Kanji Manabe was a Japanese baseball player-turned-restauranteur and Nagoya-gumi vigilante who lived in Nagoya during the 2010s.
Biography[]
Manabe in 1997
Kanji Manabe was born in Nagoya, Japan, and he became a professional baseball player, playing as a batter for the Nagoya Wyverns. Manabe was aware of the team's corruption, and he became a member of the Nagoya-gumi syndicate that was responsible for match-fixing. In 1997, after the team's masseuse Tetsuo Uno returned Manabe's lost phone, Manabe grew paranoid that Uno had read his texts and had him fired from the team. By 2007, Manabe retired from baseball and became the owner and chef of Yakiniiku Ittoukai. In 2012, his former teammate Tatsuo Shinada visited his restaurant to question him about the match-fixing that went on in the 1990s, and Manabe admitted that many matches had been fixed, before warning Shinada several times to quit digging into the case. Manabe later made a half-hearted attempt to prevent Shinada from escaping the Nagoya Family's captivity at the docks, but, once he was defeated, he called his boss Junpei Fujita (the former Wyverns coach) and handed Shinada the phone, revealing the true mastermind behind Shinada's 1997 ban from baseball.