The Secret Still

Kozo Ohishi, 46, went home to Pippu (pop. 8,600) in northern Japan last week, celebrating with proud sobriety the end of a 25-year binge during which he "never touched a drop."

Ohishi, only 19 when he suffered internal injuries in a traffic accident, seemed to have made a full recovery after surgeons patched up his torn stomach and intestines. But by 1934, when he was working as the village well digger, Ohishi found that he felt flushed and giddy, and his head got heavy ("like a sake hangover") soon after he ate bread or potatoes. Friends twitted him for secret drinking. In China, during World War II Army medics rated him "perfectly fit." So officers continued to abuse him for drunkenness, while enlisted buddies searched in vain for his source of booze.

Back home after war's end, Ohishi tried to avoid starches, but with a wife and four growing children he could not always afford the more expensive meat and vegetables. Even his family sadly wrote him off as a sly, solitary drinker. Six doctors in a row refused to believe him or to treat him. The site of Ohishi's secret still might have remained a secret still if he had not gone to Hokkaido University Hospital in Sapporo.

There, doctors humored the patient by trying the test diets he suggested. They had to admit that Ohishi was right: starches were bad for him, and bread was the worst. Dr. Tsuneo Takada, 30, took samples of Ohishi's digestive juices. In them microbiologists found a flourishing growth of a yeastlike fungus, Candida (or Monilia) albicans, occasional cause of human infections, but usually in the mouth or the vagina. In a normal gut, Candida may occur without causing fermentation. But in Ohishi's repaired bowel there was a little pocket where the Candida hid, multiplied, and busily fermented carbohydrates to form alcohol.

Dr. Takada kept Ohishi in the hospital for a month on trichomycin, a homegrown Japanese antibiotic. Satisfied that Candida had been knocked out, he fed Ohishi test meals of starchy foods. Ohishi stayed stone sober, hopes that his built-in moonshine plant will remain shut down.

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