"Edo Disease": The Curse of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy Removed
For about 2400 years, rice has occupied a special place in the diet of the Japanese people. Its importance is so great that in Japanese the hieroglyph for “boiled rice” (sounds like “gohan”) has become a synonym for food in general: asa-gohan – breakfast, hiru-gohan – lunch, ban-gohan – dinner. In addition, all parts of this plant were used: the stems were used to make tatami mats, the paste – to dye silk fabrics for kimonos, and bran was a component of some folk cosmetics.
However, rice is not a native Japanese product; it was first grown in Indian Assam and the Chinese province of Yunnan, and this grain was brought to Japan by Korean settlers. The climate of the Japanese islands turned out to be very suitable for growing rice, but the process was labor-intensive and required cooperation and joint efforts of all members of the rural community, but the harvests were very high.
Rice field, medieval Japanese miniature
Japanese women in a rice field
Over time, special Japanese rice varieties emerged – with short and wide grains that stick together when cooked, rather than crumble, but also do not turn into mush. Indian rice varieties have long and thin grains.
Since the 7th century, Japanese peasants paid their taxes in rice, and samurai were paid in the same grain. But over time, it was rice that caused a serious disease to appear in Japan. Previously, it affected mainly wealthy residents of large cities, and was even called edo-wazurai: "the disease (or problem) of Edo" (the former name of Tokyo). For example, the famous Japanese doctor Katsuki Gyuzan, who lived in the 18th century, wrote that the cause of this disease was the soil and water of Edo, and a samurai who fell ill there had to urgently leave the city and go to his native province to be cured. Moving did help, but it was not because of the particularly harmful air or soil of the Japanese capital. In the provinces, few people were engaged in cleaning and polishing rice grains, because this process was very long and laborious. But it was the rice husk that contained the substance, the lack of which caused the seemingly incurable disease, which in Japan was also called "kakke", and in other countries it was known as "beri-beri", which in translation from Indian means "sheep": in this country it was once decided that the gait of patients was similar to that of a sheep.
One of the devices for polishing rice
Later, frightening experiments were conducted that showed the harmfulness of eating only peeled rice, deprived of its shell: sparrows on such a "diet" died after 9 days, mice - after 18, and rabbits lived no more than 24 days. However, representatives of the upper classes of Japan and wealthy city dwellers considered it beneath their dignity to eat unrefined and unpolished rice. Look at what it looks like:
Not very appetizing, is it? However, this did not bother ordinary residents of the Land of the Rising Sun - the problem was the insufficient amount of this grain.
Attempts to "improve" natural products never lead to anything good. Carefully sifted premium wheat flour has lost all its useful properties. The same story – with refined and deodorized sunflower oil, which has now turned into vegetable cooking fat – and we remember the rich amber color and mind-blowing smell of fried seeds, “real” Soviet bulk sunflower oil, which was simply overflowing with vitamins and microelements. It was even worse with attempts to improve rice, since it is its husk that contains thiamine (“vitamin B1”). Its deficiency causes a terrible disease, which, by the way, has three forms – cardiovascular “wet” with swelling of the legs, “dry” with cachexia and damage to the peripheral nerves, and cerebral, which developed in drunkards.
In 1877, even the aunt of Emperor Mutsuhito (better known as the Emperor of the “bright reign” – Meiji) died of beriberi, and he also showed signs of this disease.
Refined white rice is widely eaten in many countries around the world, but it is not a staple food, so the lack of thiamine is compensated for by regular consumption of other foods. But in Southeast Asia, things were different. David Arnold, in his article “British India and the Beriberi Problem,” wrote that the disease literally devastated South and East Asia. And in Japan, beriberi suddenly became a huge problem for naval personnel. fleet this country.
The Curse of the Japanese Navy
The modern Japanese Navy is, in fact, very young. It began to form only in the 50s. The first steam (paddle) warship was given to the Japanese by the Dutch ambassador Curtius in 1855 and received the poetic name "Kanko Maru" - in honor of one of the lines of the "Book of Changes" (I-Ching), which is used for fortune telling. "Kanko" is the beginning of the line "Kan koku shi ko" ("to see the light of the country"), "Maru" is a traditional suffix, most often interpreted as a magic circle protecting the vessel, but also as "completeness" and "power".
"Kanko Maru"
At the beginning of the Meiji Restoration (1868), a program of industrialization and militarization of the country was adopted, which included a plan to create a navy.
Young Emperor Mutsuhito in a photograph from 1873.
