By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Rocky Aoki, 69, a flamboyant businessman who parlayed his savings from an ice-cream truck into the international chain of Benihana Japanese steakhouses, known for the showmanship of their knife-tossing chefs, died July 10 in New York. In recent years, he said he had suffered from diabetes, hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver.
Mr. Aoki was an improbable success story who came to the United States from Japan on a wrestling scholarship and got his start in business by renting an ice-cream truck in Harlem, N.Y. He saved $10,000 from his ice-cream sales to open the first Benihana on New York's West 56th Street in 1964. He quickly built it into an international corporation that, at its peak, had about 100 restaurants worldwide.
Although not a trained chef, Mr. Aoki combined traditional Japanese cooking with a theatrical flair that made Benihana enormously popular. He seated customers around a steel-top grill -- a style of cooking called teppanyaki -- and trained his chefs to throw their knives in the air, add seasonings with a flourish and toss shrimp onto their hats.
He also borrowed from the vaudeville showmanship of his father, who had been a tap dancer and actor in Japan before opening an American-style jazz club and coffeehouse before World War II.
"My father was an actor and I was just about weaned on grease paint and the sound of applause," he told the Atlanta Journal.
Mr. Aoki also turned to his father for the name Benihana, which means "red flower" in Japanese. According to family legend, Mr. Aoki's father was walking through Tokyo after a U.S. bombing during World War II and saw a single red flower amid the rubble. He named his new restaurant after that small symbol of hope.
In the 1970s, Mr. Aoki turned to other pursuits, sponsoring powerboat races, Broadway plays and boxing matches and spending lavishly on antique cars and houses. He became a top-ranked speedboat racer, backgammon player, hot-air balloon pilot and driver in long-distance auto rallies.
He was almost killed in 1979, when his boat crashed in the San Francisco Bay, leaving him unconscious in the water with a lacerated liver, ruptured aorta and broken bones.
"I always say, you afraid of dying, you afraid of living also," he told Sports Illustrated in 1982. "Death and life are next to each other anyways."
Mr. Aoki led a complicated personal life, with multiple mistresses and illegitimate children. He once boasted that he had three children the same age, born to three different women.
His business dealings were sometimes questionable, and in 1980 he was charged with insider trading before settling out of court. In 1999, he pleaded guilty to insider trading and was fined $500,000.
His conviction forced him to step down as chairman and chief executive of Benihana. In recent years, he had a protracted legal feud with four of his children, who he said were trying to seize control of his businesses. A series of suits and countersuits were not resolved at the time of his death.
"I want to help my kids," he told New York magazine in 2006, "but I want my children to crawl, to walk, then run on their own. Then I help them. But they can't even crawl. They just collect money and do nothing."
Hiroaki Aoki was born Oct. 9, 1938, in Tokyo and competed in track and field, karate and wrestling at Japan's Keio University before he was expelled for fighting. He was a member of Japan's 1960 Olympic wrestling team and later toured the United States, going undefeated in the 112-pound flyweight class.
After settling in New York, Mr. Aoki won the U.S. flyweight title in 1962, 1963 and 1964 and was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1995. He received an associate's degree from New York City Community College.
In the 1970s, five months after taking up backgammon, Mr. Aoki defeated a former world champion at a tournament. In November 1981, he piloted a helium balloon 5,800 miles across the Pacific Ocean, the longest balloon flight up to that time. He won the inaugural Milan-to-Moscow road rally in 1987, driving a 1959 Rolls-Royce.
Mr. Aoki continually sought new business ventures and sometimes lost big, including a $35 million investment in an Atlantic City hotel and restaurant that never opened. He was more successful with Sushi Doraku, a chain of sushi franchises.
He made sizable donations to medical and environmental causes. When he learned that Benihana used the equivalent of 50 trees' worth of wooden chopsticks in its restaurants each year, he immediately ordered that the chopsticks be made of bamboo instead.
His marriages to Chizuru Kobayashi Aoki and Pamela Hilberger Aoki ended in divorce.
Survivors include his third wife, Keiko Ono Aoki, whom he married in 2002; seven children from his first two wives and other liaisons; and at least four grandchildren.