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Final book by famous anti-yakuza lawyer will be published; PRIDE rumored to be in book
By Zach Arnold | September 3, 2010
Yesterday, I wrote an article about the curious death of anti-yakuza lawyer Toshiro Igari. Igari, who was a very famous anti-yakuza crime-fighting lawyer and ex-prosecutor, was found dead in Makati City (Manila, Philippines) at the end of August.
In a new article by Yukan Fuji today, Voices of doubt are flying around the ‘suicide’ of Mr. Igari in the Philippines.
The article notes that Igari was recently talking about the need for wearing a bulletproof vest for safety reasons. A friend of Igari’s is quoted as saying that ‘there was no reason found for him to commit suicide.’ According to the police in the Philippines, Igawa fell down on a bed, cut his left wrist with a knife, and that pills were scattered around him. Mr. Igari, who was a frequent traveler, left Japan to go to Manila on 8/11 and was scheduled to come back on 8/22. A friend of his tried to communicate with him and couldn’t reach him, which prompted the friend to contact the Japanese Embassy in the Philippines. Mr. Igari’s body was then discovered by authorities.
Mr. Igari, who was raised in Fukushima, worked his way up as a public prosecutor in the Yokohama District Public Prosecutor’s Office. He soon registered for private practice in 1990. He was very much involved in the social world of lawyers as an anti-yakuza crime fighter (as part of the Japanese Federation of Bar Associations). He gained notoriety by working with police to help fight off yakuza involvement in the scalping of baseball tickets. A couple of months ago when a major Sumo scandal broke out regarding Sumo wrestler Kotomitsuki and his baseball gambling problem, Igari told Sankei Shimbun that the Sumo world’s connections with the yakuza run much deeper than the baseball world’s connections do.
As I noted in yesterday’s article on Mr. Igari’s death, he had just finished writing a new book on investigations and projects related to yakuza cases he was focusing on. The book was set to be published by major publishing house Kodansha, which also happens to publish big-selling magazines like Shukan Gendai (the publication that broke the PRIDE yakuza scandal wide open). In the Yukan Fuji article, someone from Kodansha is quoted as saying that Mr. Igari’s book was scheduled to be published in mid-September and that the book will be published as planned as a ‘posthumous book.’ The source said that Mr. Igari finished writing his book at the end of July before he left to go to Manila.
Yesterday, we noted that a source with knowledge of the book claimed that part of the book would focus on a lawsuit that former MMA power broker Miro Mijatovic was filing against Dream Stage Entertainment. Mr. Igari was heading up a seven-lawyer team on behalf of Mr. Mijatovic to focus on DSE. With Kodansha having a prior history of being the publisher that printed the yakuza scandal stories related to PRIDE, it certainly remains a high possibility that Mr. Igari’s final book will indeed touch upon PRIDE and new details about what exactly happened during the collapse.
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, PRIDE, Zach Arnold | 2 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
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