While peace was on the horizon for World War I, nations were far from settling down. A series of problems would couple with the peace offerings. What would follow would be disease, alterations in food and commodity prices and a new world order. The latter of which would aid to exacerbate Japan’s own issues with food, particularly with rice which led to the rice riots of 1918.

Japan wasn’t new to food issues or even to riots in their streets. While the Russians were dealing with Potemkin in 1905 and the fallout of the Russo-Japanese War, the Japan also suffered under the Hibiya riot of 1905. These series of years were aptly called the “era of popular violence” within Japan.1 With the rise of the Meiji period, and its ensuing industrialization and outward empire appearance, the entire dynamic of Japan and how it had operated for hundreds of years was changing.

Some of these changes came about in how the people were grouped. Rising industrialization and new job opportunities caused the people to flood into the cities, as in other Westernized or industrialized nations, which radically changed and challenged old orders. The Japanese people, with this new “era”, discovered that they didn’t have to be led by the nose by their political leaders or other entities of power.

Food crises in Japan weren’t new by 1918. In fact, throughout the 1890s, four out of the ten years suffered from crop failures, leading to more exports than imports of food. Perhaps what had made Japanese leaders aloof during this time was that in the other six years, exports exceeded imports dramatically, so much so that only silk was a larger export product for Japan in 1888-89.2 Rice, if the crops decided to cooperate on any given year, was a great boon to the Japanese economy.

But by the beginning of 1918, signs were already showing that Japan hadn’t learned it’s past lessons. After Tsarist Russia failed and the Soviet Empire began to shackle the Russian people, Japan still had a number of troops in Siberia. This was one of the first problems noted. And the rice issues were foreseen. Newspapers and magazines were already writing about a “rice price revolution.”3 But the government wasn’t listening.

There were, of course, other problems which coincided with the stretched Japanese military. As Metzler notes, there was a grain supply shock, a pandemic shock which also went through its military in early to mid 1918 and problems with rice. The fact that Japan wasn’t the only nation suffering had exacerbated Japan’s problems as well. 1918 was an El Niño year which caused massive droughts, particularly in India.4 This, quite naturally, made the food prices much more expensive than they otherwise would have been.

Another Japan problem, although not universally related to Japan itself, was the rise in speculation. These speculators, in reaction to the poor harvest, further grew the rice prices. The Japanese government sought to alleviate some of these problems with importing of less popular, and more affordable products grown elsewhere such as indica grain. Even if one hadn’t had to resort to eating the new staple, the lacking quality for Japanese tastes would’ve been heard when local officials announced that “for the best flavor, it is better to mix foreign rice with domestic rather than cooking it alone.”5

There was a sharp divide between those haves and have-nots. Commentators wrote of “rice-less” days, resorting to only two meals a day or budgeting one’s income.6 However, this had already been done by the time of the riots in 1918 as rice price inflation shot up and there were few alternatives but to do the obvious. The people, whether literate or not, certainly didn’t need a newspaper to tell them these basic facts.

The riots bubbled and finally came to a boil in July of 1918. By early September there were over one million people involved and it spread across over 500 locations. The army had naturally been called in, the largest groups of which were in major cities and the coal-mining districts of northern Kyushu.7 As the rioters threw rocks, stones and held sharpened bamboo sticks, the police often retaliated. While the government had seemed sympathetic to the people’s cause, once the riots truly became violent, imperial troops would often react with deadly force using swords and machine guns.8

This result naturally led to arrests and convictions. 8,185 suspects had been formally charged, roughly one third of those detained or arrested throughout Japan.9 Those charged received almost no time for a defense. In a single afternoon, a judge, Nagata, sped through fifty cases in a single afternoon and over the next three days, increased his haste with up to 70 per hearing.10 Ultimately, all but thirty-three of the defendants were sentenced to prison terms and/or fined.

