that the dread phantom of disease might be intercepted.” He describes the use of X-ray equipment at hospitals, and even portable X-ray machines in field hospitals.
In contrast, war correspondents recorded a statement by one of the Russian officers caught in the siege of Port Arthur: “Our principal enemies are the scurvy and 11-inch shells, which know no obstacle and against which there is no protection.” (Eleven-inch shells were made possible by another Japanese scientific breakthrough, this time in gunpowder by Admiral Shimose Masachika; Shimose, like his compatriot Shiga, made it into Webster’s Dictionary.)
Japan’s early contact with bacteriological warfare was defensive. Seaman writes of the water sanitation methods which the Japanese practiced in an attempt to neutralize the problem that “the water supplies in the territory where the campaign was conducted had been left infected with the deadly germs of typhoid, dysentery, and cholera by the retreating Russians.”
After the battle of Mukden, he wrote of sixty thousand Russian prisoners, many of them sick and wounded, taken by Japan. Another seventeen thousand sick and wounded were captured at Port Arthur. The American surgeon recorded how the Japanese cared for captured prisoners, taking careful case notes of their injuries and dressing their wounds, while the fleeing Russians left their dead and wounded so as to be able to retreat with maximum speed. Japan was in effect relieving the burden on the enemy hospitals. “This fact should be borne well in mind,” Seaman wrote, “for should at a later date invidious comparisons be made regarding the low death-rate of the Russian wounded, it is Japan to whom the credit belongs. For it was under Japanese care that such a large percentage of them recovered.”
British war correspondents also wrote of the wartime ethics of the Japanese. One account tells of Japanese patrols finding a Russian who was wounded in the eyes. The Japanese cleansed and dressed the wound, then returned the man to his own side. This was typical Japanese action in that war.
Most armies of the world considered the role of the medical corps something that began only after a soldier suffered sickness or injury. Japan took an opposite stand and used preventive bacteriology as part of tactical planning. “The army medical systems of the world were studied and a new one evolved, of which Japan may well be proud,” Seaman writes, praising in particular a Japanese-developed portable water testing kit that technicians carried into the field in advance of the armies.
“The American Army,” he wrote, “can never hope to emulate the Japanese until the time shall have arrived when, through the reorganization of its Medical Department, the surgeon shall have executive instead of merely advisory privileges in matters of hygiene and sanitation in barrack and field; and until the line officer shall display the same courtesy and respect to the medical expert as does his Japanese brother-in-arms.”
Thus, by the turn of the century, Japanese military medicine and wartime bacteriology were the best in the world. Their standards, according to the American doctor, were far higher than those maintained by the United States and Great Britain, and medicine was treated by the Japanese as being equal in importance to guns and shells in contributing to military performance.
To address the problem of ingesting bacteria with food, the Japanese army issued creosote pills, an old standby formerly used in bronchial troubles, as a prophylactic measure. The army issued them to the soldiers with instructions to take one pellet after each meal. They tasted bad, though, and most of the pellets ended up in the fields. Japanese officers were concerned, and the problem of how to get the soldiers to take the creosote was sent back to headquarters in Tokyo to be discussed among top leaders. Sitting in on the conferences as a guest was a young American lieutenant, Douglas MacArthur, fresh out of West Point and son of the military attaché to Japan. The American’s opinion was that soldiers were soldiers, and that there was no way to make the soldiers of any nation follow orders to swallow something that they didn’t like.
The solution was found by a Japanese officer who suggested having the tins carry a message that “it is the will of the emperor that each soldier take this medicine after each meal.” What followed is best described by MacArthur in his book Reminiscences: “The result was instantaneous. Not a pill was wasted. Nothing but death itself could stop the soldiers from taking the medicine.”
The creosote was also given a new name which translates directly into “Subjugate Russia Pellets.” It retained its name for a long time after the war, becoming a popular over-the-counter medicine for intestinal troubles. Then, after World War II, the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare ordered a change to eliminate the anti-Soviet connotation. A simple change of one of the ideographs in favor of one that resembled it left the pronunciation, seirogan, unchanged, while turning the name of the medicine into a term with no particular meaning. Even today, seirogan can be found in any pharmacy in Japan.
The Japanese success in minimizing deaths from illness proved that they were correct in attaching equal priority to germs and bullets, and soon after the war’s end, a Department of Field Disease Prevention was established. It was a natural outgrowth of the lessons learned in Manchuria and a peacetime continuation of what the American medical observer termed “the most elaborate and effective system of sanitation ever practiced in war.” Commendable though this move was, though, it had its dark side. The original bacteriological aims of Japan were soon to be warped in the direction of causing, rather than preventing and curing, disease. And the fiber of the high morality of Japanese troops, praised by the American surgeon and foreign journalists and observers in Manchuria, would be shred and rewoven into racist ugliness at the hands of the Japanese military and medical elites.
Ishii Shiro
Ishii Shiro was born on June 25, 1892 in the village of Chiyoda, in an area about two hours’ drive from what is today central Tokyo. His family was one of the wealthier ones in the region by village standards, with respectable land holdings that gave them the aura of rural aristocrats. This economic status earned respect and, more importantly, loyalty from the surrounding inhabitants. Ishii would put this loyalty to good use for himself in the coming years.
In 1916, Ishii entered Kyoto Imperial University. It was a prestigious establishment, and its medical department was especially known for its work in bacteriology. The “Schweitzer of Japan,” Noguchi Hideyo, in addition to honors and awards he earned in the United States and Europe, received his Doctorate of Medicine from this university in 1911.
As a student, Ishii seemed to have had personality problems: more succinctly, he created problems for others. He was pushy, inconsiderate, and selfish. In harmony with these personality traits, he was also a ladder-climber. In a society where Confucian-rooted respect for superiors and a strong consciousness of hierarchy dictates boundaries of behavior, Ishii’s forward drive ran roughshod over protocol.
Ishii felt a calling to the military, perhaps to serve his country, but surely to advance his own goals of medical research. In 1920, he graduated university and enlisted in the army. Shortly thereafter, he was commissioned a lieutenant, and by the summer of 1922, he had managed to gain a transfer to the First Army Hospital in Tokyo. His fever for research was appreciated by his superiors, and two years later he was assigned to return to his alma mater for postgraduate work in bacteriology, among other fields.
During these days, he was a frequent visitor to the home of the school president, an affront to Ishii’s university instructors in that he was socializing not only out of his own league, but theirs, as well. He eventually grew close enough to the top man at Kyoto Imperial University to marry his daughter. This marital link cemented his position with the university’s medical research people and facilities; in a sense, thus, it also laid the beginnings of a foundation for his human experimentation in China.
Japan was a signatory to the Geneva Convention of 1925, which led to the prohibition of biological and chemical warfare. As a specialist in bacteria-related fields, Ishii actually found this development encouraging;
