White Rice, Numb Legs: A Soldier's Memories (Russo-Japanese War, 1905-38)

White Rice, Numb Legs: A Soldier's Memories (Russo-Japanese War, 1905-38)

At the time of the Russo-Japanese War, soldiers in the army were supplied with polished white rice as their staple food. Although it was welcomed as a beautiful and luxurious meal, many soldiers eventually developed beriberi, which caused numbness in the legs, difficulty walking, convulsions, and even death in a series of cases. The Navy, under the leadership of Kanehiro Takagi, adopted barley rice and succeeded in curbing the onset of beriberi, but the Army refused to introduce barley rice because Ogai Mori, the commissioner of military medicine, maintained that "beriberi is an infectious disease caused by bacteria. As a result, it is said that more soldiers lost their lives to beriberi than in battle. Soldiers voiced their frustration that if they were to die from being hit by bullets on the battlefield, they would still die from rice. In contrast to the Russian army's use of soybeans as sprouts for nutrition, the army's food policy was inefficient. The leg sickness problem
is considered a classic example of a misjudgment by an authority figure that was not corrected and affected many lives, and it remains an important lesson in medical and military history.