RL Japanese Exploitation of Resources

[SheperdN7]

Hello all, I was listening to a podcast recently (episode 404 of "We have ways of making you talk" for reference) and the guest/expert they had on the show (Robert Lyman) proclaimed that during the war, the Japanese never conducted proper planning for and never established any form of bureaucracy for the actual extraction of resources in the conquered areas (SRA, Burma, etc.) and even made the claim that Japan never extracted and never shipped back to the Home Islands ANY rubber from Malaya and no rice from Burma at any point during the war, claiming that while the Japanese had planned and succeeded in conquering the areas, they had no plan to actually use the economically vital areas. The comparison that was made was the German seizing of Maikop oil in '42, where you have the economically valuable area under your control but no way to actually use it for your own purposes.

I find this to be a highly dubious claim, especially since there was no mention of the shipping of oil or fuel from DEI either. I am just wondering if anyone has any books or sources they can point me to so I can verify this claim, as well as gain a better understanding of the Japanese war economy as a whole. The only thing I can think of to validate Lyman's claim is the lack of available merchant shipping, but even so, that point was never mentioned and the focus was directed at the supposed complete neglect of the actual economic exploitation of the conquered areas.

[RangerJoe]

Hello all, I was listening to a podcast recently (episode 404 of "We have ways of making you talk" for reference) and the guest/expert they had on the show (Robert Lyman) proclaimed that during the war, the Japanese never conducted proper planning for and never established any form of bureaucracy for the actual extraction of resources in the conquered areas (SRA, Burma, etc.) and even made the claim that Japan never extracted and never shipped back to the Home Islands ANY rubber from Malaya and no rice from Burma at any point during the war, claiming that while the Japanese had planned and succeeded in conquering the areas, they had no plan to actually use the economically vital areas. The comparison that was made was the German seizing of Maikop oil in '42, where you have the economically valuable area under your control but no way to actually use it for your own purposes.

I find this to be a highly dubious claim, especially since there was no mention of the shipping of oil or fuel from DEI either. I am just wondering if anyone has any books or sources they can point me to so I can verify this claim, as well as gain a better understanding of the Japanese war economy as a whole. The only thing I can think of to validate Lyman's claim is the lack of available merchant shipping, but even so, that point was never mentioned and the focus was directed at the supposed complete neglect of the actual economic exploitation of the conquered areas.

There was an unlighted Japanese hospital ship that was sunk by a US submarine during the war. Large raw rubber balls were floating on the sea after the sinking. I don't remember the submarine that sank that ship.

[LargeSlowTarget]

No proper planning - yes. Not shipping stuff back home - nonsense.

The Japanese government tried to establish a planned war economy, but they failed miserably due to a lack of competence and mismanagement.
Competent civilians with backgrounds in economics were sidelined, bureaucrats from the military tried to run the economy by allocating scarce money, manpower and resources as they saw fit, while struggling to control the production companies who rather preferred to see to their own economic interests.

The gov announced a "new order" in Asia with a lot of fanfare ("Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere"), but it was just hot air.
In practice, Japan's economic new order was one-directional exploitation (raw materials to Japan) which ignored and disrupted "local" (like, a quarter of the planet) economic relations and dependencies.
Japan could not implement the two-directional approach they had announced for the "Co-Prosperity" - raw materials from the SRA to Japan, manufactured goods from Japan to the SRA - as it was unable to provide those manufactured goods.
In fact, it could not even provide the machinery and spare parts needed to run a modern, mechanised form of their exploitation economy - instead they relied heavily on forced labour.

So, instead of following a proper, viable plan for the economic exploitation of the SRA, Japan simply seized, plundered and extracted available resources in the SRA in a haphazard manner - and that rich area plunged into hyperinflation and famine.

The main issue however was not even the actual extraction of resources - forced labour took care of that - but the transportation bottleneck. Resources and oil piled-up in the SRA because they could not be transported to the Home Islands fast enough.
The shipping bottleneck highlights the bad planning and mismanagement of the "allocation economy": Available shipping was allocated to three pools - Army, Navy and Civilian - guarded jealously by each party and used without any coordination. A ship allocated to the Army would ship military cargo to say Singapore but return empty because the Army had nothing to transport back to Japan, while at the same time or maybe even the same convoy, a civilian ship would steam empty to Singapore because Japan was unable to provide manufactured goods for the SRA, and return with resources for the factories producing nothing but war materials.

A bad plan to start with, and the implementation wasn't any better. [Hey, that sounds like the synopsis of my PBEM games!]

Here is a book about the lack of planning and a short extract

Japan’s Economic Planning and Mobilization in Wartime, 1930s–1940s. The Competence of the State. By YOSHIRO MIWA, Osaka Gakuin University and the University of Tokyo.

japanecon.png (108.51 KiB) Viewed 777 times

[Cavalry Corp]

In my mod, after numerous Pacific Audible books, I believe I have the resources in about the right places. And they are not as in the game in Hikado - North Japan.

They are in DEI, PI, Korea, Formosa, Manchukuo, Malaysia, Burma, and China.
Japan has been vastly reduced in R. The others offer limitless possibilities; you just have to be able to move them!

I think the designers put it where it is to help the AI.

