r/todayilearned • u/fan_tas_tic • 21h ago
TIL that Japan's first astronaut, Toyohiro Akiyama, hated his time in space because he suffered from severe space sickness and chain-smoked four packs a day on Earth. His fellow cosmonauts later reported, in regards to his nausea, that they "hadn't ever seen a man vomit that much."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyohiro_Akiyama•
u/FLG_CFC 21h ago
Sounds like a typical nicotine withdraw. They suck. Space is the last place I'd want to be going through that.
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u/Square-Singer 20h ago
According to the Wikipedia article he did over a year of space training.
Did it really occur to nobody during all that time that maybe they should cut off his nicotine supply during the training so that it didn't have to happen in space?
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u/thissexypoptart 20h ago
Also nicotine patches, gum, hell, even pills, were all available at this time. Why would no one in the planning of the mission not anticipate he’d need some?
I mean better not send someone who needs that in the first place, but if you are sending him, at least don’t have him vomiting constantly.
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u/Square-Singer 20h ago
I doubt the planning efficiency of Japan's space agency.
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u/Fart_Leviathan 16h ago
The Japanese space agency had little to do with it, his employers paid the Soviets to take him in, they did the training and planning.
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u/jld2k6 20h ago
With the way they've planned things in the past they may have forgotten to plan anything past the "getting there" portion
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u/Skruestik 20h ago edited 18h ago
It says in the article that he quit smoking cigarettes while training for his space flight, so presumably not right before.
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u/h3yw00d 20h ago
It *says* he quit during training but... do we know the conditions he was trained under?
evidence kinda points to the contrary of him quitting and its not unheard of for someone to lie about quitting.
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u/KlammFromTheCastle 20h ago
Yeah dude was probably smoking cigs like crazy everytime he got a moment alone, Obama-style.
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u/KidKickingRobot7 20h ago
There has to be something missing from this story but I'm too fucking lazy to find out.
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u/WhyDoBugsExist 20h ago
It appears nicotine patches werent available until 1992, and his space journey was in 1990. But, there nicotine gum or alternatives around 1990, but those sucked in efficacy for a smoker.
https://themaplesrehab.com/what-year-was-the-smoking-cessation-patch-released.html
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u/Available_Base_7944 20h ago
Back when I was trying to quit I would have liked to go into outer space just so I know I can’t buy any and I have to just get it over with
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u/718822 20h ago
Vomiting is not typical of nicotine withdrawal
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u/BillyDreCyrus 20h ago
Neither is space travel.
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u/dogsledonice 19h ago
The withdrawal might have made him a bit queasy, the constant floating is what caused the vomiting
It's one of the first things they screen for when testing potential astronauts. Source: The Right Stuff
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u/iRebelD 21h ago
They couldn’t send homie up with some zyns or what?
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u/FLG_CFC 20h ago
Let him chew nicotine gum for the whole mission at least. Something. It's a little on him for not prepping and a little on them for not realizing the dude they were training was smoking 4 packs a day.
I feel bad for him honestly because being in space would be so cool, and the entire experience was ruined for him and made worse for everyone else.
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u/karlnite 19h ago
No, space just makes some people violently ill the entire time they are up there. Most people only go once, and because of how hard the conditions are on them. Mostly you can’t tell someone will have issues til they are up there. Some people get over issues in training, are fine, some have no issues in training, then puke none stop up there. They still have to work, so you are working 16 hour days while sick for weeks/months. It’s the best and worst experience for some.
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u/avbbva 20h ago
Akiyama is a pretty unusual case. He wasn't a career astronaut at all, but a 48-year-old TBS journalist and former Washington bureau chief. TBS essentially bought a seat on a Soviet Soyuz as a commercial project and held an internal selection among its employees. Akiyama passed the medical screening and then spent about a year training at Star City, so apparently even his legendary four-packs-a-day smoking habit hadn't done enough damage yet to disqualify him.
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u/Pristine_Speech4719 19h ago
they "hadn't ever seen a man vomit that much."
They've obviously never been to Cardiff City Centre in the early hours of Saturday morning
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u/azad_ninja 21h ago
Aren’t astronauts supposed to be physically in peak condition? How’d Japan choose a chain smoker?
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u/SkriVanTek 20h ago
he wasn’t really an astronaut
he was a journalist with an art degree without any prior experience relating to space or flight in general
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u/Real-Werner-Herzog 20h ago
Sending journalists to space? I draw the line at oil drillers.
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u/Soul0103 20h ago
What in the Project Hail Mary is this
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u/Additional_Meeting_2 20h ago
There are plenty of people who are spend to space who are like this.
