Japan Court: Bobby Fischer Can Be Deported

TOKYO (Reuters) - A Tokyo court on Friday rejected a request by former world chess champion Bobby Fischer to have the Japanese authorities halt procedures to deport him, his lawyer said.

CHECKMATE? Bobby Fisher, former US chess champ, at an immigration office in Japan.
TATSUYA ONISHI/MAINICHI SHIMBUN/AP

Fischer is wanted by the United States for violating economic sanctions against Yugoslavia and has been in detention in Japan since last month, when he was stopped at Tokyo's Narita airport as he tried to leave for Manila on a passport that U.S. officials say was invalid.

"This does not mean that he will be deported right away," Fischer's lawyer, Masako Suzuki, told Reuters, adding Justice Minister Daizo Nozawa still had to respond to a separate plea from Fischer. No deportation order has been issued, she said.

The eccentric Fischer, considered one of the greatest chess players the world has ever seen, has been wanted in the United States since 1992 when he violated economic sanctions by going to Yugoslavia to play a match against old rival Boris Spassky.

Suzuki revealed on Monday that Fischer, 61, planned to marry Miyoko Watai, acting head of the Japan Chess Association. It was not clear if that would help his case with the Japanese authorities.

He has also been trying to renounce his American citizenship as a way of avoiding deportation.

He can only do that by telling a U.S. official face to face, but until now he has had no response to his request from the U.S. embassy in Tokyo.

However, speaking to a Philippine radio station from his detention center, Fischer said late on Friday that the U.S. embassy in Japan had finally agreed to send an official to see him so he could formally renounce his citizenship.

"Hopefully, I'll be out of this stinking hole soon," he told Manila's DZRH radio station in a live, hour-long phone interview littered with anti-Semitic and anti-American remarks.

Asked to talk about "pleasant things," he said: "Here's something pleasant. I want to talk about the destruction of the U.S.A."

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Fischer said in an interview with another radio station in the northern Philippines that the United States had got what it deserved for its foreign policy.

The former champion did not spare Japan and the Philippines, criticizing Tokyo for getting involved in Iraq and the Philippines for its high crime rate, although he praised Manila's decision to withdraw its troops from Iraq.

Fischer became world chess champion in 1972 when he beat Spassky of the Soviet Union in a victory touted as a Cold War propaganda coup for the United States.

He lost the title three years later after his conditions for a match against Anatoly Karpov, also of the Soviet Union, were rejected by chess officials. Karpov became champion by default.

Fischer's movements over the past decade remain something of a mystery but he is known to have spent time in the Philippines.

Fischer's supporters say he renewed his U.S. passport in Switzerland in 1997 and never received a letter issued in December 2003 revoking it. State Department officials in Washington have said it took years for the legal process to catch up with him.