Geisel did three cartoons a week for PM and occasional drawings for the Treasury Department, the War Production Board, and Nelson Rockefeller’s Committee on Inter-American Affairs, but after the United States got into the war, he felt so out of the main current of events that at the end of 1942 he decided to join the armed forces. He was presently stationed in California, as an Army captain attached to Frank Capra’s celebrated wartime documentary-film-making unit, for which he wrote and directed scripts calculated to elevate G.I. morals and morale. In the fall of 1944, Geisel was shipped to Europe for a spell, in connection with his film work, and at General Omar Bradley’s headquarters in Luxembourg, he ran into Ingersoll, by then a lieutenant colonel. Ingersoll said he supposed that Geisel, like most Stateside tourists, would like to have a peek at some actual fighting while he was in the area—without, of course, getting too dangerously exposed. Unfolding a top-secret map, he studied it carefully and circled “Bastogne.” Then he summoned a jeep and urged Geisel to ride on up there and take in the sights. Geisel was trapped for three days in the Battle of the Bulge, eventually being rescued by the British. “Nobody came along and put up a sign saying, ‘This is the Battle of the Bulge,’ ” he explained later. “How was I supposed to know? I thought the fact that we didn’t seem to be able to find any friendly troops in any direction was just one of the normal occurrences of combat.”
Shortly before the first atomic bomb was exploded, Geisel returned to California, where he was ordered to come up with another film for postwar occupation troops—one that would keep them on the alert by reminding them that inattention could lead to a third world war. “Make that third war a real doozy, Geisel,” he was told. Seeking inspiration, he leafed through the magazine section of a recent Sunday Times, where his eye was caught by an article suggesting that there was enough latent energy in a tumbler of water, if man could ever figure out a way of harnessing it, to blow up half the earth. Without further ado, or further research, Geisel knocked out the draft of a script suggesting the possibility of unimaginably devastating explosions, and passed it along to his superiors. Two days later, the Pentagon was on the phone, urgently asking where he’d got his facts.
“From the Times,” he replied.
“Burn your source of information, Geisel,” came the command.
“Burn the Times?” he asked.
“Yes, and report by phone as soon as you’ve carried out your orders,” he was told.
“I had long since thrown away the copy of the paper in question,” Geisel recalls, “but I wanted to be a good soldier, so I rushed my most reliable sergeant to an out-of-town news dealer, and he bought me a copy of the latest Times. We put it in a metal bucket and all marched out into a courtyard and stood in formation and gave the Boy Scout salute while a trusted lieutenant lit a match to it. Then I called Washington and said, ‘Mission accomplished, sir. We have burned the Times.’ ‘Well done, Geisel,’ I was told, and then they went on with the war.”
Mustered out, as a lieutenant colonel, early in 1946, Geisel proceeded to divide his time for several years between children’s books and motion pictures. With his wife, he wrote a documentary film about Japan, “Design for Death,” which won an Oscar in 1947, but which soured its authors on Hollywood values. The object of the picture was to show that the Japanese were at heart not much different from any other human beings (“A person’s a person, no matter how small”), and that they had allowed themselves to be dominated by a gang of ruthless leaders. One sequence, of which both Geisels were particularly fond, as illustrative of the serenity of Japanese culture, was devoted to sixteenth-century Japan. No actors were involved—just fog and water, with a muted tone poem as the musical background. While looking at some rushes one evening, the Geisels were horrified to discover that one of the producers had livened up this tranquil stretch with shots of American tanks barrelling through a crowd of shrieking Japanese. The producer refused to delete the tanks, on the ground that, anachronism or no anachronism, they gave the dreary old century some vitality. Just before the picture was released, the Geisels sneaked into a cutting room and, abetted by a film editor, snipped out the lively footage. The producer had the last word, though. Weeks later, when the Geisels passed a theatre where the film was playing, they found it advertised with posters that showed terrified white women in ripped chemises being carted off in cages by transparently ill-intentioned Japanese soldiers.
Thomas Sowell is an American TREASURE. He is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, born in NC, but raised in Harlem. Educated at Harvard, Colombia and Chicago. He is an economist who has taught at Cornell, Brandeis, The Urban Institution, UCLA, and now at Stanford.
How Killer Rice Crippled Tokyo and the Japanese Navy
One stubborn doctor pioneered a cure.
BY ANNE EWBANK
FEBRUARY 22, 2018
A mysterious illness killed princesses and sailors alike. WELLCOME COLLECTION/CC BY 4.0IN 1877, JAPAN’S MEIJI EMPEROR watched his aunt, the princess Kazu, die of a common malady: kakke. If her condition was typical, her legs would have swollen, and her speech slowed. Numbness and paralysis might have come next, along with twitching and vomiting. Death often resulted from heart failure.
The emperor had suffered from this same ailment, on-and-off, his whole life. In response, he poured money into research on the illness. It was a matter of survival: for the emperor, his family, and Japan’s ruling class. While most diseases ravage the poor and vulnerable, kakke afflicted the wealthy and powerful, especially city dwellers. This curious fact gave kakke its other name: Edo wazurai, the affliction of Edo (Edo being the old name for Tokyo). But for centuries, the culprit of kakke went unnoticed: fine, polished, white rice.
The Meiji emperor and his family. TRIALSANDERRORS/CC BY 2.0Gleaming white rice was a status symbol—it was expensive and laborious to husk, hull, polish, and wash. In Japan, the poor ate brown rice, or other carbohydrates such as sweet potatoes or barley. The rich ate polished white rice, often to the exclusion of other foods.
