in the black market (yami ichi). (1) His observations provide fascinating insight into a phenomenon that had become a way of life, intimately woven into the social fabric of early postwar Japan. For Akiyama, the black market was not solely the site of hardship and despair, as is often recalled in historical memory, but was also a place of opportunity and entrepreneurship, a dynamic space that symbolized the energy of a people "living in the turning point" (fukkanki ni ikiru). (2) While Akiyama's interpretation contrasted sharply with most early postwar accounts and later historical writings, his equating of the black market with the turning point of defeat anticipated a position that has become enshrined in the mainstream narrative of postwar Japanese history. Contemporary scholarship, while acknowledging the existence of a wartime black market, ha s generally viewed it as the tragic product of early postwar hyper-inflation, which was itself a consequence of the chaos and deprivation of defeat. (3) Most Japanese people, too, remember the black marker as a symbol of their society "standing at a crossroads." This perspective was summed up clearly by another journalist, Mishima Yukio, who wrote twenty years after the war that the black market was "one of the unmistakable points of origin for postwar peoples' history." (4)

The image of the black market as a historical marker, forged in the crucible of defeat, is powerfully persuasive, but also misleading. It did not arise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of defeat but grew steadily into a compelling structure of daily life from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. My paper analyzes this development and argues that the black market was, in fact, a structure of continuity linking war and defeat as a single historical era. (5) As such, the black market was more than just a physical space, or collection of spaces, created by the laws of supply and demand where people engaged in various acts of illegal exchange. It was in fact a network of social practices identified by specific forms of behaviour and defined by a particular language, virtually all of which predated Japan's defeat. This is not to deny the dramatic changes ushered in by Japan's defeat but rather to argue that defeat as a turning point was less a moment--the atomic bomb, the Emperor's speech, or MacArthur's arrival, for exa mple--than it was an entropic process, the movement of which can be plotted through the evolution of the black market itself. For more than a decade, from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, the black market increasingly dominated the lives of the Japanese people, expanding in inverse proportion to Japan's deteriorating war condition. By the time the people heard the scratchy recording of the Emperor's stilted prose on August 15th, the black market had already become the principal social space in which the drama of daily life was played out.

This perspective also highlights the fact that the black market was not merely the end product of socio-economic chaos. It was more accurately both the cause and effect of that chaos. Originating in the "economy of dearth" (6) created by government efforts to mobilize the nation for total war against China in 1938, the black market quickly took on a life of its own. As both monopoly and monopsony, it drew into its orbit the government official, the military officer and the corporate baron just as it did the farmer, the salaried man and woman, and the entrepreneur. The systematic destruction of Japan's cities and towns by the American civilian bombing campaigns beginning in 1944 then saw the black market emerge as structure of necessity. This horrific experience, rather than defeat itself, defined the beginning of the "era of scorched earth" (yakeato jidai). (7) Japan's defeat in August 1945 marked another transition when the policies of Japan's elites, and the American decision to let the Japanese solve their own economic problems, combined with the complete breakdown of wartime social infrastructure to create a chaotic, anything goes world of chronic scarcity, hunger, and opportunity.

On this latter point, I agree with Akiyama and Mishima. Drawing on their. collected stories, I also argue that the black market was not just a world of hardship but also one of protest and opportunity, a world driven by conflict and self-interest where sacrifice "for the sake of our nation" (waga kuni no tame ni) seemed as scarce as white rice became in the latter years of the war. (8) Long before the destruction of urban Japan, millions of Japanese flouted the law and braved arrest to procure goods, services, labour, and profits, the pursuit of which their government told them repeatedly was immoral and unpatriotic during a time of national crisis. Following the American bombing campaigns and eventual defeat, life in the black market took on a tragic urgency and, collectively, the actions of the Japanese people created a self-sustaining phenomenon where the weight of necessity/despair (kyodatsu) and the promise of opportunity/new life (shinsei) coexisted in uneasy balance. (9) In terms of material existence and the daily struggle to survive, the black market became the location for the dialectic interplay of these two extremes. Amid widespread hunger, material shortages, and the complete breakdown of social controls, millions of Japanese were forced to find daily sustenance on the black market while still others, taking advantage of this painful reality, sought a new start as purveyors to the needy, selling goods to those who had no other choice. To use philosopher Tanabe Hajime's description of repentance as a metaphor, the black market became "the site of an absolute light source that shone without ever extinguishing the darkness." (10)