Spanish Influenza in the Siberian Intervention

Spanish Influenza in the Siberian Intervention Sumiko Otsubo Associate Professor of History Metropolitan State University 700 E. 7th St., St. Paul, MN, U.S.A. Phone 651-793-1477 sumiko.otsubo@metrostate.edu In the spring of 1918 when the Great War was about to close, the Spanish Influenza was said to have broken out in the U.S., where it killed an estimated 600,000 people. Yet unlike this spring epidemic, the fall wave that succeeded it, first appearing in August, was highly lethal and quickly swept through many parts of the world. By spring 1920, it had killed about 40,000,000 people, four times as many as the war itself did. It is estimated that as many as 450,000 individuals fell victim to this disease in Japan. It was also in August 1918 that Japan began sending over 70,000 troops to Siberia from Japan proper and also from its base in Manchuria as part of the Allied effort to support White Russians against the Bolshevik revolution. Although the fatal fall wave of the Spanish Influenza coincided with this mass mobilization by the Japanese Imperial Army, little is known about its role in the spread of the flu pandemic in eastern Eurasia. Examining a geographically transnational document—a medical history of the Siberian Intervention compiled by the Japanese army—this paper analyzes the pandemic transmission in northeastern Asia when and where national boundaries were unstable and therefore systematic national and local records and vital statistics were scarcely taken. This study challenges the notion that the Spanish flu in the Asian continent was largely an affair of its eastern ports and cities because limited population mobility kept the interior unaffected by the pandemic.