August 2025 Best Buys

Weight-Loss Gains

GLP-1 Crossroads, Technology As Transportation, And Cutting-Edge Tobacco

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The Dragon Twist struck Tokyo two minutes before noon.

About an hour later, eighth-grader Masao witnessed a decapitation via sheet metal.

It was September 1, 1923 – a warm first day of school after summer vacation. Still in holiday mode, 14-year-old Masao and a friend chose to skip lunch and head to Asakuso, Tokyo’s entertainment district, to catch a matinee movie.

They knew something was wrong when theatergoers started falling out of the balcony.

It wasn’t unusual to feel slight tremors in this part of Japan – Tokyo and the neighboring port city of Yokohama were built on the convergence of four tectonic plates. But today, at precisely 11:58 a.m., a violent earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale rocked the city’s foundations – with convulsions felt as far as Spain and California.

As the ground bucked beneath Tokyo and Yokohama, countless stoves and rice cookers – red-hot from lunch prep – tipped over and set wood dwellings alight. At the same time, a freak typhoon blew in from the Sea of Japan coast and fanned the flames. Enter the Dragon Twist: a tornado-style whirl of fire that bloomed from the middle of Tokyo and carried two-thirds of the city’s buildings away on hot wings of ash. 

For young Masao, the next few hours were the stuff of nightmares.

As he and his friend struggled across the city, trying to outrun the spreading fires, they kept tripping over people who’d been trampled to death. Eventually, the boys reached a central refuge location – the hihukusho, an Army clothing depot in the Kanto district – and breathed a sigh of relief.

That’s when the piece of iron sheeting whizzed through the air.

Years later, Masao still remembered the sound it made as it sliced off his buddy’s head. Traumatized by his friend’s death and injured by debris, he fled the clothing depot just in time – the fire tornado stormed through the center of the city, incinerating 33,000 refugees on the spot.

The deaths at the hihukusho were only a fraction of the fallout from the Great Kanto Earthquake and the subsequent Dragon Twist. Japan’s worst natural disaster in history left over 100,000 dead and half of Tokyo’s population homeless. 

The worst hit, though, was to infrastructure. Some 60% of Tokyo’s buildings – and 80% of Yokohama’s – were leveled, wiping away government administration facilities, police stations, factories, banks, and schools… not to mention roads, bridges, water pipes, and telegraph lines. (For a few days, the soldiers attempting to maintain order communicated via carrier pigeon.) 

Most concerning of all – for a city with around 25,000 injured people – was the fact that 160 hospitals in Tokyo alone were destroyed – along with most of the city’s medicine and surgical supplies. The Emergency Earthquake Relief Bureau – hastily organized by the government – struggled to set up mobile clinics and field hospitals.

Masao – who, unlike his friend, lived to tell his story to historian Osamu Hiroi – recalled that once he’d limped across town to an emergency relief shelter at an elementary school, there just wasn’t any relief. The army medics – one or two for 3,000 sufferers – “did nothing because there was nothing.” 

Eventually, the medics sent Masao away without offering him any burn care, telling him he should go stay with a relative. (Thankfully, he had an uncle whose home hadn’t been destroyed).

It took a good decade for Japan to rebuild after that dreadful September day – with a heavy assist from international organizations like the American Red Cross – and districts like Honjo would never be the same. Buddhist sages pointed to Tokyo’s decadence and cruelty, and preached that the Dragon Twist had provided a painful, but much-needed course correction. 

But for one young entrepreneur named Juzo Ueno, the Dragon Twist brought surprising good fortune…

Just 30 when the Great Kanto Earthquake hit, Ueno watched the fallout in horror, and was especially concerned by the way his city’s medical infrastructure collapsed. He decided he’d launch a medical import/export company that partnered with European suppliers to attract reliable, high-quality pharmaceuticals. Eventually, he planned to export drugs too, when Japan’s pharma industry recovered.

In March 1925 – less than two years after the dragon stormed over Tokyo – Ueno launched his small medical import-export business, with one German pharma partner (Stuttgart-based Gehe & Co.), just seven employees, and a Japanese name that meant, literally, “In and Out.”

The “Out” part – exports – didn’t kick in until the 1930s, when Ueno and his lab team figured out how to make a revolutionary tuberculosis treatment. Soon, the little company was exporting Salsobrocanon worldwide – and, by 2001, had grown to be Japan’s 10th-largest drug company. It sold a controlling interest to Swiss pharma company Roche.

Today, Ueno’s company has developed a drug that we believe will revolutionize the industry – and it has licensed the drug to a big pharma company, which we are making one of our latest Best Buys.

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