KinchStalker

Taking a break for a couple days before I start on the longest chapter. I've thrust myself so deeply into transcription that I've barely watched any wrestling since the start of February. However, I will leave you guys with a fun little nugget I just found on a post from Igapro's old blog (this article was reproduced on their current site but with this bit taken out): The 1981 RWTL final, where Hansen made his shocking AJPW entrance, was happening at the same time as Fujinami's wedding reception, so that is where Hisashi Shinma (and presumably the others) found out that All Japan had struck back at them. That's amazing, but I pity Fujinami's wife for having their special occasion probably be ruined by the stress of her new husband's coworkers.

I'm on there under my real name, though wrestling isn't a huge part of my social media presence.

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART SEVEN Finally, I have completed transcription of chapter 9, about the Tsuruta/Tenryu feud. It starts with the broad strokes of Tenryu’s early wrestling career, but I think he deserves a bit more from me in this post than that. Tenryu’s autobiography is one of the books that I’ve considered doing a transcription of after the Jumbo bio (though a 2019 Four Pillars bio will probably be my next project if I do this again), but I’d like to add a couple tidbits about his pre-puroresu life. Would any of you be interested in a detour post about SWS? I don’t know if the story of that company has been played out in English-language circles. 1.) Genichiro Shimada’s father, a farmer, responded to the inquiry of a Nisshonoseki stable patron for potential sumo recruits while they were at a barbershop. The future Tenryu would ultimately join in December 1963. Genichiro tried to balance sumo with schoolwork, but his stablemates found out and forced him to cancel his correspondence course. (One of Genichiro’s classmates in junior high was Yasumichi Ai, who became a master rakugo comedian now known by his stage name of San'yūtei Enraku VI. The two remained friends – apparently a Tenryu impression is part of the latter’s repertoire – and this is how Tenryu met Akira Taue.) His famous generosity took after that of two of his elder stablemates: namely, Taihō Kōki–one of the greatest rikishi of the 20th century, and at the time the youngest-ever yokozuna–and Daikirin Takayoshi. (Apparently, Flair took care of him when they crossed paths during his training excursion, which was another influence.) 2.) Tenryu’s decision to leave sumo and start a new chapter was motivated by the succession crisis that the death of his stablemaster created, but was also influenced by personal loss: namely, the death of his girlfriend. Motoko Baba gave him a second-row ticket to the 1976.06.11 Kuramae Kokugikan AJPW show, most famous for holding the Jumbo/Terry NWA title match. The show convinced Tenryu to become a professional wrestler. 3.) Tenryu has said that “Baba made me want to become a professional wrestler, but Jumbo made me want to remain one”. While their fundamental difference in lifestyles meant that they would never become the closest of friends, they hit it off quite well in Tenryu’s early days. Remember, the only relative peers Jumbo had were his three juniors, so someone just a year older than him was a welcome addition. (Here’s an adorable photo of Jumbo playing with Tenryu’s hair after his chonmage-cutting ceremony in December 1976…and another one of the two from the following March in Amarillo.) 4.) However, Tenryu suffered in Jumbo’s shadow for years. Dory remarked that “after three months, he had nothing left to teach Tommy”, but Tenryu just wasn’t such a quick learner. As noted in an earlier post, the weird place Jumbo occupied in the 70s – a #2 guy from the beginning, never less but never more – was further accentuated by how slow the other top prospects (as opposed to guys like Fujinami who started from the bottom), Tenryu and Choshu, were at finding their groove compared to him. 5.) Tenryu and Tsuruta started to become less close around the summer of 1981, shortly after Tenryu settled in Japan for good. Even in the early 80s, Tenryu was the more ambitious one with regards to backstage decisions, and having disagreed with Sato’s reforms for some reason, he tried to get Jumbo to actually use his weight to help him change some things, but to no avail. A public acknowledgment of Tsuruta’s resistance to backstage involvement came in his response to an in-ring “this is no longer the era of Baba and Inoki” promo that Choshu cut in January 1985, where he said that “our era is expressed in our matches”. 6.) The lore around the split of the KakuRyu team states that it roots back to the postmatch of their June 1986 match against the Road Warriors, when Jumbo pulled his partner’s hair to get him back to his feet. Apparently Tenryu blew up at him for his ingratitude, basically stating that he was sick of being his Ricky Morton and getting no respect for it. (Tenryu has said that he also lost respect for Tenryu after a match where, if I read this correctly, Tsuruta was motioning to a photographer to get a good shot of his cobra twist.) After Choshu’s departure, Tenryu was frustrated with Jumbo’s lack of urgency in his work, and went to Baba and said that he was sick of watching Jumbo’s back and babysitting Wajima. It was a break in hierarchy, but uncharacteristically, Baba agreed with Tenryu and allowed him to split from Jumbo, in what would be called the first “bloodless revolution” in puroresu. The bio does not mention this, but I have a speculation that there was possibly another factor in this creative decision. Around this time, Weekly Pro Wrestling head editor Tarzan Yamamoto began to work as an advisor to Baba, and even wrote an “All Japan Reform Proposal”. Yamamoto would later claim that he had convinced Baba to put Misawa over Jumbo – something which I cited in my extensive rewrite of Misawa’s Wikipedia page. (I’m not as proud of my work on it now that I’ve seen a bunch of other sources and the peer review process for good article certification took a lot out of me, but I put months of work into it, and the project that my research is going towards is basically the successor to it.) [2021.10.08 correction: Subsequent information I have gathered makes it clear that Yamamoto was not a creative consultant for Baba until the summer of 1988.] Either way, there’s an interesting undercurrent around this time pertaining to the Japanese wrestling journalism scene. Kagehiro Osano, the writer of this very bio, was actually Tenryu’s reporter for Gong in the 80s, and he has commented that Tenryu was basically the only reason Gong had any real coverage of All Japan in his day. (Jumbo was a very professional and often boring interview, while Tenryu was far more able to give the press what they wanted.) In 1989, Tenryu had a secret meeting with Inoki in Los Angeles, and Osano got the exclusive scoop. Tarzan Yamamoto’s later use of Weekly Pro Wrestling to criticize Tenryu, SWS, and later WAR is well-known (well, about as well-known as any 1990s puro wrestling journalism politics are), and Yamamoto would in fact admit in his autobiography that Baba had paid him to print negative coverage (although Baba would apparently say that he never asked him to go as far as he did), but the tensions started here. 7.) Before the 1987-90 series of seven singles matches, Jumbo and Tenryu had had two prior singles matches which both went to thirty-minute draws. The first was for the 1982 Champion Carnival tournament, the last until 1991. The second happened during a CC tour show the following year, but received no television coverage. In fact, it was part of a card which Baba had hastily rearranged when he learned that network executives would be attending the show to evaluate its worthiness for prime time. 8.) Their 1987.08.31 match drew a 12.4 Nielsen. Their October rematch drew a 9.5, which was still impressive since news of Brody’s interference in the finish had widely spread by its broadcast. 