Rocky Aoki; Telegraph obit
Hyfler/Rosner
crossed the Pacific in a balloon
Last Updated: 11:42PM BST 29 Jul 2008
Rocky Aoki, who died on July 10 aged 69, was selected to
compete as a wrestler in the Olympics, launched a porn
magazine, became a record-breaking balloonist and powerboat
champion and was credited with introducing the West to
Japanese cuisine.
Aoki arrived in New York from Japan in 1960 with little
money but a determination to succeed.
In 1964 he opened a four-table restaurant, Benihana, on West
56th Street. The food - based very loosely on a style of
cheap Japanese street cookery known as teppanyaki (literally
something cooked on a hot plate or teppan) - was nothing
special. Aoki was not a cook.
But he sensed the American taste for showmanship, put his
chefs at the centre of the action and trained them to throw
their knives in the air, add seasonings with a flourish,
toss shrimps on to their hats and generally add a bit of
theatrical flash to the unspectacular business of grilling
chicken, seafood and steak.
For six months he lost money until the Herald Tribune wrote
a favourable review and the crowds flocked in. He built
Benihana into a multimillion dollar international
corporation that, at its peak, had 100 restaurants around
the world, three of them in London.
Aoki then set about making himself a minor celebrity,
defying the stoic, conformist Japanese stereotype.
He posed for photographs in a hot tub in his stretch Rolls
Royce; competed in a cross-country race in a stretch
Volkswagen Beetle; had a walk-on part in Hawaii Five-O; won
a national backgammon championship; set a world record in
1981 by becoming the first person to cross the Pacific in a
hot air balloon; won the 1987 inuagural Milan-to-Moscow road
rally; nearly killed himself powerboat racing and launched a
soft-porn magazine, Genesis, with "two centrefolds for the
price of one".
In 1979 he featured on the cover of Newsweek under the
headline "Making it in America" - an embodiment of the
American Dream. "I was like Trump," he recalled. "Anything
to promote my company, I did it. Richard Branson? He copy
me."
He was born Hiroaki Aoki in Tokyo on October 9 1938. His
father was, variously, a vaudeville tap dancer, actor and
jazz club and coffee shop proprietor. Rocky was six when the
Americans firebombed Tokyo. After the war his father named
his coffee shop Benihana, after a red safflower that grew in
the ruins.
At school young Rocky sold girlie pictures as a sideline and
at Keio University he founded a rock band called Rowdy
Sounds, though he mainly distinguished himself by being
summarily ejected from both establishments for getting into
fights.
While helping out in his family coffee shop he took up
wrestling and qualified for the 1960 Olympics in Rome. In
the event he was over the weight limit and could not
participate, but he won a sports scholarship to New York
City Technical College and in the early 1960s took three
national championships in the flyweight class.
He supported himself by selling ice cream in Harlem from a
rented truck, which he covered with posters about his
prowess as a wrestler to deter would-be muggers, while
studying restaurant management at night school. He used
$10,000 saved from his ice cream business to set up his
first restaurant.
With the earnings from his business Aoki set out with equal
determination to make his name as a swashbuckling
international playboy and sexual athlete with multiple
mistresses and wives.
He boasted of having three children of the same age by three
different women and, in 1979, after nearly killing himself
in a powerboat crash in San Francisco Bay, he woke up in
hospital after 10 hours in the operating theatre to find his
Japanese wife and American mistress standing over his bed,
glowering.
Although his wife assured him that it was perfectly
acceptable for a Japanese man to take a mistress, he decided
that he did not want "this two-girl type of situation" and
dumped her for the mistress, whom he married, though that
relationship, too, came unstuck.
Aoki resigned from his company in 1998 after learning that
he was under investigation for insider trading. He pleaded
guilty to the charges and was fined $500,000 and given a
three- year probationary sentence. He narrowly escaped
deportation.
His conviction obliged him to place control of Benihana in a
trust which pitted his third wife, Keiko Ono, a former Miss
Tokyo who introduced the Wonderbra to Japan, against four of
his six legitimate children. For some time the American
public was entertained, and American lawyers enriched, by
what became a very public family feud, Aoki accusing his
offspring of incompetence and disloyalty and his children
accusing their father, who was suffering from diabetes,
Hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver, of being duped by
his wife.
"Basically they think my wife is, like, gold digger," Aoki
told New York magazine in 2006. "My daughter Grace is
telling me 'Daddy your wife is going to poison you to death.
Be careful what you eat'."
Rocky Aoki is survived by his wife and children. The legal
squabbles over his business empire remain unresolved.
Hyfler/Rosner
Entrepreneur, wrestler and playboy who founded an