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Kazuko Hosoki , a fortune teller and judge on the original Iron Chef, passed away on November 8, 2021.
If you watched any of the many episodes she was a judge in, you know she was very opinionated. She usually judged in place of late Iron Chef judge Asako Kishi. I just finished watching the King Crab Battle with Morimoto vs Tetsuji Iio and was reminded of when she didn’t like her portion of the kelp wrapped King Crab cooked in gravel rock and took the other judges and tried his, ending up enjoying his. She always had her way of judging and was an effective addition to the panel.
According to Ironchefdb, Kazuko Hosoki judged 37 battles, all appearing from 1998 and beyond into the 2000 battles. She also was the author of over 100 books and a winner on the Japanese version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire in 2004.
As the holiday seasons approach, I have a soft spot in my heart for Iron Chef Japan. My family established a holiday tradition almost a decade ago of binge-watching as much Iron Chef Japan as we could find through the holidays. The creativity and flair on display helped inspire some of our family’s traditional dishes and, though we have seen almost every episode more than a few times, we always appreciated learning something new every time we watched.
As 2021 draws to a close, I’m looking forward to be renewing this holiday tradition for the first time in a while! Iron Chef Fan Joe wrote in to let us know that FilmRise recently acquired the rights to dubbed episodes of Iron Chef Japan and that Pluto TV is airing ICJ on its free-to-download app. Along with the Twitch stream, this provides more access to Iron Chef Japan than we’ve seen in a while and answers some long-running questions many of you have had about the possibility of seeing it aired again.
Check out FilmRise and PlutoTV and let us know if they have what you’re looking for!
This is definitely something I wanted to share because it combines a few things to say the least that we don’t see too often (or at least, things we didn’t see too often during Iron Chef‘s original run): Iron Chefs dealing with the loss of someone they know, Morimoto doing a full English interview and an Iron Chef being on CNN.
How it came about was definitely something that was all too understandable, though. When Anthony Bourdain died in 2018, Morimoto went on Quest Means Business in order to pay tribute to the No Reservations star, who had been a friend of his to the point that they’d worked together onscreen as well.
This one’s definitely a bit bittersweet because it’s all about the late, great Kobe, but I couldn’t possibly not share it. This is something the Iron Chef Episodes Twitch Channel introduced me to: Shortly after Kobe’s debut in Battle Short Pasta (522), a 26-minute documentary aired showing Kobe’s life story up to that point and how he was balancing his debut as Iron Chef Italian with his day-to-day business – which would mean this is from 1997 in all likelihood. Really hope you enjoy this one.
Hey all! I’m so excited to share with you all that one of my personal passion projects for the site is now something I’m working on (a little each week) for the next few months – a data source for statistics on Iron Chef Japan. With any luck, we’ll be able to use the completed data to drive interactive trivia on our website! We’ll see how far we get at the end of the year, but this is easily going to be one or two years in the making (because we’ve got to catch each ep on streaming or rerun to capture the data) and will take quite a bit of time to complete. I’m a bit of a nerd for data and databases, so am excited to show a sneak peek of my Iron Chef Japan-related development system so far:
I only recently came across a YouTube video profiling a sushi chef with a name that looked familiar, and on further inspection, it was!
It was Kenji Nakazawa, the Edo-style sushi specialist who had challenged Iron Chef Japanese Morimoto in Battle Sushi (722). In 2019, Eater caught up with him when he was running an omakase in Hawaii that was already one of the best outside Japan for their video profile series, also titled Omakase (the Japanese term used in sushi restaurants that indicates you’re leaving it up to the chef). It’s mainly in Japanese but is subtitled. Hope you enjoy!