After 24 long years, Hanshin Tigers fans can finally heave a sigh of relief with the news that a long lost statue of Colonel Sanders has been reassembled, after it was recovered from Osaka’s Dotonbori River.
The statue has long being linked with a curse that plagued the team since it was first lost to the unwholesome depths of the Dotonburi, and fans around Japan hope it might finally mark a return to form for the team.
According to legend, in 1985, after the Hanshin Tigers famously swept both the Central League championship and the Japan Series, drunken fans celebrated at the Ebisubashi Bridge on the Dotonbori River.
It was said that they started shouting the full roster of the team, and a person resembling the player would jump into the river.
Lacking someone that looked like imported star Randy Bass, they decided to substitute his lookalike with the Colonel Sanders statue from a nearby KFC, perhaps reasoning that they were both non-Japanese.
The Tigers never won a championship after this act of desecration.
The Colonel Sanders statue was recovered in two parts, the top part first, and the legs and hand on the day after; they had wound up 300m down the river from where they were first so ignominiously tossed into the murk.
The city council discovered it whilst cleaning the river in preparation for paving the river banks, a popular civic pastime in Japan.
The Colonel’s two feet and left hand remain trapped in the depths, along with his glasses, but officials have declared that they will not be searching for them (if indeed they had been actively searching for them in the first place).
Tigers manager Akinobu Mayumi was quoted as saying: “The statue should be sent to the Koushien Stadium (the Tigers home stadium), as the myth is famous with the Hanshin Tigers”.
The statue was searched for previously, most famously by local TV program, “Tantei Knight Scoop”, but was not found due to the murky waters.
There is no word from KFC as to their response to the vandalism and belated salvage of their founder’s likeness.
Via Yomiuri and Japan Times.
SPOILER: To Japanese all old foreigners look like The Colonel. Schoolgirls go around whispering “Kentucky, Kentucky” every time an elderly foreigner passes by.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBnwHCz5mnQ
if the tigers win a championship after this then the curse would turly be lifted, hmm
Won’t help They haven’t covered it in chicken blood and raped a virgin, to appease their master.
This was a frontpage story in the Chicago Sun Times which was suggesting that the Cubs(an team who haven’t won a pennant in 55 years and the World Series in 100 years) should try to have it make a visit in Chicago for it to give the team some luck for the upcoming season.
LOL, I don’t get it.
What does KFC has to do with the Hanshin Tigers and baseball? Were they their sponsors back in the day or something?
Short story? Team won championship, fans got drunk. Fans who looked like team members jumped in river from bridge to celebrate.
They didn’t have anyone who looked like the Yank on the team (Randy Bass), so they used the statue (as the restaurant to which the statue belonged was close to the bridge) as a substitute, because they were plastered, and chucked it into the river.
In accordance with the Animistic tradition in Japan, the subsequent losses of the team, were ascribed to the spirit of the statue having been angered by their antics.
It was the Japanese equivalence of the Curse of the Bambino essentially.
See here for more detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_the_Colonel