9.) Speaking of Brody, the Budokan show that became the Memorial Night was originally a card that was to be determined by a fan vote. The votes came in, and the top matches were Brody/Hansen for singles, and Jumbo/Brody vs Hansen/Tenryu for tag. The bio claims that Baba was looking forward to going all in on this new matchup possibility, and whatever one might think of an alternate universe where Brody continues working for All Japan for a couple more years, it is an interesting display of the shift in puro fan mentality, and while the Hansen/Tenryu team would later happen on-and-off for eleven months it still feels like a road not taken. 10.) Baba and Sakaguchi met on January 4, 1990 to announce their cooperation. Baba, who had finally gotten the presidential seat back from Mitsuo Mitsune in April 1989, remarked that he was “celebrating his appointment as president” in this way. The common narrative around their meeting is that Jim Herd backed out of the NJPW/WCW Dome show, and that may be true, but there’s something really interesting in this telling of the story. Remember the anti-pullout agreement that Baba and Inoki had signed in December 1985? Well, that still applied, even to gaikokujin (hence why Dick Murdoch couldn’t ever come back to All Japan, and maybe why he ended up doing those Japan indie appearances later on), and even though AJPW had long since left the NWA by this point, Ric Flair was still considered an All Japan gaikokujin by its terms. Sakaguchi wanted Flair, while Baba wanted Steve Williams, and they made each other’s wishes happen, on top of the 1990.02.10 Dome show. (The writing about the show itself is mostly a recap of Jumbo’s match, but apparently Kengo Kimura received some training from Benny “the Jet” Urquidez in 1987?) 11.) The WWF/AJPW/NJPW Wrestling Summit was largely booked by Akio Sato, whom the WWF had hired the previous November as both a wrestler and a coordinator for their vague plans for Japanese expansion. (They had initially sent letters to AJPW and NJPW requesting their cooperation, but received no reply, and a later story claimed that the AJPW letter was accidentally sent to AJW.) Sato returned to work the New Year Giant Series tour in January, during which he also negotiated with Baba as Vince’s representative. Vince’s initial idea was to have the show be a WWF-AJPW coproduction, but it was Baba who proposed that he offer to let Sakaguchi in on it. It was at Choshu’s request, as he was working as NJPW’s on-site manager, that the NJPW wrestlers only wrestled each other on the card, as he wanted to “show their style”. Sato initially considered a Jumbo/Savage match, but instead opted for Tenryu. 12.) Kawada and Fuyuki returned to the “regular army” from Revolution in early 1990. Meanwhile, Tenryu’s tensions with the company increased. Immediately after the March 1990 Budokan show, Tenryu received his offer for contract renewal. He was dissatisfied with the increase in salary, and his attempts to raise the wages of the others who had worked alongside him (as in Footloose and the midcarders aligned with Revolution) fell on deaf ears. Another source of frustration was creative; Tenryu did not see the point in continuing the Jumbo program if Tsuruta was unwilling to escalate the matches further, specifically with blood. He was unaware that Tsuruta was just trying to protect him and others from his disease, and Kyohei Wada was unaware as well, so when Wada told Jumbo of his intentions, and Tsuruta told him to “tell Gen-chan to take it easy on me tonight”, Tenryu saw this as a maddening display of complacency. He would later state that he would have understood if he had been told what was really going on. During the Champion Carnival tour (where Revolution was officially disbanded on the twelfth show), Tenryu was recruited by Kazuo Sakurada for what would become SWS. Three days before the last Jumbo/Tenryu match, in the waiting room of the Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium, Kagehiro Osano was with Tenryu, when he muttered “If I lose to Jumbo, I quit.” He told Osano that he meant he was “going out of business” as opposed to retiring, but told him not to tell anyone. However, this was too big for a reporter to ignore, and he was obligated to print it. The April 25, 1990 issue of Gong had this as its cover…six days after Tenryu lost. The following day, the Gong editor-in-chief [2022.06.09 EDIT: Tsutomu Shimizu] received a call from Motoko Baba. Shohei then took over, and rather than complain about the 4/25 story, told him and Osano that Tenryu was going to Megane Super, under the assumption that Osano already knew (he did not), but requested that they keep things quiet for now, since they had come to “a clean agreement”, and there was the possibility that AJPW and SWS could collaborate in the future through an interpromotional angle. 13.) I’d like to end with some more facts about SWS’s origin. As is known in English-language circles, Hachiro Tanaka’s original plan was to swipe Keiji Mutoh, but there’s a couple interesting things that this Igapro article states. First, Mutoh was approached by Tanaka’s agents in the industry, Kazuo Sakurada and Masa Wakamatsu. Second, the initial plan was not going to be an immediate new organization, but a training camp for young wrestling recruits to create a reserve force. (Former wrestlers would also be accepted during this time, and a percentage of SWS’s profits would be distributed to them as a pension.) It looks like Tenryu wasn’t actively trying to take wrestlers from AJPW, but that “he couldn’t turn down anyone who wanted to come and leave them in limbo”. This led Baba to suspect that Tenryu was using money to destroy All Japan, and led him to pour oil on the fire by paying Tarzan Yamamoto. I do know that Yatsu and Kabuki left the company more due to problems with it than feelings towards Tenryu (even though Kabuki’s favoritism as SWS booker towards Tenryu would cause friction with its other “rooms” – Tenryu had launched a “room system” in SWS inspired by sumo and nonexistent elsewhere in puro – George Takano’s Palaistra and Nagasaki & Wakamatsu’s Dojo Geki).

