#8, the article about the food shortage: towards the end of the article is a mention of how Saburo Kurusu was living as a farmer in Karuizawa. Karuizawa is in the middle of the Japan Alps, about 100 miles each from Tokyo to the southeast and Kanazawa to the west. It was where Westerners who were not considered prisoners of war stayed in the last years of the war, from 1943-45. Kurusu was married to an American, Alice Little, whom he had met during WWI when he was studying in NY. She spent the bulk of her widowhood defending her husband's reputation, that he genuinely did not know of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor while special envoy at the Japanese Embassy in DC. (More on her here).
She was not the only American married to a Japanese diplomat there. Gwen Harold was married to Hidenari Terasaki, a junior diplomat at the Japanese embassy. Gwen went with her husband and their daughter to Japan after Pearl Harbor, and eventually ended up in Tateshina, the next village over from Karuizawa. One would assume that the two American wives would have contacted each other during their years in the mountains. More information as to what it was like to live there in the war years can be found here, in a memoir of a teenager who was there.
Incidentally, the number of Westerners who either lived or spent summers in Karuizawa before, during, and after the war led to more than the usual number of churches and Christian organizations in the area, up to and including today. Here is one, and here is another--the office is in Yokohama, but the honcho, Tim Cole, lives and works out of Karuizawa, and his late father was an evangelical missionary there.
It really was evil for the militarists to put the Japanese people through this. Even more so handing these same starving people bamboo sticks and telling them they will be using them to fight the most modern army on earth.