The government did more than simply send out the soldiers. They had sought to resolve the issue, if a bit late, by increasing the production of rice to lower the cost. They did this through the colonies in both Korea and Taiwan. But over time, particularly through the 1920s, this would hurt Japanese farmers with falling crop prices. At the same time, Koreans suffered through the exact same problems but on a more enhanced scale.11

During the rice riots, however, Korea would be taken care of in a different way. Japan opted to import sorghum from Manchuria to Korea to replace the rice the Koreans ate, which would then go into Japan. At the same time, Taiwan opted to grow more sweet potatoes and other staples so their excess rice could also be sent to Japan.12 Some have argued that these actions have created a higher Japanese dependence on its colonies, lowered agricultural wages in Japan which predictably expanded the desire for empire and imperialism. Such events and their resulting actions would be displayed for the world in less than twenty years from the rice riot event.

Aside from simply importing, the Japanese government also sought to go after the speculators. While they made the laws more strict, the punishments were very light. While beginning these efforts months before the rice riots, it did nothing to lower the prices and in fact, the prices had reached a new peak in February 1918.13 By the end of July of the same year, the price of polished rice had been hiked up 60 percent within thirty days.14 By 9 August, the entire nation had been essentially consumed by the riots.

After the riots of 1918, there weren’t anymore city-wide riots. The dynamic had changed. Now, as the 1920s were engaged, more assemblies were held, the people had worked through their organizations rather than rioting on the streets and workers sought more limited goals. Even during the onset of the depression in the late 1920s there weren’t organized attacks on merchants or authorities.15

At the same time, the demands of the people were felt. In late 1918, during the forty-first Diet session, there were over 200 petitions demanding that Japan make Japan self-sufficient when it came to food. Another 216 petitions followed concerning the regulation of rice prices.16 In time, the government changed as well. Hara stepped in, increasing grain supplies and deregulating imports. While 1919 was another difficult year for the crop, there weren’t any organized riots in part because real wages had gone up.

Japan had changed slightly during this time. The people were beginning to understand their power. The word “society” or other such connotations were often verboten,17 but there were the beginning notions of social welfare and its introduction. Fascism had eventually bested Socialism in Japan, there was still a left-wing fringe hanging on to that version of collectivism.

There were mixed feelings about the after-effects of the power of the people but they had obtained something they had only recently come to know. Due to the government’s lackluster response and preparation to the rice problems and the consolidation of the urban and rural people into the city, for the first time, the Japanese people didn’t have to act through intermediaries and began to understand the power they held. While it is still contested, the rice riots may have even led to Empire within Japan, giving more shape and form to the events which led to their incursion into China and through World War II.

Works Cited

1 Gordon p 26

2 Ericson p 337

3 Lewis p 11

4 Metzler p 3

5 Ericson p 344

6 Lewis p 11

7 ibid. p 28

8 ibid. p 28

9 ibid. p 28

10 ibid. p 29

11 Metzler p 19

12 Lewis p 246

13 ibid. p 12

14 ibid. p 15

15 Gordon p 32

16 Lewis pp 244-5

17 ibid. p 247

Bibliography

Ericson, Steven J. “Japonica, Indica: Rice and Foreign Trade in Meiji Japan.” The Journal of Japanese Studies 41, no. 2 (2015): 317–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43917708.

Gordon, Andrew. Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan, 1992. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=lzKRQlI7D5oC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=The%2Bperiod%2Bbounded%2Bby%2Bthe%2Bmassive%2BHibiya%2Briot%2Bof%2B1905%2Band%2Bthe%2Bnation-wide%2Brice%2Briots%2Bof%2B1918%2Bis%2Baptly%2Bdubbed%2BJapan%27s%2B%22era%2Bof%2Bpopular%2Bviolence&ots=dvJBcdcvrn&sig=8eEiu5Bfg_20zqH4D9SCvT0NeK0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Lewis, Michael. Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan. University of California Press, 1990.

Metzler, Mark. The Correlation of Crises, 1918–1920: Asia After Versailles, December 2017. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mark-Metzler/publication/365960869_The_Correlation_of_Crises_1918-20_from_UM_Zachmann_ed_Asia_After_Versailles/links/638a25637d9b40514e0b068f/The-Correlation-of-Crises-1918-20-from-UM-Zachmann-ed-Asia-After-Versailles.pdf.