Episodes of Masao Ota (2)
Tohoku Imperial University Period
The more than ten years Masao Ota spent in Sendai appear to have been a period of calm fulfillment for him, both as a physician and as a man of culture. He later wrote, “When I lived in Sendai, I had much leisure and often sketched the plants and trees in my garden.”
Yet in a reminiscence at his sixtieth birthday celebration he remarked:
“Next I went to Sendai, where the competition was intense, and I studied quite hard.
When I was leaving Sendai, students asked why I was going to Tokyo.
I answered that it would be more convenient for study, but unfortunately I accomplished nothing there…”
This was clearly an expression of modesty. In fact, as already noted, he produced a great number of achievements during this period.
Tohoku at that time was home to many cultural figures such as Jiro Abe, Toyotaka Komiya, and Kikuo Kojima, and Ota also interacted with the German architect Bruno Taut.
During his years in Manchuria Ota had moved away from the clinical practice and research of Hansen’s disease, but he resumed both in Sendai. Although he did not publish a formal dermatology textbook, there remained a mimeographed lecture volume titled Dermatologie (333 pages). It had originally been compiled by students from his lectures, but Ota repeatedly corrected and annotated it extensively in red ink during the proofreading process. He is said to have remarked:
“There were so many errors in the manuscript that it would have been far easier to write the whole thing myself.”
In 1937, the same year he moved to the University of Tokyo, he published “Dermatoses Caused by Animal Parasites.”
Professor Akira Takahashi of the University of Tokyo’s Department of Urology praised the book in a memorial issue for Mokutaro Kinoshita:
“This work, Dermatoses Caused by Animal Parasites, was written with extraordinary effort by Dr. Ota.
From protozoa such as spirochetes to arthropods such as insects, he systematically describes a vast variety of organisms that directly or indirectly produce skin symptoms in humans.
It is an invaluable and unparalleled book.
Such a monumental work could only have been accomplished by Dr. Ota.”
Entries in Mokutaro’s diary reveal that he spent days from morning until midnight searching the literature on parasitic organisms for this book. Even when urged by the publisher Kinkōdō to hasten publication, he replied, “Even if I had a thousand hands, it could not be done so easily.” He pursued the historical and etymological origins of terms thoroughly, tracing them back to Greek and Latin.
Of the book’s 368 pages, no fewer than 77 pages are devoted to references alone.
A copy of the work remains at Kumamoto University. After reading it, Professor Tomomichi Ono wrote:
“Just seeing the list of references is enough to intimidate the reader. One cannot imagine how many sources he must have consulted in order to write such a historical account.”
“Even today, anyone writing a paper on dermatoses caused by animal parasites must first read this classic. I wish to tell young dermatologists that it remains an indispensable work.”
Research on Nevus of Ota, which later flourished in Tokyo, had already begun to germinate during his Sendai years.
Tokyo Imperial University Period
In 1937 Ota left the fulfilling life he had built in Sendai and assumed the professorship at Tokyo Imperial University. He was deeply devoted to his students and even organized gatherings dedicated to Mori Ōgai. Many students strongly urged him not to leave Sendai.
His decision to move to Tokyo was made for the advancement of scholarship and research. Yet surprisingly, the beginning of his life there was filled with expressions of hardship and regret. In his diary four months after arriving in Tokyo, he wrote words filled with remorse about the move.
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Financial hardship. He had moved alone to Tokyo, leaving his family in Sendai. His salary was insufficient to maintain two households. He had to see referred patients he disliked, yet the fees were minimal, while expenses such as retirement contributions arrived one after another.
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A transitional department. The department seemed to function independently of him. He was merely involved in outpatient care, ward work, and lectures.
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Instability among staff. Members of the department were leaving for new positions, each pursuing unrelated doctoral projects. His own research on leprosy had effectively come to a halt.
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Limited financial resources. The department’s income of 120,000 yen per year was mostly absorbed by the university administration. The remainder barely covered departmental operations and research funds for staff. There was no money to purchase books, hire illustrators, or even buy a Leica camera; he often had to finance research himself.
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Cultural life was harder in Tokyo. Paradoxically, it was more difficult to devote spare time to literature and the arts than it had been in Sendai.
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Shared leadership. Unlike Sendai, the department was not entirely under his control; dermatology and urology shared the same department and there were two professors.
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Personal life lacked enjoyment.
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Separation from urology. Unlike in Sendai, he now lived in a completely separate world from physicians in other fields.
Gradually, however, he regained stability in Tokyo. But the footsteps of war were already approaching. Its influence soon affected both intellectual discourse and the work of the department. Supplies grew scarce, and members of the department were sent to the battlefield.
Even under these circumstances, Ota presented four major academic reports and steadily accumulated scholarly achievements.
Hansen’s Disease and Ota’s Convictions
Hansen’s disease was a field to which Ota devoted particular energy. Although he had once moved away from the topic during his time in Manchuria and France, he revived his research in Sendai.
A particularly notable event was his attendance at the First International Leprosy Congress in Manila in 1930. The League of Nations committee member Mataro Nagayo had originally been invited, but because of illness Ota attended as Japan’s representative.
At this conference, and during his subsequent visit to the Culion leprosy colony in the Philippines, Ota became convinced that the correct approach was not absolute isolation but “isolation combined with outpatient treatment.”
Japan’s national policy, however, clearly moved toward absolute segregation.
