Arrest Of Health Food Guru Gives Bitter Taste To Magic Elixir

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday June 24, 1994

Ben Hills

WHILE the media besieged Tokyo's Parliament building this week in a frenzy over the fate of the Government, a far more personal problem distracted many of Japan's legislators - the future of their diet, rather than control of the Diet.

The arrest of Kazu Tateishi, health food guru to the stars, has cast a pall over the miracle brew containing boiled radish tops that has been promoted with amazing success as a cure for everything from cancer to AIDS and athlete's foot.

As well as a swag of high-profile authors, journalists, TV stars and artists, Tateishi's magic soup has won converts right to the top in Japanese politics - the Prime Minister, Mr Tsutomu Hata, no less, who swears by the stuff and drinks a bowl every day.

Tateishi, the son of a farmer from the cormorant-fishing town of Gifu in central Japan, rocketed to national fame last March when he published a book called Ganso Yasai Supu Kenko Ho, which translates literally as The Original Vegetable Soup Health Law.

The book gives detailed instructions on how to make the elixir - the main ingredients being unpeeled daikon (giant Japanese radish), with its leaves, carrots, dried shiitake mushrooms and gobo (burdock root), which are minced up and boiled in water for an hour.

The book's cover proclaims "Cancer cells gone in three days |" and, inside, Tateishi says the mixture is not only effective against cancer but cures a variety of other ailments including senile dementia, rheumatism and acne.

But what sent the book shooting to the top of the best-seller list - it has sold no fewer than 185,000 copies - was the plug on the dust jacket that"Michio Watanabe also recovered - a great recommendation".

Mr Watanabe is one of Japan's most enduring and colourful conservative politicians. At 70, he was forced to step down as Foreign Minister last year to undergo an operation for gall bladder cancer - but, to everyone's surprise, he has bounced back with amazing vigour, even offering himself as Prime Minister to solve the current political crisis.

When Mr Watanabe confirmed in a TV interview that he drank a bowl of the vegetable broth each day - a bottled one made by a company in Tohoku - and acclaimed it as the cause of his recovery, Tateishi became an overnight celebrity and people rushed by the tens of thousands to brew, and buy, his broth, especially scores of Mr Watanabe's fellow members of the Diet(Parliament) worried about their health.

Dozens of copycat books flooded the market, manufacturers rushed radish-leaf soup in a bewildering array of bottles and cans to the supermarket shelves. Hundreds of press articles and TV programs were devoted to Tateishi's miracle broth.

The list of converts reads like a Who's Who of Japan's rich and famous. Ichitaka Kubota, one of the country's greatest dye craftsmen, began drinking six glasses of the soup every day. "I'm 77 years old and that's the reason I never have to see a doctor," he said.

The actress Tetsuko Kuroyanagi endorsed it, as did Takehiko Maeda, a well-known TV presenter. The journalist Daizo Kusayanagi claimed he knew people who had been cured of Alzheimer's disease. A film cameraman said it had cured the athlete's foot he had suffered since his schooldays.

Riding on the avalanche of publicity, Tateishi began holding seminars across the country at which he would lecture, sell books, videos and recipes and examine people, for a fee of up to $240 a consultation. The diagnosis -surprise, surprise - always called for copious amounts of Tateishi's soup.

It all came to tears last week when police pounced on Tateishi and arrested him on charges of practising medicine and selling a registered drug without a licence - not the soup, but an extract of laxative senna pods.

It emerged that, although Tateishi uses the title "doctor", he made his living until recently as a taxi driver and his only "medical qualifications"appeared to consist of a spell as an assistant nurse in a hospital mortuary.

As well as the not inconsiderable proceeds of his book, police estimate Tateishi had conned more than 10,000 people into bogus consultations and pocketed some $1.3 million. He is being held in a cell at Gifu detention centre for 23 days' questioning - and he is not, police said, allowed his radish-leaf soup.

Red-faced TV stars, journalists and politicians were keeping low profiles this week in the wake of these revelations - although some, such as Mr Hata and Mr Watanabe, said they intended to keep on drinking the magic broth in spite of the arrest of their guru.