Eating Too Much Rice Almost Doomed Japan’s Imperial Navy

After the war, the Emergency Beriberi Investigative Committee investigated the disease’s devastation of Japanese ranks. In August 1882 in Incheon Bay near Seoul, four Japanese warships were locked in a tense stand-off with two Chinese warships that had brought troops to quell a revolt on the Korean peninsula. Basil Hall Chamberlain, a preeminent Japanologist, demonstrated the lack of understanding of the disease’s causes in his 1890 Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan.

Source: nationalinterest.org