A macabre exhibition

First we had the German doctor who liked to exhibit corpses got up so as to show off their muscles and body structure. Then we had the Mexican museum of mummies. Now we have a Japanese doctor who went in for skinning the corpses of people who had had interesting tattoos and preserving the hides, rather as you might preserve a deer skin or a tiger skin. A doctor I read about in the otherwise (so far) innocuous reference 1, to be given full notice in due course.

The impression given by Bing is that, just like the German doctor, there was no shortage of wannabee donors for the Japanese doctor.

At one point he had thousands of these hides, plus photographs, but most of them were lost towards the end of the second world war. All that is left is a remnant, outsourced in 1942 to an air raid shelter for some reason. Now to be found in the Tokyo University Museum of Pathology.

I don't think I would want to go and see them, even if they were on loan in London, any more than I would want to see the German or Mexican remains. In fact, I am a bit squeamish about this sort of thing altogether, not really liking it when ancient bodies - perhaps rescued from some cave in Egypt or some glacier in the Alps - are put on display. Poke around, if you must, in private. But then a decent - and final - burial. Squeamish in a way that I do not suppose either FIL or my father would have been; they both rather liked to dwell on our innards. At mealtimes too.

References

Reference 1: Sentient: What animals reveal about our senses - Jackie Higgins - 2021.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushi_Masaichi. The Japanese doctor.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunther_von_Hagens. The German doctor.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/holne-two.html. The Mexicans turn up at the end of this post.

Reference 5: https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/about/museums.html. Failed to find any hides.

Reference 6: http://mhm.m.u-tokyo.ac.jp/. Still failed to find any hides, despite the website being translated for me.