Ippei Mizuhara, Reiwa’s worst traitor who stole a large sum of money from Shohei Otani… The “darkness of the heart” behind the fall of a star interpreter into the abyss

I want to apologize to Otani, the Dodgers, MLB, and my family.

The man appeared in federal court in Los Angeles in a suit with an ankle lock on his ankle. Ippei Mizuhara, 39, who expressed his apologies to his former allies and others through his lawyer, looked blank throughout the courtroom and disappeared without responding to scheduled media interviews after the court adjourned.

Mizuhara is suspected of bank fraud in which he used his position as an interpreter to transfer more than $16 million (about 2.47 billion yen) from the account of Shohei Otani, 29, between 2009 and January of this year. Mr. Mizuhara has gambled away an estimated 28 billion yen, leaving him with a negative balance of 6.3 billion yen. Such a huge amount of fraudulent trouble is very rare even in the United States,” said a local media reporter.

I’m done. How did Mizuhara fall into the swamp of illegal gambling that ruined his life? Keith White, president of the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) in the United States, said, “There are illegal bookmakers in the United States.

There are hundreds of thousands of illegal bookmakers in the United States. Illegal bookmakers are very skilled at recruiting people with vast assets and getting them to spend large sums of money. Mizuhara must have been targeted because he held the accounts of athletes who had signed the most lucrative contracts in sports history. Mizuhara, who was threatened that if he did not return the money, he would contact Otani, fell into an endless loop of further betting to make up for his losses.
Generally, when you hear the word gambling, you may think of casinos, but what he was doing was online betting, which can be done with a single smartphone, and the market is said to be worth billions of dollars or more.”

Even though he was being targeted, it is not a normal state of mind to put one’s hands on another person’s money. Mototaka Igawa, former chairman of Daio Paper Corporation and a convicted gambler himself, said, “It doesn’t matter to us gamblers how much money we win or lose.

It doesn’t matter to us gamblers how much we win or lose. We become addicted to the brain numbing sensation that only such an experience can give you. Gambling within the limits of one’s own earnings does not numb the brain. That must be why Mr. Mizuhara bet Mr. Otani’s money, and a lot of money at that. Even though he was losing money, I think he naively thought that if he won and returned the money and got down on his knees, he would be forgiven.
In fact, I too lost a total of about 1 trillion yen when I put the company’s money into the casino, and lost about 10 billion yen after deducting my winnings. After the company found out, I lost almost 2 billion yen more. Addiction is a powerful thing. Even if they take away your phone, you are in such a state of mind that you bet on whether the next person who walks by will be a man or a woman.

Due to the size of the amount of money involved, it is believed that he will not escape jail time, including up to 30 years of imprisonment. What kind of fate will Mizuhara face?

Even after he atones for his crime, his addiction will continue. Some people are never cured. Ideally, they should attend meetings for gamblers, which they can attend anonymously, and live modestly by monitoring each other, but Mizuhara’s face has become known to the public” (Mr. White, above).

Mizuhara has fallen from a star interpreter to Reiwa’s worst traitor. The road to rehabilitation is incredibly difficult and long.

From the May 3, 2024 issue of FRIDAY