On Fourth of July, Takeru Kobayashi Checks America’s Pulse
By Cal Setar
How many hot dogs will you eat?
For most, it’s a fairly innocuous question, usually asked by a friend or family member during the midday hours of Fourth of July, America’s celebration of its illimitable and (mostly) unquestioned freedom. It is just another tradition to honor on this most revelatory of days, right at home within the framework of patriotic celebration alongside fireworks, beer and potato salad.
For Takeru Kobayashi, for the man known to a generation of competitive eating fans simply as Kobayashi, the question carries the weight of a lifetime spent in contest, spent pushing himself farther, harder, faster in the hopes every year of devouring more than his opponents, in the hopes that the physical discomfort that will, of course, result, will have been worth it.
At this point, it’d be fair to wonder if Kobayashi believes it was.
Kobayashi has gone to great lengths, has sweat, bled, cried, and yes, eaten, in order to make himself the greatest competitive eater he could be. But all of that, all of the accolades, the plaudits of the early 2000s havn’t meant good things, and good things alone, for Kobi.
There’s been pain and frustration, even humiliation, severed relationships and, perhaps worst of all, a realization that, on a day that celebrates freedom, freedom isn’t always for the free.
***
In the late hours of a sweltering Fourth in 2010, the day of independence winding down for most Americans, hamburgers and hot dogs traded for graham crackers and fire-toasted marshmallows, Kobayashi languished in a New York jail cell.
It had been a whirlwind 24 hours for the world’s greatest competitive eater. More than that, it had been a whirlwind few months.
Kobayashi, determined to see the exclusivity terms of the contract he had signed with the International Federation of Competitive Eaters (the IFOCE, now known as Major League Eating), the governing body of the mouth-mangling masticators, terms that strictly prohibited competitors like Kobayashi from competing in any non MLE-sanctioned event, lifted, took in the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest from the sidelines for the first time since he first took part in 2001. On the day of the event, Kobayashi and a group of supporters mingled with the hungry crowd, clad in “Free Kobi” gear and, along with the rest of the spectators, ready to watch the competitive eating world’s most noteworthy spectacle.
But with the competition winding down, Kobayashi suddenly felt himself propelled toward the stage, ushered along by security who recognized him, whose Fourth of July at Nathan’s seemed somehow naked without him. An hour later, Kobayashi was in a jail cell, struggling to piece together a day that had taken such a sudden and destructive turn.
It was, for a man who had so long dominated that Coney Island stage, a world-rending development.
“When you’re on the stage and you can only hear the screams, you’re performing as an athlete, you don’t get to feel who are your fans, who actually care about you,” Kobayashi said, via a translator. “But when that happened to me, it was the first realization, the first clear realization who the majority of my fans were.”
There were plenty of voices on both sides – those reaching out to Kobayashi, offering helping hands, attempting to pry him from the grasp of police. But there were just as many shouts of gleeful hate, slurs and curses hurled with intent, with unquestioned malice.
What struck Kobayashi the hardest was the clear racial dividing line between those eager to help, and those determined to hurt.
***
Since 2010, Kobayashi, the lithe Japanese man whose name was once synonymous with competitive eating and the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest held every Fourth of July in Coney Island, hasn’t eaten a Nathan’s hot dog on the Fourth of July.
Now 15 years removed from his record-breaking 50 hot dog debut at Nathan’s in 2001, Kobayashi hasn’t hung up his gastrointestinal cleats, hasn’t given up on his seemingly inhuman ability to devour food. In fact, at this stage of his athletic development, the idea of competition has, in a way, crystallized for Kobayashi, allowing him to separate himself from the outcome, from the larger implications, and focus instead on simply being great.
But that doesn’t mean that Kobayashi shies away when greater societal issues come calling.
On that Coney Island stage, on that day in 2010, Kobayashi saw the faces of his attackers, and he understood – the so-called “minorities” were, by and large, not among them. In the weeks following that incident, his night in jail, many fans reached out to Kobayashi to offer words of encouragement, to tell him that what he’d done for the sport, that who he was as a person, had meant more than he could ever know.
“It was the black community, it was the Latin community, the Hispanic community,” Kobayashi said. “It was a lot of the LGBT, gay people, lesbians, bisexuals, who had come out, and people that I hadn’t even realized had been such fans for a long time.”
Of course, there were many white fans as well who reached out in the wake of the incident. But when combined with past concerns that had been mounting in Kobayashi’s mind, most notably Nathan’s painting of Joey Chestnut’s unexpected victory over him in 2007 as American boy makes good over elite Japanese competitor, it left a sour taste that Kobayashi simply could not wash away.
“In the beginning, it was just a competition between athletes, people training to do a sport, which was not about a country against a country,” Kobayashi said.
