Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

Tuberculosis carried off far more victims than all the other diseases combined. The annual tuberculosis death count had increased steadily from the mid-1930s. The disease claimed 130,763 lives in 1935, 160,398 in 1942. Impressionistic evidence suggests even greater numbers over the next four years. In 1947, when official statistics resumed, 146,241 persons were reported to have died of TB, and it was not until 1951 that total annual deaths dropped below 100,000.31 For every person who died of tuberculosis, several others contracted the disease. Following surrender, the total number of TB cases annually was probably well over a million.32 Like radiation sickness, like physical disability, like being a war orphan or a poor war widow or a “third-country person,” having tuberculosis was a social stigma.