INQUIRER Sports

TOKYO - The death of Japanese swimming legend Hironoshin Furuhashi has stirred emotions in his country, which drew much inspiration from his stunning run of world records in the years immediately after World War II.

Furuhashi, who was 80, was found dead of heart failure on Sunday in his hotel room in Rome where he had attended the world swimming championships as vice president of the sport's governing body FINA.

Prime Minister Taro Aso said in a statement that "his world record in the 400m freestyle gave a ray of hope to the Japanese when the country was depressed after its defeat in war," Jiji Press reported.

Furuhashi earned the nickname the "Flying Fish of Fujiyama (Mount Fuji)" from a stunned US media when he broke the 400m, 800m and 1,500m marks at the US national championships in 1949.

"Mr. Furuhashi inspired the Japanese people who felt disheartened after the war," Shunichiro Okano, a Japanese member of the International Olympic Committee, told local media.

Daichi Suzuki, who won the 100-metre backstroke gold medal for Japan at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, said: "He told me to 'swim until you become a fish' when he encouraged me during my competitive years. I won't forget that."

Furuhashi retired from competition in 1952 but remained a key figure in the sport, heading the Japanese Olympic Committee from 1990 to 1999 after guiding the national swimming federation.

Last year, when Speedo's high-tech LZR Racer swimsuit helped spark a rush of world records, Furuhashi bluntly said: "It's not the swimsuit that matters. In my days, people swam in fundoshi (loincloths)."

"Everybody should swim in fundoshi," he said.

Born in the Pacific coast city of Hamamatsu in 1928, his early swimming career was halted by World War II.

He lost the tip of his left middle finger in a machine accident at an ammunition factory where he was among the school students mobilised to support the war effort.

Furuhashi overcame the physical handicap as well as poor nutrition and a lack of opportunities to compete after the war ended in 1945. He broke freestyle world records 33 times from 1947.

At the 1947 national championships, he broke the 400m world record, but his time was not ratified because Japan was still excluded from FINA because of its WWII military aggression.

The country was also barred from the 1948 London Olympics. But at a national meet in Tokyo the same year, Furuhashi won the 400 and 1,500 metres freestyle races in world best times, swimming faster than the Olympic champions.

"We only ate sweet potatoes then," he later said. "I was surprised at the slow Olympic results."

In his only Olympic appearance, at the 1952 Helsinki Games, he finished eighth in the 400m, a disappointing performance blamed on his battle with dysentery, which he had contracted during a trip to South America in 1950.