April 2, 2012
TOKYO, JAPAN
Saburo Arashida, the chairman of Kyodo Tokyo, passed away of kidney disease at the age of seventy-nine on March 19. Arashida once positively participated in the boxing world and actually materialized many WBC title bouts in 1970’s, but gradually retired from the boxing business. Kyodo Tokyo has been a leading entertainment enterprise in Japan, having booked Beatles, Michael Jackson, Madonna, etc. May his soul rest in peace.
Ex-OPBF middleweight champ and ex-world challenger Naotaka Hozumi, already retired at 37, was shamefully arrested by the Metropolitan police last week for threatening his acquaintance to plunder him of 300,000 Yen (some $3,600). It was the fifth arrest for him since the police first caught him for alleged violence in 1998. He became the second Japanese boxer that had an ambitious crack at the world middleweight championship only to lose to William Joppy via tenth-round TKO in 2002. The talented bad boy was arrested for interference with a policeman in executing his duty in 2008, and then was indefinitely banned by Japan Boxing Commission (JBC). In Japan we have neither wife-beating boxers nor drug addicts in the boxing fraternity, so Hozumi is a very rare case to cause such a social crime.
Formerly two-class world champ Vic Darchinyan, from Australia, loudly said last Friday, “I don’t come here to challenger the WBC bantam champ Shinsuke Yamanaka, but it’s Yamanaka that challenges me. I’m more experienced, more hard-hitting and faster.” At the public workout at the Teiken gym, Darchinyan’s big mouth fully entertained our press people despite showing his shadowboxing just a round. We don’t predict who the winner will be, but Darchinyan obviously won the verbal contest in the first session. They will actually square off on this coming Friday.