Kintaro Oki and the Birth of Korean Wrestling

[KinchStalker]

Gogeum sits about a mile south of the tip of the Goheung Peninsula. Its 63 square miles, bolstered by reclaimed land in the northwest, make it just a little bigger than Chicago. Kim Tae-sik was born in Gogeum in 1929, as his country sat beneath the “black umbrella” of Japanese annexation. Little of the island itself is arable, so Kim’s father farmed green laver. Although this practice has declined significantly in recent decades, it is likely that he did so using the traditional ‘racks’ method. Every year, he would have planted bamboo in the seabed. Then, he would have affixed nets to the sticks to catch floating laver seed. These nets would then be arranged in racks on the farm, submerged in high tide but exposed to the sun on low tide, and the seaweed bred from winter through spring. It’s a demanding process with low yield, and it should be little surprise that the Kims lived in poverty.

Kim (center) with a calf won in ssireum.

Tae-sik was the eldest of five. His future valet, Masanori Toguchi (Kim Duk), recalled the names of all but the third. Kwon-sik was the second, Yu-shik was the fourth, and Kwang-sik was the fifth, born in 1952.[1] As a child, Tae-sik had wanted to join a sumo stable in Japan. He would later compete in local ssireum tournaments where the prize was a calf. The legend goes that he won 27 of these, but Toguchi thinks this is an exaggeration. Tae-sik married Park Geum-rei when he was 16, and the two would have two sons and two daughters.[2] While Kim would have been able to watch wrestling on Japanese televisions in the Busan area, this isn’t what tipped him off to the existence of Rikidozan. Japan and the Republic of Korea had no diplomatic relations, but their fishery industries still did business together. It was a sailor at the Yeosu port who showed Kim a wrestling magazine.

He made the hard decision to leave his family and smuggle to Japan on a fishing boat. The voyage from Yeosu to Shimonoseki, the city at the southwestern tip of Honshu, took 20 hours. Kim made it to Osaka and took a train to Tokyo, where he was arrested. Kim did time in a special prison for stowaways in the Kyushu city of Omura. He wrote a letter to JWA commissioner and Liberal Democratic Party politician Banboku Ōno, appealing to join the promotion. After nine months in jail, he was essentially released into Rikidozan’s custody in April 1958. The truth of these circumstances was not revealed for some time, as a 1961 Pro Wrestling & Boxing article claimed that Kim was a failed businessman who came to Rikidozan’s home and asked to join the JWA. It was not until the 1972 Gong serial “Tiger of Asia”, written by JWA Commission secretary general Shigeo Kado, that the real story was publicized. (This was one example of how Kado's writings, while likely sensationalized, were the most revealing of early puroresu journalism.)

He was given the ring name Kintaro Oki. Kintaro, or “Golden Boy”, is a folk hero: a boy with superhuman strength.[3] Billed as being four years younger than he really was, Oki debuted in November 1959 as the second of puroresu’s first “four pillars” (after Yukio Suzuki). The following year, he was the debut opponent of one Kanji Inoki. Oki took well to Inoki backstage, believing at first that he was really Brazilian and bonding with another outsider. As Inoki disclosed in his autobiography, he lost his virginity on Oki’s dime in a Kumamoto brothel. Inoki wrestled him numerous times throughout the first four years of his career, eventually taking him to many draws but never beating him.

[Note: I will be referring to Kim as Oki henceforth, for ease of reading.]

In September 1963, Oki left for an American excursion; the story has long gone that it was originally intended for Inoki, but that a knee injury caused him to be passed over. Billed as a Japanese native, Oki teamed up with Mr. Moto in the WWA and won their tag titles from Bearcat Wright & Red Bastien on December 10. During this stint in Los Angeles, he created what would eventually become his Korean stage name. One night at a Korean diner, Oki met UCLA student architect Lee Chun-sung and introduced himself as Kim Il. Lee would connect him with the local Korean community, who attended his matches at the Olympic Auditorium. A decade later, Lee would design the Cultural Gymnasium in Seoul, which was initially owned by Oki's promotion.

Oki at Haneda Airport in January 1964.

After Rikidozan’s death, Oki returned to Japan on January 24, 1964. He had done so without permission, but was nevertheless allowed to work for them starting in February. He competed in the 6th World Big League, losing against Gene Kiniski and Caripus Hurricane to notch three wins, two losses, and one draw. On a Sapporo show on May 28, he debuted a ring name that he would work under intermittently for the rest of the decade, Kintaro Kongo (金剛金太郎). It was said at the time that he wanted to avoid confusion with head referee Oki Shikina, but this name had apparently been thought of by Rikidozan. According to Toguchi, Kongo was a reference to North Korea’s Mount Kumgang (금강산/金剛山).

