Yoshimitsu Matsuzaka

Yoshimitsu Matsuzaka
Height:	7 ft 9.5 in (237.5cm)
Birth:	1920 Japan
Death:	1961 Japan
Verified

Yoshimitsu Matsuzaka (1920-1961) was a Japanese man who was the tallest man ever in Japan to have been verified. No color photos exist of him; even though he died in the 1960s.

Biography

When Yoshimitsu Matsuzaka was born in 1920, his parents gave thanks to the gods for sending them a son. Yoshimitsu was a big boy, and his proud parents watched him grow. They worried only a little at first when the boy complained of occasional headaches.

But Yoshimitsu grew, and grew, and grew. Soon, his parents' pride turned to alarm, and Yoshimitsu became like a clumsy giraffe, and was about as useful. His height shamed him, and from the sixth grade he often stayed away from school because he was so different from the other boys.

The operation

Yoshimitsu was taken to a hospital where doctors diagnosed his trouble as giantism, the abnormal growth of a person's body due to a malfunction of the pituitary gland resulting in a excessive amount of secreted human growth hormone. Dr. Kentaro Shimizu, a neurosurgeon at Tokyo University Hospital, performed a operation on Yoshimitsu in 1958 to remove an excess of eosinophilic cells in the pituitary gland which controls a person's growth. After the operation, his boned hardened and he stopped growing.

Later life

In 1959, he worked as a handyman for the Shiunkai Mental Institution in Yokohama. He had a IQ of 100 and ate not much more than the average Japanese back then. He tired easily, which disqualified him from doing sports. He didn't care about being famous, he wanted to just live a normal life and be a part of society. He died in 1962.

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