Conclusion

Summary

Writing to a popular audience in 1941 about eliminating national diseases during a time of total war, Takano Rokurō called on the people to give up their “white rice-ism,” because as a food, it was not “the complete package.” Adding mixed grains while increasing the amount of vegetables and seafood would solve Japan's beriberi problem. The solution, Takano recognized, was not easy since white rice eaters were prone to this disease. The advent of machine milling allowed beriberi to spread throughout rural and urban populations, striking those living in communal settings where nutrition is not given much attention, such as in dorms, prisons, unhygienic factories, and mines. Takano recounted how beriberi shook the foundations of the army and navy, disabling ships and, during the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, debilitating army units. Beriberi also threatened the intellectual strength of the nation, afflicting students who traveled to Tokyo to attend schools. Living in dorms, eating their fill of white rice, they fell victim to the national disease. “Even knowing they will develop beriberi, the Japanese demand that at least their staple fare be white rice. They do not know that the flavor of white rice is the taste of beriberi.”

Takano's work exemplifies the type of medical discourse examined in Beriberi in Modern Japan, revealing how beriberi came to be defined as an affliction associated with the nation and the people, seen especially as a threat to Japan's modern military. Public health officials and statesmen alike devoted tremendous resources to both research and prevention. The development of a modern military and its deployment in East Asia highlighted the nation's susceptibility to this disease. In short, beriberi was a disease of empire, though not in the traditional sense; it was not a disease encounted on the periphery of imperial expansion, but one the Japanese brought with them to continental battlefields. National and imperial cultures combined to create epidemics: army culture, with its emphasis on a white rice diet, set the stage, and war in China—life on the march, bivouacking, and brutal combat conditions—was the catalyst of high morbidity. Military medicine was central to the making of the national body and its specific national disease. War created a mountain of data concerning beriberi etiology; at the same time, empire could not have been won or maintained without beriberi prevention.