Ask any Japanese who experienced the war and the Allied Occupation about their recollections of those years and their first memory will probably concern hunger.
"The rations for Japanese and Foreign Nationals add up to the absolute minimum number of calories to keep alive. It seems to me that it is around 1,800 calories a day, which doesn't permit any flourishes and certainly no sweets," wrote Elizabeth Ryan during her stay in Occupied Japan.
Ryan, who worked from 1947 to 1948 as a provost court reporter for the Inspector General of the Occupation force at the U.S. base in Kobe, described the situation many Japanese faced right after the war in a letter sent to her family back in Milwaukee.