Kitasato Shibasaburo — The Man Who Wouldn't Listen

Doctors and Monks

"Being a doctor or a monk is no work for a grown man with arms and legs."

"All my life my goal has been to serve the nation. I have trained in fighting and studied letters, all the way to today. I have no intention at all of joining the long sleeves now."

When his father suggested the medical school, the young man felt this way, it is said.

The "long sleeves" were people who wore robes with long sleeves and carried no sword. The word meant doctors and monks. Hearing his father, he was at a loss, and he let out a long sigh, they say.

His name was Kitasato Shibasaburo. (Kitasato is his family name.) He was the eldest son of a family of village headmen, who oversaw a group of villages in Oguni, a mountain valley in Higo, today's Kumamoto Prefecture in southern Japan.

Since childhood he hated to lose. Whoever he faced, he showed that nature and held nothing back, a biography says.

From the age of eight, on his mother's idea, he was raised in relatives' homes. At his aunt's house he swept the porch carefully every day, until it shone. Later, after his name became known, the family kept that porch as a treasure, it is said.

He was also sent to Mori in Bungo (today's Oita Prefecture), where his mother's family lived. There he was not allowed to learn martial arts, because he was a child from another han, another lord's domain. He talked back to his uncle, it is said:

"Why learn the fighting skills of a little domain like Mori? When I go back to Kumamoto, there are the fighting skills of a domain of 540,000 koku (a measure of rice)."

He made his uncle angry and went back to his home in Oguni. As soon as he got there, he asked his father to let him study in Kumamoto. When his father agreed, he did not even wait to spend New Year's at home. He left the village at dawn, passed Mount Aso's smoking crater on his left, crossed a mountain pass, and walked fifteen ri (about 60 kilometers, or 37 miles) of mountain road in one day, reaching Kumamoto by evening, they say.

At his school in Kumamoto, too, he cared more about swords than books. He carried his practice gear on his shoulder to the training hall, and his teacher frowned at him. Until late at night he argued about the state of the world with his friends. He planned to become a soldier someday.

But that road was closed to him. When he tried to apply to a military school in Osaka that gathered the domain's best students, his parents and relatives all stopped him. What good is a soldier from an eldest son? Do you want to let the family fields go to ruin?

Even a young man who almost never took anyone's advice saw this time that the odds were against him, and he put his dream of being a soldier away in his heart, they say. The talk of the medical school came after that.

After thinking it over for a long time, he came up with a trick. The new learning of the age had begun with Dutch learning. Entering a medical school did not mean he had to become a doctor. He could learn Dutch and wait patiently for his chance. According to a biography, that was his reasoning when he decided to enroll.

In 1871, Shibasaburo entered the medical school newly opened in Kumamoto. The teacher was a Dutch doctor, Mansvelt.

Mansvelt took a liking to this student. Every evening he invited him to his house and taught him not only Dutch but even geography. Of all the students, Shibasaburo was the only one taught that much, they say.

One day, it is said, the teacher asked:

"Are you really studying to become a doctor?"

Shibasaburo trusted his teacher, so he answered honestly. His parents and relatives were against his plans, so he was only pretending to be a doctor. He had come for the language, and in time he meant to become a soldier or a politician.

Mansvelt answered him, it is said:

"A man's will cannot be bent. But you must not waste even one day. Medicine, too, is by no means a useless subject."

One day, in a lab class on the tissues of the body, Shibasaburo stared at a tiny piece of tissue magnified under the microscope. For some reason, it is said, he felt a strange excitement.

Medicine, too, was worth learning.

It seems this was the first time he felt that way, a biography says. From then on, he threw himself even harder into his studies.

In 1874, Mansvelt's term ended, and he was to leave Kumamoto. As they parted, it is said, the teacher told him:

"Go to Tokyo and enter the university. When you finish the university in Tokyo, come to Europe. When you do, I will gladly help you."

After seeing his teacher off, Shibasaburo decided at once to go to Tokyo.

His family had no money to send for school. His parents told him that, as anyone could see, they could not afford it, so he should study as if he had been given nothing but his own body, they say. His mother was even stricter.

"Until your studies are done, I will think of you as not here. Do not think about the house at all."

In September that year, twenty-one-year-old Shibasaburo arrived in Tokyo.

Now and then, a bundle reached him in Tokyo with clothes his mother had woven by hand, season by season.

Sometimes, inside that bundle, a little pocket money was tucked away.

Not an Order

The dormitory of the Tokyo Medical School was full of rough boys.

