Watai admits Fischer marriage plans aimed at getting visa
Miyoko Watai, Japanese chess champion and fiancee of Bobby Fischer, has admitted in an interview with a chess website that she was prompted to marry the incarcerated grandmaster to prevent him from being expelled from the country.
"We had been satisfied with our life before. But the arrest messed it up," Watai told chessbase.com, explaining why she and Fischer had decided to formalize a defacto marriage they had lived in for the past four years. "Marrying him legally may be helpful to avoid the possible deportation and enable him to get a permanent visa in Japan."
Watai said she was uncertain whether they would have married had Fischer not been arrested at Narita Airport on July 13 for traveling with a passport the U.S. said was invalid.
"One thing for sure is that we want to live together forever. He told me I'm the most reliable person for him and the closest to him," Watai said in the interview conducted Aug. 22 and listed on the Web site Tuesday.
Watai, who shares a desire for privacy rivaling her reclusive lover, spoke in some detail about her life with Fischer, who is languishing in the East Japan Immigration Bureau Detention Center in Ushiku, Ibaraki Prefecture, as he fights a deportation order.
"He is like a prisoner on Death Row. He is afraid of being deported to the U.S., which could happen today or tomorrow. Why does he have to endure such misery," Watai said.
Fischer is wanted in the U.S. for playing chess in Yugoslavia in 1992 in violation of economic sanctions on that country for supporting Serbian ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Muslims. If convicted, the 64-year-old former world chess champion faces up to 10 years imprisonment and a fine of 250,000 dollars.
Watai said Fischer's incarceration had turned him off Japan, a country he once adored for its hot springs and the privacy it gave him.
Fischer's fiancee said the former chess champion had "calmed down" in his detention center after an early period of anger. She said he had brought him newspapers and money he used to buy his "favorite" fermented soybeans and miso soup to eat in his cell.
Watai conceded that Fischer, who is known for his virulent anti-Semitic and anti-American attacks, could be prickly and "shouldn't be judged from ordinary people's standards."
"He is very stubborn. He sticks to his policies," she said. "He also doesn't like women wearing lipstick and high-heel shoes and coloring their hair."
Watai said she became smitten with Fischer after he defeated Boris Spassky, then of the Soviet Union, to become world champion in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972.
"He was like the god of chess. I cut out every article about him from magazines and English newspapers, and I studied records of his games," she said.
She was invited to show him around Tokyo when he visited in 1973 and their friendship apparently blossomed from there.
"He asked me to stop by his place in the States before I visited Colombia for the Women's Chess Olympiad in 1974, so I did," Watai said, adding that the tour involved trips together to Disneyland and Las Vegas. "We had continued to visit each other's places and exchange letters. I was invited by Bobby to watch the rematch with Spassky in Yugoslavia in 1992."
Watai said Fischer lived in Hungary for a few years after the Spassky rematch resulted in him being indicted by a U.S. grand jury. She said it was while he was there that they became intimate, which in turn led to them living together in Tokyo from 2000.