Abstract
While the resilience of the citizens of Hanoi under the onslaught of American bombing during the “Vietnam War” is legendary, the experience of the city and its vast rural hinterland under Japanese wartime occupation in March–August 1945 is less well known. This chapter examines the Great Famine of March–April 1945 especially as it impacted Hanoi, arguing that environment—here taken as a rural-urban continuum—was finely tuned according to a millennium-long hydraulic pact between an imperial state and its population in the management of rice fields and food production, but also a pact subverted under colonial auspices by a series of shocks, both man-made and natural, largely preventable and therefore inexcusably human.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For a study of the city as an imperial capital reaching back to its origins in 1010 as Thang Long, and with maps supplied, see Nguyen Khac Vien, ed. Hanoi . Volume 1, From the origins to the 19th century (Hanoi: Vietnamese Studies, no. 48, 1977). For a popular modern history but with a spare paragraph on the wartime famine, see William Stewart Logan, Hanoi: Biography of a City (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000). For a longitudinal study on Hanoi connected to its immediate rural hinterland written by a professional geographer, see Danielle Labbé, Land Politics and Livelihoods on the Margins of Hanoi, 1920–2010 (Vancouver: UBS Press, 2014). Distinctive in the way it attends to the everyday practices of “periurban residents” (p. 44), Labbé’s work briefly addresses food insecurity in Hanoi through the Great Famine into the 1950s and down until relatively recent times.
- 2.
Although the Great Famine has attracted wide scholarly interest, no single work offers a focus upon Hanoi. An exception might be David Marr’s Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945–1946) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), at least in the sense of intertwining the revolution and famine theme. I also attempted the same in my Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam: The Great Famine and the Viet Minh Road to Power (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), but with greater attention to the agrarian setting, colonial policy with respect to famine management, Japanese rice procurement, and French-Japanese mismanagement of the crisis in the critical March–April 1945 period.
The following studies can also be usefully consulted, although the list is hardly exhaustive, namely: Sugata Bose, “Starvation amidst Plenty: The Making of Famine in Bengal, Honan, and Tonkin, 1942–44,” Modern Asian Studies 24, no. 4 (October 1990): 699–727; Bui Ming Dung, “Japan’s Role in the Vietnamese Starvation of 1944–45,” Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 3 (July 1995): 575–76; Nguyen The Anh, “Japanese Food Policies and the 1945 Great Famine in Vietnam,” in Paul H. Kratoska, ed., Food Supplies and the Japanese Occupation in South-East Asia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 208–226; and the author’s “The Great Vietnamese Famine of 1944–45 Revisited,” Japan Focus 5, no. 4 (January 24, 2011). http://apjjf.org/2011/9/5/Geoffrey-Gunn/3483/article.html
Of special interest, at least for its attempt to collect and analyze data on famine victims, is the Vietnamese-language work published by the state-sponsored Institute of History, namely Van Tao and Moto Furuta, eds, Nan doi nam 1945 o Viet Nam: Nhung chung tich lich su [The Famine of 1945 in Vietnam: Some Historical Evidence] (Hanoi: NhaNam, 1995). This and a companion publication are critiqued by Ken MacLean, “History Reformatted: Vietnam’s Great Famine (1944–45) in Archival Form,” Southeast Asian Studies 5, no. 2 (August 2016): 208. https://englishkyoto-seas.org/2016/08/vol-5-no-2-ken-maclean/. As the title of his work suggests, MacLean views these official studies as examples of “how historical evidence regarding the Great Famine is fashioned rather than found,” to fit a patriotic narrative. On his part, MacLean drew upon ethnographic and archival research conducted in the northern Vietnamese countryside during 2000–03.
- 3.
Pierre Gourou, Les paysans du delta tonkinois (Paris: EFEO, 1936). See also René Bouvier, Richesse et Misère du Delta Tonkinois (Paris: André Touron et Cie, May 1937). And see Charles Robequain, The Economic Development of French Indochina (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), for a standard text on the colonial economy of Indochina, drawing upon a range of French literature, including a supplement on Japanese military rice procurement.
- 4.
See Geoffrey C. Gunn “Hunger amidst Plenty: Rice Supply and Livelihood in Wartime Macau ,” in Geoffrey C. Gunn, ed., Wartime Macau: Under the Japanese Shadow (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), 72–93.
- 5.
Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochina : An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 439, note 33.
- 6.
Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963).
- 7.
Gunn, “The Great Vietnamese Famine of 1944–45 Revisited.”
- 8.
US War Department, Magic Summary No. 652, January 5, 1944.
- 9.
Labbé, Land Politics and Livelihoods on the Margins of Hanoi , 1920–2010, 44–45.
- 10.
US War Department, Magic Summary, No. 652, January 5, 1944.
- 11.
MacLean, “History Reformatted,” 203.
- 12.
MacLean, “History Reformatted,” 203.
- 13.
Gunn, Ricewars in Colonial Vietnam, 240–242; 247–48.
- 14.
Gunn, “The Great Vietnamese Famine of 1944–45 Revisited.”
- 15.
US War Department, Magic Summary, February 1945.
- 16.
US War Department Magic Summary, February 1945.
- 17.
Martin L. Mickelsen, “A mission of vengeance: Vichy French in Indochina in World War II,” Air Power History (December 17, 2010).
- 18.
United States State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), 35 Crew to Secretary of State, August 6, 1945.
- 19.
Mandaley Perkins, Hanoi adieu: A bittersweet memoir of French Indochina (Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2012). This is a posthumous memoir published two years after L’Herpinière’s death and edited by Mandaley Perkins.
- 20.
Perkins, Hanoi adieu, 91.
- 21.
Perkins, ibid., 100, 123–24.
- 22.
Perkins, ibid., 142.
- 23.
Perkins, ibid., 144.
- 24.
Perkins, ibid., 152.
- 25.
Perkins, ibid., 140.
- 26.
“Horrific photos recall Vietnamese Famine of 1945.” http://www.thanhniennews.com/arts-culture/horrific-photos-recall-vietnamese-famine-of-1945-37,591.html . The photos can be found at the Museum of Vietnamese History in Hanoi. See “Rare photos of Vietnam’s famine in 1945.” http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/society/138833/rare-photos-of-vietnam-s-famine-in-1945.html
- 27.
Ken MacLean, “History Reformatted.”
- 28.
Archimedes Patti, Why Vietnam: Prelude to America’s Albatross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 86.
- 29.
William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion Books, 2000), 330; Gunn, Rice Wars, 263.
- 30.
Jean Sainteny, Histoire d’une paix manquée: Indochine 1946–1947 (Paris: Amiot-Dumont, 1953), 71, 74.
- 31.
Perkins, Hanoi adieu, 165.
- 32.
King C. Chen, Vietnam and China , 1938–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 114, 133.
- 33.
Dixee Bartholomew-Feis, The OSS and Ho Chi Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War against Japan, (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 250–51.
- 34.
Gunn, Rice Wars, 264–65.
- 35.
Marr, Vietnam, 6.
- 36.
Nguyen The Anh, “Japanese Food Policies and the 1945 Great Famine in Vietnam,” 223–234.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gunn, G.C. (2019). Japanese-Occupied Hanoi. In: Laakkonen, S., McNeill, J.R., Tucker, R.P., Vuorisalo, T. (eds) The Resilient City in World War II. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17439-2_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17439-2_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17438-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17439-2
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)