The bodies of Vietnamese people who starved to death were piled up in heaps and transported away by car for disposal. From the winter of 1944 to 1945, the Japanese army occupied Vietnam and a shortage of rice spread throughout the country.

　　The bodies of Vietnamese people who starved to death were piled up in heaps and transported away by car for disposal. From the winter of 1944 to 1945, starvation spread throughout Vietnam, which had been occupied by the Japanese army, and became increasingly severe, with a shortage of rice spreading from the countryside to urban areas and even to the capital, Hanoi. In many areas, entire families, entire neighborhoods, or almost entire villages died. In order to avoid being discovered by the Japanese soldiers, Vu Anh Ninh secretly took photographs of the starving Vietnamese.

　　The greatest disaster caused by the Japanese military's five-year rule of Vietnam was the food crisis. The French colonial rule, which lasted for more than half a century, and the five-year Japanese military occupation had made Vietnamese production and living conditions miserable. In particular, the Japanese occupation policy, which positioned Vietnam as a base for supplying food and other goods, deprived the Vietnamese of the rice they had produced, and forced them to grow jute (a type of hemp used to make bags and rope) instead of food crops such as corn, causing them to suffer from a shortage of food.

　　The winters in the northern part of Vietnam between 1994 and 1945 were particularly cold, and this added a double whammy to the people who were already suffering from food shortages. As a result, there were huge numbers of people who died of starvation. One theory suggests that the number of people who died of starvation was as high as 2 million. Despite this, the Japanese army's warehouses were piled high with rice.

In Vietnam, in particular, the cold winter arrived next to the hungry, and the temperature dropped to 4 degrees in the capital Hanoi on the Lunar New Year of the year of Atdau (February 13, 1945). There were old women crying and screaming, naked children lying on mats huddled in the corners of walls, fathers and children lying naked on the roadside, and twisted corpses scattered everywhere. The number of victims was 2 million out of Vietnam's population of less than 10 million. In the mountainous regions of northern Vietnam, the army and the people rose up against the occupation of the area by attacking the bases, but they destroyed the warehouses of grain and salt that had been distributed to the people and stored for the soldiers and guerrillas. From March to July 1945, the Vietminh instigated the destruction of rice warehouses. People were encouraged to destroy their granaries themselves, incited not to pay taxes, and asked to demand the distribution of rice.