He Has a Feint Chance to Get Out of Debt

TOKYO — In a concrete and neon canyon in Japan’s most famous drinking district, the boxer stands ready to become a human punching bag.

“Please hit me,” he calls out to the crowd of gawkers that quickly forms. A one-minute all-you-can-slug session costs $9 for men. Women may vent their aggression for half price. The boxer wears a mouthpiece and headgear, but he doesn’t raise his fists to block the blows. His defense is limited to ducking, at which he excels.

Since February, when financial desperation drove him into the streets, Akira Hareruya, a former pro boxer who once ranked 17th in Japan, has suffered bloody noses, black eyes and broken ribs. He has been harassed by the police, threatened by debt collectors and knocked down, but never knocked out.

But the 36-year-old fighter has become something of a media superstar, and a folk antihero, for the simplest of reasons: His electrical contracting business fell victim to Japan’s worst postwar recession, he is utterly broke, and he is taking punches to try to pay off a $1.3-million debt.

At a time when personal bankruptcies are soaring and despairing debtors are killing themselves in escalating numbers or fleeing into the night, Hareruya would prefer to be slugged than to surrender. In a country where bankrupts continue to be stigmatized, and most still believe they have a moral duty to pay off their debts, Hareruya is seen by many as taking a noble, if quixotic, approach.

His popularity--he has been featured in at least five major Japanese newspapers and appeared on almost every top TV news show--stems from the espousal of an old-fashioned but still highly prized Japanese value: gaman, meaning grit, endurance or the willingness to bear suffering in silence.

The boxer brushes off such comments. “I don’t have any honor. That’s why I’m doing this,” says Hareruya (a stage name he uses in part to protect the privacy of his mortified wife and his three children). “I just would like to repay my debts without going bankrupt.”

He says he hasn’t actually ruled out declaring bankruptcy, and his friends have been encouraging him to do so. But he thinks he can hold out a little longer.

He has been buoyed by the admiration and encouragement of many of his customers, and the hope that he could land a job, get a permanent gig on a TV show or even make a commercial. He has had nibbles, he says, but all have fallen through. “They think my image is too dark,” he says with a laugh.

Help has come from unlikely quarters, including one of his first customers, Mitsuo Izumi, tough-talking president of a small construction company. After paying to go three rounds with Hareruya and learning of his troubles, Izumi lent the boxer about $5,000 on the spot.

Izumi too knows the bitter aftertaste of Japan’s soured economy. Three years ago, his company nearly went belly up. “The worst was my daughter’s birthday, when I couldn’t afford to buy her a cake,” Izumi says. “She was 6. She cried, saying, ‘Why can’t I have a cake?’ . . . If it hadn’t been for my daughter’s tears, I would never have been able to pull out of it.”

Like Hareruya, Izumi is still deeply in debt--a legacy of Japan’s “bubble years,” during which banks shoved loans at often-unsophisticated small-business men, who were left holding the bag when the economy went south. Izumi was helped by a stranger he happened to meet, and he says he wanted to pass along the favor.

He ended up hiring Hareruya as a construction laborer, for about $100 a day, and is urging him to quit street boxing as soon as possible.

The boxer has tried working the streets in various sections of Tokyo but has found the police to be most tolerant in Kabukicho, a neighborhood of bars, movie theaters, cheap restaurants, strip joints and “soaplands,” the current Japanese euphemism for brothels.

Last weekend, Hareruya was out working a small plaza in front of some cinemas. Nearby, several homeless men slept on cardboard, ignored by tipsy “salarymen” in wilting white shirts, young women in the gaudiest of fashions waiting for dates, tough yakuza-looking types grunting into cell phones and neatly dressed young moviegoers.

Hareruya offers his customers a pair of clean white gloves followed by a pair of boxing gloves, and he explains the rules: no hitting below the belt, elbowing, head-butting, biting or hitting him when he is down. He tries to avoid customers who are too drunk. “They come out and pop me before I’ve even had a chance to explain the rules,” he complains.

Then the boxer invites them to shout out their name, age, occupation and the kind of stress they are feeling, and he tells them to “make beautiful memories to take home.”

“The world suuuucks,” screams Eiken Kudo, 22, a university student majoring in international economics. Sporting an Ungaro T-shirt and a murderous expression, Kudo chases the feinting boxer around the plaza for a full minute without landing a punch. Panting, Kudo reveals that he is actually a fencing instructor and is shocked that his fists found only air.

“My boyfriend is a jeeeerk,” shouts fellow student Kazumi Takashi. She too finds her blows fall a hair too short until Hareruya turns his back and lets her flail away for a full 10 seconds.

About a tenth of his customers are women. “Women and children have a lot of stress they need to release,” the boxer says. “They’re timid and don’t really want to hit me, so sometimes I let them do it two at a time.”

But then there are the bouncers, the thugs, the fellow boxers and the martial artists who have heard about Hareruya and want to test their talents or impress their friends. A man in a gray tank top and shorts with buzz-cut hair and a scar over his left eye steps up, glaring. Then come the sickening thuds of high-speed glove against rib and jaw. The customer, it turns out, is a low-ranking pro boxer.

Hareruya takes a break and strolls around the plaza singing a plaintive Japanese folk song. The line of customers grows longer. The boxer claims to have taken on more than 2,000 people, and he can draw 60 people a night. He has earned as much as $800 on good nights but says he averages more like $200.

“I hate my boss,” cries a 33-year-old real estate assessor. He says he has a brown belt in karate and has done a little boxing but complains, “I couldn’t get anywhere near him.” He buys another round, and fails again, but then hugs Hareruya as if the boxer were a long-lost friend.

“The guy is great,” he says. “Ordinary people would despair, but this guy always thinks positively. . . . He’s a rare person in Japan.”