# 阪神ファンが怯えた、カーネル・サンダースの呪い。#199

- Show: ゆる民俗学ラジオ
- Published: 2026-10-04
- Canonical: https://podc.club/en/episode/1669005447_da26e1594fc5.html
- Audio: https://api.robotstart.jp/api/for-media/v1/articles/36a5048b/permanent/with-advertise/podcast/55cad7a0591791d8d491bcfd664c56b0.mp3
- Source: Edited from a machine transcript of the first 30 minutes of the episode. Not an official summary.

On the night of October 16, 1985, jubilant Hanshin Tigers fans in Osaka hurled a Colonel Sanders statue into the Dōtonbori River after using it as a stand-in for American slugger Randy Bass during post-pennant celebrations — and 17 consecutive years without a league title followed. A Japanese folklore podcast now argues that the dōage (celebratory body-toss) the fans gave the statue just before throwing it in, not the throwing itself, was the true trigger of the curse.

## What this episode answers

### How did the Colonel Sanders Curse begin?

On October 16, 1985, Hanshin fans hauled a Colonel Sanders statue from a nearby KFC to serve as a stand-in for Randy Bass, assaulting an employee who tried to intervene, then dōage'd and hurled the statue into the Dōtonbori River; 17 consecutive years without a league title, poor draft results, and club misfortunes followed, and the curse was not considered broken until Hanshin's 2023 Japan Series victory.

### In what kinds of settings was dōage originally performed as a ritual?

Dōage was widely performed in Shinto rituals and festivals to mark transitions — at Zenkoji's annual Goyoshi-shiki to hand over the dōdōji role, at Saitama's Suwa Shrine after the lion-dance performers' final dance, and in sumo as a ceremony to send the gods back after a tournament, as well as during year-end cleaning and Setsubun for the year's representative man; a shared feature across all cases is that handover ceremonies and sake rituals accompany the act.

### What meaning did Yanagita Kunio find in dōage and shoulder-carrying?

In his essay 'Kataグuruma' (Shoulder Carrying), Yanagita Kunio argued that lifting sacred children or brides off the ground — by shoulder-carry, hand-cradle, or dōage — prevented their spiritual power from draining away through contact with the earth or being contaminated by earthly impurity, and he classified all three as rituals marking the transition from ke (the mundane) to hare (the sacred).

### Why is the dōage thought to have triggered the Colonel Sanders Curse?

The crowd's dōage elevated the Colonel Sanders statue from a soulless object to a 'hare being' and, via the tamafuri (soul-shaking) logic applied to mikoshi, activated and imbued it with spiritual power; when the newly-empowered statue was thrown into the river, it triggered the same mechanism as traditional rain-making rites — angering a divine image by submerging it — turning the Colonel into a wrathful curse deity.

### Why are capitalism and modern society not incompatible with magical practices?

Competitive society demands rational effort but always reaches a point where all possible moves have been made; as AI accelerates that process, the limits of human agency become more clearly defined, leaving more space for actively awaiting fate — which is precisely what magical practice is — so capitalism may amplify rather than suppress the role of curses.

## Article

## The Colonel Sanders Curse — What Happened

On October 16, 1985 (Shōwa 60), the Hanshin Tigers won the Central League pennant for the first time in 21 years. Elated fans in Osaka began leaping into the Dōtonbori River, calling out the batting order as each one jumped — "Number one, Mayumi!" "Number two, Hirota!" When they reached the third slot, filled by American import Randy Bass, no one in the crowd looked the part. The nearest thing to an American was a Colonel Sanders statue standing outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Assaulting an employee who tried to stop them, fans hauled the statue out, gave it a dōage — the celebratory body-toss — and hurled it into the river.

What followed was grim: 17 consecutive years without a league title, a string of poor draft picks, and a series of accidents and misfortunes inside the organization. The episode became known as "the Colonel Sanders Curse." The statue was recovered from the Dōtonbori in 2009, badly deteriorated. The curse was considered broken when Hanshin won the Japan Series in 2023.

## The Folklore of Dōage — Its Role in Sacred Rites

The podcast's central hypothesis is that the dōage — not the act of throwing the statue into the river — was the true trigger of the curse. To make the case, the show traces dōage through Japanese religious history.