To Kobayashi, Nathan’s wasn’t just selling hot dogs – they were selling nationalism.
“They were selling the American against the Japanese. And that wasn’t something that I wanted. That was something that they branded.”
In the end, it left Kobayashi’s relationship with MLE and Nathan’s, unsalvageable, or as he put it, “destroyed.”
***
It’s a strange thing, this concept of a diminutive Asian man as the personification of American excess, in a way, the embodiment of the glory that is American freedom.
But for so long, so long it seemed it may never be any other way, that’s just the way it was.
Kobayashi, the small, softly-spoken Japanese competitive eater wasn’t just good – he was head and shoulders above the best, wasn’t just where the conversation for the greatest competitive eater in the world started; he was the conversation.
These days, though, Americans like Chestnut and Matt “Megatoad” Stonie, have taken the MLE by storm, winning competitions and changing the face – and the country – of the sport. Chestnut holds the distinction of having dethroned Kobayashi, ending the latter’s six-year reign, as well as Japan’s former stranglehold on the event. Prior to Kobayashi’s half-decade run, fellow Japanese combatants Hirofumi Nakajima and Kazutoyo Arai had combined to win three of the four prior contests.
But Kobayashi’s rise to international prominence in the early 2000s brought the sport as a whole with him. His stunning mark of 50 in 2001, a doubling of the previous record, broke the competitive eating world wide open. It would take six years for anyone to even come close to topping him.
It’s something that, he says, fellow competitors still thank him for to this day.
In the end, it took Chestnut downing 66 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes to finally stop his run of dominance.
This past year, Stonie finally ended Chestnut’s eight-year run with 62.
But for Kobayashi, the competition at Nathan’s and his relationship with MLE has been forever altered, in a way, damning him in the world of competitive eating. The MLE website boasts approximately 80 major eating competitions annually, competitions that include many of the best eaters in America and the world, eaters like Chestnut, Sonya Thomas, Patrick Bertoletti, Eater X Tim and Bob Shoudt. With the connection between the league and Kobayashi broken, he no longer takes part at Nathan’s, or any of their other major events.
It did not have to be this way, he believes.
In a way, it’s understandable. On Independence Day of all days, an American finally wresting control of an American competition from a dominant foreign competitor – it’s easy, and surely alluring, to play it as American vs. Other, Us vs. Them.
But for Kobayashi, this flew in the face of everything he’d come to understand about the Fourth of July and American freedom.
“The first year I came and I won by doubling the record with 50 hot dogs, it was really – yes they said the Japanese kid – but it was really about this human being doing this phenomenon. And people were like, ‘who is this person, what is he doing?,’ and it was kind of this crazy story.”
When Chestnut finally won though, it had, without Kobayashi’s realization, become an issue of race, and of nationalism. Suddenly, he found himself at odds with a country that had once, not so long ago, lionized him.
***
Kobayashi will be eating hot dogs, and plenty of them, in New York this Fourth of July.
They just won’t be Nathan’s.
Instead, he’ll be devouring dogs as part of a celebration at King’s County Distillery in Brooklyn, honoring the victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting and aimed at raising funds for the families. Spectators will submit bids guessing at how many hot dogs Kobayashi will eat in a given amount of time.
It’s not quite the same as Nathan’s, when all the characters, MLE or otherwise, come out, when the competitive juices are flowing and the lights are brightest. But it’s certainly brought him back to his roots.
These days, Kobayashi is still a regular on the competitive eating circuit. He’s just not as visible, thanks mostly to his fractured relationship with the MLE and Nathan’s, maybe in some not-so-small part because of his nationality.
So how many hot dogs will Kobayashi, the lean, mean, dog devouring man from Japan, be consuming on the Fourth?
He doesn’t know.
At this point, after his six year run at the top of Nathan’s, the sport of competitive eating, Kobayashi has earned the right to take his time deciding, to let the event, more of a demonstration of his hot dog eating prowess, and his feelings on the day dictate.
But while the stakes may seem lower, in some ways, it may be that they are in fact higher – much higher.
Because as a person, not just an athlete, the scope of Kobayashi’s concerns has moved well beyond competition. Sure, it will always be a part of him, will always be a beast requiring regular feedings. But for the man who brought the sport of competitive eating of the back room and into the light, his stage, his standing isn’t just meant for competing anymore – it’s meant for helping.
“I don’t eat anymore just to eat. I eat because I think, I hope that it makes somebody happy or it inspires somebody. To have an effect beyond just the sport.”
To the Japanese kid who realized the American dream on our nation’s day of independence, the hope is that his efforts can help any minority, any person made to feel “less than,” see that there is more, and they are more. That whatever your medium, whether music or medicine, hot dogs or pizza, you can be great, and in the process, also the change you hope to see.