In previous Discover Nikkei columns, I have told the story of Aijiro and Nao Tashiro and their five remarkable children. In these next installments, I wish to explore the career of Aijiro’s younger brother Shiro Tashiro, a brilliant biochemist, and his three children.
Shirosuke Tashiro was born on February 12, 1882 in Satsumasendai, Kagoshima, Japan. (He was thus still a young boy when Aijiro, 16 years his senior, left Japan). As Shiro later described it, his family was marginalized in his native village due to his father’s nonconformist ideas. “My own poor father, dreaming, impractical, introvert, and something of a philosopher,” he explained, was the only atheist in the vicinity.
After attending the Chu Fu Academy in Yokohama, the young Shiro was given $100 to get to the United States, and immigrated in 1901. Once in the United States, he settled in Chicago, where Aijiro was living. According to one story, he was swindled out of his savings, then began work in a Japanese novelties store on the South Side. After a time, he took out a want ad in the Chicago Tribune. On the basis of the ad, he found work in a boarding house, and supplemented his income by taking a newspaper delivery route for the Tribune on the side.
Shiro Tashiro attended Hyde Park High School for two years, graduating in 1906. After completing high school, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, then a rather new institution. During his undergraduate years, though he stood barely 5 feet tall, Tashiro starred as an athlete. Tashiro was recruited for the track team, competed for the university’s wrestling squad, and translated a Japanese song into a football anthem. (He would retain his athleticism in later years, and according to one source played a daily game of handball into his 60s).
Tashiro also excelled academically. He was named president of the University Cosmopolitan Club, formed in 1910, and in his senior year became the first-ever ethnic Japanese to be named Phi Beta Kappa. He received a B.S. in physiological Chemistry from University of Chicago in 1909 and a Ph.D. magna cum laude in the same subject three years later. His dissertation was entitled, “Carbon dioxide production from nerve fibres when resting and when stimulated.”
Following his graduation, Tashiro joined the staff of the University of Chicago, physiological chemistry department, during 1913–1914 as an associate, in 1914–1918 an instructor, and in 1918 an assistant professor. According to one source, he also taught at Rush Medical College. During this period, he worked part of the time at the Rockefeller Institute, where he became close with the renowned medical researcher Dr. Hideyo Noguchi.
In 1915, working on behalf of the Carnegie Institute, Tashiro visited Hawaii to study the relation between sea water and coral reefs. At Waikiki, he did experiments on the connection between human blood and salt water. In the course of his stay in Hawaii, he met Shizuka Kawasaki, the the elder daughter of K. Kawasaki, a local physician. The two were married in 1915.
In these years, Tashiro pursued his research on carbon dioxide production and made his great discovery, which would transform the field of physiology. He found that, in addition to carrying an electrical charge, nerves undergo a chemical change when nerve fibers are stimulated, producing infinitesimal amounts of carbon dioxide. Tashiro concluded that living tissue, when injured, put out a greater amount of carbon dioxide than normal tissue, even as dead tissue produced no carbon dioxide—if tissue samples emitted carbon dioxide, it proved that they were still alive.
In conjunction with H. N. McCoy, Tashiro devised an apparatus called the Tashiro biometer that could detect carbon dioxide in quantities as small as one ten-millionth of a gram. The biometer used drops of barium hydroxide solution, onto which carbon dioxide would precipitate in quantities detectible under a microscope. In the 1917 book Chemical Sign of Life, Tashiro explained how to build and use the biometer. Using laypeople’s terms, he spoke at length about the importance of its work for detecting life:
“The increment of carbon dioxide produced by living things when they are irritated or stimulated in any way is a sure measure of the amount of life they have; and we may hope that it is to be an indirect measure of the amount of psychism they possess, although, of course, we cannot be sure of this as yet…Anaesthetized or sick things do not show the normal increase; those abounding in life show a remarkable increase.”
Tashiro’s discoveries brought him international fame. An anonymous reviewer of his book in the New York Times placed Tashiro’s experiments at a level with those of the 18th Century scientist Galvani as a means for determining the presence of life.
In 1917, following United States entry into World War I, Tashiro agreed to undertake research for a government agency. He was asked to investigate, with aid from his biometer, the effect of saccharine on cellular activity, and whether it changed the metabolic rates of those who consumed it.
In 1919, Tashiro was appointed to the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine as associate professor of biochemistry. He also was named assistant director of the Biochemistry Service at Cincinnati General Hospital.
Soon after, he returned to Japan to attend medical school. In July 1923, he received his MD degree from Kyoto University, with a dissertation on the metabolism of nerve fibres. For his work, he received an Osaka Mainichi Prize, and the Crown Prince Memorial Prize from the Imperial Academy of Japan.
In 1925, following his return to the United States, he became a full professor at Cincinnati in 1925. In the following years, he was admitted as a member of many chemical and biological societies in the United States, France, and in the United Kingdom. With his colleague N. C. Foot, Tashiro translated an important treatise by Rinya Kawamura on tsutsugamushi disease (i.e. scrub typhus). Together with another colleague, L.H. Schmidt, Tashiro pursued studies over the next years on bile salts, hoping to discover a potential role for the salts in formation of gastric ulcers. He also experimented on the use of phospholipids in ulcer treatment.
He published in a wide variety of journals, including American Journal of Physiology, Biological Bulletin, and Internationale Zeitschrift für physikalisch-chemische Biologie. In addition to his purely scientific studies, in 1930 Tashiro put together an unpublished handwritten volume that he called “Defence of Fancy.” It was made up of remembrances of his youth and school experiences in Japan in the 1890s and early 1900s, as well as folk tales of the Japanese. Tashiro defended many Japanese folk customs and superstitions as based in good science. He seems to have drawn material for several lectures from the volume. He seems to have offered it to his friend Dr. John Uri Lloyd, in whose papers the book remained.
Beginning in the 1920s, Tashiro served as a sponsor for multiple family members who enrolled at University of Cincinnati. In 1928, with his support, his brother-in-law Leonard Kawasaki enrolled at the medical school at the University, and served as an intern at Christ Hospital. He lived at the Tashiro house during his studies. In the next years, Shiro Tashiro helped nephews Aiji and Saburo Tashiro to enroll at the University. Meanwhile, following the death of his mother’s Nao Tashiro, Arthur Tashiro, the youngest of Shiro’s nephews, moved into his uncle’s house and lived there for a period. Shiro also housed his niece Tae Tashiro when she came to Cincinnati from Japan to study for a Masters Degree in child care and training.
In addition to his support for family members, Shiro Tashiro became known as a Japanese community leader and advocate of good relations between Japan and the United States. In 1927, he led a tour group of students and academics to Japan. In an interview, he stated, “The attitude of students in the American collegiate circles is exceedingly democratic and wholesome, and the question of respect for the professors depends not so much upon the race or nationality as upon the character, personality, and ability of the individual.”
In 1932, he addressed a local club on “What the Japanese Youth Faces Today.” In 1936, in partnership with Hazime Hoshi, a wealthy pharmacist in the state of Washington, he arranged a gift of 5,000 flowering Japanese cherry trees to Cincinnati, to be planted in local parks.
To be continued ...
© 2024 Greg Robinson
