maisov wrote:In Japanese navy, a doctor Kanehiro Takagi, educated in Britain, suspected that beriberi is a deficiency disease of unknown nutrition. In 1882, a IJN vessel suffered beriberi in her 10 months' voyage resulting in 169 beriberi infectants from 378 crews. Takagi proposed an experiment in the next year letting a vessel cruise the same course with western foods including breads and more meats. The vessel finished the voyage without any beriberi infectant. IJN decided to introduce western style foods for their rations.
This sounds similar to James Lind, senior Physician to the Royal Navy in 1747 whose famous investigation of scurvy among British sailors showed that citrus fruits cured and prevented that disease. However it took until 1795 for the Admiralty office to officially require lime juice with the sailor's rations. The sick lists fell off greatly, in time to double the available RN crews for the Napoleonic Wars.
Arguably, Lind’s finding was itself was as important as Trafalgar. It may indeed have made that victory possible from the start. What strikes me is how promptly it seems the Japanese Navy took up its cure. Most military forces are conservative in their procedures to a greater or lesser degree, especially in peacetime.
Under the best conditions an army or navy might try not to cross their soldiers' food tastes for the sake of morale. If the IJN began to introduce some (or more) meat in its rations I would have thought that was more of a change than it might seem today. Did not the Imperial serviceman eat better than he might have at home, at certain times in history? As was sometimes true in earlier American and European armies and navies?
The IJA issued some types of biscuits with different ration issues, particularly its "iron ration". But I have seen mention that the Japanese soldier in general did not prefer breads as regular issue any more than the American one would take rice as an everyday staple.
maisov wrote: On the other hand IJA, influenced by German medical science, insisted that beriberi was infectious disease by unknown bacteria. At last in 1908 IJA authorized to supply rice with barley. Umetaro Suzuki finally found vitamin B1 in 1910 (his article in German was in 1912 and perhaps in Europe he is not treated as the first founder of vitamin B1).
In 1901, Dutch physician Gerrit Grijns conclusively reported from Java that beri-beri was traceable to polished rice, and curable with unpolished rice. Before him Christiaan Rijkman had been carrying out the Indies experiments on chickens, unlike Lind and Takagi who experimented on men. Grijns, however, did not isolate the vitamin. He only pinpointed rice hulls as the source of a beri-beri curative.
In 1910, US Army doctor Edward B. Vedder successfully treated beri-beri in the Philippines with an alcohol-based extract of rice hulls. His assistant Robert R. Williams set out to isolate the ingredient responsible, but his work was deferred with a career change to chemistry for Bell Telephone Company. Work slowdown in the Great Depression allowed him to return to beri-beri research, and it was not until 1933 when he successfully isolated its vitamin preventative in quantity. In 1936 he first synthesized it and named it thiamine, Vitamin B1 being its original name.
Could these Japanese, American, and European researchers have been easily aware of each other's work, even if not as fast as modern researchers are today? Did Suzuki formally identify vitamin B1 itself?
There is a scientific saying that when conditions are right, breakthroughs from different directions are made quickly and often simultaneously across the world. So if Suzuki was actually before Vedder and Williams, his finding may be quantifiable. The problem then becomes putting the new findings into practice. Even though the British realized lemon juice would save 18th century Royal Navy sailors from scurvy, they then argued over the financial costs of using it. And since no one understood
how it worked, the debate over it went on and on for 50 years.
If Japanese Army medicine was influenced by the German and insisted that beri-beri was communicable, the US Public Health Service had this same problem in the 1910s. Many American doctors believed that pellagra, the disease of niacin deficiency, was infectious too. Pellagra ravaged the American South at the time, and the USPHS assigned Dr. Joseph Goldberger to track it down. Through wide-ranging experiments on prisoners and the poor, he conclusively found that pellagra was not infectious, and that meat, eggs, and milk kept it away. But the niacin in these foods would not be identified until 1937.
Nutritional history sources: Sebrell Jr, William H., Director of US National Institute of Health:
Food and Nutrition. Life Science Library, Time-Life Publishers revised edition 1980 pages 103-113. Tannahill, Reay:
Food in History. Crown Publishers, revised edition 1987 page 226-27.
maisov wrote:It was still difficult to produce vitamin B1. In 1929 'Strong Wakamoto', brewer's yeast with much vitamin B1, was put into sales. In 1930 similar medicine Ebios was on sale from an monopolistic brewery Dai-Nippon Beer Co. Ltd. After the war this firm was divided by anti-trust law and related laws, and Asahi Breweries' subsidiary is still supplying this medicine. Ebios was supplied both in IJA and IJN, and Strong Wakamoto was as popular as Ebios among civilians.
How was this supplement used (or eaten) by soldiers and sailors? You can find so much in documents and veterans' accounts of what the German Army ate, you can even buy reproduction German rations for re-enactors. But most accounts I have seen about what Japanese troops ate are only scattered mentions. The usual US War Department Handbook (page 346) mentions the wide IJA use of vitamin B and C pills, and even vitamins by injection.
I have looked for some mention of barley in everyday Japanese cooking, but found only barley tea so far. Curry from the Royal Navy found a place in Japanese food, and this is what I was looking for about barley -- some kind of trace left by past military life. In Britain you have the lime rickey mixed drink, in Germany there is
Komissbrot bread. In the US, various processed foods of today originated with the World Wars. Spam is popular today in South Korea and the Philippines because US forces used it as food aid in rebuilding those countries after war.
I don’t fully understand the soldier’s resistance to barley supplements in the rice. Was it a matter of how it tasted? Or it was simply foreign to the way rice was cooked at home in Japan? In food history – a small field in itself – social class is a part of it too. Was barley something that continental Asians ate? Koreans eat raw garlic, like Russians -- and like I do, much to my family’s jokes. A distant Korean relative told me that Japanese historically look down on eating garlic as low-class. Yet some modern Japanese appreciate the nutrition value of garlic, and they have distilled it into odorless pill form. Was barley thought of as medicinal only, and maybe low-class as food?
MacArthur recalled an early experience of Imperial Japan when he had heard that its soldiers were issued creosote pills. They tasted very bad of course, and were commonly thrown away. This seemed unsolvable until one day the pills were issued with the printed instructions “It is the Emperor’s will that his soldiers consume this pill”. Not a pill was wasted from then on.
Considering the general discipline of the Imperial forces and their need to conserve manpower, it seems strange to me troops would refuse their vitamin supplements and beri-beri return in wartime. Unless it was due mainly to general supply difficulties, stoppages, and shortages, whether or not by enemy action.