Sachiyo Nomura

Yoshie Ito Engel Nomura

In addition to being the mother of one of the most controversial figures in Japanese baseball history and the wife of another, Sachiyo Nomura has been a controversial character in her own right. A teenage beauty queen, she married an American 16 years older than herself. She gave birth to Don Engel on May 17, 1957 when she was 24 years old.Later on she gave birth to another son Kenneth Nomura. At age six, she abandoned the family (her husband and two sons). By the 1970s, she had remarried, now wedding Japanese baseball legend Katsuya Nomura and gave birth to Katsunori Nomura in 1973. Katsuya lost the Nankai Hawks managerial job due to Sachiyo's meddling with the team. She then became a TV personality, famous for being famous and being married to someone famous. In 1996 she ran for parliament and would have been elected had her party won one more seat. She was later criticized for allegedly falsifying her educational background during her run for office. She has also gotten into a national scandal for "borrowing" things she did not return. In 2002, she was sentenced to two years in jail for failing to pay 213 million yen in corporate and income tax. The tax evasion scandal cost her husband his job managing the Hanshin Tigers.

Sources include The Meaning of Ichiro by Robert Whiting