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Baron extra=30 October 1849 – 12 April 1920 was a Japanese naval physician. He is known for his work on preventing the vitamin deficiency disease beriberi among sailors in the Japanese navy, who had been living mainly on white rice.
In 1883 Takaki learned of a high incidence of beriberi among cadets on a training mission from Japan to Hawaii, via New Zealand and South America that lasted for 9 months. On board, 169 men out of 376 developed the disease and 25 died. Takaki made a petition to Emperor Meiji to fund an experiment with an improved diet for the seamen that included more barley, meat, milk, bread and vegetables. He succeeded, and in 1884, another mission took the same route, but this time only sixteen beriberi cases among 333 seamen were reported. This experiment convinced the Imperial Japanese Navy that poor diet was the prime factor in beriberi, and the disease was soon eliminated from the fleet.
Takaki's success occurred ten years before Christiaan Eijkman, working in Jakarta, advanced his theory that beriberi was caused by a nutritional deficiency, with his later identification of vitamin B1 earning Eijkman the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Although Takaki clearly established that the cause was due to issues, this conflicted with the prevailing idea among medical scientists that beriberi was an infectious disease. The Imperial Japanese Army, which was dominated by Mori Ōgai and other doctors from Tokyo Imperial University, persisted in their belief that beriberi was an infectious disease, and refused to implement a remedy for decades. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, over 200,000 soldiers suffered from beriberi – 27,000 fatally, compared to 47,000 deaths from combat.
In 1905, Takaki was ennobled with the title of danshaku (baron) under the kazoku peerage system for his contribution of eliminating beriberi from the Imperial Japanese Navy, and also awarded the Order of the Rising Sun (first class). He was later affectionately nicknamed "Barley Baron".
Takaki founded the Sei-I-Kwai medical society in January 1881. In May, 1881, he founded the Sei-I-Kwai Koshujo (Sei-I-Kwai Medical Training School), now the Jikei University School of Medicine. Takaki's school was the first private medical college in Japan, and was the first in Japan to have students autopsy.
Takaki was posthumously honored by having a peninsula in Antarctica at named "Takaki Promontory" in his honor. It is the only peninsula in Antarctica named after a Japanese person.
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