THE SUBURB OF IKEGAMI is as colourless and nondescript as any in Tokyo, and until one transforming day six weeks ago Miyoko Watai and her foreign friend attracted little attention there. They would certainly have stood out as a couple — she a small, short-haired, smiling Japanese lady of late middle age; he a taciturn, grey-bearded American. But it is years since foreigners in Tokyo have drawn stares, and a city of 30 million people is an easy place to lie low.
She went to work every day at her office. He slept until late in the morning then spent the day reading history books and biographies or shopping for the latest gadgets in the Akihabara electronics district. They had few friends and did little socialising. In the evenings they would go to the cinema or eat out (he loved fatty tuna sushi and Ketel, a famous old German restaurant in the Ginza district). At weekends they would leave Tokyo to visit Japan’s famous onsen — mountain resorts, where volcanically heated spa water bubbles naturally out of the ground.
After a lifetime of conflict and controversy — and 12 years as a fugitive from American justice — Bobby Fischer, the former world chess champion, had found peace in a most unlikely place. “He led a very ordinary life,” says Miyoko. “He liked the food, the hot springs, the latest electronic products. This is a safe country. Nobody bothered him. I think that he was happy here.” Until the afternoon of the July 13, when Miyoko and Bobby’s dully idyllic existence came to an abrupt end.
At Narita airport, as he was embarking on one of his regular trips to the Philippines, Fischer was arrested and detained by Japanese immigration officers. His passport, they informed him, had been revoked by the United States authorities and he was to be deported to his home country, where he faces prosecution and up to ten years in prison.
A small band of lawyers and Fischer fans are fighting a legal battle to prevent his deportation, but their options are narrowing. With the rejection of two separate appeals on Tuesday it was only a last minute application for an injunction that prevented Fischer from being frogmarched on to a plane that very night.
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What might have seemed a routine matter to the Japanese authorities has provoked diverse and polarised reactions. To his supporters it is an outrageous and vindictive violation of one man’s human rights. To most Japanese, among whom chess has no mass following, it is viewed with puzzled indifference. To those around the world who have followed with dismay — and morbid fascination — Fischer’s descent from chess hero to hate-filled conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite, it is something akin to justice.
But no one is in better position to talk about Bobby Fischer than Miyoko Watai, the woman who has announced that she wishes to become his wife. Having previously described herself as simply a close friend, she revealed that the two had been living in a de facto marriage since February 2000. How did the world’s greatest chess player end up in Japan? What is it like to love a man who has called publicly for the execution of “several hundred thousand” Jews and once described women as “weak and stupid”? In the seventh decade of his life, 32 years after his famous Cold War victory over Boris Spassky, who is Bobby Fischer?
Miyoko, 59, is a typical Japanese lady of her generation: politely unassertive, easily embarrassed and deeply uncomfortable discussing personal matters. The decision to speak, she makes clear, has been made solely out of a wish to help Bobby; when their sudden engagement was announced, many people assumed that it was a just another legal ploy, a marriage of convenience intended to help a friend out of a sticky situation.
“I am a pawn, but in chess there is such a thing as pawn promotion, where a pawn can become a queen,” she joked uneasily. “He is my king and I want to become his queen so we can join together and win.” But two things become clear as she speaks — first, that she genuinely loves Bobby Fischer, and second, that their relationship goes back decades.
They met in 1973, the year after his titanic confrontation with Boris Spassky, one of the defining moments of the Cold War. The poorly educated, unpredictable and abrasive American overcame the suave Russian; overnight chess was transformed from the pastime of asthmatic nerds to a game of conquerors. As a young and promising chess player Miyoko was invited to meet Fischer when he visited Tokyo and acted as his guide. The following year she spent 10 days with him in New York en route to a tournament.
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The 1970s and 1980s were years of turmoil for Fischer, who virtually gave up international level competitive chess, was embroiled with a religious cult, and became convinced that he was being tracked by communist assassins. His romance with Miyoko, she says, began in earnest after 1992, another pivotal date in Fischer’s life and the root of his present troubles.
That year he and Spassky played a return match in the former Yugoslavia. As a result of the civil war Americans were barred by presidential order from indulging in “economic activity” in Yugoslavia. Yet with its winner’s purse of $3.3 million, the Fischer-Spassky rematch was nothing if not lucrative. Presented with a “cease-and-desist” letter by the US government, Fischer publicly spat upon it; and after his victory over Spassky he remained in Eastern Europe, settling in Hungary. It was during this period, she says, that Bobby and Miyoko became lovers.