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u/Jiveturtle 19h ago
Right, for example Jeff Bezos has been to space. Seems likely Elon Musk will probably go soon.
Letting them come back is the mistake part of it.
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u/0thethethe0 20h ago edited 19h ago
I was bored and looking through some recent astronauts' resumes yesterday.
Things have definitely changed!
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u/weguccino 21h ago
He was in peak condition WHEN he was able to smoke 4 packs a day. Obviously they didn't take into account that he couldn't smoke in space lol.
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u/rclonecopymove 20h ago
Nick Naylor: Cigarettes in space?
Jeff Megall: It's the final frontier, Nick.
Nick Naylor: But wouldn't they blow up in an all oxygen environment?
Jeff Megall: Probably. But it's an easy fix. One line of dialogue. 'Thank God we invented the... you know, whatever device.'
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u/Mbembez 20h ago
This movie has such great dialogue but it's scary because I can see these people really saying that kind of stuff.
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u/TheyCallMeHammer 20h ago
What movie?
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u/edrec 20h ago
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u/BLAZEtms 20h ago
Remarkably good film, I think it’s due for another rewatch, thank you for reminding me of it o7
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u/MMachine17 19h ago
I'm planning on using a different quote from this film in a college essay. The one where Jay asks Nick about the strength of Am's gov:t and Nick's response.
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u/FlannelBeard 19h ago
The endless appeals system....
Wait Joey, you're not really writing that are you?
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u/Wise-Requirement2331 19h ago
So strange seeing “Elon Musk” pop up in those credits.
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u/Background-Fly-8374 20h ago
I believe it's from the movie "Thank you for smoking." It's a fantastic dark comedy with great dialogue. "You know that guy who can pick up any girl? I'm him, on crack."
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u/LexHanley 20h ago
"There he goes. He passed all the tests so despite the smoking I'm glad we chose him."
"Wouldn't this means he's going to go through withdrawl in space? Isn't that kind of counter productive to research?"
"... We may have overlooked something."
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u/TetraThiaFulvalene 20h ago
Him being frustrated and going out the hatch to smoke would have been the perfect anime moment.
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u/bubblesculptor 19h ago
I think he literally tried to do something like that, attempting or threatening to open a hatch. Not to smoke but more like a psychotic break. They ended up changing some procedures afterwards to place more safeguards to protect from out-of-control astronaut sabotage.
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u/thalefteye 20h ago
Wait so was the guy having withdrawals in space 😂, damn that must have been hell for him.
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u/basquehomme 20h ago
Yea maybe the chronic space sickness was caused by nicotine withdrawal?
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u/alucardou 20h ago
Not to be too judgemental, but how is a dude that smokes 4 packs a day in anything close to peak condition? Was every other Japanese candidate a raging dug addict?
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u/Argnir 20h ago
It was a media stunt from a TV station who bought a place inside of a Russian mission. He stopped smoking 4 months before during his training.
I guess part of the appeal was also showing what space is actually like for a "normal" person and not a super elite astronaut.
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u/dogsledonice 19h ago
The answer: Nauseating. Being in zero-gravity can be nauseating for the regular joe
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u/wheelienonstop12 20h ago edited 16h ago
Astronauts obviously need to be 100% healthy but they dont need to be in top athletic condition. IIRC very high levels of physical fitness have actually turned out to be detrimental to adapting to space life for some medical reason. Not to mention the mental side - somebody who enjoys, and is used to, the amount of physical activity and exercise you need for the fitness levels of a real athlete would likely go stir crazy in a space station.
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u/WasianActual 20h ago
Smoking is pretty popular and was A LOT more popular back then. It is very likely no other astronauts didn’t smoke and definitely didn’t pass the quals he did
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u/Mr_MacGrubber 20h ago
There’s smoking and there’s 4 packs a day snoking. I’m just going to say he sleeps 8hrs per day. That means 16 waking hours= 960min / 80 cigarettes = new cigarette every 12 minutes. I’m betting he used a lot of “last cigarette” to light “next cigarette”.
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u/TheDoktorIsIn 20h ago
Yeah lots of people smoked back then, almost my entire family did, but nobody smoked more than a pack a day. 4 is insane.
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u/FesteringNeonDistrac 19h ago
People that smoke like that don't sleep 8 hrs. They wake up several times a night to smoke.
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u/tsammons 20h ago
Outlived most Redditors to the ripe age of 84
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u/SteelMarch 21h ago
It was the 90s. Good luck finding a man who didnt smoke in Asia.
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u/jarvi123 20h ago
Hahaha yeah he was probably the candidate that smoked the least.
