Kazuko Hosoki , a fortune teller and judge on the original Iron Chef, passed away on November 8, 2021.
If you watched any of the many episodes she was a judge in, you know she was very opinionated. She usually judged in place of late Iron Chef judge Asako Kishi. I just finished watching the King Crab Battle with Morimoto vs Tetsuji Iio and was reminded of when she didn’t like her portion of the kelp wrapped King Crab cooked in gravel rock and took the other judges and tried his, ending up enjoying his. She always had her way of judging and was an effective addition to the panel.
According to Ironchefdb, Kazuko Hosoki judged 37 battles, all appearing from 1998 and beyond into the 2000 battles. She also was the author of over 100 books and a winner on the Japanese version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire in 2004.
Savage Turnip
7 January, 2022
About a month ago, @tuthead and I were sent a strongly-worded letter by our site service provider, letting us know that they were getting ready to take action against our sites’ archived content (reasons unspecified, though they were content to be vague). I’ve been working hard over the last month to come up with a good alternative space to keep the materials we do have so that our members will continue to have the same great experience they have had over the past decade. Our articles and posts will remain intact – that’s not a problem. PLEASE NOTE: Some of our other media may temporarily be offline for a short time while we figure out where, how much, and when.
One of the major challenges of sorting through the options is justifying how people will use our materials: we have already been offered some business-level options for $995 a year but there are also lower cost options that probably don’t come with features “called as necessities” by these… whatever the technical website equivalent of new car salesmen are. I believe communities work together better when all the information is shared! Sadly, our service provider did not feel the same way, opting to try to make us handle these serious content changes with short notice.
I’d like your help: We don’t need to overspend for what we have, and the cost of what we’re now being forced to pick up is dependent on how YOU, the users, want to use this site: your site. I’m going to leave a poll up asking for your help to tell us what you think is most important on this site and I look forward to your response. Allez-cuisine!

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Scott Richardson
18 October, 2019
I got this comment from long-time friend of the site Ironnut77 the other day:
I just came across what appears to be a new site (at least I have never seen it before). It is a database for all of the original Iron Chef battles, with PICTURES and all kinds of other goodies!
Iron Chef Battle Database
The site looks very interesting. Give it a look when you have a chance.
To the owner of ICBDB, if you would like to link to any of the episodes or posts on this site, please feel free to do so. And thank you for adding a wonderful resource for the Iron Chef community.
Keith
Scott Richardson
20 March, 2018