About a century ago the Spanish flu pandemic swept the globe just as COVID-19 has done this year. Spanish flu killed nearly 400,000 people in Japan, including more than 30,000 in the Tohoku region.
The Kahoku Shimpo has looked back at how the region coped with the pandemic back then, drawing on its past articles, and was surprised at the striking similarity to what Japan and the world is dealing with now: the economic slump, a collapse in the medical system, school shutdowns and face mask shortages.
In its Dec. 12, 1918 edition, Kahoku Shimpo reported that the virus caused a cluster in the 2nd Division of the Imperial Japanese Army stationed in Sendai, overwhelming a local hospital.
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