Unless stated otherwise, all photos here come from Tokino Minoru’s Wikipedia article and their respective sources.
So let’s talk about another one of those super important horses in horse racing Lore.
All the way back in 1948 a horse was born from Theft, the leading sire at the time; and the second Tyrant Queen, which was one of Koiwai Farm’s imported mares. Back in the post-war days, importing horses was difficult so very few farms had imported horses.
Racehorses don’t have a name from birth, so ranch staff often give them “childhood names” as a sort of stand-in. As some examples, Toukai Teio was nicknamed Hama no Teio (“Teio/Emperor of the bay”), Oguri Cap was nicknamed Hatsuratsu (“Lively”), and Symboli Rudolf was nicknamed Luna (from the crescent moon mark on his head).
Tokino Minoru was nicknamed “Perfect”, but his evaluation was anything but. He seemed like a really strong horse, for all intents and purposes, but his father was known as a short distance runner (which wasn’t as popular back in the day) and all of his brothers had bad runs. As such, there were no buyers immediately.
Cut to Kazuichiro Tanaka, a trainer from Tokyo. Tanaka fell in love with the horse and convinced Masakazu Nagata, president of Daiei, to buy the horse… and convince him he did, because even when Nagata put the money for the horse he didn’t show any particular love or interest for him, so much so that he didn’t even name it, and so he was registered under his nickname of “Perfect”.
Perfect, again, was anything but during training. He was a difficult horse to deal with, from a family of difficult horses to deal with. Despite this, Perfect had an impressive debut and when Tanaka reported this to Nagata… he completely forgot he had bought Perfect. Despite this, when he visited the stables later he was in a good mood and finally gave the horse attention. Marking the ocassion, he finally gave Perfect its name: Tokino Minoru.
The name is actually more dramatic than what the tale of “now you’re worthy of a proper name” story entails. It was explained that “Tokino Minoru” was decided because “競馬に懸けた時が実るときが来た” (“Keiba ni kaketa toki ga minoru toki ga kita”, “The time has come for horse racing to bear fruit”). In other words “Tokino Minoru” means “Time to bear fruit”.
And you know what? It’s a shame they changed his name in a way because Tokino Minoru’s racing record IS perfect.
Quite literally.
To THIS DAY Tokino Minoru has the record of being the horse with the longest undefeated streak in Japanese racehorsing history.
It’s even a god damn 10 out of 10 victories!
After his debut Tokino Minoru gather so much steam in his first year of racing, that by the time the Satsuki Sho rolled around he made it into mainstream news, Tokino Minoru in a race became an event unto itself with people that weren’t interested in horse racing or betting all the way back in 1951.
After that race, Tokino Minoru seemed to have some sort of problem on his leg that persisted into the Nihon Derby, but this didn’t stop the hype behind him. It was the first time the Nihon Derby became such an event, with more than 70.000 people attending the race and the first time a horse race was printed in the same method as regular newspapers, with a rotary press instead of a mimeograph, in order to sell it as soon as it’s out.
People RUSHED to Tokino Minoru after his victory flooding his surroundings and damaging fences in the process. He made THAT MUCH of an impression on people.
He was 10 for 10 and for the first time ever they were considering a racing expedition to the US.
As it’s often the case in these tales, that never happened.
A week or so after the Nihon Derby, Tokino Minoru was reportedly weaker, and as time went on, he wasn’t getting markedly worse but he wasn’t getting any better either, not having much apetite. Slowly, it became clear that Tokino Minoru was suffering from severe tetanus. On June 20th he died of sepsis related to the tetanus, after 12 days of convalescence.
Trainer Tanaka begged for no expense to be spared not knowing that all of the Nihon Derby’s prize money and then some had been used in the treatment. The cause is suspected to actually be that the tetanus bacillus entered from the same hoof cleft that Tokino Minoru had entering the Nihon Derby, probably from his horseshoe.
There is a bright side to all this in that his case was so well-documented that it helped advance research into Tetanus as a whole.
After Tokino Minoru’s death, he was given the nickname of “Phantom Horse”, though “Phantom” doesn’t fully convey the nuance of the nickname.
“幻の馬” (Maboroshi no Uma), “幻” (Maboroshi) can be translated as “phantom” (something illusory), but its meaning is more akin to something… fleeting, a short-lived dream, something majestic and ephemeral that makes you doubt it was real. Which perfectly describes an undefeated horse that left as fast as they came.
Surprisingly, despite forgetting he bought the horse, Nagata mourned his loss so much he pushed for his company (Daiei) to make a movie, resulting in the 1955 flick “Maboroshi no Uma”. Of course, Nagata was also the first one under fire for making Tokino Minoru run despite clearly having some condition on his hoof.
Tokino Minoru was the first horse to be inducted into what’s basically Japan’s horseracing hall of fame, the Kenshouba Seido (顕彰馬制度, “Honorable Horse System”). And as I mentioned before, the Kyoudou Tsuushin Hai was nicknamed “Tokino Minoru Memorial”, the first horse in a club of other eight that have races named after them.
But keen eyes might notice a pattern I’ve written about in the past. Though short lived Tokino Minoru incited a frenzy in people, he was the first horse to break that barrier of horseracing being only for gamblers in some way. It’s not an understatement to say that Haiseiko was only able to create the First Horseracing Boom because 20 years earlier Tokino Minoru showed that it was a thing that people were open to.
Such an important horse would need to be in Uma Musume in some way, right?
Well, that’s a tricky deal. For one, Tokino Minoru didn’t leave anything but a legacy behind. No progeny or anything else. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Tokino Minoru established in many ways the basis from which horse racing eventually became such a different beast in Japan, but despite this he is indeed a phantom.
A flare that burned bright and fast, so bright and fast that you doubt if you even saw them.
A ghost that nonetheless benevolently looks over the current state of Japanese horseracing.
An unassuming entity that you don’t think about as often, and yet without them things wouldn’t work the way they do…
Shame nothing comes to mind for that, perhaps they’ll do something with it someday.