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u/antagron1 20h ago
“It says here you smoke 4 packs per day.”
“Yes sir, is that going to be a problem?”
(Whispers to the other examiner) “every other candidate smokes 8!”
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u/loulan 19h ago
Man, in the 90s I knew several people who smoked two packs a day, but four packs a day is just nuts. It's 80 cigarettes a day. If each takes 3 minutes, you spend four hours a day smoking.
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u/Another-Mans-Rubarb 18h ago
That's easy when you can smoke at your desk at work and in restaurants.
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u/CurrencyDesperate286 20h ago
Well unless they had any female candidates. The historical taboo around women smoking in Asian societies leads to some pretty crazy stats in Asia. For an extreme example, somewhere around 70% of men smoke in Indonesia…. Women - 2%.
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u/jarvi123 20h ago
A female candidate in 1990 Japan? You're dreaming. I believe those stats, many Asian societies are massively sexist towards women still. Japanese me will berate Japanese women if they have tattoos or smoke like they are corrupting society as if the age of consent wasnt 13 until 3 years ago.
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u/LOTDT 20h ago
A female candidate in 1990 Japan? You're dreaming.
If you bothered to read anything besides the title, you would know that they did, in fact, have a female candidate.
TBS wanted to send the first Japanese person to space in order to boost their TV ratings.[10] 163 TBS employees applied for the opportunity to fly to space. Eventually, Akiyama and camerawoman Ryoko Kikuchi were selected as the two final candidates. When Kikuchi developed a case of appendicitis a week before launch, Akiyama was selected for cosmonaut training and he was the primary crew member, with no backup in place.
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u/CurrencyDesperate286 20h ago
I was going to add “… but of course Japan would not have put forward a woman” but forgot to.
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u/equeim 20h ago
USSR didn't have another female cosmonaut either until 80s. Tereshkova was a political move, she only flew once and was discarded.
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u/TheFrenchSavage 20h ago
Yeah but 4 packs a day? Dude should have a special suit with a nicotine atmosphere.
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u/PinkOneHasBeenChosen 20h ago
That reminds me of SciShow’s ulcerative colitis video. “This doctor noticed many of his UC patients didn’t smoke, which was weird, because it was the 80s.” Something to that effect.
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u/jarvi123 20h ago
They weren't really astronauts, they were chosen from the employee pool at TBS Corporation. It was basically a publicity stunt for TBS to celebrate their 40th anniversary. Toyohiro was the backup and was called apon to replace another person that came down with appendicitis. It's basically the 1990 equivalent of Blue origin sending Katy Perry to space.
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u/mostly_helpful 20h ago
Imagine being chosen to go to space and then your appendix calls it quits. God damn.
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u/Interrogatingthecat 20h ago
Better than "Imagine going to space and whilst you're up there, your appendix calls it quits"
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u/jarvi123 20h ago
Didn't that happen to a Soviet doctor in the Artic? He had to perform surgery on himself and ended up making a full recovery I think.
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u/rumade 20h ago
Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov in April 1961. Apparently it's referred to as an "auto-appendectomy", which makes it sound like it's done by a machine at the press of a button, rather than by yourself looking in a mirror and trying not to pass out.
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u/Sharlinator 20h ago
"Auto-" just means "self-". An automobile is self-moving. Autofellatio is, well, you get the idea.
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u/BangkokRios 20h ago
It was the 1990 equivalent of Christa McAuliffe. Akiyama orbited the earth 125+ times over 8 days. He did the work.
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u/Nubeel 20h ago
The more important question is why they never figured out how to smoke in outer space and inside space suits and vehicles etc.
Back then they were going to extraordinary lengths to accommodate smokers anywhere and everywhere.
And I’d imagine that inventing space cigarettes would have been endgame levels of marketing for a tobacco company.
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u/Gauntlets28 20h ago
Unfortunately for him, they seem to have sent a journalist into space, rather than an astronaut as such.
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u/plaguedbullets 20h ago
From documentaries I've seen it was cheaper this way, the cost of training astronauts in journalism was too high
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u/kippetjeh 20h ago
Yeah you might be right but I think that docu was about miners/drillers in space.
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u/__louis__ 21h ago
He was a journalist, not an astronaut. The title is fake.
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u/Spez_is-a-nazi 20h ago
Did he also smuggle potato chips on board?
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u/Xyyzx 20h ago edited 19h ago
I mean it’s not ‘fake’, it’s just a definition of ‘Astronaut’ meaning ‘anybody who has been to space’, instead of applying it only to people specifically trained for that to be their job.
In the days where it was almost entirely professionals with very occasional guest passengers, I think it was pretty widely accepted that ‘Astronaut/Cosmonaut’ applied to everyone up there regardless of the reason.
