This story originally appeared in the Japanese newspaper Yukan Fuji in 2016.
I have always thought of former baseball star Kazuhiro Kiyohara as a gangster. To me he looked like a thug. He acted like a thug. I would hear stories from mutual acquaintances about his connections to the underworld.
One story in particular I heard was about a Japanese baseball player, one who had played in MLB, had got in trouble at a S and M club one night. He had gotten carried away with S part of S and M and did so much damage to the girl he had selected for the evening that she wound up in the hospital. The Yamaguchi-Gumi owned the club and were extremely angry about the incident because she had sustained such severe injuries she wouldn’t be able to work anymore. The Y-Gumi demanded ¥200 million from the player as compensation. He didn’t have the money so he turned to Kiyohara for help because he knew Kiyohara had connections to the gang. One thing led to another and Kiyohara wound up loaning the player the money to pay the Y-Gumi.
I don’t know whether that story is true, but I have heard it repeated from reliable sources I have both in the baseball world and in the Japanese underworld.
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