The economy had yet to recover from its wartime privations, with shortages of basic consumer goods, including housing.
Many Japanese have endured the privations with a similar mood of quiet stoicism, and the strong sense of community that still prevails in these northern rural areas.
Non-combatants in the big cities generally accepted shortages and other privations with patriotic stoicism.Two-and-a-half decades on, Iran again gives the impression of a country at war even if, for the moment, the guns are silent.
The character does not know what is coming, but the novelist does, and she prepares you for later privations with a page describing eating two fresh trout, with their "salty, delicate crust of scales".
When Lessing set out to tell the story of her parents in her final book, "Alfred and Emily," published in 2008, she split it in two, pairing the real account of their miseries and privations with an imagined counter-history of what their lives might have been if the First World War had never happened.
Research findings from the 1980s [ 25, 26] suggested that children who lived in areas of greater social privation, but with access to water treated with fluoride, had better oral health than those from a similar social situation without access to fluoridated water, or than those from a higher social class but who lived in communities without fluoridated water [ 25, 26].
First, because the trivia drowns out the serious; second, because anti-democracy nationalist crazies can use the net to fuel hatred and intolerance; and lastly, because the old hardship involved in political organising was itself a means of honing your commitment – the risks and privation associated with dissident activity hardened dissidents' resolve.
He slept on the ground with them, drank the water, and shared every hardship, privation and danger with his Afghan Mujahideen hosts.
Fighting excess with privation: it's a particularly American foible, like ordering a Diet Coke with your fries, in the hope that one might cancel out the other.
The cultural critic Mark Greif writes that such privations "go with a degree of discernment and class distinction".
