During the infancy stage of Fiji’s sugar industry authorities were willing to experiment with different labour options.
One of these experiments involved bringing over hundreds of Japanese men to work on sugar can farms in Fiji.
Documentation about the Girmit era abounds but nothing much is known about the tragedy involving the Japanese who arrived to work in Fiji but ended up dying like flies.
About 305 of the men were recruited in May 1894 to work on sugarcane plantations in the country.
Eighty-five of the labourers would perish in a relatively short period of time shocking local authorities who were perplexed as to what was causing their fast demise.
A study conducted by Judy A Bennet of University of Otago found that being fed the wrong type of rice was ultimately what killed them.
They had died of beriberi.
This was the first time beriberi was experienced in epidemic form in Fiji.
Their quick deaths left authorities bemused because the plantation they had worked on were considered healthy.
Just two years previously before the deaths, Fijian newspapers had been praising the “remarkable adaptability of the Japanese coolies for service in Fijian plantation.”
Just only a year later a report from Fiji revealed the disaster that severely cost the CSR, but more importantly cost the men their lives.
“This extraordinary mortality is very hard to understand as the company has been most assiduous in its care for them, far exceeding the demand of the contract in this case..and they have been a source of considerable loss to the company,” wrote a Fijian correspondent for the Sydney Daily Telegraph.
“The Japanese labourers in Fiji and Queensland had seen beriberi at home but, being young, healthy men, they passed quarantine and medical inspections on their arrival and soon were working hard,” Bennet noted in her paper, Germs or Rations — The Japanese Labour Experiment in Fiji and Queensland.
“The bulk of their rations had been purchased in Japan, enough for six months, after which time local food could be assimilated into the diet, providing the inspectors and the employer agreed.
“The ordinary rice for labourers in Japan at this time was usually pounded by hand to remove the husk, and so much of the tissue holding the thiamine remained.”
“The purchasing agents of Burns Philp acting on CSR’s behalf, however, bought a polished white rice; their reasoning had been, in Knox’s words, “that the polished white rice was sent because it was thought that the rice ordinarily used by labourers in Japan would not keep in Fiji”.
“This hulled and polished white rice probably originated from the mills of Saigon or Rangoon, where mechanised polishing reduced the likelihood of the rice going rancid and attracting weevils,” Bennet wrote.
The CSR agents had sent a sample of twenty bags of somewhat less expensive, brown but hulled rice which had been looked on with optimism by Japanese inspectors.
As the Japanese inspectors, Shoda and Hatta, commented to the manager in July 1894, “they have never eaten such good rice before and even the cleaned but unpolished rice was of better quality than the usual,” the paper goes on.
Because the unpolished rice kept relatively well and cost only £7 13s. a ton compared to £8 10s. a ton for the white rice, CSR instructed Burns Philp that future orders from Japan be of “ordinary rice used by the labouring classes of Japan” for three months’ rations.
However the CSR had seriously overlooked the fact that this particular rice was distinctly lacking in thiamine.
“It seems CSR discarded the shoyu and miso as ‘unfit for food’ and with them a small, but useful, addition of thiamine,” wrote Bennet.
“Given the turnaround time between Japan and Fiji, this order took three months to fill and arrived in Fiji in mid-September 1894, when seven men had already died.
“As the original supply was for six months, it seems almost certain that the men continued to consume that supply until mid-November at least, when Knox was discussing how the three months’ supply on hand
should be utilised if the Japanese were repatriated.”
Tragically by this time the disease was quite entrenched amongst the Japanese workers.
“So debilitated were most of the Japanese that they may not have been able to ingest even ideal rice in the usual form,” Bennet added.
“The remedies administered, such as quinine, iron, strychnine, arsenic, belladonna, digitalis, and, after meals, hydrochloric acid, cannot have stimulated or maintained appetite.
“Today, thirteen to thirty times the normal intake of thiamine is prescribed daily for two weeks for rapid recovery, then reduced to about seven times the normal requirement for some weeks more.”
Bennet concluded that “even if diet had been improved,” such dosages were either unavailable or un-prescribed under existing medical regimes.
“Recovery would have been very slow, providing potentially fatal bacterial or viral complications such as pneumonia or dysentery did not intervene.
The study points to the ignorance of the CSR and the labourers themselves “cut off other avenues that may have compensated in part for the thiamine-deficient rice.”
In July1894 when the Japanese asked for potatoes the labourers were told their contract had stated either vegetables or potatoes.
They were instead offered yams and sweet potatoes which were cheaper.