They made noise over the rice in the dining hall. They skipped class all together. In the middle of the night they called for hot pot noodles through a window, lowered a basket to take them, and never paid. Their pranks were beyond counting, a biography says. Shibasaburo was counted as one of this "rowdy gang."

Soon he started a student society, the Alliance Society, and became its leader. A man must be good with words, he said, so every Saturday they held a speech meeting and argued about politics, foreign affairs, and the military.

Once, a foreign professor named Schultz printed the main points of his lectures and handed them out, then put the parts he had not yet taught on the exam. Shibasaburo took the lead and made a pledge with his classmates. If anyone was asked about a part not yet taught, nobody would answer.

When the exam began, nobody answered, as promised. Near the end, a few broke the promise.

Schultz saw through the plot and, furious, snapped at them, it is said:

"Except for this one and that one, none of you has any hope of becoming a doctor. You had better leave the university today."

Then he walked out and left the class behind. The students stamped their feet and clapped their hands and jeered, they say.

No hope of becoming a doctor, huh. I never meant to be one in the first place.

The uproar finally settled when the head of the school stepped in.

He ran around for the society more than he studied, yet his grades never fell below the middle of the class. He earned his own school fees, and he even called his younger brother from home and paid for his schooling, too, they say.

In 1883 he graduated from the medical department of Tokyo University. More than 130 classmates had entered with him. Now about twenty were left. Shibasaburo was thirty.

Most of his classmates happily scattered to become heads of local hospitals at a salary of about 200 yen a month. Shibasaburo could not understand how they felt. With only the knowledge and experience from university, could anyone really diagnose and cure every illness? That was his doubt, a biography says.

What he really wanted was to go to Germany. But he had to feed himself, and he had no way to get there.

So he chose the Health Bureau of the Home Ministry, the office in charge of the nation's health. Healing the nation with medicine. This is close to my goal, he thought, and slapped his knee, they say.

Then he heard the terms, and he could not let it go. A newly graduated doctor was, by the rules, a low-ranking hired clerk at 70 yen a month. Goto Shinpei, who was hired away from a hospital director's job the same year, was treated one step higher and got 80 yen.

Shibasaburo made his case to the head of the bureau, Nagayo Sensai, it is said:

"As you know, I am a graduate of the highest school in the land, and my education is not the same as Goto's. I cannot stand below him."

When Nagayo talked sense into him, he answered:

"Then I will follow the rules."

It was not that he was unhappy about the pay, a biography says. He had turned down a hospital director's 200 yen. He only wanted to show from the start that this young man would not be easy to handle.

After that, he and Goto kept glaring at each other in the office. How dare a country doctor with no learning be above me! You're just a kid who waves foreign words around! Each looked down on the other like that, it seems, a biography says.

In 1884, Shibasaburo went along as an attendant for more than three months on a tour of the Tohoku region and Hokkaido by two of his bosses. Both were laymen in medicine and traveled like grand lords, throwing their weight around as officials, they say.

In Akita, Inukai Tsuyoshi, who was writing for an Akita newspaper, visited their inn. He said that a public health lecture was planned, and he asked the two men to speak.

They could not refuse. But they could not talk about health. So they called Shibasaburo, who was waiting in the next room, and half ordered him: please speak in our place tomorrow.

Shibasaburo refused on the spot, it is said:

"I am only an attendant, not a regular official of the Home Ministry. For me to speak in public in place of you two would be overstepping my place."

When the two men were at their wits' end and could only keep begging, he pressed the point:

"So you are not ordering me, you are pleading with me?"

And he agreed, on one condition.

The next day, after the lecture, a banquet was held to thank the speaker. The guest in the seat of honor at the front was Shibasaburo. Inukai and the others treated him warmly, and treated the two bosses, at the lowest seats, as if they were not there at all.

That was the condition Shibasaburo had set.

The office's real pleasure lay elsewhere. At the Health Bureau's laboratory he became an assistant to Ogata Masanori, and in a room with three Zeiss microscopes in a row, he began to learn bacteriology. Escaping the office chores, he had finally entered the life of a scholar.

In 1885, a chance to study in Germany came up. It had nearly been settled for someone else, but a voice said that Kitasato was right there in their own ministry. Officials insisted the budget did not allow it, but the higher-ups overruled them, and two men were sent.

In November that year, Shibasaburo left Yokohama on a French steamship. He had been a poor sailor since birth, and during the forty days at sea, he did nothing but complain about how slow the ship was, they say.

January 1886, Berlin. The day after he arrived, the man who had been told he had no hope of becoming a doctor stood in front of Robert Koch, the leading figure of bacteriology.

Koch later spoke of that day, it is said:

"At that time, I was only surprised that Kitasato spoke such good German."