In the second year of the Taishō Period (1913), when he was old enough, namely 25 years old, Taichirō established a practice of his own.[1] Although he had been leaning towards opening a clinic in either Tōkyō or Fukuoka City, one of his friends from college asked him to return to the Chikuhō Region. To sweeten the deal, the friend prepared a plot of land for his clinic next to his own in Kurakata.
Before long, Taichirō married one of his cousins, as was common among established families in those days, and soon fathered a baby boy. Over the next several years, he would also have four daughters.
Taichirō’s triumphs came one after another and he went on to have a very successful career as a doctor. His dermatology and “social disease” clinic benefited from a close relationship with the Kaijima Coal Mining Company, which sent its employees to see Taichirō to have their diseases treated.[2] It could be said that seeing a dermatologist for a sexually transmitted disease was something of a rite of passage for men in those days. Using an organic arsenic compound called arsphenamine which was first synthesized in 1907 in Germany and later sold under the brand name Salvarsan #606, Taichirō was able to successfully treat syphilis and develop a good reputation. Patients would pay for injections with two bags of rice which at the time were worth one yen and seventy-five sen which is worth about $140 today.
Taichirō also ran a psychiatry hospital with some of his friends in Kita-Kyūshū, allowing him to earn ¥90,000 in his first 11 years of business. In the Taisho Era, you could support a family of 9 for their entire lives with ¥10,000, so it was quite a bit of money. Nevertheless, he saved his money so that he could study abroad. I have read that he was able to put away 20,000 yen which in today’s money amounts to about 52 million yen, or about half a million dollars. I guess you could say that Taichirō was doing rather well. In the meantime, he continued to study German, gaining a much better command of the language. And so, eleven years after opening his clinic in Kurakata, he finally secured a letter of recommendation from Keizō Doi, his professor of dermatology at the Tōkyō Imperial University, to study in Germany.
At the time, there were quite a few people who had tried to talk Taichirō out of going by saying, “Why would you want to do such a stupid thing? You’re already making a fortune. You’re just going to end up dying over there in an accident.” Undeterred by the concerns of others, Taichirō left Japan in 1923, the voyage by ship and train taking six long months. Once there, Taichirō paid a visit to Professor Hincks at the University of Berlin’s Department of Medicine only to discover that the professor had retired and opened a private practice. Perplexed at what he should do, he then travelled to University of Bonn and called upon Erich Hoffman, one of the doctors who in 1905 first identified the causative organism of syphilis, a spiral-shaped spirochete called Treponema pallidum. Taichirō held little expectation that a professor as famous as Hoffman would give him the time of day, but, thanks to the assistance of a friend of his wife’s, he was allowed to meet with, and eventually study under, the great professor.
During his time in Germany, Taichirō learned not only the German language, but also the country’s customs and the political reality of the time. It was a relatively stable and prosperous period in Germany’s history, a time known as the Goldene Zwanziger Jahre, or the Golden Twenties. In 1924, Hitler was in prison, writing his political manifesto, Mein Kampf, and the Nazi Party was still banned from politics. It was a time to explore the arts, humanities, and freedoms. Women, too, were enjoying new liberties.
Throwing himself into his studies, Taichirō came to understand the causes and treatments of syphilis. Moreover, his study of frambesia tropica, or the yaws, which is an infection of the skin, bones, and joints caused by the same bacterium that caused syphilis, progressed. He took part in German conferences with his professors and members of the medical staff from all around Europe and was eager to study more. In those day, however, the Minister of Education of Japan only allowed students to study abroad for a year and a half. Taichirō once told me that he would have needed to stay at least three years in order to truly master the German language and get accustomed to life in Europe.
Taichirō was able to study in Germany for two years, earning a second medical degree. Afterwards, he traveled around Europe for a year, experiencing much more beyond medicine: a Europe that was living on borrowed time before the worldwide economic collapse of the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism.
