During World War II, there were massive government-led community mobilizations throughout Japan to make the most effective use of available resources to support the war effort. This was accomplished by the tonari-gumi system (translates approximately to "neighborhood groups"), an idea common in wartime for both Japan and China since the early Tokugawa and Qing periods, respectively. The tonari-gumi and other local and regional level community groups were brought together under the National Spiritual Mobilization Campaign, under the guidance of Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro. This was used to relay and enforce government policies quickly and effectively, including (but not limited to) rationing, production quotas for agriculture (rural Japanese) and factories (urban Japanese), and a major campaign to distribute radios to ensure that each Japanese family would have one in their home so that they could listen to news and propaganda broadcasts, which made the dissemination of information to the populace (true or not) much faster and far less labor and cost intensive for rural areas. A special note on the proliferation of radios: The order by Emperor Hirohito to the Japanese people to surrender and cooperate with the army of occupation was the first time a Japanese Emperor's voice was ever heard by the public, and it was broadcast nationally by NHK. The mere fact that they were hearing his voice for the first time is widely reported to have brought Japanese people to tears en masse, and is to some extent credited for the level of cooperation MacArthur received from the Japanese public. There is also some debate among historians as to whether or not Hirohito did this because he allegedly believed that if he did not, the Imperial Army would refuse to surrender to the last man. End of note.
Rural villages were hit particularly hard and suffered deeply on two fronts. First was the akagami (lit. "red letters") which is the colloquial name for conscription orders, after the red paper they were written on. Most of the able bodied younger men were called up to serve before the US entered the war in 1941 (the war is generally accepted to have started for Japan in 1937 with the Manchurian Campaign), which put the burden of agriculture on women, children, the elderly, and the disabled who were not eligible for conscription. Combined with the second front, the increasingly tight rationing as the war pressed on and the rising quotas trying to support an increasingly strained military, the villagers started to become seriously malnourished, further reducing productivity, which in turn reduced available supplies, continuing cyclically ad nauseum.
In order to bring money to their families in the villages, many girls and younger women traveled to the cities to work either in factories, domestic work, or clerical positions, where they could earn a small salary which they would send home, as they believed that would be of more benefit to the family than staying to work the fields.
An excellent book which provides a detailed account on village life during the war is Dr. Simon Partner's Toshié: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan (ISBN: 0-520-24097-9). It is the source of most of the information in my response (Chapter 3 is about the war). Another excellent book, while not directly about life in Japan for the people, is Dr. Herbert Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, (ISBN: 978-0-06-093130-8), which I think provides an excellent examination of government operations as they pertain to the life of the Imperial family.
TL/DR: Life kinda sucked, then it sucked more, then it totally sucked, then the war ended.
Source: Partner, Simon. Toshié: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
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