TOKYO -- For 12 years he has stayed one move ahead of the US government he despises, always in motion, hard to corner. But American justice may have finally caught up with Bobby Fischer.

Wanted for defying an American ban on doing business with Yugoslavia in 1992, the onetime world chess champion was arrested by Japanese immigration officials Tuesday as he tried to fly out of Tokyo's Narita airport. Fischer, who was headed to the Philippines, stands accused by the Japanese of traveling on a revoked American passport.

The man often said to possess the world's most brilliant chess mind, and a great eccentric in a game that has many, sits in an airport jail facing deportation and subsequent arrest by US marshals as early as tomorrow.

Returning to the United States in handcuffs would mark a bitter homecoming for the Brooklyn-raised exile. In the 1960s and '70s, Fischer transformed chess from nerdy to sexy and became a Cold War-era hero by vanquishing Boris Spassky, the Soviet Union's best, in the strange but legendary world championship contest of 1972.

He has been a recluse almost since then. Now 61, Fischer has emerged in public only fitfully in recent years, usually to berate the US government for what he regards as its evil foreign policies and to cast himself the victim of persecution by ''world Jewry."

The prospect of a return to face trial on the 1992 charge, which could carry a prison sentence of up to 10 years and a $50,000 fine, looks increasingly probable...