This was a problem. Removing the outer layers of a grain of rice also removes one vital nutrient: thiamine, or vitamin B-1. Without thiamine, animals and humans develop kakke, now known in English as beriberi. But for too long, the cause of the condition remained unknown. In his book Beriberi in Modern Japan: The Making of a National Disease, Alexander R. Bay describes the efforts of Edo-era doctors to figure out the disease. A common suspect was dampness and damp ground. One doctor administered herbal medicines and a fasting regimen to a samurai, who died within months. Other doctors burned dried mugwort on patients’ bodies to stimulate qi and blood flow. Some remedies did work—even if they didn’t come from a true understanding of the disease. Katsuki Gyuzan, an early, 18th-century doctor, believed Edo itself was the issue. Samurai, he wrote, would come to Edo and get kakke from the water and soil. Only samurai who went back to their provincial homes—going over the Hakone Pass—would be cured. Those who were seriously ill had to move quickly, “for the worst cases always result in death,” Katsuki cautioned. Since heavily processed white rice was less available outside Edo and in the countryside, this likely was a cure. Similarly, a number of physicians prescribed barley and red beans, which both contain thiamine.
Moxibustion, an ancient technique of burning mugwort atop skin. WELLCOME COLLECTION/CC BY 4.0By 1877, Japan’s beriberi problem was getting really serious. When the princess Kazu died of kakke at 31, it was only a decade after her former husband, Japan’s shogun, had died, almost certainly from the mysterious disease. Machine-milling made polished rice available to the masses, and as the government invested in an army and navy, it fed soldiers with white rice. (White rice, as it happened, was less bulky and lasted longer than brown rice, which could go rancid in warm weather.) Inevitably, soldiers and sailors got beriberi.
No longer was this just a problem for the upper class, or even Japan. In his article British India and the “Beriberi Problem,” 1798–1942, David Arnold writes that by the time the emperor was funding research, beriberi was ravaging South and East Asia, especially “soldiers, sailors, plantation labourers, prisoners, and asylum inmates.”
Into this mess stepped a precocious doctor: Takaki Kanehiro. Almost immediately after joining the navy in 1872, he noticed the high numbers of sailors suffering from beriberi. But it wasn’t until he returned from medical school in London and took up the role of director of the Tokyo Naval Hospital that he could do anything about it. After surveying suffering sailors, he found that “the rate [of disease] was highest among prisoners, lower among sailors and petty officers, and lowest among officers.”
A crude machine for polishing rice. PROJECT GUTENBERG/PUBLIC DOMAINSince they differed mainly by diet, Takaki believed a lack of protein among lower-status sailors caused the disease. (This contradicted the most common theory at the time: that beriberi was an infectious disease caused by bacteria.) Takaki even wrangled a meeting with the emperor to discuss his theory. “If the cause of this condition is discovered by someone outside of Japan, it would be dishonorable,” he told the emperor. Change couldn’t come soon enough. In 1883, 120 Japanese sailors out of 1,000 had the disease.
Takaki also noticed that Western navies didn’t suffer from beriberi. But instituting a Western-style diet was expensive, and sailors were resistant to eating bread. An unfortunate incident, though, allowed Takaki to make his point emphatically. In late 1883, a training ship full of cadets returned from a journey to New Zealand, South America, and Hawaii. Out of the 370 cadets and crewmen, 169 had gotten beriberi, and 25 had died.
Takaki proposed an experiment. Another training ship, the Tsukuba, would set out on the exact same route. Takaki leveraged every connection he had to arrange for the Tsukuba to carry bread and meat instead of just white rice. So while the Tsukuba made its way around the world, the doctor spent sleepless nights fretting about the result: If crew members died from beriberi, he would look like a fool. Later, he told a student that he would have killed himself if his experiment failed.
A man with legs affected by beriberi stands with a walking stick. WELLCOME COLLECTION/CC BY 4.0Instead, the Tsukuba returned to Japan in triumph. Only 14 crew members had gotten beriberi, and those men had not eaten the ordered diet. Takaki wasn’t exactly right: He believed the issue was protein rather than thiamine. But since meat was expensive, Takaki proposed giving sailors protein-filled barley, which is actually rich in thiamine. In the face of this evidence, the navy began mixing rations with barley. Within a few years, beriberi was almost totally eradicated in the navy.
But only in the navy. Takaki became navy surgeon general in 1885, yet other doctors attacked his theories and questioned his results. The sad result was that while the navy ate barley, the army ate only rice. According to Bay, the use of barley smacked of discredited traditional Japanese medicine to many Western-trained doctors. Plus, recruits were enticed into the army by promises of as much white rice as they could eat.
A Japanese battlefield hospital during the Russo-Japanese war. WELLCOME COLLECTION/CC BY 4.0The result was deadly. During the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, beriberi killed 27,000 soldiers, compared to 47,000 men killed by actual war wounds. Finally, barley became a vital battlefield ration. The source of a disease that had ravaged Japan’s leadership and kneecapped the military was identified. It was the country’s staple crop, everyday meal, and cultural touchstone: simple white rice.
Vitamins had yet to be discovered, and the debate over the true cause of beriberi lingered for decades. But few could deny that Takaki had uncovered white rice’s deadly secret. Takaki, for his efforts, was made a member of the nobility in 1905. Charmingly, he was given the nickname “the Barley Baron.”
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