Japan’s police chief has vowed to smash the murky links between sumo and yakuza organized crime after a widening scandal over illegal gambling led to the arrest of a former wrestler.
The biggest scandal to tarnish Japan’s ancient national sport in years has led big-name sponsors to pull out millions and put in doubt whether national broadcaster NHK will show the summer tournament next month.
Governing body the Japan Sumo Association has said 29 unnamed wrestlers had admitted to illegal gambling, although media reported that 36 others also had bet on cards, baseball, golf and other pursuits.
PHOTO: AFP
As investigators seek to untangle the links between the big boys of sumo and the bad boys of the Japanese mafia, police on Thursday arrested a former wrestler, Mitsutomo Furuichi, 38, on extortion charges.
Furuichi, who reportedly told police that he is a former gangster, allegedly demanded hush money from a sumo wrestler who had been involved in widespread gambling on baseball matches and other sports.
“He is suspected of blackmailing the victim ... and received ¥3.5 million [US$39,000] in cash,” a police spokesman said.
Media reported the victim of the extortion attempt was wrestler Kotomitsuki — ranked second only to the yokozuna, or grand champion.
“We have to clean yakuza crime links out of the sumo world,” National Police Agency chief Takaharu Ando said after the latest news to tarnish the sport that has been at the heart of Japanese culture for 2,000 years.
Those links became apparent last month when sumo officials were disciplined after it emerged that they had given ring-side seats at a sumo tournament to top bosses of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s largest crime group.
Because NHK broadcasts of tournaments are shown in Japan’s prisons, the ring-side seats allowed crime bosses to send a silent message of support to their members doing time behind bars, commentators said.
The sumo association censured those who made the tickets available to the gangsters — but the case highlighted connections between two of Japan’s most macho and mystery-shrouded institutions.
Sumo, based on ancient Shinto rituals, puts its wrestlers through punishing workouts and an austere and strictly hierarchical lifestyle in the isolation of their “sumo stables.”
Once populated by tough country boys, and increasingly by foreign-born wrestlers, it is a world of 3am roll calls and grueling workouts where only the toughest fighters last to reach the top.
About 90 percent of stables have allowed beatings of trainees and punishments such as forcing salt or sand into their mouths, the sumo association has said.
Many Japanese were shocked by the 2007 case of a stable master who ordered the “hazing” of a 17-year-old wrestler who died after being beaten with a beer bottle and a baseball bat. The stable master was jailed.
While sumo is a tough and cloistered world of male athletes, the true bad boys of Japan have long been the yakuza, whose heavily tattooed gangsters have spawned numerous movies, manga comics and fanzines.
The yakuza, who trace their roots to samurai gone astray during the 17th-century Edo period, traditionally relied on gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking and protection rackets as their bread and butter.
In recent decades they have turned to money laundering, deposit fraud, cybercrime and extorting huge sums from blue-chip companies by threatening to show up at their shareholder meetings.
They have operated relatively openly, entertaining close ties with politicians, and police have tolerated their existence as long as they have stayed on their turf and kept down street crime.
Amazingly for outsiders, yakuza groups themselves are not illegal and openly operate from large corporate headquarters.
Japanese organized crime counts about 82,600 members, according to the National Police Agency — nearly half of them with the Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, dubbed the “Wal-Mart of crime syndicates.”
North Korea’s FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup-winning team on Saturday received a heroes’ welcome back in the capital, Pyongyang, with hundreds of people on the streets to celebrate their success. They had defeated Spain on penalties after a 1-1 draw in the U17 World Cup final in the Dominican Republic on Nov. 3. It was the second global title in two months for secretive North Korea — largely closed off to the outside world; they also lifted the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup in September. Officials and players’ families gathered at Pyongyang International Airport to wave flowers and North Korea flags as the
Taiwan’s top table tennis player Lin Yun-ju made his debut in the US professional table tennis scene by taking on a new role as a team’s co-owner. On Wednesday, Major League Table Tennis (MLTT), founded in September last year, announced on its official Web site that Lin had become part of the ownership group of the Princeton Revolution, one of the league’s eight teams. MLTT chief executive officer Flint Lane described Lin’s investment as “another great milestone for table tennis in America,” saying that the league’s “commitment to growth and innovation is drawing attention from the best in the sport, and we’re
Coco Gauff of the US on Friday defeated top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka 7-6 (7/4), 6-3 to set up a showdown with Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen in the final of the WTA Finals, while in the doubles, Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching was eliminated. Gauff generated six break points to Belarusian Sabalenka’s four and built on early momentum in the opening set’s tiebreak that she carried through to the second set. She is the youngest player at 20 to make the final at the WTA Finals since Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki in 2010. Zheng earlier defeated Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejcikova of the Czech Republic 6-3, 7-5 to book
For King Faisal, a 20-year-old winger from Ghana, the invitation to move to Brazil to play soccer “was a dream.” “I believed when I came here, it would help me change the life of my family and many other people,” he said in Sao Paulo. For the past year and a half, he has been playing on the under-20s squad for Sao Paulo FC, one of South America’s most prominent clubs. He and a small number of other Africans are tearing across pitches in a country known as the biggest producer and exporter of soccer stars in the world, from Pele to Neymar. For
RSS