Igapro has another article about the Riki Sports Palace. It looks like it held weekly events, and became the default venue for televised material. To directly answer your question, if the shows ran a deficit, then that deficit wasn't helped by the other things the Palace had fingers in. It also featured a bowling alley, a top-class restaurant and coffee shop, a sauna, a bodybuilding gym, and clinics and beauty salons, on top of Rikidozan's personal office and the Riki Enterprises headquarters. The Palace was rented out for boxing but I don't know how much that might have helped.

I’m down to the last forty pages of chapter 9, but as a break and for a stopgap release I thought I could compose an extended post about the post-Rikidōzan transitional period of the JWA. The primary source is a pair of Igapro articles (1, 2) with various sources. TL;DR version is that there were some very shady people at the top of the JWA, and Kokichi Endo was a ruthless man. This is definitely some useful context for my JWA coup post near the beginning of the thread. JWA: The Transitional Period The day after Rikidōzan’s death, it was announced at a makeshift wake that his position would be taken over by the council of Toyonobori, who would become the ace in this transitional period, Yoshinosato, Kokichi Endo, and Michiaki Yoshimura. (When referred to as a collective I’ll just call them the council.) This was the decision reached by NTV, sponsor Ken Okubo (of Mitsubishi Electric), Japan Pro-Wrestling Association chairman Yoshio Kodama, and vice chairmen Kazuo Taoka and Hisayuki Machii. ---------------- We have to pause now to talk about the JWA’s connections to the criminal underworld, because I just dropped some *heavy* names. At some point – Haruo Yamaguchi’s 2019 Crowbar Press book Japan: The Rikidōzan Years states that it was after the June 1956 death of Shinsaku Nitta, Rikidōzan’s old sumo patron and initial co-financier of the JWA – Rikidōzan made connections with the aforementioned Kodama, an ultra-right power broker, as well as Liberal Democratic Party vice president Banboku Ōno, who would be named JWA commissioner. Ōno was tied to Nippon Television Network Corporation president and founder Matsutaro Shoriki, as both had worked in the pre-war Ministry of Home Affairs; I presume that this facilitated the connection. Ōno is referred to in Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld as “[one] of Japan’s most Yakuza-tainted politicians”, and in 1963 would make an infamous public address at a reception for Honda-kai godfather Katsuichi Hirata. The Honda-kai was a subgroup of the largest Yakuza organization, the Yamaguchi-gumi, which was then led by the aforementioned Kazuo Taoka. Taoka’s support was necessary for Rikidōzan because he was also head of the dominant Kobe Entertainment Company, and in turn the JWA would become a major revenue source for the Yamaguchi-gumi. Hisayuki Machii was the head of the Tosei-kai Yakuza organization, who was also Taoka’s protégé and one of Rikidōzan’s friends to share his Korean heritage. According to Weekly Pro Wrestling’s 2015 special issue History of Japan Professional Wrestling Case Vol.12, cited in both the Igapro posts this is mainly sourced from and the JWA’s Japanese Wikipedia page, any JWA events held west of Hamamatsu were under Taoka’s influence, Kanto events were Machii’s domain, and events north of Tohoku were the jurisdiction of Kodama’s ally Goichi Okamura. When Rikidōzan died, many thought that professional wrestling in Japan was over, and that NTV would cancel and Mitsubishi would drop its sponsorship. Alas, beyond its viewership the JWA was too important to the criminal underworld to go down like that. ---------------- Back to the story. While the JWA was in the black, Rikidōzan’s Riki Enterprises was very much not, and changes had to be made. The first move was to fire booker the Great Togo, whose demands for large kickbacks were widely seen as extortive.[1] He allegedly tried to take over the JWA himself, even booking himself in the main event against Buddy Austin on December 20, and resisted the firing at first by insisting Rikidōzan had been in his debt. The council disagreed, but reluctantly compensated Togo through solatium and wiped their hands of him, and temporarily instated referee Shikina Oki as booker. (Japan: The Rikidōzan Years mentions a rumor that this was in exchange for Togo’s oath never to work in Japanese wrestling again, but if this were the case he would break it in a few years with his early involvement with and failed coup of the IWE.) In January 1964, Rikidōzan’s widow Keiko Momota, a stewardess he had only married the previous June, was appointed president. However, while this would not become public knowledge until the JWA’s demise, the council then established a separate company with a nearly identical name (日本プロ・レスリング興業株式会社, as opposed to 日本プロレスリング興業株式会社 – essentially “Nihon Pro-Wres” instead of “Nihon Puroresu”). The new company would get the box office and broadcasting rights, while Keiko was stuck with all her husband’s debts. She was only useful to the JWA in that the public appearance of Rikidōzan’s family’s cooperation was vital to continuing the NTV and Mitsubishi contracts, and the council hoped the new company would convince them that they had inherited Rikidōzan. The book was transferred from Oki to Mr. Moto. This facilitated a shift in how the JWA did business with America. In Rikidōzan’s day, the JWA’s connections to America were facilitated by Honolulu’s Mid-Pacific Promotions (later and better known as Big Time Wrestliing), headed by Al Karasick, and NWA San Francisco, headed by Joe Malcewicz. Rikidōzan would lean more towards the latter as time went on, due to Karasick’s investments (assisted by theatrical company Yoshimoto Kogyo, now an entertainment conglomerate which represents most of Japan’s TV comedians) and schemes to take Japan over himself. [Major correction 2021.09.09: In 1962, however, Rikidozan approached Jules Strongbow for a run with the World Wrestling Association title that the promoter had created upon his departure from the NWA, and used his iron grip on the press to convince the Japanese public that this World Wrestling Association belt was more prestigious than the NWA World Heavyweight title.] In this new era, Mr. Moto would continue this connection with the WWA, to make that the JWA’s new go-between with the American industry. The first snag against the wishes of the council was the return of Giant Baba from his American excursion. Toyonobori was not fond of Baba, but NTV overruled him on this one. Baba had been managed by Togo in America, but by this time Baba had distanced himself from him in distrust, so Toyonobori couldn’t use that as an excuse. Soon though, a much bigger problem arose. Bamboku Ōno, who had been hospitalized since January, died of cardiac arrest that May. In February, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department began to spearhead what would be a five-year crackdown on the Yakuza, and while Ōno’s connections to the Yamaguchi-gumi had initially been a buffer between them and the police, now he was gone. The police knew that the JWA brought a lot of money to the org, and they set their sights. Ōno’s LDP successor Shojiro Kawashima would also take his place as JWA commissioner, but while the two had similar backgrounds and politics he doesn’t seem to have been nearly as deep in the underworld. But Kodama, Taoka, and Machii were still problems, and the JWA’s personnel would be renewed in acquiescence with the pressures of law enforcement. All three men would leave their chairs in early 1965 as their terms expired. Some crazy shit very nearly went down in response. You know that 1965.02.26 WWA title match between Toyonobori and the Destroyer? Well, what if I told you that 1,300 Tosei-kai members tried to storm the venue in protest of Machii’s resignation? They were met by riot police, but the fear that shots would be fired was a real one, and while nothing states this, the idea that Toyonobori and Destroyer might have gone to a broadway to give the cops as much kayfabe time as possible to get the situation under control cracks me up. Machii would be forced to disband the Tosei-kai that year, but its successor, the Toa-kai, is active to this day. After the Toyonobori/Destroyer match, Keiko Momota stepped down from her position. This marked the beginning of a period where the WWA title essentially became the JWA’s top singles belt, as the NWA International Heavyweight and Asian Heavyweight championships still belonged to the Momotas. The council was no longer tethered to Rikidōzan. It was, alas, a perfect time for the beginning of their end. Toyonobori had had a gambling problem since before Rikidōzan’s death. In fact, this had led to some financial troubles between the two towards the end, and it was at Kodama and Taoka’s behest that he became involved in the new regime, not because Rikidōzan had pegged him as a potential successor. When he became president he ended up passing his duties onto vice president Yoshinosato, while taking money out of the company vault to fund his addiction. He wasn’t the only sketchy one backstage. The accounting was sloppy; the future Great Kabuki told a story that when he was laid off and received a severance package, but was then kept on by Yoshinosato, the company refused to accept the money back. Kokichi Endo, meanwhile, was taking full advantage of the sloppiness to line his own pockets. Toyonobori formed his own little squad within the JWA called the Hayabusa Corps, consisting of Takachiho, the Great Kojika, Kantaro Hoshino, and Ushinosuke Hayashi (best known as Mr. Hayashi). The Hayabusa Corps were at the center of a memorable episode pertaining to Endo. A printing company which worked with the JWA (I wonder if this is the same one that later allegedly tipped off Endo to the JWA coup attempt) was to promote a Ventures concert, but then Toyonobori got the rights and entrusted them to the Hayabusa Corps…before Endo intercepted, swiped the rights at the last minute and got the money. For his cunning, Toyonobori sicced the Corps on Endo, who beat the shit out of him and forced him to apologize. [2021.05.18 addition: according to an Igapro article about Tokyo Pro Wrestling, the younger wrestlers were the ones who were supposed to have received the profits from the concert.] Toyonobori started acting up as WWA champion, refusing to defend the belt in its home territory because, while he could handle a flight to Hawaii, the continental US was just too much. The WWA began using a spare belt, the California State Heavyweight title, in response, and when the Japanese wrestling press reported on this, Toyonobori finally manned up and went to LA for a unification match. The first match saw him go over Luke Graham, but in a rematch, Toyonobori got disqualified and, over (presumably kayfabe) protests, the title changed hands. If the WWA title had remained in Japan, they might have jeopardized their WWA relationship. After giving it up, the JWA planned to revive the promotion’s old title, but instead of Toyonobori, they chose Baba. Endo and the like didn’t share Toyonobori’s dislike of Baba, and now that Toyonobori was no longer WWA champion they decided to start getting him out of the picture. An embezzlement investigation led to Toyonobori losing favor and becoming isolated. I can’t find out exactly what the JWA did to get the NWA International Heavyweight title back. The source I’m taking this from doesn’t state if they resolved their dispute with the Momotas, and also implies that they somehow went to the NWA itself (despite what the list of NWA territories Wikipedia page says, it appears that the JWA wasn't actually a full member by this point). [Major correction 2023.01.30: the new NWA International Heavyweight title was originally certified through the WWA, because it was cheaper. It would not be the NWA International title for several years.] Either way, Baba got the belt in November 1965 when he went over the man that Rikidōzan had wanted to bring over to Japan but hadn’t gotten in time: Dick the Bruiser. The next January, Toyonobori was dismissed. Publicly the reason given was as kidney disease, but it was really his gambling addiction, and the likes of the just-as-dirty Endo turning on him. Vice President Yoshinosato would move up to the presidential chair. Meanwhile, Endo took this opportunity to start cleaning out anything that still bore Rikidōzan’s name, and proceeded to sell the Riki Sports Palace, which Rikidōzan had mortgaged to finance his business Riki Enterprises. It was this issue that led to sales manager Isao Yoshihara, who still believed that a permanent wrestling venue had value to the company, leaving the JWA to then form the IWE. Yoshihara had tried to buy the venue, but Endo sabotaged this by claiming that Yoshihara was going to do this to buy out the JWA itself.

