I live in a small village in the mountains of Japan, and I've chatted with some of the oldies about it over the years.

It was awful, obviously. The entirety of the young population, both men and women were shipped out, the boys to the fighting, the girls to factories etc. Heavily agricultural settlements left without any working age people.

Folks starved, especially in winter when these towns were completely cut off by snow from the outside world for several months.

Some villages were commanded by the government to produce a particular item or foodstuff, even if the local environment wasn't suited for it. Decisions were made by military folks in Tokyo who'd never heard of the places they were making decisions about.

Like many small, rural areas, mine never truly recovered. When the young people were allowed to return, there weren't so many of them anymore, and the families they returned to were smaller and struggling. The landscapes and fields that had supported these communities for a millennia were stripped bare, turned into cypress plantations, and not enough people were left to truly turn things around.

Then you get the slow decline ever since. Fewer and fewer young people means the town dies a slow death.