Although this paper provides some much needed discussion of this relatively obscure topic the author makes a few (typical) mistakes. The most apparent one discussing price controls without making an effort to understand why a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie would enact them.

A generic antisocialist would explain this away with the claim that they were simply a poor personal choice, or at least an inevitability due to poor personal choices, but that explanation fails to consider how they benefitted the Imperial bourgeoisie. Forcing the vendor to sell at a lower price maximized the buyer’s profits.

Similarly:

a substantial part of the incentive that price disparities would have provided to grow and trade in rice was dissipated by [Imperial] suppression of the black market.

The author mentioned this without further comment. The part about price disparities may be true, but it misses the point. The intention of suppressing the black market was to encourage the native populace to focus on feeding the Axis war machine.

Because Java’s highly integrated rice market tended to equalize supplies and iron out price rises due to crop failures, a decision towards the end of 1944 to close Residency boundaries for food crops and order Residencies to become self-sufficient in food production was a badly misguided policy.

What I said above can apply here, as it’s likelier that the intention was to concentrate distribution to the Axis war machine and away from the native inhabitants. The author’s use of ‘badly misguided’ implies that the Axis rulers had the natives’ best interests at heart, which is odd.

Different [Axis] policies, perhaps even a willingness in early 1943 to change policy, might also have prevented famine. Instead, [Axis] officials and policymakers showed little understanding of the Javanese rice economy and the importance to it of market mechanisms and incentives.

That may have been because of an inflexible, military government; because the [Axis] lacked Javanese experience; or, most likely, because it was thought best to adopt a system like that which existed in Japan. When things began to go wrong, [Axis] administrators relentlessly moved away from market solutions and, as described above, enforced ever more restrictions: ‘the more the Japanese tried to control rice marketing, the more it slipped out of control’.

Remember: this was after the Fascists failed to conquer Stalingrad, at which point an Axis victory was all but assured and only became more and more improbable by the month. That the Axis would intensify its exploitation—even if it meant sacrificing entire populations—to achieve victory does not enter into the author’s consideration at all.

The Viet Minh, of course, had its own goals. While understanding the famine’s use as a weapon of revolution, discussed below, the Viet Minh also saw the opportunity to enlist the famine to try to gain American support against the French. Judging from Patti’s account of his interaction with Ho Chi Minh, an alliance with the Americans, not aid for famine sufferers, appears to have been the principal motivation behind the ‘Black Book’ of photographic famine evidence that Ho gave Patti.

Now it wouldn’t a Western historian’s paper without the compulsory potshot at communists, would it?

That said, this article is still worth reading. Even if you discount natural factors the Western Allies bore some responsibility for the famines, so I wouldn’t blame them entirely on the Axis, but the Axis’s rôle in them was still important.