It’s just that recently the entire human race came together in one shining moment of global unity, where we collectively and definitely decided that Katy Perry should not be allowed to put ‘Astronaut’ on her Wikipedia page under her listed occupations.
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u/DoomDoomGir 21h ago
Four packs a day is insane
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u/dispo030 21h ago
as a smoker myself, the thought of having to finish even two packs is sickening.
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u/Crescentine 20h ago
And these were 90s Asian cigarettes with probably 0 filters. Ive smoked 2 packs a day before and my throat would be destroyed the next day.
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u/DamntheTrains 20h ago
Japanese smokes are pretty weak from what I remember
people who wanted harder stufff asked for Malboros and stuff from people who lived in hte US
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u/Jeb_Babushka 18h ago
Some of the seven stars are heavy actually.
I regularly get a dizzy kick from it when I smoke after dinner or first one after breakfast whenever I'm in Japan.
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u/Illiteratevegetable 20h ago
I am a heavy smoker. But damn, my record was 3 packs and I was feeling my lungs. That's too much. And he lived to be 84...
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u/aphex978 20h ago
80 cigarettes / 16 waking hours is a smoke every 12 mins. Non stop from wake to sleep. Damn.
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u/Nostromeow 19h ago edited 17h ago
I consider myself a pretty heavy smoker (like 10 a day, maybe more if I go out to a bar or something) and 4 packs is INSANE. Like this guy smoked 8 TIMES more than I do, wtf.
I don’t even understand how it’s physically possible in the long term, he must have been out of breath 24/7. I went on a quite intense hike in the mountains this summer, and I could definitely feel the 15 years of smoking lol. My lung capacity is not what it used to be. This guy must have been gasping for air just getting out of bed !
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u/Smkingbowls 18h ago
I just picture this dude (he’s a journalist not a real astronaut) probably just sitting at his desk, typing, with the cig hanging from his lip. He probably had an ashtray that had as many 1/2 smoked cigs as fully smoked cigs.
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u/angelicism 20h ago
Yeah I'm struggling to process that.
A cigarette takes me about 5 minutes. 4x20x5=400. That's the better part of 7 hours a day smoking. He spent roughly as much of his waking hours smoking as not.
When I have very stressful days I might get up to a pack and a half and I will definitely feel sick the next day.
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u/Smkingbowls 18h ago
Back then he was probably smoking at his desk at work (he was a journalist not a real astronaut) I bet the whole office was shrouded in smoke
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u/Few-Hair-5382 21h ago
How did a four pack a day chain smoker get picked as his country's first astronaut? I thought these people (astronauts, not the Japanese) were supposed to be the peak of physical fitness?
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u/BoxOfJunimos 21h ago
Akiyama was a journalist, not a career astronaut. His network spent millions of dollars for a position on the space program in order to celebrate their 40th anniversary
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u/Time_Traveling_Idiot 20h ago
This explains a lot. The man was NOT a professionally trained astronaut. He was basically a rando picked for TV purposes (Japan amirite?). However - He IS the first person of Japanese nationality to fly in space, so there's that.
Mamoru Mohri later became the first officially trained Japanese national space program astronaut to fly into space, traveling on a NASA Space Shuttle mission 2 years later in 1992.
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u/RoastedRhino 20h ago
It’s kind of weird that a country did not put some more respect into who is their first citizen to go to space.
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u/MeiNeedsMoreBuffs 20h ago
A lot of people didn't like him because he wasn't a real astronaut. His entire spaceflight was a corporate marketing gimmick that briefly caused a short spike in viewership, but people quickly lost interest and ratings went back to normal so quickly that he was still in space when this happened.
Looking at his wikipedia history, he was kind of a weird dude. He was promoted to Deputy Director of his network but quit because he "disagreed with the commercialization of television". He left his wife to go farm mushrooms in the mountains, and later became a Professor of Agriculture, where he lectured for twelve years. He also died less than two weeks ago, which is probably where OP learned about this.
Mamoru Mohri, their first real astronaut, is viewed much more positively and is a national hero
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u/Creeps05 20h ago
The country didn’t really do it. It was a sponsored flight by a private japanese company.
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u/thiagoqf 20h ago
Wasn't better to assign a military to act like a journalist than a journalist to act like a military?
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u/Thin_Object_3981 20h ago
During that time period, the Soviet Union was opening up to the world and they allowed other countries to pay to send people up into space. This was quite appealing because a lot of countries still hadn't sent a person to space yet. For some countries, this was just a publicity stunt so they didn't really care about the qualifications for astronauts and chose candidates for political or commercial reasons.