For centuries, the "scourge" of European sailors was scurvy - a disease caused by a deficiency of ascorbic acid ("vitamin C"). And sailors of the Japanese navy suffered from beriberi, and this may seem strange - we remember that initially this disease was the lot of the rich and noble. However, peeled rice is stored better, does not go rancid and requires less fresh water when cooking - all this is of great importance at sea. And in 1861, the Englishman Sampson Moore invented a machine for quickly peeling rice. And therefore, not only military ships, but also army units were now supplied with white rice. Peeled rice was now cheap enough that ordinary subjects of the emperor could afford it, which they did very willingly - after all, it put them on the same level with nobles.
The situation in the navy was aggravated by the fact that in peacetime, the ships' crews received only rice in the galleys for free - they could buy other products. Almost all ordinary sailors preferred to eat for free, and sent the money they saved to their families. The result was quite natural. Everyone was especially shocked by the situation on the training ship "Ryujo", where during a 9-month expedition to the shores of New Zealand, Chile, Peru and the Hawaiian Islands (from December 19, 1882 to October 15, 1883), 169 crew members out of 367 (44,9%) fell ill, and 25 of them died (6,7%). The situation was so acute that the ship had to make a stop in Hawaii, where the sick recovered and the ship was able to head for home shores. The reason for the recovery was a change in the diet (the addition of fresh vegetables), but at the time no one attached any importance to this.
The situation in the Japanese army was no better. It is known that during the Russo-Japanese War, beriberi was diagnosed in 250 soldiers. The number of victims of this disease reached 27 people - despite the fact that 47 Japanese soldiers and officers were killed directly on the battlefield and died from their wounds in hospitals. But it was on Japanese warships that the situation was most tragic: on some of them, the number of sick people reached a third of the entire personnel. But on European and American ships, the mysterious disease beriberi was not even heard of.
Kanehiro Takaki's Saving Mistake
Kanehiro Takaki in a photograph from 1899.
At that time (since 1872), Kanehiro Takaki, a graduate of the Kaisei Gakko Medical School in Kagoshima, served as a doctor in the navy. In 1875, the promising young doctor was sent to Great Britain for an internship, where he worked at St. Thomas' Hospital and became the first Japanese member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Returning to his homeland in 1880, he received the post of head of the medical department of the Ministry of the Navy. The following year, he founded the Sei-I-Kwai Medical School, which is now the medical faculty of the private Jikei University (the name translates into English as "mercy and love") located in Tokyo's Minato district.
In the line of duty, he also took up the problem of beriberi. The epidemic was gaining momentum. In 1883, the average incidence of beriberi in the navy was 12%, but on some ships the number of cases reached 30%. At that time, it was believed that this disease was infectious, and in 1885 there was even a report about the discovery of the causative bacterium, which, however, was soon refuted. However, the infectious version of the cause of the disease continued to be considered a priority, so the Japanese navy began to pay great attention to the issues of sanitation and personal hygiene of sailors. As a result, there were practically no intestinal infections on the military ships of this country, but these measures did not affect the incidence of beriberi. According to another version, the cause of beriberi was excessive dampness and humidity.
Takaki decided to look at the problem from a different angle. He noticed that the disease affected people very selectively, and naval officers fell ill much less often than sailors. On this basis, he made an absolutely correct conclusion that the cause could be the difference in diet: officers with more money ate more varied food. Nobody knew about vitamins at that time (they were discovered in 1911), and Takaki decided that the problem was a lack of protein. This conclusion was incorrect, the cause of the disease was a deficiency of vitamin "B1", but by a lucky chance, Takaki decided to increase the sailors' protein intake by barley - a product that contains a lot of thiamine.
The problem was that the conservatively minded Japanese admirals opposed changing the diet of their subordinates. And the ordinary sailors did not want to switch to unfamiliar products, and later even "bread riots" broke out on the ships. Takaki appealed directly to the emperor. He asked permission to conduct an experiment with changing the diet (instead of white rice - bread, barley in various forms and small portions of meat) on a ship going on a long voyage. The argument he gave in his conversation with the monarch is curious:
"It would be a disgrace to the country if the cause of this disease were discovered outside of Japan by foreigners."
Emperor Meiji, whose plans to create a combat-ready fleet and expand to the continent were being ruined by an incomprehensible and invincible epidemic of beriberi, was ready to consider any proposal. Moreover, as we remember, cases of the disease had been noted in his family, even with a fatal outcome. And so he gave permission, and for the "purity of the experiment" Takaki insisted that the training ship Tsukuba change its route and completely repeat the path of the unfortunate ship Ryujo. 
tsukuba
Takaki was not sure of success. Realizing that none of his superiors would forgive him for his insolence, this native of a poor samurai family of Satsuma decided to commit ritual suicide in case of failure. But the voyage of the Tsukuba ended in triumph: the ship was at sea from February 3, 1884 to November 16, 1884, and during this time only 14 people fell ill, while its crew numbered more than 300. It turned out that it was those who fell ill who were the most malicious violators of the prescribed diet. Let us recall that on the Ryujo in 1882-1883, during a similar voyage, out of 267 crew members, 169 fell ill and 25 died.
