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Fifteen years ago today, two men died at the Fujita Health University Hospital in Aichi Prefecture: Kōtetsuyama Kōnoshin and Hashimoto Seiichirō. I had expected to see their deaths being revisited in the press this year, considering what’s been happening in the sumō world. (Mark Schilling contributed a good piece to the Wall Street Journal in February covering all that.) But given the events of March 11 and the aftermath of the disaster it isn’t too surprising that sports are taking a back seat.

Kōtetsuyama, a former rikishi who wrestled under a number of names from 1957 to 1975 (see his Japanese Wikipedia entry for the details), took the name Ōnaruto when he became a sumō elder and stable master. Hashimoto, another former wrestler (Wikipedia), had served as an officer in kōenkai (“support groups,” or fund-raising fan clubs) for the yokozuna Kitanofuji and for the Ōnaruto-beya led by Kōtetsuyama. As vice chair of the Kitanofuji club, Hashimoto was allegedly involved in raising money to pay for the bout-fixing that helped the wrestler attain the sport’s highest rank—one tidbit that eventually went into Kōtetsuyama’s tell-all book, Yaochō: Sumō Kyōkai ittō ryōdan (Bout-rigging: The Sumō Association’s drastic solution).

Since February 1996, the two men had also been writing a series of articles for Shūkan Posuto under their real names, exposing the organized crime connections, match-rigging, drug use, prostitution, and other sordidness in the sumō world. Kōtetsuyama was scheduled to give a prepublication press conference on April 26, where he would talk about the similar content of his forthcoming book. He died 12 days earlier, though, in the early morning hours of April 14. Doctors at the hospital gave the cause of death as acute, severe pneumonia and heart failure.

An unfortunate death with unfortunate timing. But it became scandalous when Hashimoto died in the same hospital that evening, of what doctors described as the same causes. The article “Sumo Wrestling in Grip of Corruption,” published a month or so after their deaths, gives a good overview.

Three days before his death, the 53-year-old former wrestler told Tokyo’s Weekly Post magazine that he had received threatening phone calls from men identifying themselves as members of a large crime syndicate.

He also claimed that a senior JSA executive had told his gangster friends to “stop Onaruto”, and said he was afraid of being poisoned.

None of this prevented the book from going to press, and it sold well. Not well enough to force any sort of police investigation of the men’s deaths, sadly. In April 2010 the government abolished the statute of limitations for murder cases, so theoretically these deaths could be looked into once again, but that isn’t likely without some media pressure—and today, like I said above, the media has bigger stories to report than 15-year-old sumō scandal. But I thought Kōtetsuyama and Hashimoto deserved at least a mention on this day.