Japan, the UK, Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Kazakhstan sent their first people to space like this via the Soviet union. Japan sent a journalist, the UK sent a chcolate chemist, Austria sent an electrical engineer and the others sensibly sent military pilots.
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u/MethodofMadness2342 20h ago
Doctors did not care about smoking in the past. All of the astronauts on the moon landing were smokers. So hardly "peak physical fitness". Smoking was just something you did nobody considered anything else.
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u/fan_tas_tic 20h ago
I love that even his facial expression in this photo cannot hide his feelings.
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u/sakhabeg 21h ago
Brilliant idea to send chain smokers into space.
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u/MethodofMadness2342 20h ago
All of the moon landing people were smokers too. They really weren't "peak physical fitness"
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u/TrailMomKat 15h ago
There's also Jake Garn, the guy that had space sickness so fucking badly that they literally named the scale for space sickness after him. The Garn Scale.
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u/Mindfultameprism 20h ago
Not to dull the narrative with what might be facts but he had to stop smoking one year before going into space. Because it was a commercial flight, sponsored by TBS, he didn't undergo official astronaut training. Viewership waned after a pretty short time and TBS lost around 7 million, all according to Wikipedia. Lol
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u/WolverineNicest 20h ago
putting a 4 pack a day chain smoker in a spinning metal tube with zero nicotine is basicly an hr violation. dude wasnt even space sick, he was just raw dogging the most violent nicotine withdrawal in human history while floating in a tin can. those poor russian cosmonauts definitely wanted to eject him out the airlock by day two
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u/Walking_Distraction 20h ago
Space sickness? Man was just going through nicotine withdrawl while in zero G
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u/chibibunker 20h ago edited 20h ago
I watched a video talking about this not long ago, apparently boat/flying sickness (whatever the name is in english) is different from space sickness and it's very hard to predict if someone is going to be sick or not. I would imagine they have ways to test that today but maybe not at the time of Toyohiro
From what i understand, while flying in a plane your eyes think you are fine but your guts feel the movement
When you are in 0G your eyes can see that you are moving/floating but your guts don't feel it. Your brain does not understand, the only explanation for him is that you might have been poisoned and activates the mega vomitator to purge everything
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u/Sir_Fridge 19h ago
Oh it's like vr sickness then? For me that does get better the more I play
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u/echochambered69 17h ago
Why tf did they send a chain smoker up to space? Surely there were other much better candidates?
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u/ImTooSaxy 18h ago
Four packs of cigarettes a day?
I looked it up. He just died in August. He was 84.
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u/KorovasId 17h ago
There's a bit about this in some show but yeah, asian counties consume nicotine at an insane rate and somehow live into their 80s and far beyond. The joke was that an American diet/lifestyle will kill you way faster than smoking, or something like that.
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u/Kruger-Dunning 16h ago
Guy had an interesting life after space--led his news station then quit over commercialization of media. Then left his wife and kids in Tokyo and became a well-known organic/ethical farming influencer/farmer, focusing on rice and mushrooms. Then the Fukushima disaster destroyed his farm and he became an agriculture professor at a university in Kyoto.
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u/MeddlingMike 10h ago
Surprising that a guy smoking 4 packs a day was considered a good candidate to go to space. As I understand it physical fitness is an important criteria.
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u/Chronotaru 10h ago
I was expecting his stay in space to be much earlier because of this, but no, 1990 with Mir. Very bizarre.
Apparently a commercial sponsored flight, that might go some way to explaining it.
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u/0thethethe0 19h ago
I guess he was really good at origami
it actually starts out with the selection process that Japanese astronauts go through, and some of the methods they use are unique to say the least. First, there’s the paper-crane test. During a week-long continuous observation session, candidates have to fold a thousand origami cranes. These cranes are then analyzed by a team of psychologists to see how the person deals with boring, repetitive tasks and time constraints. The psychologists check whether the folds get less precise at the end of the task, and see how they compare with the first ones.
https://www.meanwhile-in-japan.com/how-japan-selects-astronauts/
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u/Ballistic_86 18h ago
I don’t understand how someone so dependent on nicotine could be approved as an astronaut.
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u/Macrihanishautomatic 20h ago
Apparently the other candidate had appendicitis a week before launch and had to withdraw from the program. Imagine if the appendicitis had started when they were up in space.
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u/Meta2048 20h ago
For everyone too lazy to read the article: guy was a TV news reporter and he was sent up by his station as a sort of publicity stunt to boost ratings. They paid a lot of money send him up.
Not an astronaut in the typical sense, more like one of the first space tourists.