As thiamine content in potatoes is much greater than in yams and sweet potatoes this choice reduced the potential intake of the vitamin.
“Moreover, the ration stipulated “fresh meat or fish,” but CSR, at least for the first month or two, issued beef boiled in 6-lb. tins, tinned mutton, and salted beef from Sydney — all of which would have had no measurable thiamine.”
Knox also ordered fresh fish reduced and replaced by dried fish, with slight traces of thiamne as that was what the labourers wanted.
“..all the potential sources of thiamine in the laborers’ diet were simply non-existent or, like shoyu and miso, too minute by themselves,” Bennet revealed.
“It seems that a supply of fresh meat may have alleviated the disease for a time, but by late July sickness had returned and beriberi developed.”
The disease was so severe that a paper presented to the Fiji’s Legislative Council.
The first report was by Dr Charles Hirch, the medical officer for the Rewa district, where fifty of the Japanese worked at CSR’s Nausori plantations on the eastern side of Viti Levu;
The other report was completed by Dr Noble Joynt, who was based out of Labasa.
Two hundred Japanese went to Wailevu and about fifty to Ba, both on the western side of the same island.
Bennet also notes that despite chief medical officer, Dr B Glanville Corney having some idea of what constituted a proper diet for the Japanese workers he failed to act on it.
Apparently the doctor was given a copy of the Annual Report of the Health of the Imperial Navy for 1887.
The report which was provided by the medical officer of the HIMJS Hiyei, a Dr. Sasaki on a visit to Fiji in 1889 by the Japanese navy’s training squadron.
“This report contained tables and information by Takaki on his dietary innovations for the navy,” Bennet continued adding that “he certainly knew of Takaki’s emphasis on diet and also mentions the dietary focus of earlier researchers.”The damage by then had already been done.
“Corney, in spite of all this hard data from the entire population of the Japanese navy of over fifty-three hundred, remained a prisoner of the paradigm of an infective agent in the environment, even in the face of conflicting research, for he went on to state that we may not assume that a deficiency of nitrogen to make good the natural bodily waste is the sole or active cause of . . . Beriberi. . . .”
Although conceding that the Fiji Japanese workers’ ration “was inferior in nitrogenous material to the proportion insisted on by Takaki,” Corney describes “residence . . . in an infected place” as an essential factor in producing beriberi.
Corney also recommended the Takaki diet as well as the treatments with drugs believed to relieve symptoms.
However one of the doctors involved, Joynt, after discussing the drug “tonics” and regimes for his Labasa patients, commented that he believed “good nourishing nitrogenous food . . . to be as efficacious as any drug treatment.”
In time, much of Corney’s recommendations was carried out.
Despite the government not being obliged by law to supply free medical care to CSR, alarm over the outbreak convinced it “to assist the company in its present difficulties” with medical attention on payment of a fee.
By October, the doctors had advised on returning the Japanese men to a cold climate.
In time the government agreed to allow the sick labourers to be moved to isolation on the quarantine island of Nukulau.
Concerned the disease would spread, government doctors recommended elaborate hygiene measures to prevent the “microbe disease” from infecting the Nukulau compound.
In the Fijian language newspaper, Na Mata, the government’s commissioner for native affairs even warned Fijians of the dangers of contracting beriberi from clothes sold by the Japanese.
Earlier, Knox had considered the possibility of bringing in a Japanese doctor, but, as the steamer turnaround time was so great, he decided to return the men to their homeland once the difficulties of transportation during the Sino-Japanese war had lessened.
In the meantime, CSR’s Fiji manager sought in vain for “a suitable man” to care for the Japanese in Nukulau.
The government could not provide a doctor there, so the CSR abandoned the plan to move the sick to Nukulau.
Government doctors continued to care for them at the plantation hospitals of Nausori and Labasa.
Burns Philp could not arrange a steamer to Japan earlier than 4 February 1895.
“Thereafter, the company was not concerned with the fate of the 223 survivors sent home,” Bennet remarked.
The return trip home for the men was a sorry affair
“After embarking 223 Japs at Suva the survivors of an original shipment of 305, 82 having died in the islands, the Afghan set out for Japan,” a Japanese newspaper reported.
26 more of the men would die on board the vessel while at sea.
“Two died while being conveyed to the steamer on the small steam launch and almost every day saw one death, sometimes two, during the voyage,” the newspaper report continued.
The departure of the Afghan from Suva marked the end of the saddest chapters in the history of labour market in Fiji and the Pacific.