At Zenkoji temple in Nagano, an annual ceremony called the Goyoshi-shiki (御越年式) is held on the second Day of the Monkey in December. A robed figure called the dōdōji appears, shares sake, sings, and is then lifted three times in dōage, as are other senior figures. At Suwa Shrine (諏訪神社) in Fukaya, Saitama, until around the 1890s, lion-dance performers were given a dōage after their final dance, surrounded by a handover ceremony for the following year's performers. The two sites share a connection — before the Meiji-era separation of Buddhism and Shinto, Zenkoji housed a shrine to the Suwa deity — suggesting that dōage may trace back to Suwa worship.

In sumo wrestling, the head referee (gyōji) is tossed in dōage on the final day of a tournament as a ritual to send the gods back. The dohyo is sacred ground, and the gyōji presides over the pre-tournament dohyo ceremony as a vessel for the deity; lifting him skyward returns the god to the heavens. Similar customs existed after year-end cleaning (susuhara) and at Setsubun, when the year's representative man (toshiotoko) was tossed in dōage. The Yoshikawa Kōbunkan encyclopedia Nihon Minzoku Daijiten concludes that "there is no shortage of examples of dōage being performed to mark transitions."

## Yanagita Kunio's "Shoulder Carrying" Essay and the Tamafuri Hypothesis

The folklorist Yanagita Kunio (柳田国男) examined in his essay "Kataグuruma" (Shoulder Carrying) why sacred children and brides in Shinto rites were lifted onto shoulders or horses rather than allowed to walk. His answer: contact with the ground would either drain their spiritual power or contaminate them with earthly impurity. He grouped shoulder-carrying, hand-cradle carrying (teguruma), and dōage together as rituals that lift a person off the ground to mark the shift from ke (毛, the mundane everyday) to hare (晴れ, the sacred and extraordinary).

The podcast adds a further layer borrowed from the concept of tamafuri — the practice of physically shaking a mikoshi (portable shrine) during mikoshi momi to stimulate the spirit dwelling within. The lifting and tossing motion of dōage, the argument goes, functions identically: it agitates and energizes the soul of whoever — or whatever — is being tossed.

## How the Colonel Became a Curse Deity

Here is the hypothesis in full. Before the statue was thrown into the river, it received a dōage from the crowd. Under this folklore logic, that act elevated a spiritually inert object to a hare being and imbued it with an activated soul through tamafuri.

Moments later, the now-empowered statue was cast into the water. Across Japan there is a tradition of submerging sacred images to bring rain — the logic being that the act angers the deity, who retaliates with destructive weather. In 2025, a revival of this custom in Yamagata Prefecture, sinking a Kannon image in a pond, reportedly produced actual rainfall.

The Colonel, empowered by dōage and angered by submersion, thus became a wrathful curse deity. Without the preceding dōage, the podcast suggests, the statue would have remained a soulless object and the curse would not have lasted. The breaking of the curse in 2023 reflects how long it took — from the statue's 2009 recovery through its ensuing enshrinement — for the accumulated divine anger to be absorbed and placated.

## Capitalism and Magic — Curses Are Still Alive Today

The podcast closes by questioning why magical thinking persists in a rationalized modern world. One common argument holds that modernity has driven out darkness, shrinking the space for ghosts and spirits. But capitalism and magic are not natural enemies. Competitive society demands rational effort — yet rational effort always reaches a ceiling. Once every possible move has been made, all that remains is to await fate. As AI accelerates how quickly people exhaust their rational options, the limits of human agency become more sharply visible, and the time spent actively awaiting fate — magical practice — grows rather than shrinks. The curse is not a relic of the pre-modern world; it is a living response to uncertainty, and capitalism may be one of its most reliable sponsors.

## Takeaways

- The dōage given to the Colonel Sanders statue before it was thrown in elevated it from a soulless object to a spiritually active being through tamafuri logic, and the subsequent submersion triggered the same 'anger a deity by sinking their image' mechanism behind traditional Japanese rain-making rites — placing dōage, not the throwing, at the heart of the curse.
- Dōage has deep roots in Japanese Shinto ritual as a ceremony marking the transition from ke (the mundane) to hare (the sacred), documented at Zenkoji's Goyoshi-shiki, Saitama's Suwa Shrine lion-dance handovers, and sumo wrestling's end-of-tournament god-sending rite.
- As AI accelerates the exhaustion of rational effort and clarifies the limits of human agency, the space for actively awaiting fate — magical practice — grows rather than shrinks, making capitalism a potential amplifier, not a suppressor, of curse culture.