Top figures in the political and criminal spheres are involved in this story. Top to bottom, left to right: Park Jong-gyu, Yoshio Kodama, Park Chung-hee, Hisayuki Machii, and Kim Jong-pil.

Oki returned to Korea for the first time in six years on June 27. According to his autobiography, he had come into contact with an agent of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, who asked if he wanted to meet President Park Chung-hee. Smuggling to Seoul for ten days, Oki did not meet Park. He did, however, meet KCIA director Kim Jong-pil. Three years earlier, Kim had engineered the coup in which Park had seized power. He was an associate of Hisayuki Machii, the Yakuza godfather who ran the Tosei-kai and held the rights to promote JWA shows in the Tokyo market. Kim asked Oki to become “the Rikidozan of Korea”, and that would be taken rather more literally than one might imagine. Machii and Yoshio Kodama—ultra-nationalist, power broker, and president of the JWA’s shareholders organization—pressured the JWA in a summer meeting to allow Oki to adopt Rikidozan’s stage name in Korea. While the recently deceased Bamboku Ono had opposed the effort for Japan to sign a treaty with the Republic of Korea, these two strongly favored and facilitated it, as they stood to gain a cut of the investments that reparations money would go towards. Alongside the casinos and cabarets they would open in Seoul, it is clear that they planned to replicate the Rikidozan formula with Oki. In fact, they were carrying out what Toguchi suspects Rikidozan had intended all along. Rikidozan had visited South Korea at Kodama’s insistence in January 1963, and the Korean side had wanted him to hold and wrestle in an international tournament there. Rikidozan would never have agreed to this due to the risk that it would expose his secret in Japan.[4]

As top wrestler-executive Junzo Yoshinosato later recalled, the only way that they got out of the demand was by setting an impossible condition. They would allow Oki to adopt the name…if he defeated the NWA World Heavyweight champion. After a brief return to Japan in August, reverting to his first ring name, Oki returned to the States in September and, well, he tried. On October 16 in Houston, he got a match with the NWA champ, a 48-year-old Lou Thesz. He went off-script with a shoot headbutt and was beaten and bloodied for it, to the tune of 24 facial stitches. While I do not know whether Thesz was ever made aware of the political context of Oki’s actions (I’m sure Koji Miyamoto could have told him the story at some point), the two would become friends. Thirty years later, Thesz pushed Oki’s wheelchair for his retirement ceremony, which took place during Weekly Pro Wrestling’s Bridge of Dreams show at the Tokyo Dome.

Oki returned to Japan in June 1965. On June 11, though, the JWA expelled him for the match with Thesz, as he had gotten it booked through former JWA talent booker Great Togo. Togo was persona non grata in the JWA since he had extorted them for solatium after Rikidozan's death, which they only granted with his promise never to work in Japan again. Just two weeks later, Japan and the Republic of Korea signed the Treaty on Basic Relations. That same day, Oki met with Toyonobori in Tokyo.

There is a factor that I have not discussed yet. Oki would be encroaching on another promoter's territory.

Jang Yeong-chol and Chun Kyu-deok, the pioneers of Korean pro wrestling.

Pro wrestling had existed in South Korea for four years. Jang Yeong-chol, a wrestling coach, and Chun Kyu-deok, a serviceman who taught taekwondo at night, had seen Rikidozan on Busan television. They had no one to properly teach them, so they had to learn secondhand.[5] They apparently ran first in Busan before taking their operation up to Seoul, in which they held their first show in June 1961. (Two months earlier, a trio of former JWA wrestlers—Osamu Abe, Takao Kaneko, and Mitsuo Surugaumi—had run a pair of Seoul shows.) They eventually earned the support of President Park Chung-hee, who expected them to run once a month at the 10,000-seat Jangchung Gymnasium once it was opened in 1963. Jang's promotion was built on matches against Japanese talent unaffiliated with the JWA. He did business with a group led by former AJPW Association wrestler Hisaharu Kaji, which as mentioned in Interlude #3.1 of my Naoki Otsuka/NJPW series included Mr. Takahashi.[6] In December 1964, they received network backing when Tongyang Television launched, thanks to future Seoul Olympics production director Kim Jae-gil. Jang would surely be interested in a JWA partnership, and Oki could not let that happen.

