Inada has reported that the Japanese know how to get 
virus-like, quite invisible particles or spirochete-fragments 
from special cultures of spirochetes of infectious jaundice. 
The Japanese say that such infinitesimals can be used to 
infect animals and men, by spraying droplets containing 

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Japan's Secret Weapon 


these spirochete-creating bits into the air, or spreading them 
through water, or scattering them in mud or damp soil. 
This reported technic of starting epidemics has not been 
tried outside Japan— so far as non-Japanese scientists are 
aware. 

“Isn’t this group of spirochetes restricted to Japan?’’ you 
may ask. 

“Slime fever struck down many of Napoleon’s troops 
during his Egyptian campaign. Except for a peculiarly viru- 
lent strain originating apparently in Japan only, the spiro- 
chetes of slime fever and related diseases are distributed all 
over the world, in West Africa, the Congo, along the North 
African coast, in Holland, the Balkans, Russia. In World 
War I, slime fever broke out on the Western Front, in the 
muddy trenches of Flanders and Italy. Recently infections 
have been showing up throughout Europe. Just before 
World War II, the spirochetes became active enough in 
Hawaii and the United States to attract the attention of 
the public health authorities. In 1941, the Journal of the 
American Medical Association ran an article on Lepto- 
spirosis: A Public Health Hazard. Leptospirosis is the 
name given to any infection caused by a member of the 
spirochete group that includes the spirals of slime fever, 
nanukayami, and akiyama, not to mention several other 
apparently related spirochetes known only to the Japanese.’’ 
“Do you suppose that the Japanese have had anything to 
do with these sudden new outbreaks of slime fever?’’ 

“Why should they bother to spread it? It has been spread- 
ing without Japanese aid, just like the Japanese beetle. It 

55 



Spirochete Warfare 

may be theorized that American experts are just waking up 
to the menace, which must have been here all along, al- 
though nobody really knows. Of course, you could accuse 
the Japanese. And you could come very near convicting 
them on circumstantial evidence. Immediately before the 
Japanese invasion of China, Indo-China, the Dutch East 
Indies, and the Malay States, and shortly before the Japa- 
nese invasion of India and the Japanese strokes at Australia, 
the very first outbreaks of slime fever were reported from 
every one of these areas. The cases in Calcutta were of the 
peculiar Japanese type, to judge from the high mortality 
— 60 per cent. So were the cases in Hawaii in 1939. In 1938, 
a sudden epizootic with a high mortality killed many dogs 
in California. Sixty-seven were autopsied and slime fever 
spirochetes were found in most of them. A veterinarian was 
accidentally infected by the so-called California dog strain 
of slime fever spirochetes and he developed the typical 
symptoms of Japanese infectious jaundice, but he survived. 
But only a very few additional cases have occurred in Cali- 
fornia, although the spirochetes are already at large uni- 
versally among rats, mice, ground squirrels, and wild ro- 
dents of all kinds. The worst that is expected, however, is 
for a case or two to pop up every now and then, just as in 
the instance of bubonic plague, whose bacilli were intro- 
duced accidentally into California from the Orient years 
ago and are now prevalent in wild rodents in a number of 
western states. A strikingly similar accident has not caused 
very many deaths. The plague-like bacilli of tularemia, or 
rabbit fever, somehow got in accidentally from Japan, and 

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Japan’s Secret Weapon 

were first discovered in Tulare County, California. Since 
then the germs have infected rabbits and other wild animals 
in every state in the nation, and hundreds of human cases 
have occurred. There is no need to worry because nothing 
can be done about it. The germs get around like the Japa- 
nese beetles.