My grandfather enjoyed his life in Europe, even having one or two little romances while he was there, something that made us grandchildren suspect that the women in question must have had unusual taste in men. By no means, could Taichirō have been considered handsome, even when he was young. Nevertheless, Taichirō claimed that a German countess had fallen for him and that he had left her once he had grown tired of the woman. Whether that was yet another one of Taichirō’s yarns, I do not know, but I did hear that his landlady’s daughter had fallen so deeply in love with him that she travelled all the way to Japan to look for him after he had returned.
After about three years in Europe, Taichirō finally returned to Kurakata in March of 1927. Back in Japan, he commissioned Konoike Kumi (鴻ノ池組), the same general contractor which oversaw the construction of Kyūshū University among other famous structures, to rebuild his clinic. A carbon copy of the home of Dr. Hoffman, his professor in Germany, it was built in a classical style, with light beige bricks, ionic pillars and entablature, as well as stained glass and copper furnishings. Inside, it was bright and clean with high vaulted ceilings and tasteful crown molding and cherry woodwork along the edges of the walls.
For the next ten years, Taichirō was in charge of the geisha girls in the red-light district in addition to his other duties. There were some sixty or seventy girls working in the brothels of Kurakata and my grandfather would examine them once a week. He also employed doctor’s assistants to carry out examinations because they were cheaper to employ. When the Medical Practitioner’s Law was strengthened, such non-licensed medics were no longer allowed to examine patients, which hurt the clinic’s bottom line, but was better for the welfare of the patients.
In July of 1937, Marco Polo Bridge Incident occurred, when a dispute between Japanese and Chinese troops escalated into full-scale invasion, triggering the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the beginning of WWII in Asia. There was a rule in which one doctor from each county in Japan could get an exception from military service and by some miracle of fate, Taichirō won the lottery. Some people suspected that because his father had been the village mayor, he had received special treatment, but actually it was merely thanks to his prodigious good fortune.
On New Year’s Eve in 1940, a fire broke out at an udon shop nearby. Before long, it spread to the clinic which also caught fire, damaging it. Apparently, some young men who had been making and delivering toshikoshi soba noodles for end of the year celebrations. The fire started after they had gone to sleep in a room above the shop and all five died. The clinic was rebuilt over the course of the following year, incorporating both Western and Japanese elements to the design. At any rate, Taichirō hurried to have the clinic ready for the arrival of his daughter-in-law, my mother, the following year.
During the war years, almost all young men were drafted into the military and the illnesses of the so-called “floating world” of the geisha became less common. Instead of treating STDs, my grandfather found himself treating more and more people who were exhibiting signs of severe malnutrition and vitamin deficiency.
Even before Japan’s fateful attack on Pearl Harbor, there had already been shortages. This would only worsen over the next four years. Rice was rationed and there were metal and other scrap drives—anything that had usable metal or leather was requisitioned by the authorities. The electricity supply was sporadic and the lights would often go out at night.
Taichirō had to keep his guard up when examining patients because things would go missing. Two of his three stethoscopes were stolen by a patient who may have sold the rubber tubes on the black market. After the second one was taken, he had to keep the third with him at all times to prevent it from being stolen, too.
Despite the shortages and rationing, my family was able to get by better than others. They had extra rations of sugar from the medical association and were able to indulge in better quality food from time to time, something the neighbors did not look upon too lightly. Because there were so few doctors practicing, my grandfather could still make quite a bit of money and was thankful to God that he had narrowly escaped being swallowed up by the war like so many other men were.
Following the defeat in 1945, soldiers were repatriated from overseas and, thanks to the number of soldiers suffering from sexually transmitted diseases, Taichirō’s clinic was busier than ever. Reforms to the health care system in 1947, however, hurt the profitability of the clinic considerably. Furthermore, the enactment of land reform to reduce absentee landlordism caused the family’s farmland in the Chikuhō Region to be confiscated and redistributed. Bank deposits were also frozen and a new bill was introduced to fight the rampant hyperinflation, making the old money worthless. In the end, the situation between those who had returned from abroad and those who had stayed was little different.
Although the situation in Japan would eventually start to improve and the clinic would prosper once more—not everything would go as Taichirō hoped, as you will soon learn.
