Daily Sports Column (Japanese) Here / トレバーの虎場から
I’m not gonna lie to you, I miss real Christmas. I understand the irony of claiming a singular “real” definer on a holiday that means different things to different people in different countries and of different religions. I’ll even spare you my religious beliefs, and stick to the festive side of the holiday.
Holiday definitions aside, one thing about Christmas that makes me chuckle and cry at the same time is the food. Even to this day, many of my Japanese acquaintances are blown away when I tell them that Kentucky Fried Chicken has NOTHING to do with Christmas, and that *NO ONE* back home eats the Colonel’s secret recipe on December 25. In case you didn’t know, Japan created this link between one big white man (the Colonel) and another (Santa Claus). It’s become so deeply entrenched in modern Japanese culture that there is simply no separating the two.
On the other side of the ocean, there is another improper link between one big white man and another. It is also related to fried chicken, but the other side of the link only has a faint connection to Santa Claus. (Hint: The man to whom it’s connected has been known to wear a red-and-white uniform at a local department store some Decembers.) The connection is much more closely linked to our favorite baseball team, the Hanshin Tigers, but as I said earlier, the connection is a myth, a fable, and has been incorrectly passed down to the next generation.
Some of you might remember the Hanshin Tigers’ 1985 Nippon Ichi season, and how the team’s fans celebrated. That’s right, it’s time to drag out the Curse of the Colonel story. Down by the old Dotombori Canal in downtown Osaka, fans gathered, singing cheer songs and jumping into the murky “water.” Who jumped was determined by which player’s song was sung. If you looked like him, you jumped. The problem was, no one present looked like superstar hitter Randy Bass. Drunken fans found a statue of Colonel Sanders at a nearby KFC, wrestled it from panicking employees, hoisted it above their heads, and threw it in the drink. He sunk, and subsequently, the Tigers stunk.
A Japanese TV show in the late 1980s first hit on the idea that maybe the team had been cursed by this lack of respect for Mr. Harland Sanders. In fact, until his remains were recovered from the river, the team was doomed to lose.
They did keep losing, and the plastic statue remained lost, until 2009. A decade later, the team has still not won the Nippon Series. So are we still cursed???
NO! Here’s the reason I can boldly say so.
Read the true Curse of the Colonel story here
Almost every English report of the curse says that fans threw the statue into the river on November 2, 1985, to celebrate the team’s victory over the Seibu Lions. However, Japanese reports (which are more obscure, believe it or not, than the English ones), give us the truth: he was dunked on October 16, the day the team clinched its first pennant in 21 years.
Aha, so the curse was on the pennant, not on the Nippon Ichi! In that case, it ended in 2003, some six years before he was retrieved from his watery grave. No more Curse of the Colonel! But go ahead, Google it in English… everybody has the facts wrong. In fact, nearly every piece you will find on the internet about the Curse of the Colonel has been written since 2003, and all the videos on YouTube were made after 2009. There’s no excuse for not knowing the truth.
Perpetuate the myth if you want, but I’ll stick to the facts. I mean, you wouldn’t want me perpetuating the fairy tale that Americans eat KFC on Christmas Day, would you?
No chickens have been harmed and no curses have been started as a result of this article being written.