My range of wrestling history knowledge is pretty narrow, so I don't know how much this will contribute to the discussion, but I think I think the simplest way to put it is that NJPW made a colossal mistake in booking Brody to be *the* gaijin star, even if changes in the American landscape had made that their only option. The wisdom of Baba (and by extension, NTV-imposed booker Akio Sato, who occupied the position from mid-1981 through 1984) was to try as much as possible to book a gaijin of equal or comparable stature alongside Brody. This was a major reason why it would have been so important to acquire Hansen when Abby jumped ship; Snuka sure wasn't going to fill that void. This might be pedantic, but I think that the "Baba didn't want Brody to job" narrative, while in keeping with how he would book the Road Warriors, might have been a bit closer to "Baba gave Brody the room to be booked as he wanted because of a general compatibility between Baba's gaijin-on-top booking mentality and Brody's selfishness, but always made sure that Brody wasn't the singular star". (Note: Baba had apparently known that Brody was likely to jump ship before he did so, but didn't try to stop him because, at that point, Hansen and Choshu were more popular.)

Nippon TV's three-year plan saw the transition happen gradually and indirectly. I've never read anyone state this, but I suspect that part of why the Champion Carnival tournament was put on ice after 1982 (until 1991) was to avoid forcing Jumbo to face him directly again. Jumbo was retooled in 1982/3 to be the clearly ascending ace (between the black trunks to reference Rikidozan and adopting the signature moves of Thesz), but even in 1984 they were going to time-limit draws in tag matches. He only went over him in the 1984 RWTL because Rusher Kimura turned on Baba and the match was thrown out.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the (apparently terrible) NES overhead shooter where you play a caveman that transforms into Choshu with a powerup. Sadly this was lost in localization, but we at least have Choshu advertising the game by flashing his pecs.

JAPAN PRO WRESTLING, PART TWO (THE AJPW YEARS) Before I go radio silent for a while to get the first of two mammoth chapters transcribed, here is a second post about JPW and what ultimately tore them apart. These are my attempts to chronicle events laid out in a series of Igapro posts, sourced from Vol. 47 of G Spirits magazine, the Nihon Sports Publications book Showa Pro Wrestling Restoration, and Kenta Tasaki’s biography of Choshu. This is by far the biggest headache I’ve ever had trying to write a coherent narrative in this thread, and I honestly doubt I pulled it off. ---------------- JPW formally joined AJPW as a satellite promotion in January 1985, and completed their Tokyo dojo around this time. It was at its opening where Naoki Otsuka and Riki Choshu’s respective positions as JPW chairman and president were announced. However, the real head honchos were Otsuka and Katsushi Takeda, the NJPW Entertainment investor I mentioned in the first JPW post, who had also footed the bill for everyone’s salaries. Choshu’s function was only really that of an on-site supervisor. Neither Baba nor Choshu were in the loop when Otsuka grabbed the Calgary Hurricanes, and Choshu was not happy about it. He didn’t want JPW’s relationship with New Japan to go even more sour than it was already, and to him this went against Otsuka’s stated ideal for JPW to be “a ring not controlled by Baba and Inoki”. Baba became wary and made an aggressive move, demanding that JPW’s workers signed contracts with him in exchange for an increase in the NTV broadcasting rights fee. JPW resisted this at first, but their events were not successful despite having borrowed All Japan talent, and negotiations for their own television presence on TBS (yes, the network that originally carried the IWE) broke down. Alas, JPW had to accept AJPW’s conditions to make up for the hit on their business, as well as pare down their events to one-off shows. On December 15, 1985, the 23rd anniversary of Rikidōzan’s death, Baba and Inoki met at his grave to sign an anti-pullout agreement between their respective promotions, with lawyers on both sides as witnesses. (Chikara Momota, grandson of Rikidōzan, shared a great photo from this meeting, with him in his father Mitsuo’s arms alongside Baba, Inoki, and Jumbo.) As a result of this, the Calgary Hurricanes were forced to revert to technically being New Japan talent until their contracts expired in March. Even then, Otsuka’s intent to use them to make JPW an independent promotion was dashed when they too were forced to sign with All Japan through the collective JPW agreement. In 1986, further cracks in the JPW-AJPW relationship formed. 1986 marked the beginning of the Japanese asset price bubble, whose bursting in 1992 would be a major factor in what would initially become known as Japan’s Lost Decade, although subsequent difficulties would lead some commentators to stretch this out to the Lost 20, and then 30 years. Anyway, as the value of the JPW headquarters building went up, and all that money went into Takeda’s pocket, the talent grew resentful of the fact that he was receiving money both from JPW and from the property. The higher-ups, meanwhile, were frustrated with the wrestlers because they already had higher wages than those which New Japan had paid them. As these conflicts began, Choshu was approached by JPW managing director Kazuyoshi Kato, who was also the head of JPW’s entertainment division, which is what Riki Production had officially become. Kato and Otsuka had been sales rivals during their tenures in New Japan, but they had joined forces in the coup attempt and subsequent JPW formation as their interests aligned. However, he now bristled over not being allowed to use JPW’s head office, and became Choshu’s confidant. After the Osaka show on September 3, 1986, Baba and Takeda held a meeting to determine what was to be done about their profits not increasing despite their number of events doing so. Takeda stated that he only needed Choshu and Yatsu, and would restructure the rest to desaturate the roster and improve match quality. Takeda wasn’t just unpopular with the boys for meddling in their financial affairs; now he was trying to exert creative influence as well. Rumors had been circulating for as long as the infighting had begun in 1986 that Choshu was considering a jump back to New Japan. He publicly denied it, but had stated off the record that he had met with Fujinami around this time, and Inoki had even claimed that Choshu had wanted to participate in the October 9, 1986 NJPW event. Meanwhile, Baba was using Jumbo, Tenryu, Hansen, and most recently, Hiroshi Wajima to keep Choshu in check. On January 8, 1987 Otsuka met with former NJPW external relations head Toyohisa Sugita at the JPW headquarters. New Japan’s partnership with the UWF did not do the business they had wanted, and World Pro Wrestling was moved from its Friday primetime slot to a worse Monday slot that often saw it preempted and taken off the air by special programs. They wanted help, and TV Asahi, by now in control of New Japan, probably wanted Choshu back. Otsuka did not answer due to his affiliation with All Japan, but he did accept Inoki’s request for a meeting when Sugita passed it along. Choshu was also invited, and accepted. Inoki’s original intent was to get all of JPW back, but when Otsuka and Choshu came to meet him at New Japan headquarters, his focus narrowed. Otsuka would regret bringing Choshu along as Inoki offered Riki 100 million yen to return. After this meeting, Choshu began to seriously consider returning home. The day after their meeting, an NJPW director named Tetsuo Baisho, who was a drinking buddy of Choshu’s, approached Kazuyoshi Kato. Baisho had been deposed by Otsuka during the 1983 coup attempt, and while he had since been reinstated, he was determined to make sure Otsuka never worked for New Japan again. They began to plan to draw a separate line to bring Choshu back to NJPW through Sugita instead of Otsuka. On January 17, after defending the PWF title against Curt Hennig in his hometown, Choshu made waves when he namedropped Fujinami on live television during his postmatch interview with Kenji Wakabayashi. He was supposed to meet with Fujinami and Sakaguchi in Fukuoka afterwards, with Otsuka, Eigen, and Sugita also present. Choshu suddenly claimed the meeting had been canceled, but this seemed to be a misdirection as he went to meet with Sakaguchi anyway. By this point he felt that he had gone as far as he could go in All Japan, and the returning Masa Saito’s intentions to join back up with New Japan were also a factor in JPW’s internal tensions. Around this time Baba would learn from Haruka Eigen about what was going on inside JPW. On February 3, he made his move, and approached Choshu and Yatsu to sign directly with All Japan instead of through JPW, breaking their promise to Otsuka. Choshu would take a break from here due to poor health, but he would later state that he had been “weighing the scales’, waiting out to see what would happen between AJPW, NJPW, and JPW. By this time, though, he was trying to convince Yatsu to come with him back to New Japan. However, Yatsu had already decided to stay, as despite his membership in Ishingun and ostensible support of Choshu, he was personally wary both of him and of NJPW. Outwardly, Choshu apologized to Baba for bailing before the Excite Series had ended, and promised to participate in the coming Champion Carnival tour, which as JPW president he was obligated to do. He also instructed Inoki to abide by the anti-pullout agreement. However, Choshu announced at a JPW general meeting that while he would return for the Carnival, he would also end his affiliation with All Japan at the end of March to become a true independent. He professed that JPW would essentially return to its original intended form, as an independent promotion in which wrestlers from either promotion could participate due to series-by-series contracts with AJPW and NJPW. Yatsu and Eigen protested, and accused Choshu of using this plan as merely a pretext to eventually just make JPW part of New Japan again. And needless to say, Baba was having none of it. JPW’s contract with All Japan stipulated that they were required to give six months’ notice if they declined to renew, and JPW were still considered All Japan talent under the anti-pullout agreement of 1985. So All Japan would have to be the ones to break their contract if JPW workers would ever be able to set foot inside a New Japan ring again. On top of this, there was no way that NJPW would agree to separate Otsuka and Choshu (despite Baisho’s attempts to the contrary). The day before March 26, when Saito was slated to appear for New Japan once again, Choshu appeared at some reception and handed him a contract to withdraw from the Carnival. At this point Choshu himself was apparently still intending to participate in the Carnival. But then, Baba was told by Otsuka that it would be difficult for Choshu to do so, went to the JPW headquarters the day before the tour began. There, he demanded that Choshu and the others withdraw their independence and sign a new contract with All Japan, including Saito. On the first day of the Carnival tour, as Otsuka and Takeda were out of town, Choshu holed up in the company headquarters intending to boycott with the following JPW employees: Saito, Kuniaki Kobayashi, Isamu Teranishi, Nobuo Yasunaga, Masanobu Kurisu, Shinji Sasazaki, Kensuke Sasaki, Tiger Hattori, Super Strong Machine, and Hiro Saito. Choshu did not want to lose his line with New Japan, so he was not going to acquiesce to Baba’s demands. The Calgary Hurricanes, while independent, were essentially a JPW subsidiary, and with the exception of Shunji Takano, whom Baba liked and was currently working in America, they felt they had gone as far as they could go in AJPW and were ready to return to New Japan. But then, Masanobu Kurisu broke away and went to Korakuen Hall, where All Japan were to hold their show. He had no interest in returning to New Japan, and had only ever joined JPW in the first place due to his admiration of Otsuka. On March 30, Otsuka and Takeda announced Choshu’s expulsion from New Japan. This left him free to return to NJPW, but now apparently he could not receive the 100 million yen which Inoki had promised. He had no bargaining power anymore, and had probably incurred a penalty fee for his actions, so he only got 10 million yen. (Choshu apparently denies this, for the record.) Teranishi left Choshu’s faction. While Hamaguchi remained at Choshu’s side, he decided to retire as he “had promised he would retire if he caused trouble” when he joined JPW. Killer Khan was working in the WWF at this point, and was so disappointed by the news of JPW’s split that he retired. Hiroshi Hase, who was training overseas in Calgary, was asked by Choshu to return and come with him. His fellow JPW trainee on excursion, Fumisuke Niikura, was left behind because Eigen had invited him to join All Japan already. When Choshu returned to New Japan, he did so through the base of Riki Production, which I guess was its own thing again (still headed by his buddy Kato). But as he did so without resolving matters with All Japan, both Baba and Otsuka hardened their stance. Apparently it was somehow due to this that World Pro Wrestling changed its timeslot once again to Tuesday nights, and they were unable to broadcast Choshu’s matches until October even though other ex-JPW guys gradually got back on television before him. Eventually Choshu and company signed directly with New Japan again, but Kato was unable to return alongside them and Riki Production was disbanded. After Yatsu and the rest of the JPW holdouts signed directly with All Japan, Otsuka had no wrestlers left. They terminated their relationship with All Japan after the August 31, 1987 Budokan show, and after an AJW event that they had been contracted to promote, they disbanded entirely. Otsuka would leave the business entirely until, after the NOAH exodus, he offered his services to Motoko Baba as an outside consultant.

