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       Background of Japanese Biological Warfare

      A Proud Medical Tradition

      In all wars up until the Russo-Japanese War, it had been known that the “silent enemy”—disease—took a greater toll of lives among fighting men than did bullets. With the outbreak of the conflict with Russia, Japan made history by resolving to learn from her mistakes. Chastened by the waste represented by sickness-induced casualties that she had suffered in her recent war with China, she paid an extraordinary amount of attention to curbing battlefield illness. By the beginning of the twentieth century, her scientists were already gaining fame for their work, and feathers in their caps included discovery of the causes of beri-beri and dysentery. One strain of bacteria, the Shiga bacillus, even carries the name of its Japanese discoverer, Dr. Shiga Kiyoshi. The Western press termed the Japanese “scientific fanatics,” a telling commentary on the lack of scientific awareness in other countries of the world, especially in military medicine. By contrast, Japan’s army had come to be a—if not the—world leader in this field.

      A perspective on Japanese military medicine at the time of Japan’s war with Russia in 1904–05 is offered by a U.S. Army doctor, Louis Livingston Seaman. The Japanese granted him the privileges of a foreign military attaché, and he accompanied Japanese troops in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War. In addition to visiting field and base hospitals in Manchuria, he also observed hospitals in Japan. After the war, he published a book titled The Real Triumph of Japan: the Conquest of the Silent Foe. In it, he writes that

      the history of warfare for centuries has proven that in prolonged campaigns the first, or open enemy, kills twenty per cent of the total mortality in the conflict, whilst the second, or silent enemy, kills eighty … This dreadful and unnecessary sacrifice of life, especially among the Anglo-Saxon races, is the most ghastly proposition of modern war, and the Japanese have gone a long way toward conquering or eliminating it …

      I unhesitatingly assert that the greatest conquests of Japan have been in the humanities of war, in the stopping of the needless sacrifice of life through preventable disease …

      In our war with Mexico, the proportion of losses was about three from disease to one from bullets, and in our great Civil War nearly the same proportion obtained … No lessons seem to have been learned from these frightful experiences, for later statistics show no improvement. In the French Campaign in Madagascar in 1894 fourteen thousand men were sent to the front, of whom twenty-nine were killed in action and seven thousand perished from preventable disease. In the Boer War in South Africa the English losses from disease were simply frightful, greater than even our Civil War record. But the crowning piece of imbecility was reserved for our war with Spain, where, in 1898, fourteen were needlessly sacrificed to ignorance and incompetency for every one who died on the firing line or from battle casualties.

      The author points out how in Japan’s war with China in 1894, the Japanese ratio of losses from disease was about the same as that suffered by American soldiers suffered in two of the wars cited above. The experience gained from that clash in Manchuria, however, was put to good use a decade later, and the Japanese army’s ratio of combat casualties to those caused by disease turned around dramatically. Noting Japan’s success, he writes, “Only one and two-tenths percent of the entire army died of sickness or disease. Only one and one-half died of gunshot wounds, although twenty-four percent were wounded … This record is, I believe, unparalleled and unapproached in the annals of war.”

      “Japan put into use the most elaborate and effective system of sanitation that has ever been practiced in war,” he wrote. For instance, “every hospital throughout Japan, and every base and field hospital in Manchuria, has its bacteriological laboratory.” The author praises the work done by “Japan’s corps of trained experts with the microscope, 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

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