Now for something completely different.

I like to do a lot of reading on a variety of topics and can sometimes find myself going to a rabbit hole of esoteric knowledge. For this column, I wanted to showcase a very bizarre urban legend out of Japan.

Now Japan is know for some rather bizarre urban legends such as that of the “Slit-Mouthed Woman” or “Teke Teke”, but unlike those stories that involve some malicious spirt, this one in question involves a more familiar face…Colonel Sanders. So for some background, we are going to take a look at baseball team the Hashin Tigers. The Tigers are one of Japan’s oldest baseball teams and are also known for being eternal underdogs.

In 1985, the Hashin Tigers managed to take their first and only victory in the Japan Series. The win surprised fans and they celebrated the victory by calling out the name of each team member and having a fan that resembled the player jump into the Dotonbori Canal.

There was one member of the team that none of the fans resembled: Randy Bass. As in Democratic Oklahoma State Senator from 2005 to 2019 Randy Bass, and so without a fan that resembled Bass, the fans threw a life-sized model of Colonel Sanders from KFC into the Canal, on the grounds that like Bass, Colonel Sanders had a beard and wasn’t Japanese.

According to the urban legend, this act began the Curse of the Colonel, and the Tigers suffered an 18-year long losing streak. Attempts were made to try and recover the statue in the hope that the curse would be removed.

It was on March 10, 2009, that the top half of the statue, minus its left hand, was finally recovered. The bottom half and right hand were found shortly after.

Since then, the Tigers have still not won the Japan Series. They’ve made it to the 2014 Japan Series, but lost to Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks.

Despite the statue’s recovery, it would seem that the Colonel’s curse is still finger-licking good.