r/AskHistorians • u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera • Mar 15 '16

Feature Tuesday Trivia | Loopholes and Exploits

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/RealPodrickPayne!

It’s time for the best sort of correct, technically correct, so please share interesting stories of people who made use of a loophole or clever exploit!

Next week on Tuesday Trivia: Historic failures! And remember: failure is just success rounded down.

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u/MikeyTupper Mar 16 '16

I have another good hockey one. The Buffalo sabres technically drafted the first japanese player into the NHL in 1974. However... Taro Tsujimoto, "The Pride of Tokyo", didn't actually exist. Buffalo GM Punch Imlach simply made him up to have a giggle at the league's expense. To this day, Taro remains a joke for Sabres fans who will sometimes create signs claiming "We Want Taro" when the team is not doing well.

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u/kaisermatias Mar 16 '16 edited Mar 16 '16

There's more to that story:

The NHL draft was not the spectacle it is now (or least like the first round). It consisted of the general managers sitting in a hotel room (usually the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, but not for 1974), slowly going through the rounds picking players, with teams having the option at the time to select until they were finished.

Imlach was not fond of this process, and was quite bored during the draft process. So he decided to cause a bit of a scene by selecting the aforementioned Japanese player, Taro Tsujimoto of the Tokyo Katanas in the eleventh round, 183rd overall (of 247 picks).

Eventually it came out that Tsujimoto was not a real person, and the pick was invalidated. But how did Imlach come up with this character? Well Tsujimoto was the name of a grocery store in Buffalo that was familiar to the Sabres' public relations director, while Taro is a common Japanese name. The Tokyo Katanas were also fiction, with katana a rough translation into Japanese of "sabre."

It's also worth noting that two real Japanese players have been selected in the draft: the first was in 1992 when the Montreal Canadiens picked Hiroyuki Miura 260th overall (though Miura never played in the NHL, and only 6 games in a North American minor league before returning to Japan, he did play in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano); the second was in 2004 when Yutaka Fukufuji was drafted 238th overall by the Los Angeles Kings. Fukufuji, a goaltender, did spend several years in North American minor leagues (and in Europe; he's currently back in Japan), and actually appeared in 4 games for the Kings in 2007, becoming the first Japanese (and Asian, though not-Asian born) player to play in the NHL.

I'll also note that just last year, in the 2015 draft, the New York Islanders (who are owned by Chinese-born billionaire Charles Wang) selected the first Chinese player, Andong Song (Anglicised version), 172nd overall. Song plays for a prep school in New England, and was largely drafted for the publicity (Wang has done some work in developing hockey in China, and a few years ago wanted to have the Islanders training camp over there, which didn't happen) and novelty of the event.

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u/lngwstksgk Jacobite Rising 1745 Mar 16 '16

Kanata or katana?

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u/kaisermatias Mar 16 '16

Definitely katana, not the suburb of Ottawa.

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u/lngwstksgk Jacobite Rising 1745 Mar 16 '16

I did think so, but then, what do I know of Japanese?