You’ve probably vaguely heard of the mysterious link between Colonel Harland Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the Hanshin Tigers baseball club. But let me drop two bombs on you: the information you heard was filled with inaccuracies, and the curse is a hoax. Still, the story behind the curse is not without its charm, so here is my attempt to concisely but accurately recount what happened.

First, the background. The Tigers won Central League pennants in 1962 and 1964, but quickly fell into bridesmaid role as the Yomiuri Giants peeled off 9 straight championships in the subsequent years. After that, the team bumbled in mediocrity for another decade or so, until at long last, they had a magical season in 1985. With a few games left, and needing a tie or win against the Yakult Swallows (at Meiji Jingu Stadium) on October 16, the team came from behind, knotted the score at 5 in the ninth, and ultimately recorded three outs in the home half of the tenth inning to ensure themselves first place for the first time in 21 years.

Fans in the Kansai area, hundreds of miles from their heroes, could not control their joy. Gathering outside of the Dotombori Canal, they began to sing out the players’ cheer songs one by one, according to the team’s batting order. For reasons only known to the delirious and inebriated, a fan resembling each player would jump into the sludgy, highly-polluted river upon the completion of his song. Mayumi — jumper. Hirota — jumper. Randy Bass… no doppelganger, no jumper. Luckily, some intoxicated fans had a brilliant idea.

My PechaKucha Night Presentation on the Curse

They stormed a nearby Kentucky Fried Chicken and attempted to abscond the smiling statue of Harland “Colonel” Sanders from outside the shop. (The first Colonel statue, incidentally, was brought back to Japan from Canada in 1971. From then on, the Colonel has stood guard outside of Japanese KFC shops. Recently, though, they have been converting the statues to sitting Sanderses.) Despite the staff’s frenzied attempts to stop the mob, the drunken hooligans got violent with them, kidnapped the Colonel, hoisted him in the air multiple times, sang Bass’ cheer song, and threw the statue into the river.

It sank into the murky waters. And from that time on…

  • Star slugger Masayuki Kakefu got beaned on April 20, 1986, ending a 663-game ironman streak. A month later he returned for 11 days before injuring his shoulder while in the field. He suffered a third injury that August, breaking another bone. He ultimately retired after the 1988 season at the tender age of 33.
  • Ace pitcher Chikafusa Ikeda broke his heel bone while covering first base in May 1986.
  • The team finished the 1987 season with its worst winning percentage ever (.331).
  • Bass was dismissed in the middle of the 1988 season when he failed to return to Japan after an extended time in America, where he was taking care of his ill son.
  • The team lost out on twelve consecutive first-round draft pick lotteries, including Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Hideo Nomo, Hideki Matsui, Sho Nakata and Yusei Kikuchi. (The streak ended in 2012 when manager Yutaka Wada pulled the winning ballot in the Shintaro Fujinami sweepstakes.)
  • The team did not win another pennant until 2003 – an 18-year gap, most of which was spent at or near the bottom of the standings.

Then again, it wasn’t a true curse, because the Sanders incident happened immediately after the team won the CL Pennant. In other words, contrary to most English reports out there, the Nippon Series had not yet been played. If the jinx started when the statue sank, then how could they have won the Nippon Series two weeks later? They have not won it all since 1985, mind you, but did the Colonel hex the team from the bottom of the Dotombori, saying, “You can win the Nippon Series this year, but never again”?

So how did this curse become an urban legend, anyways? This (in my opinion) is the fun part of the story. For the first two seasons after the incident, no one spoke of any curse. It was just baffling that such a strong team could so quickly become so weak. Nothing more.

Well, there was (and still is) a popular late night TV show called Knight Scoop, on which viewers send in questions or requests for the show to solve particular mysteries. On the first request answered by the show (March 1988), they were commissioned to recover the sunken statue of the Colonel. When they tried but failed (four times over the course of a month), the hosts of the show apparently said, “Until the Colonel is rescued and cleansed of the sludge, Hanshin has no hopes of winning a championship.”

And so a legend, a myth, a curse is born. As the years went by and the team continued to embarrass itself, more and more credibility was given to the myth.

But then, with the Colonel still in Davey Jones’ locker, the team won the pennant in 2003. So was the curse on the team winning the pennant, or the championship? If the former, then the curse lasted nearly 18 dreadful years, but ended on September 15, 2003. If the latter, then one could argue that the curse started on October 16, 1985, and ended on November 2, 1985. A grand total of 17 days.

In either case, let’s flash forward to March 10, 2009. During the annual routine cleaning of the Dotombori Canal, at around 4:00 pm, Osaka city workers discovered something. (And this video clearly shows that the infamous incident happened on October 16, not November 2. Check at the 0:57 mark.)

It was the Colonel. First, his upper body, albeit handless, was found around 180 meters from where he first dove into the grime. (Incidentally, Knight Scoop divers had searched up to 150 meters downstream, so they were pretty close!) A proper search for the rest of the statue was scheduled for the next day, and it took just three minutes to find the right hand. A short time later, the lower half of his body was found, and for the first time in 24 years, Colonel Sanders was able to “stand” near the Dotombori Canal.

Relief swept across Tigers Nation, and expectations were that the team would win it all in 2009. They would finish in fourth in the Central, out of the playoffs. With no Japan Series championships yet since 1985, the “curse” continues to this day.

So where is the recovered statue of the Colonel now? Before we get to that, let’s look at its travels over the past decade.

First, it had to be ceremonially cleansed at a shrine in the Kansai area. That was part of the conditional clause in the curse, remember? Then, at incumbent manager Akinobu Mayumi‘s urging, the statue went on public displayed at a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop just outside of Koshien Stadium in March 2010. It remained there for three years, but as the team continued to flounder, it was clear that its presence near the stadium was not helping the team – if anything, it was just a business gimmick.

At that point, KFC had it shipped off to the Tokyo area, where it was kept at company headquarters. There was a period during which guests and staff alike could enjoy seeing the restored statue, which was still without its left hand and glasses. However, eventually, it was put under lock and key, accessible to only a limited number of executives.

Then in 2017, when KFC’s headquarters was moved to Yokohama, the statue was returned to the KFC office in Osaka, where it has become a good luck charm of sorts. For some reason unknown to logical thinkers and myth busters, it took six years before that good luck rubbed off on the team. On November 5, 2023, at long last, Hanshin won its first second Japan Series Championship since the Colonel was tossed in the river.

Facebook Comments