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART SIX Here we go with chapter 8. 1.) There’s a linguistic note that I think is worth making about JPW’s name, as Japan Pro Wrestling sounds more generic than it originally came off when divorced from context. See, their name was *literally* Japan in katakana (ジャパン), rather than the Nihon (日本) that AJPW and NJPW had in their Japanese names. 2.) Choshu claims that Akio Nojima never directly tried to court him towards All Japan, though the biography maintains that All Japan was first to approach him. However, like Tsuruta his decision to join New Japan was perhaps influenced by his stomach, as he was treated by NET TV’s athletic director and future NJPW managing director to a top-class steak-and-sukiyaki dinner. ("Wrestlers eat like this every day?" "Uh, they sure do kiddo.") Whatever the case, it’s made clear as the chapter ends that, whatever RIki Choshu’s gripes towards Jumbo, Mitsuo Yoshida had genuine respect for Tsuruta from the beginning, and had even gotten second-row seats alongside the rest of his wrestling team to one of Jumbo’s first All Japan shows. 3.) I really wish this bio didn’t wait until halfway through to drop this trivia, but Jumbo’s jumping knee was inspired by that which was used by kickboxer Tadashi Sawamura. (Here’s a clip of the genuine article.) Sawamura was popular enough to receive his own anime, and he would later be immortalized in Pokémon as the original namesake of the species which players such as myself would come to know as Hitmonlee. [Note 2021.04.13: Three weeks after this post, Sawamura died of lung cancer at the age of 78.] 4.) The author, who was working for Gong by this time, recalled in January 1985 that All Japan vetoed their intent to put Choshu on the cover, since Jumbo is the ace of AJPW and don’t you forget it. (I was looking at the covers on the preview function of Weekly Pro Wrestling’s site, and had been puzzled by AJPW-era Choshu’s initial absence from covers despite objectively being the biggest story. This explains it.) 5.) There’s some really interesting stuff about Yoshiaki Yatsu here. While he was preparing for the Moscow Olympics, in which the US-led boycott would prevent him from competing, he worked at the Ashikaga Institute of Technology’s high school, where he was active in the coaching of Misawa and Kawada. He was broken into the business in a way that was unusually Americanized for a New Japan talent of the time. Instead of being sent to Gotch’s house, he was trained first by Pat Patterson and then Hiro Matsuda. From here he would work on-and-off in the Louisiana and Florida territories in the early 80s, where he ended up making the acquaintance of several All Japan guys, such as Kabuki, Sakurada, and Fuchi. A year-and-a-half before he made his debut in an All Japan ring, he worked on a World Class show in June 1983 where Baba, Jumbo, and Tenryu also performed, and Baba booked him and Jumbo to share a hotel room, where they talked until the morning about their careers. 6.) The Jumbo/Choshu singles match was originally scheduled for August 5, 1985, as part of JPW’s third tour, the Summer Dream Festival. (In kayfabe this appears to have been the result of a brawl that broke out between the two in a press conference leading up to the June 21 Budokan show, when Choshu got pissed about Jumbo’s reaction about not getting to wrestle Choshu in a singles match. Basically he saw it as emblematic of Jumbo’s air of superiority.) The bio doesn’t mention this, but my suspicion is that they wanted this match to happen on this tour because this was the first JPW tour to get Nippon TV coverage. (All we have of the first two tours are handhelds.) In kayfabe this would be further delayed due to the events of the match on August 2, a KakuRyu vs. Choshu/Khan tag wherein the latter inflicted a worked injury on Tsuruta. On August 5, Tsuruta was admitted to the Keio University hospital. If you’ve watched through the 1985 AJPW television, you might have noticed that starting in late May, Jumbo began wearing a supporter on his right elbow. Here he learned the cause of the pain: acute osteoarthritis and delayed ulnar nerve palsy. That day, he underwent a three-hour surgery. His right knee joint did suffer a hematoma due to the August 2 match, but physical therapy was sufficient. These weren’t serious injuries, but it was during the blood tests that Tsuruta learned something far worse. He carried the hepatitis B virus, through matrilineal transmission. In late 1986, he began taking interferons to fight it off.