Now even Takaki's enemies and ill-wishers were forced to admit that he was right, and bread and barley were urgently introduced into the sailors' diet. But the sailors did not want to eat them. Takaki himself wrote then:
"From last year's experience, we found that most of the personnel do not like bread, and we do not know what to do next."
A solution was found: not only rice, but also barley flour began to be added to the popular naval curry (a dish with fish, less often with meat). The result exceeded all expectations: in just a few years, beriberi became a rare disease on Japanese warships. And in 1904, at the start of the war with the Russian Empire, Japan had a powerful and combat-ready fleet with well-trained crews.
The situation was much worse in the army ground forces, where polished white rice was the mainstay of the soldiers' diet even in 1904. Such was the force of inertia, which was further aggravated by the traditional rivalry between the army and the navy. As a result, beriberi "put 250 soldiers in hospitals," of whom 27 died - almost 57,5% of combat losses. There could have been more deaths, but in February 1905, Army Minister General Masatake Terauchi ordered barley flour added to the rations of his subordinates.
Terauchi Masatake in a portrait by an unknown artist
It is curious that at the same time the prison diet was changed – and this also caused great discontent among the prisoners.
Retired soldiers and sailors continued to eat the customary barley dishes at home. The army and navy had a very high reputation in Japanese society, and so the example of the retirees was followed by their relatives and acquaintances, and new dishes began to be served in local catering establishments (izakaya, koryo-rii, robatayaki, etc.). Beriberi began to recede, but relapses also occurred.
Thus, during the Second World War, it struck soldiers of some Japanese garrisons located on remote islands. The problem was that they ignored instructions according to which barley should be added to white rice, and out of habit, cooked their own meals exclusively from rice.
Japanese soldiers preparing food
However, in post-war Japan, the gastronomic preferences of its inhabitants underwent a significant transformation, especially noticeable among the people of the new generation. Japan's agriculture suffered greatly, rice production fell significantly, and they had to eat wheat imported by the Americans. Schoolchildren did not get rice at all - they only got wheat bread during lunch.
On the other hand, demobilized soldiers brought back from Manchuria and China recipes for wheat noodles and unique dumplings called gyoza, the dough for which is traditionally made from wheat flour. Things got to the point that in the 1970s the Japanese government decided to conduct a propaganda campaign calling for a “return to the roots.” The Japanese still eat a lot of rice and are very sensitive to rising prices for this product. However, they have never returned to the pre-war level of consumption of this grain.
"The Barley Baron"
But let's see what happened in Japan after Kanehiro Takaki's complete victory.
Kanehiro Takaki in a photograph from 1904.
In 1905, he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, 1920st class, and received the Japanese noble title of danshaku, which is often compared to the European baronial title. Dissatisfied aristocrats of old families contemptuously called the doctor the "barley baron" (or "barley baron"), and this name stuck, Takaki himself did not see anything shameful in this nickname. In addition, his name appeared on the map of Antarctica - Cape Takaki. The doctor Kanehiro Takaki, respected by all in Japan, died at the age of seventy and a half in XNUMX.
The secret of take-take
Kanehiro Takaki was right in his fears that the secret of beriberi would be discovered not by Japanese but by European scientists. Back in the 1880s, Russian doctor Nikolai Lunin conducted an experiment in which one group of mice was fed natural milk, and another – an artificial mixture of proteins, fats, carbohydrates and salt. All the mice in the second group soon died. It became clear that a living organism needs something else to function normally.
In 1897, the Dutch doctor Christiaan Eijkman, in experiments on poultry, established that in the case of beriberi, the problem was not a lack of protein food, but a deficiency of some substance contained in rice husks.
In 1905, W. Fletcher established that beriberi inevitably develops in people whose diet is based on polished white rice, but this disease does not affect those who eat brown rice in the same quantities.
In 1906, Frederick Hopkins proposed that food contains not only compounds known to science (fats, proteins, carbohydrates), but also some microscopic additives that are vital for the normal functioning of the body.
In 1911, Polish scientist Casimir Funk isolated a crystalline substance from rice bran that was absent from rice grains and effective in treating beriberi. Since it belonged to the amine group, Funk named it “vitamine” – “amine of life” (in 1920, the familiar name – vitamins – appeared). Strictly speaking, Funk obtained a crystalline mixture of different substances, and the proportion of thiamine in it was only 0,1%. Thiamine was isolated in pure form only in 1926.
In 1929, Eijkman and Hopkins received the Nobel Prize. But Nikolai Lunin's contribution was forgotten even in Russia, and in 1934 he was not invited to the first All-Union Conference on Vitamins held in Leningrad.
Information