After becoming professor at Tokyo Imperial University, Ota devoted himself even more passionately to leprosy research. He commuted regularly to the Institute of Infectious Diseases, attempting to cultivate Mycobacterium leprae and also conducting outpatient treatment.
The central figure in Japan’s leprosy policy was Kensuke Mitsuda, who worked extensively on the disease. Later, Fujio Otani, a former Ministry of Health official who participated in the movement to abolish the Leprosy Prevention Law, wrote:
“Almost everything in Japan’s leprosy program, for better or worse, depended on the assertions and actions of Kensuke Mitsuda. His life was truly that of a giant. Yet today the consequences of decades of patient suffering compel us to reconsider both his merits and faults.”
Although Ota was not in a position to openly oppose national policy, he consistently remained critical of absolute segregation. He firmly stated that since leprosy was a bacterial infectious disease, the rational treatment must be chemical therapy. For this reason he devoted himself to attempts to cultivate the bacillus through animal inoculation.
Even during wartime he continued commuting to the Institute of Infectious Diseases between air raids, persisting in his efforts to culture the leprosy bacillus. Unfortunately, these attempts ultimately failed.
This was understandable: in 2001 the full genome of Mycobacterium leprae was decoded, revealing numerous pseudogenes and relatively few functional genes. The organism can proliferate only in special environments such as macrophages in living hosts or the footpads of nude mice.
Nevertheless, Ota’s conceptual direction proved correct. Shortly after the war, the therapeutic effectiveness of Prominbecame clear.
Ota, however, did not live to see these results.
He passed away on October 15, 1945.
Ota and the War
Ironically, Ota assumed his professorship in Tokyo in the very year the Second Sino-Japanese War began. Economic conditions gradually worsened, supplies became scarce, speech was increasingly controlled, and students were sent to the battlefield.
Despite these circumstances, Ota produced remarkable scholarly work and left behind a mimeographed dermatology textbook.
His diaries reveal how he experienced this era and how he felt about the war.
At a departmental gathering shortly after the outbreak of the Pacific War, he said:
“Until now I had complained privately that the army and navy were doing whatever they pleased, but since December 8 I have stopped saying so. I feel grateful to have been born into such an unprecedented age…”
At first glance this sounds like approval of the war, but as a government professor he could hardly express open opposition. He lectured at the Army Medical School and participated in army penicillin research groups.
Yet as the war progressed, his diaries increasingly contained critical remarks about the military.
He wrote passages such as:
“Anyone can see that allowing the imperial capital to suffer such devastation proves that the military’s calculations were poor and the preparations for war were bungled.”
“The military ruled by force. Once that force weakens or is known to be weak, criticism inevitably arises.”
“It has become clear that beyond brute force they possessed no superiority in wisdom, morality, science, or technology.”
“They proclaimed that life was lighter than a feather and killed human beings like dogs or locusts. Treating life so lightly hindered not only defense but also the development of offensive weapons.”
Even amid air raids he continued to lecture students. In an air-raid shelter he told them:
“Are you studying?”
“Precisely because of these times, you must study. If one hears the truth in the morning, it is acceptable to die in the evening.”
“You must distinguish knowledge from wisdom. Knowledge can increase endlessly. But accumulating knowledge alone only makes one a monster of knowledge. That will not do. To benefit humanity we must possess wisdom. And to learn wisdom, one must read the classics. They contain the wisdom of humankind.”
After saying this, Mokutaro reportedly stood up and left like a gust of wind.
One of the students who attended Ota’s lectures during this time was Shuichi Kato, who later wrote:
“When the surrender was announced on August 15, 1945, many people wept. It is said that Masao Ota, lying on his sickbed with a fatal illness, clapped his hands with joy. He understood what war meant. I feel there was nothing that ought to have been known that he did not know.”
Final Days
Amid the ruins after the war, on October 15, Ota’s turbulent sixty-one-year life came to an end. The cause was gastric cancer.
According to Tonoibukuro, he passed away surrounded by many of his disciples. Yet in the extreme hardship of the postwar period, there were not even flowers to place before his spirit.
Does Masao Ota, resting beneath the earth, know that today he is highly regarded not only in Japan but internationally as both a dermatologist and a man of culture? His legacy has not faded.
Ota once wrote of Mori Ōgai:
“Mori Ōgai is like the great city of Thebes with its hundred gates. Enter by the eastern gate and one cannot exhaust the western gate; each scholar glimpses one or two gates and leaves the other ninety-eight unseen.”
Takashi Okamoto later observed that these words could just as easily apply to Mokutaro Kinoshita himself. Poet Sanshi Ueda once lamented:
“Even Mori Ōgai is beyond our full grasp—and Mokutaro Kinoshita is equally beyond the reach of our research and criticism.”
The writer Utaro Noda, who revered him as a lifelong mentor, closely accompanied Ota in the years before his death while working as an editor. After Ota’s passing he searched for materials and devoted himself to completing the Collected Works of Mokutaro Kinoshita. It is largely thanks to Noda’s efforts that Mokutaro’s legacy has not been forgotten.
From the essays of Kenichi Ueno and Tomomichi Ono, I have excerpted only the parts related to medical history. I have deliberately omitted the aspects of Mokutaro Kinoshita as a cultural figure. In the next installment I will extract those portions.
English version prepared with AI assistance
(Originally published in Japanese on Janually 23,,2018)
Japanese version:
https://hifuka-otibohiroi.net/太田正雄のエピソード2/