Chapter 8 is nearly complete, by the way. I wish to let you all know that my output is going to slow a bit, because this biography is almost comically backloaded. Chapters 9 and 10 (of 11), which are about the Revolution and Chosedaigun (AKA Super Generation Army) era, are 87 and 97 pages respectively. While I could split these chapters into two parts, the fact that this biography isn’t really a beat-by-beat chronicle makes me feel that it’s best just to complete the chapters and knock out the interesting info in single posts. I intend to make up for the coming silence by making another post which will go into greater detail about JPW and Choshu and company’s return to NJPW.

Yeah, I saw that, though I must admit that I wasn't thinking about the chikan phenomenon specifically. (I know I've heard of it before, but it didn't register.) There's this one guy who puts out comic strips of puro stories (sadly, his strip on the time Shinya Hashimoto did public Batman cosplay is the closest thing I can find to an actual picture) and I saw his about that.

Choshu and Kobashi finally fought each other one-on-one...in Street Fighter II.

I suspect the widows of puro get a bad rap in general to some extent, probably going all the way back to Keiko Momota.

You’re right. I know it's a cultural norm. My perception of the story might have been colored a bit by some speculation I’ve seen on the Japanese web surrounding her actions, running with how the guy who arranged the surgery didn’t get all of the payment because the operation was a failure (and because the hospital director gave his medical opinion to the press), and his claims that Yasuko not only wasn’t present when he died, but was also exchanging business cards in the hospital that day, which made him suspicious of the foundation she started. Maybe she had wanted to work again?

JAPAN PRO WRESTLING, PART ONE (FORMATION AND NJPW SPLIT) I’m about 10 pages into chapter 8, about the JPW era of AJPW, but as a lead-in to that post I thought that I should go into greater detail than the bio itself does about the story of JPW’s formation. My posts have tended to be more about the non-New Japan side of puro history, since my personal project pertains to All Japan specifically, but this post should help make up for that a bit. What would eventually become Japan Pro Wrestling was a result of the extended fallout from the unsuccessful coup attempt in August 1983, when Inoki’s financial abuse of his position was revealed. I don’t know how well-known the actual affair is in English-language circles, so I’m going to go into it. ----------- In 1980, Inoki founded Anton Heisel (I don’t know the meaning of the Heisel part, but I do know that Anton is derived from Antonio), a biotech startup with the cooperation of the Brazilian government focused on the production of ethanol from sugarcane bagasse. This had really taken off in Brazil in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis, when its government financed a program to phase out fossil fuels in automobiles. This manifested in the ethanol-gasoline blends now sold in the country. There were, as there continue to be, great concerns about the pollutant effects of bagasse conversion to ethanol (specifically the aldehydes produced in alcohol oxidization), but Inoki was convinced that they were manageable. Sure, livestock which are fed recycled bagasse are prone to diarrhea, but Inoki logic saw that as a good thing because that meant more fertilizer. Inoki could solve the food crisis! He couldn’t. Japanese climates couldn’t facilitate the fermentation process of such organic fertilizer effectively. This enterprise ended up hitting Inoki’s wallet even harder due to Brazilian inflation. To recoup the billions he had lost, Inoki got TV Asahi to pledge 1.2 billion yen in broadcasting rights as collateral, but it wasn’t enough. (The debt would eventually be transferred to Kiyoshi Sagawa, founder and then-chairman of delivery company Sagawa Express, in exchange for stock certificates.) What seems to have led to the coup attempt was NJPW’s June 1983 shareholders’ report, which reported a profit margin of a mere 26 million yen on nearly 2 billion yen in sales, with a carryover profit of 7.2 million and no shareholder dividends. ----------- Back to the story. In December 1983, NJPW sales manager and coup conspirator Naoki Otsuka resigned from his post to form New Japan Pro-Wrestling Entertainment. The name was transferred to him by Inoki, which he did to “keep the New Japan name” even if the promotion itself was taken over by TV Asahi. Investors included Haruka Eigen and eventual JPW chairman Katsushi Takeda. Choshu would quickly become closer to Otsuka than New Japan proper, as his private production company, RIki Production, was entrusted to New Japan Pro-Wrestling Entertainment to operate. Cracks soon formed in the relationship between the ostensible sister companies. Inoki was not present at NJPW Entertainment’s founding party, which led to distrust from Otsuka. NJPW Entertainment, rather than NJPW itself, organized a Fujinami/Choshu match on February 3, 1984. I can’t tell you exactly how they did this, but it clearly didn’t help their relationship, as Inoki began to suspect that Otsuka planned to take over event booking and monopolize profits. Choshu’s own relationship with the company would deteriorate. The source I’m taking this from kayfabes it as manifesting in his interference in the June 14 Inoki/Hogan match, where he hit Hogan with a lariat. To put it mildly, the fans did not like that. However, I think it’s reasonable to suspect that this was true in a different way: namely, that Choshu did not like this angle or at least its result. Hogan got to go back to the WWF without any real damage, and Inoki’s kayfabe supremacy prevailed. After this tour, NJPW Entertainment arranged an event at the Denen Coliseum on August 26, but New Japan cancelled. This is where Giant Baba enters the picture. Either Otsuka, who thought NJPW was harassing him, or Baba, who respected Otsuka’s acumen as a salesman, sought contact with the other through the go-between of Gong magazine’s Kosuke Takeuchi. Now, it must be made clear that this was not Otsuka jumping sides; as he ran an entertainment company, either he believed or Baba convinced him that he could play with both sides. But when the Denen event was revived as an AJPW event, NJPW obviously saw it as betrayal. As NJPW’s Summer Fight Series began, Yoshiaki Fujiwara and Nobuhiko Takada jumped ship to the UWF. Choshu would also be offered a UWF contract, but Otsuka reported this to New Japan, who then moved to offer an exclusive contract with TV Asahi, in an attempt to both curb Shinma’s attempt and to separate Choshu from Otsuka. Two months later on August 24, just after the company had returned from Pakistan, Otsuka was handed his notice by Inoki himself. After the scheduled events through Septemer, the two companies’ dealings would cease. Two days after the AJPW Denen show, Otsuka notified New Japan that he was leaving, and that he was going to pull everybody except Inoki and Sakaguchi with him. In fact, the day after receiving his notice, Kuniaki Kobayashi had asked Otsuka if he was quitting. After this, Otsuka received a call from Choshu to meet him at his apartment, and when he did so he found Kobayashi, Yoshiaki Yatsu, Animal Hamaguchi, and Isamu Teranishi were also present. It was here when Otsuka made his offer to Choshu to come along with him and “break new ground”. Ishingun would proceed to participate in the Bloody Fight Series, but Choshu approached Sakaguchi to request that he and Yatsu take an expedition to the WWF to refresh themselves. At this point the cracks in the promotions’ relationship had obviously begun to form, but Vince hadn’t totally burned the bridge by jacking up the fee yet. So this appealed to Sakaguchi because Choshu would not only be separated from Otsuka, but could also help repair their relationship with what had been their most fruitful American partnership. Sakaguchi announced backstage on September 18 that Choshu would be going on expedition, and Ishingun vowed to unite with Inoki. However, three days later, Ishingun held a press conference at the Capital Tokyo Hotel. (I believe this photo is from that conference.) Ten minutes beforehand, they had collectively submitted their notice to New Japan and announced they were joining Otsuka. Baba was not a part of the conference, but he showed up and stated that All Japan would be ready to accept them if they approached. Then, even more of the New Japan roster would align with Otsuka. These included Eigen, who as previously mentioned had been one of NJPW Entertainment’s investors, and Otsuka’s friends Masanobu Kurisu, Nobuo Yasunaga, Shinichi Nakano, and Fumihiro Niikura. Killer Khan then joined at Otsuka’s invitation, and Masa Saito and referee Tiger Hattori did the same at Choshu’s request. Katsushi Takeda put up the money for everyone’s contracts. At this point, NJPW Entertainment merged with Riki Production to form Japan Pro. Before Ishingun’s dramatic entrance into AJPW on December 8, 1984, Japan Pro also arranged the British Bulldogs’ ship-jumping to become AJPW gaijins, starting with the RWTL. The next year, they would also lure over the Calgary Hurricanes: Super Strong Machine, Hiro Saito, and Shunji Takano. (This is skipping ahead a bit, but I know that in late 1985 AJPW and NJPW would sign a no-pulling – or as machine translation hilariously puts it sometimes, no-pullout – agreement. This is why Dick Murdoch never came back to All Japan, even though he apparently wanted to.)

