Wartime rationing and shortages in Japan

Wartime rationing and shortages in Japan recast material goods as measures of dependence, protection, and survival. In the world of geisha, a lavish kimono or a silver hair ornament can display wealth and status; as the war tightens its hold, food, tea, cloth, and fuel become rationed resources, while heirlooms are sold, confiscated, or hidden. The novel traces this change unevenly: Gion’s relative privilege initially cushions the Nitta okiya, but General Tottori’s protection proves temporary, and the privation that follows reaches from household stores to the wreckage of industry.

Scarcity and the value of objects

The story establishes the scale of geisha consumption before showing what scarcity takes away. Hatsumomo’s obi is an elaborate construction of cords, clasps, and padding, and her brocade kimono, patterned with deer against autumnal colors, may have cost as much as a policeman or shopkeeper earned in a year. In the okiya’s loft, lacquered cases hold kimono in great numbers; Sayuri estimates their value at twice that of the villages of Yoroido and Senzuru together. These objects are not merely decoration: they are costly work garments, carefully stored assets, and visible signs of a household’s standing.

Even gifts carry financial and relational weight. At a banquet, Nobu gives Sayuri an antique ornamental comb in a little wooden box; its red half-circle and bright flowers are a luxury presented as a personal token. Later, wartime scarcity makes gifts less common, and Sayuri’s possessions amount to a few scrolls, inkstones, bowls, and stereoscopic photographs. Among them is a sterling-silver viewer given by the Kabuki actor Onoe Yoegoro XVII. The military government has banned cosmetics and permanents as luxuries, although women in Gion, protected by their ties to men in power, continue to use them. The contrast makes privilege visible: restrictions exist, but their force depends on one’s place in the network of protection.

Protection within Gion

For a time, the Nitta okiya benefits from the General’s position as director of military procurement. He pays Sayuri’s lesson fees, registration costs, and medical expenses, and supplies goods that are growing scarce, including tea, sugar, and chocolate. When Auntie falls ill in March 1939 and ordinary doctors cannot help, a call to the General brings an important doctor from the military hospital in Kamigyo Ward, whose medicine cures her. His patronage therefore offers more than personal support to Sayuri: it gives the household access to medical care and goods unavailable to others.

The okiya’s security also enables it to pass supplies along. Long after rationing begins, it continues to receive foodstuffs, tea, linens, and even cosmetics and chocolate. Mother shares some of these resources with people who come asking for help, though the account presents this as a practical recognition that Gion’s households depend on one another, rather than simple generosity. In autumn 1941, when the military police find a maid carrying roughly ten times her okiya’s permitted ration coupons, her mistress sends her to the Nitta household to be sheltered until arrangements can be made to take her to the countryside. General Tottori has instructed the police to leave the Nitta okiya alone. Protection determines who can hold resources, who can evade scrutiny, and who can be given refuge.

The protection breaks

The arrangement ends abruptly in December 1942, when a military policeman comes to the okiya. The neighborhood association has reported violations that include hoarding cotton, failing to surrender metal and rubber for the war effort, and misusing ration tickets. The household has committed these offenses, as have other okiya in Gion, but its relative good fortune and ability to preserve its stores have made it a conspicuous target. Mother tells Sayuri that General Tottori has been taken into custody and warns her to hide the household’s best things before they are seized.

Within a week, the okiya loses stores of food and undergarments that other households had already done without. The neighborhood association then confiscates ceramics and scrolls for sale on what the residents call the gray market: unlike the black market in rationed or illegal goods such as fuel, food, and metals, this is a trade in household valuables sold to raise cash. The distinction offers little comfort to the Nitta household. Its possessions are taken partly as punishment, and the proceeds benefit others. Even the association’s head, the mistress of a nearby okiya, feels sorry as she removes the objects, but the military police’s orders leave her no room to refuse.

Hunger and the “onion life”

By the middle of 1943, the war’s shortages have become more than a disruption to ordinary routines. People worry privately about the war’s outcome, and pleasure itself seems suspect. The geisha Raiha voices the bleakness through a dark joke: “Nothing is bleaker than the future, except perhaps the past”. The laughter that follows is inseparable from fear; at the same time, rumors that the government will close Japan’s geisha districts are becoming harder to dismiss.

Sayuri’s later account of wartime life with the Arashino family gives scarcity its most intimate details. The family’s home and workshop become her refuge, where she and the Arashinos sew parachutes by day and sleep on futons on the workshop floor at night. With charcoal almost gone, they burn compressed leaves, newspapers, and magazines for warmth. Food is scarcer still: they eat soybean dregs normally given to livestock and nukapan, made from rice bran fried in wheat flour, as well as occasional potatoes, dried whale meat, seal sausage, and sardines. The family’s young grandson, Juntaro, cries from hunger. When that happens, Mr. Arashino may sell a kimono from his collection. Sayuri calls this existence “the onion life”: a gradual peeling away of what remains, accompanied by grief at every layer lost.

The contrast between the Arashinos’ desperate household economy and Mother’s wartime dealings sharpens the unequal circulation of possessions. Mother grows richer buying and selling other people’s heirlooms in the gray market. When Mr. Arashino asks Sayuri to contact her so she can recover one of his sold kimono, Mother appears unable, or unwilling, to locate it. The kimono remains valuable, but its meaning has shifted: it is now a source of cash for a hungry family and an opportunity for profit for an intermediary.

From shortages to wartime and postwar rupture

Scarcity is also a material history of damage beyond the home. When Nobu visits after the war, he gives Sayuri a fist-sized piece of concrete from the Iwamura Electric factory in Osaka. Two of the company’s four factories have been destroyed, and he fears that it may not survive the next few years. The rubble stands in for a larger loss: Nobu describes it as a piece of himself, and asks Sayuri to help turn it into something like a jewel. The object is not a luxury but a fragment of industrial ruin, placed in a relationship of mutual obligation.

The crisis continues into the Allied Occupation, when the authorities are prepared to issue a final judgment against Iwamura Electric and seize the company. The Deputy Minister intervenes, reopens the case, and persuades the authorities that the company has been treated too harshly. Thus the wartime story of limited access to goods opens onto a postwar struggle over whether the business itself can continue. Across these episodes, material security never appears as an evenly shared condition: it depends on military connections, household position, and the ability to preserve or exchange possessions. When those protections fail, the consequences are measured in confiscated heirlooms, empty stores, hunger, and a company uncertain of its future.