Cav

[LargeSlowTarget]

Yes Cav, probably a designer decision because it was to be expected that the majority of matches played would be "Allied human player vs Japanese computer player". Your mod echoes my approach in mine, I have moved a lot of resource centres from the HI to the SRA and China as well. But not all - Hokkaido was an important mining area for coal, providing almost 30% of Japan's domestic production.

[Cavalry Corp]

OK good point on the Coal, I will review for next patch, but I still have a good amount there,

Cav

[PaxMondo]

The challenge with resources is "which ones"? Remember, this is a 'catch-all' of everything from coal to gold, basically everything that isn't supply.

I think the devs basically used an economic model from 1939 or so for IJ and scaled that up for the war. Based upon how poorly the economy was managed and the lack of inventiveness that was put into production, its actually a pretty good fit based upon what records we have of 1943-45 economy. This would mean coal and iron would be the "big boys" and everything else just noise. This is just looking at raw tonnes of material used/shipped.

Bottom line: given what they have (and this is not a "Victoria type" game with 50 materials for resources) they did as well and as accurate as it can be done. And yes, the Hokkaido and Sakhalin mines were really that big and that important as in the stock game.

[Tcao]

Hello all, I was listening to a podcast recently (episode 404 of "We have ways of making you talk" for reference) and the guest/expert they had on the show (Robert Lyman) proclaimed that during the war, the Japanese never conducted proper planning for and never established any form of bureaucracy for the actual extraction of resources in the conquered areas (SRA, Burma, etc.) and even made the claim that Japan never extracted and never shipped back to the Home Islands ANY rubber from Malaya and no rice from Burma at any point during the war, claiming that while the Japanese had planned and succeeded in conquering the areas, they had no plan to actually use the economically vital areas. The comparison that was made was the German seizing of Maikop oil in '42, where you have the economically valuable area under your control but no way to actually use it for your own purposes.

I find this to be a highly dubious claim, especially since there was no mention of the shipping of oil or fuel from DEI either. I am just wondering if anyone has any books or sources they can point me to so I can verify this claim, as well as gain a better understanding of the Japanese war economy as a whole. The only thing I can think of to validate Lyman's claim is the lack of available merchant shipping, but even so, that point was never mentioned and the focus was directed at the supposed complete neglect of the actual economic exploitation of the conquered areas.

There was an unlighted Japanese hospital ship that was sunk by a US submarine during the war. Large raw rubber balls were floating on the sea after the sinking. I don't remember the submarine that sank that ship.

Awa Maru and USS Queenfish
Only one survivor

[Rising-Sun]

Wish mod or mods does have realistic resources for Japan need to ship back to homeland? Cause the stock grand campaign is not accurate at all. I can understand this for the AI or easy for Japan players to access to it.

I wouldnt mind crawling back into this game, been looking for a mod that is close accurate as possible for all things.

[LargeSlowTarget]

With an economic model limited to "oil" and "resources" it is difficult to come up with something accurate.

PaxMondo is correct that in sheer volume, coal and iron ore were the most important assets.

For coal, I have rough figures which put the sources of coal at about 30% from the Home Islands (mostly Hokkaido and Sachalin), 20% from Manschukuo/Korea, and the remaining 50% mainly from China and Vietnam with a small part from other sources in the SRA.

However, without smaller but vital quantities of other materials, the economy would have grounded to a stop as well (bauxite for example, Japan's sole sources were in the Palau Islands and on Bintan Island just south of Singapore).

I would not want to play a game at the scale of WitP with an economic model using 50 different types of resources and stuff, but the game could be much more accurate with 'oil', 'coal', 'iron', 'rare metals', 'other resources' on one side and with 'fuel', 'avgas', 'food', 'ammo' and 'other supplies' on the other side.

[Cavalry Corp]

Wish mod or mods does have realistic resources for Japan need to ship back to homeland? Cause the stock grand campaign is not accurate at all. I can understand this for the AI or easy for Japan players to access to it.

I wouldnt mind crawling back into this game, been looking for a mod that is close accurate as possible for all things.

Take a look around my mod, you will see that RES are far more in line with what seems historical. That is from the point of view that it comes from areas they wanted and knew they must capture - Listened to 4 or 5 big audible books to build the case for this. I did reduce the Hokkaido amounts (even if there were mountains of coal there) as J otherwise has no need of the other places for RES. But please see LST post, RES are just too blanket in this game, so I just did what I felt was plausible and put pressure on Japan to exploit the Res situation ( by reducing HI and Hokkaido availability but increasing it elsewhere, broadly in line with what LST says, but also expanded Formosa, Malaya and China). But more importantly, face the challenge of getting it back to Japan.

Cav

[RangerJoe]

Just remember the limitations of the computers at the time when this game came out.

[Bo Rearguard]

However, without smaller but vital quantities of other materials, the economy would have grounded to a stop as well (bauxite for example, Japan's sole sources were in the Palau Islands and on Bintan Island just south of Singapore).

Nickel was another limiting resource for the Japanese. Almost indispensable as an alloy for manufacturing high quality armor and stainless steel the Japanese never captured enough deposits in the SRA to make up for the shortfall of no longer having access to the world nickel market. Despite melting down a huge pre-war stock of hoarded coins, by the end of the war the Japanese had virtually eliminated nickel from their steel alloys, with great loss in quality particularly for aircraft engines.

There was a rich nickel ore deposit on New Caledonia (70 resources altogether on the island in the game) but obviously the Japanese never quite made it there.