Initially misread this as a Scorpio partner, and instantly thought of Kobashi in Bagwell's place alongside 2 Cold, dancing to his theme, while donning the suit that he wore on that 1997 TV appearance where he, Misawa, and Kawada covered Japanese boy band SMAP. Didn't Heyman claim once that he almost got Kobashi vs Misawa for Heatwave '98? Assuming it wasn't hot air, that's the only context I could possibly see Kobashi in 90s America. (Then again, that would've had Misawa's first match post-break be a singles match in another country. Fat chance.)

This match is from the 1981 Champion Carnival, and it is my belief that it is the last televised singles match between Baba and Jumbo. (They would have one more in the tournament the following year - after which it was put on ice until 1991 - but this did not make broadcast.) The copy in circulation is clipped to the four-minute mark, but this still gives us much more of this match than we received of their 1980 Carnival match, so I am fine with it all things considered. The fact that this is a tournament draw in 1981 dooms this to being less substantive than the best of their singles matches, which were the first two. However, this does feel of a piece with the aforementioned 1980 match, and is interesting on those terms. If extended grind-down sessions on the mat are not your thing then this isn't a match that you're likely to be too hot on, but it worked for me. Neither man can grind the other down, but neither are willing to make a wide swing to jeopardize their standings. Not the best thirty-minute singles draw to come from early 80s All Japan by any means, but it was exactly what it needed to be. ***1/4

Not really. The closest he came was the 1989 RWTL match (alongside Rusher Kimura) against Ryukanhou, in which Tenryu got the pin in a total aberration of All Japan hierarchy. As I've been recounting in my history thread, the torch-passing from Baba to Jumbo in the early 80s was the doing of Nippon TV, and that never involved Baba putting Tsuruta over. After Hansen beat him for the PWF title that last time in 1985 his biggest singles matches were old-man bouts against Kimura and a couple nostalgia matches against Abby and Singh. So in Misawa's defense, him going over Jumbo was really something that Baba (note that Weekly Pro Wrestling editor Tarzan Yamamoto - whom Baba later paid to print negative coverage of Tenryu post-exodus - claimed he had a hand in convincing Baba to put Misawa over) only did once.

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART FIVE I have finished transcription of chapter 7. This is one of the lighter chapters on new information overall, as it spends a lot of time recapping matches, but there is still some stuff worth sharing. The next chapter will be about the Ishingun period. 1. Jumbo’s switch to black trunks, first seen in the 1982.06.08 Flair match, was the decision of one of the television producers. To make the subtext explicit, this was to recall Rikidōzan, just as the change of his signature moves was to recall Thesz. In this way, Jumbo made a symbolic break from the shadow of the Funks and Amarillo, which his moves and starred trunks had evoked. 2. At one point, one of the network people told Jumbo he wanted to see a “real” Thesz-style backdrop. He proceeded to do one in a singles match against Harley Race, and Race blew up at him backstage afterward. (This reminds me of the story of Harley chewing Jumbo out after his first NWA title match against Flair, for suplexing the champ before the finish.) 3. Verne Gagne originally wanted Baba to be Nick Bockwinkel’s opponent on what would be the February 23, 1984 AWA title match. (There is actually some logic to this, since Jumbo had received four unsuccessful shots at Bockwinkel from 1979-83, while Baba had only wrestled him once in a 1980 RWTL tour singles match.) However, both president Mitsuo Mitsune and television producer Akira Hara wanted Jumbo to finally win the belt. While this book does not go so far as to acknowledge wrestling’s worked nature, Akio Sato makes it as clear as he possibly can without breaking kayfabe that he threatened to quit All Japan if Baba didn't let him put Jumbo over. The 14.9 rating that the episode with the title match drew was satisfactory from NTV’s perspective. 4. Sato told Jumbo not to work dirty during his AWA tour as champion, which is why the matches we have on tape from this reign are more Jumbo’s take on the travelling champion than an attempt to be a sneaky foreigner. 5. It’s finally time to talk about Yasuko. Things are about to get mushy, brothers. Yasuko Aramaki was studying at Kobe University in 1978 when her classmate and friend, then dating AJPW lead commentator Takao Kuramochi, took her to see a summer show. As Tsuruta told their “love story” to the author (staying up until 3am to tell it the night after announcing their engagement), it was love at first sight for him. They dated over the next two years, albeit relatively infrequently due to their lifestyles and relative distance. Kuramochi has spoken of being his friend’s wingman to help him with his shyness. However, they broke up around the time of her graduation; he’d suddenly gotten serious and wanted her to marry him and be a housewife, but she held on to her childhood dream of working as a stewardess. He claimed to have burned the letters and cried, but she continued to send him cards over the years. Yasuko would have a change of heart in December 1983 when, as luck would have it, she would serve the Babas. It was after the RWTL tour had ended, and they were taking the class of the Meikyukai, a NPB hall of fame founded by the great Zainichi Korean pitcher Masaichi Kaneda, on a holiday trip to Hawaii. (Kaneda had been a friend of Rikidōzan, and in fact was probably the biggest celebrity friend who shared and was privy to his true heritage. Judging by this story, as well as a great photograph from New Year’s 1982 which features him alongside Baba, Inoki and Jumbo, I must assume that this carried over into friendships with Rikidōzan’s successors.) Yasuko was struck by Baba’s gentlemanly manner, and began to desire a life like that which Motoko had. On January 24, 1984, Tsuruta received a call from Yasuko’s mother, asking him to meet her daughter again if he was still single. On the 30th, they reunited, and she told him that she had achieved her dream, and was now ready to quit and “be happy as a woman”. After the US tour in March, they went to Yasuko’s parents’ house to receive their blessing, and then to visit the house of Tsuruta’s youth. They were engaged on June 24, with Mitsune and his wife attending on the Babas’ behalf, and officially announced this in July. (This timestamped clip from the announcement is all I’ve seen. In it, Yasuko is asked what she wants her husband-to-be to do differently once they are married. She responds that he always lets go of her hand when others see them, out of shyness, and that she wants him to stop doing that.) Unfortunately, Kuramochi’s friendship with the Tsurutas would not survive Jumbo’s death, as he disclosed in an interview a couple years back. Yasuko had begged him to prevent the television director (he was retired from commentary by this point, but was still working with the network) from using footage of Tsuruta’s open casket in their funeral coverage. Her husband would not have wanted the world to see him in such a way. However, the salaciousness of the imagery was too great for Kuramochi to convince the producers to respect this wish, no matter how hard he tried. He and Yasuko have never spoken since.

