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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.

SheperdN7 wrote: Mon Jan 19, 2026 10:37 pm 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.

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.

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

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.

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

Cav

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.

RangerJoe wrote: Tue Jan 20, 2026 1:07 am

SheperdN7 wrote: Mon Jan 19, 2026 10:37 pm 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