Today the heavy workers had their monthly medical examination. I was very pleased to find I had put on 2 lbs and my blood pressure too had gone up. I now weigh 134 lbs and my bp is 122 over 70. So I am back to my weight of 6 months ago. Harold, poor chap, has lost 6 lbs this month and is down to 133 lbs. He has lost 14 lb in the last three months which isn’t so good. Yvonne too thinks she has gained a little in weight and we put down our gains to the egg yolk and bean flour and sugar that we have been concentrating on in our canteen purchases. Also, I think our garden produce has helped us a lot. But people’s weight here goes up and down in the most unaccountable manner – due probably to food deficiencies which affect various people in different ways.
Some time ago I started to write about our ration situation and got as far as the cessation of our meat and flour supply, the latter in the first half of Feb. The Japanese then substituted fish for meat and we received enough for a small piece of either fried or boiled fish once a day; or sometimes the cooks embarked upon more ambitious menus of fish balls or fish flake - shredded fish covered with minced vegetables and baked in the bakery oven. Then, in mid March, the Japanese informed us that they were sorry but they could no longer maintain the existing fish supply and they would have to reduce our ration to half the amount. They said they would make up for this by sending in more vegetables. Soon after the New Year, when the army supplied our rations, the quality of the vegetables had improved considerably and they sent us carrots, tomatoes, European type and sweet potatoes and cabbage, all of which had higher protein and vitamin values than the quantities of local Chinese ‘greens’ we had been supplied with till then. They also sent in quite a lot of onions and the better kind of spinach and practically cut out the supply of chives, that most objectionable of vegetables, which they had sent us in large quantities the previous year. They sent us also turnips and kohl-rabbi (which is similar to turnip) but there is not much food value in these two types of veg.
Unfortunately the supply of winter vegetables began to give out by the end of April and in their place the Japs sent us pumpkins, brinjals, cucumbers, water spinach etc., all vegetable with about 95% water content and very little food value; in fact the rations began seriously to deteriorate after the army’s brief initial spurt, and there were a considerable increase in the number of cases of malnutrition. Dr Deane-Smith, with the assistance of some of the other doctors, had written a very clear and concise report on the food situation in camp and accompanied it with several graphs comparing the amounts of the various foods we received with the minimum required by a human being living a non active type of life, as laid down in a report published at the last International Medical Conference. Also, a comparison between the daily amount of calories our food rations supply and the minimum required for the maintainance of normal human life and also the amount required for those performing manual labour or active pursuits. At no time, since the beginning of this camp, have our rations from the Japanese even approximated to the minimum requirements, let alone the extra third or so necessary for manual work, and recently the graph of our supplies had shown a steady and adverse trend.
Dr Deane-Smith has specialised in dietetics and managed to bring into camp some of his books of statistics etc. He has kept records of camp supplies and malnutrition cases since the inception of this camp and intends, one day, to publish a full report on the subject as his thesis for his MD or whatever the degree is. In fact he has started work on it already. This report, which was very clearly and forcibly worded, was brought round to all the blocks and read out to us, together with a covering letter by Gimson and it was addressed to the Swiss Minister in Tokyo. The report could have left no doubt in the minds of the Japanese that their rations for us amounted to a starvation diet. One paragraph of the report stated:
“That the incidence of death in this camp coming through undernourishment has, so far, remained relatively small is due to principally three reasons:- 1) Through the supply of foodstuffs and money allowances received from the I.R.C., 2) The private parcels received from friends in Hong Kong and 3) Through the produce of private gardens. (For none of which can the Japanese claim any credit except that they have not prohibited these source of supply).”
This letter and report were handed to the Japanese on May 10th and some days later he was informed that they had been dispatched to the Swiss Minister in Tokyo. Whether it ever reached the minister is another matter, for Gimson never received any acknowledgement from that quarter.
Gimson was also informed by Hatori that we were receiving the same food rations as the fighting forces of the Japanese army. This we know was untrue because internees who got to know some of the Japanese guards asked them about their food and found they had considerably more. They always had as much rice as they could eat, and rice is the staple food that the Japanese have lived on for centuries and would be equivalent to giving us as much bread as we could eat. It may be that these guards were getting better rations than the Japanese soldiers in the front line but it would be impossible for any man to maintain a standard of fighting fitness on our rations.
The report listed a number of foodstuffs that were evidently procurable locally because they were sold in our canteen. The items include eggs, bananas, beans, bran etc. and the Japanese were asked to include these in our rations. Even one egg a week would have helped. However, none of these items has ever materialised. The one good thing that the Japanese have done is to issue us with ¼ lb of oil each every 10 days. This has been arriving since about March and has made a tremendous difference both to the quality and the flavour of our food.