First of all, the machine translation was misleading; upon further research it looks like he was a senior of Jumbo's in the sense that he was an alumni. I ran his name through some Japanese sites. The most journalistic source is sadly locked behind a paywall, and I can't find much of anything pre-UWF, but I managed to find some info about his tenure as UWF president from the blog I've been consulting. He was brought on by Shinma, a fellow Chuo alum. He then brought scandal upon the UWF when he was arrested for coercion of Sayama's manager, Shoji Koncha. (During a meeting, Urata had had a Yakuza boss he knew, who happened to be Koncha's boss, attend as a witness, and said boss forced Koncha to break his contract with Sayama and write a letter of reminder.) It looks like he came back and was reinstated right around the time of the infamous last Sayama/Maeda match, and facilitated the deal that absorbed the UWF remnants back into NJPW. After this, he apparently got involved with Shooto.

2020 JUMBO BIO, PART FOUR Somehow, after taking a break on Monday, I managed to crank out all 50 pages of chapter six by 3am Friday morning. This won’t be as dense in factoids as the previous one, because much of this chapter is dedicated to a discussion that, while interesting and definitely important in an understanding of Jumbo’s reception, contains relatively few tidbits that I can really package in the format I have done up to this point. There is some juicy stuff in this chapter, but much of it is packed in the back 15 or so pages. So, about Jumbo’s reception. The bio states that, as early as a Gong article in June 1978, Tsuruta’s aptitude as the future of All Japan was being called into question, for he “lacked the mental fortitude” of a future ace. He slotted into that Number Two role very well, and had certainly gotten the hang of professional wrestling faster than Tenryu and Choshu, who were the only other contemporaries who’d been plucked as “elite” prospects. But as this article notes, his true rivals at the time were all those who had “been discarded like weeds, and…risen on their own”; these were Fujinami, Rocky Hata, and Masanori Toguchi, working at the time as Kim Duk. It’s noted that Rocky Hata connected to many fans more than Tsuruta due to his more hard-fought path. But it was Toguchi who would be Jumbo’s first native singles rival, even though his gimmick name obscured that fact. (In every single thing I’ve read about him, it’s made very clear that Toguchi has continued to hold onto a legitimate dislike of Tsuruta. I looked up Japanese Amazon reviews of his autobiography, and one of them even read that he’d made the claim that Jumbo had actually gotten Hep A, and had contracted it because he wasn’t hygienic enough to buy his own bar of soap! [2021.04.23 MAJOR CORRECTION: THIS WAS AN ERROR IN MACHINE TRANSLATION. TOGUCHI WAS CLAIMING THAT TSURUTA HAD CONTRACTED HEPATITIS AT A "SOAPLAND", I.E. BROTHEL. Upon Tsuruta's death, Kabuki also made comments to this effect.]) Toguchi ended up leaving All Japan at the end of April 1981. New Japan sent out feelers when they learned that he was having a dispute with the company over his wish to bring his family from North Carolina to Japan. Mitsu Hirai, one of the people who joined AJPW in the JWA absorption, had wanted to teach Jumbo more than Koma had taught him, but Baba used Koma as a shield to prevent him from getting involved in his training. Kabuki stated that “Jumbo didn’t have any ideas of his own, and wasn’t very resourceful in fights.” A passage that sums up this part of the bio: “Anyone can make a fight. However, it was Jumbo's responsibility to make a wave in the whole flow of the match, to make Jumbo Tsuruta. But Jumbo was never responsible for any of his fights. Baba-san lost Rikidōzan. After Toyonobori's death, Baba must have felt that he had to do it himself, and the image of Giant Baba was created in NTV's broadcasts, and he gradually became a top star. That's why Baba-san was so good at "playing the role of the 209cm Giant Baba". That's the greatness of Baba. But Jumbo had never been given responsibility, so he didn't know what he had to do in the end.“ This coupled with Jumbo’s persistent failure to win NWA title matches led to him earning the sarcastic moniker of “zensenman” (“good fight man”). To close this part, I want to quote the comments of television producer Akira Hara, which I think dovetail interestingly with some of the criticisms I’ve seen levied against Tsuruta, some on this very forum by various departed old gods of the IWC: “He was undoubtedly a genius. He was the top wrestler in the world. The only thing he lacks is something to touch the audience's heart. He was too smart to be a professional wrestler. He lacked something that would touch the hearts and souls of the Japanese. I think that was the only thing he didn't inherit from Baba. There were many good role models, though. Like Baba-san, I think Antonio Inoki was the best example in terms of wrestling to win the hearts of the audience. Hypothetically speaking, if he had been exposed to Inoki, he might have come up with something completely different.“ (Insert Terry Taylor reference here.) --------------- Now for the hot gossip. 1. Samson Kutsuwada attempted a coup (which I alluded to elsewhere on the forum) in 1977. He was going to have the support of major right-wing player Ryoichi Sasagawa. Sasagawa was going to bribe both Baba and Inoki out of the promoting game with gobs of money, and puro was going to be united once again, with Jumbo and Fujinami as the aces of the new generation. But word got to Baba, and Kutsuwada was dismissed and subsequently blacklisted. Baba did not allow the story of the coup to go public because it was imperative that he maintain a stable image against the openly tumultous NJPW company culture. (On the inside, the bio appears to at least imply that Baba tried to keep All Japan so culturally hierarchical partially because he wanted to prevent another Baba vs Inoki sort of situation happening internally.) Baba gave Jumbo preferential treatment after the coup by making him the president of affiliate company B&J, which handled the ring transportation and setup. However, he had no authority. According to Kyohei Wada, Motoko's attitude was that "we can't leave anything to him until he learns", but they never really taught him. Jumbo wasn't stupid, so he knew he was just a figurehead. Honestly this surprises me because he was more like Misawa in that way than I thought; it's just that Baba wasn't going to die anytime soon at this point. So Jumbo tried not to get involved in management from then on, not because he was overwhelmed like I'd assumed, but because of this treatment. 2. 1981 is when a major restructuring of AJPW took place at Nippon TV’s behest. At the end of this year, Mitsuo Mitsune took the presidential seat, and three big plans were set in motion: a three-year phase-out of Baba as ace (or even a retirement), the transition of Tsuruta to ace, and the fostering of a new Number Two. They wanted to make Tsuruta the new booker, but he very much did not want this responsibility. Luckily, Akio Sato had learned how to book from George Scott while working in the Mid-Atlantic territory, and eventually took the position. He was responsible for abolishing the seniority system, nurturing the likes of Misawa and Koshinaka (the latter has said that their Mexican excursion never would’ve happened if not for Sato), and ushering in the KakuRyu (Jumbo/Tenryu) era. 3. Hisashi Shinma tried once again to get Tsuruta in 1980/1. Three years later, his old Chuo University wrestling team senior Noboru Urata, now UWF president, also approached him.

I had figured the dancers (thanks for the context) were the equivalent of something like Legs & Co., which was this troupe in the late 70s who would dance to songs on Top of the Pops.