Ultimately, Oki was successful. He wasn't brought back into the JWA, but he intended to wrestle in Korea anyway. Jang and Chun would be forced to work on his terms. On June 30, he landed in Seoul Airport to a hero's welcome. In the two months before Oki's Korean debut, Jang struggled with tensions in his ranks, particularly as to his top prospect. Pak Song-nam, a 6'6" giant he had scouted two years before, refused to swear loyalty to him. In early August, Jang allegedly had Pak abducted and held without food or water in a secluded mountain cottage near the Korean Demilitarized Zone. He was found after five days by a military patrol. Late that month, Oki wrestled as Kim Il for the first time in the Far Eastern Heavyweight Championship Tournament. He brought four JWA wrestlers with him: Yoshinosato, the former light heavyweight champion soon to become JWA president; Michiaki Yoshimura, the best worker of puroresu's first generation; undercard stalwart and onetime coach Hideyuki Nagasawa; and Umanosuke Ueda, a bone-dry technician yet to discover his voice as a heel. The Korean end of the tournament was Kim, Jang, Chun, and Pak. Oki defeated Yoshinosato to win the tournament and the eponymous title.

An article states that "pro wrestling is a show".

Three months later, the World Big League-inspired Five Nations Championship Tournament was held. The same four Koreans in the previous tournament competed against representatives of Japan, Turkey, Sweden, and Denmark. Yusuf Turk, who helped book the tournament alongside Oki and Shigeo Kado, represented Turkey. Karl Karlsson, seen donning a leather helmet in newsreel footage, represented Sweden. Denmark’s Viking Hansen was the future Erik the Red. Finally, three-year veteran Motoshi Okuma stood in for the JWA. On November 25, Jang and Okuma wrestled in a tournament match that went south when Okuma cranked back on a single-leg crab and Jang’s posse stormed the ring to break it up and beat him. The particulars of what happened next appear to have been misunderstood in decades of Japanese accounts. Their narrative went that Jang exposed the business to the police to keep his boys from being arrested. Chun asserted in a late-life interview that it had happened somewhat differently. Jang had kept his mouth shut, but the police had taken his silence as a confirmation. Regardless, the next day’s papers read that “pro wrestling was a show”. Jang lost his support from Park Chung-hee, and the dojo built for him in Seoul’s Samgakji area was taken over by Oki’s group. Jang’s faction also switched sides. In December, Oki defended the Far Eastern Heavyweight title against Ripper Collins. This was the first time that South Korea booked an American talent independently of the JWA, and with the financial backing of a dictator, it would not be the last. President Park's right-hand man, Park Jong-gyu, became the president of the promotion, named the Kim Il Supporters' Association upon its formation in 1967.

FOOTNOTES

Spoiler

1. Kwang-sik would follow Tae-sik into professional wrestling in the 1970s, and his brother got him booked for several AJPW and IWE tours. When Toguchi lived in Korea, Yu-shik was a wrestling coach. 

2. Their elder daughter would marry wrestler Kang Sung-yung. As Nankaizan (the Japanese reading of Kang’s name in Chinese script), Kang teamed with Oki in his first tag match against Giant Baba & Jumbo Tsuruta.

3. In his 2020 interview with Toguchi, Kagehiro Osano mentions an old rumor that Oki had earned his ring name for the size of his genitalia. Oki (大木) reads literally as “large tree”.

4. Two newspapers acknowledged Rikidozan’s January 1963 trip to the ROK, both published on January 11. Sports Nippon was one. An Associated Press article that referred to Rikidozan’s January 1963 visit as a “homecoming” was translated by and published in Tokyo Chunichi Shimbun. Rikidozan was furious.

5. As Chun recalled many years later, he studied the 1953 Mexican movie La Bestia Magnifica. This movie featured three complete matches with the likes of Enrique Llanes and Rito Romero. Archived issues of Korean magazine Screen indicate that a print had been screened as early as 1957. From what Toguchi understands, though, they shied away from such advanced techniques at first out of the concern that they could not incorporate them organically; the audience would have "seen right through them". As a result, their first shows "weren't much to look at".

6. Talent from this era can be seen in newsreels uploaded to YouTube by KTV. One of them was former sumo wrestler Arakuma, who had competed for the Sadogatake stable as Kotonobori in the late fifties. Also, Wikipedia incorrectly pegs this group as having been led by former AJPW Association ace Toshio Yamaguchi, due to Takahashi’s comments in a 1978 Gong interview. Kaji’s group was indeed a descendent of the AJPW Association, but Yamaguchi seems to have had no involvement in the business after his 1958 retirement show. Kaji would have been fairly obscure, as he had left the Association shortly before its collapse to transfer into sumo.