The Five Days After Masakazu Fukuda’s Last Match

On April 14, 2000, Masakazu Fukuda met Katsuyori Shibata in a Young Lion Cup league match. The match context and date are consistent across the surviving accounts. One archive’s more detailed account says Shibata delivered a flying elbow, after which Fukuda took another bad blow to the head. That was the point at which the bout became a medical emergency.

The archive reports that Fukuda suffered a convulsion and was taken to a Kessennuma city hospital, where doctors performed surgery. By April 15, he remained unconscious, and his body temperature had not returned to normal. The injury had moved from the ring into continuing hospital care, while the available account recorded no return to consciousness.

Fukuda died on April 19, 2000, at age 27. The recorded cause of death appears in equivalent terms across the accounts: a subdural hematoma or a brain hemorrhage. Those descriptions identify the documented brain injury, but they do not supply a more exact account of how his condition progressed during the five days after the match.

The consequences then reached Fukuda’s family and the company with which he was connected. The same archive says Tatsumi Fujinami told the family of his death. New Japan Pro-Wrestling held a company-sponsored vigil at a temple in Tokyo’s Shinagawa ward. At the end of the five-day sequence, Fukuda’s death was carried from the hospital record into a family notification and a public act of mourning by New Japan.