He moved to Japan in 2000. Without a formal visa he used the 90-day stamp automatically given to US tourists; when the time was up he would fly out, and then return for another three months. “He wanted to get married,” Miyoko says. “But I valued my independence and I wanted to stay as I was. Now that he is in detention we decided to make it legal, to preserve the life we have had together until now.”
What has Bobby Fischer been doing with himself in Japan? Miyoko is too discreet to discuss his financial affairs but one can only assume that the prize from the 1992 match has been well invested. “He loves electrical goods, and the new IC (integrated circuit) products, like tape recorders,” she says. “There’s no other country in the world where you can get all the new models. He gives the old versions to me.” The Japan Chess Association, which Miyoko heads, has been developing a chess clock based on Bobby’s ideas — but now the company planning to market it appears to be backing off.
Fischer has a sophisticated appreciation of Japanese food, and adores delicacies which make many foreigners blanch, including uni, the gooey orange innards of the sea urchin. At the Ushiku detention centre, where Miyoko visits him every day, he pays the guards to supplement his food with daily servings of natto, a challenging fermentation of rotting soy beans. One thing he seems to spend little time on is chess; for more than a decade he has consented to play only his own eccentric variant which he calls Fischerandom Chess. As Miyoko says: “He has no one to play Fischerandom chess with in Japan — just me.”
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“He’s honest and gentle, although he’s not good at socialising and those who meet him may misunderstand him at first,” she says. “If he doesn’t know people, he doesn’t speak to them.” This view of Fischer — as a shy, socially inept but fundamentally good man — is often articulated. “Bobby is a tragic personality,” wrote his old rival, Boris Spassky, this month in an extraordinary personal appeal to President Bush. “He is an honest and good natured man.”
And yet such a charitable view withers in the face of Fischer’s public statements. His website takes aim at various personal targets — a former friend who allowed a storage container of his possessions to be auctioned off, the US government (“a brutal, evil dictatorship”). But most appalling is his anti-Semitism. References to “filthy Jews”, “bastard Jews” and “garbage people (the Jews)” litter almost every public statement he makes. His various hatreds reached their climax in a notorious interview he gave on a Philippines radio station a few hours after the September 11 attacks: “I applaud the act,” he told his astonished interviewer. “F*** the US. I wanna see the US wiped out. Democracy is just a load of bullshit. I’m hoping sane people will take over the US, military people. They will imprison the Jews, they will execute several hundred thousand of them at least.”
What does Miyoko make of such utterances? “It’s a difficult question.” Does she agree with them? She shakes her head sadly. “He’s a really stubborn person. Once be believes in something, he’s incapable of changing his mind. He is very difficult to live with. He makes simple things very complicated. Once he decides he wants something, he will not change his mind. Shoes, for example. He always wears these German shoes, Birkenstocks, and there is only one model of Birkenstocks that he will wear. No variations. It is the same with watches, with radios.” What about his remark about women being “weak and stupid”? “That was a long time ago,” she says. Has he changed his mind? “I am always told by Bobby that I am weak — and I admit that it’s true.” Miyoko believes that if Fischer is sent back to the US and imprisoned “it will be death for him. In jail, people are murdered, and it is just ignored. I really hope that it won’t happen but if he is deported I will go to the United States too.” It is not even clear that marriage to Miyoko will make any difference to the Japanese government’s plans to deport him. In any case the couple have been unable to formalise the union because of the absence of Fischer’s passport, which has been confiscated by the US consulate in Tokyo. Then there are the persistent rumours about Bobby’s visits to the Philippines — according to the American magazine The Atlantic and various internet sites he has a Filipina wife, or at least a girlfriend, and a young daughter with the capitivating name of Jinky Ong. “I don’t know for a fact,” says Miyoko. “But I understand that he’s never been married before.”
Does she believe he will make a good husband? “He is very wagamama (selfish). It’s part of his character.” Would she be marrying him if he had not found himself in detention? “It’s difficult. Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. He is always angry. In the depths of his heart, he is angry. I always tell him that people who carry anger have no chance of good fortune.”