Haruka Eigen

[KinchStalker]

Haruka Eigen (永源遙)

Profession: Wrestler, Executive
Real name: Haruka Eigen
Professional names: Masaru Eigen, Great Togo
Life: 1/11/1946-11/28/2016
Born: Kashima, Ishikawa, Japan
Career: 1966-2006
Height/Weight: 178cm/110kg (5’10”/242lbs.)
Signature moves: Giant swing, piledriver, headbutt
Promotions: Tokyo Pro Wrestling, Japan Wrestling Association, New Japan Pro-Wrestling, Japan Pro Wrestling, All Japan Pro Wrestling, Pro Wrestling NOAH
Titles: NWA World Tag Team [NWA Central States] (1x, w/Tokyo Joe); IWA World Tag Team [IWE] (1x, w/Strong Kobayashi)

Haruka Eigen wrestled lower-card matches for forty years while making important contributions behind the scenes. 

17-year-old Eigen (second from left) celebrates a division win in the September 1963 sumo tournament. On his left is Katsuhisa Shibata.

Haruka Eigen entered the Tachinami sumo stable at the age of fifteen, debuting in July 1961. Despite what his English Wikipedia page may say, he wrestled for five years, not four. After the May 1966 tournament, he was invited by Masao Kimura to join Tokyo Pro Wrestling’s training camp, alongside stablemates Takeji Suruzaki and Isamu Teranishi. They were joined by former Nishonoseki wrestler Tsuyoshi Sendai and former Asahiyama wrestlers Katsuhisa Shibata and Hiroshi Nakagawa. As trainer Tadaharu Tanaka had so badly misappropriated company funds that he could not afford to build a ring, he broke these half-dozen men into the business on a beach. Eigen later claimed they had made less money than civil servants and were not even fed rice. On Tokyo Pro’s kickoff show at Kuramae that October, Eigen debuted in a singles match against Kimura. While he lost, Eigen struck Kimura with a headbutt and bloodied him in a fierce brawl. He would only last five minutes before giving up to a single-leg crab, but he gave Kimura an eight-stitch wound. Although Nakagawa would leave the company after this shambling first tour, the other five joined Antonio Inoki that December when he created a parallel Tokyo Pro Wrestling company and transferred the whole roster except Toyonobori and Tanaka to it. They joined forces with the IWE on their first tour in January 1967.

Eigen dines with Seiji Sakaguchi at Sakaguchis’ parents’ house in Kurume on May 4, 1969.

Inoki was approached that spring to rejoin the JWA. As his valet alongside Motoyuki Kitazawa, Eigen was allowed to join in a package deal, with Katsuhisa Shibata following later. Eigen would be allowed to work under his real name while being reassigned to valet duty for Seiji Sakaguchi. According to a 2018 G Spirits article, Eigen did his job well as an undercard wrestler, with his matches against Akihisa Takachiho being considered the best curtainjerker bouts that the company had to offer. Before the JWA built its new dojo in late 1971, Eigen was compensated by Michiaki Yoshimura to let rookies bunk with him. These included Tatsumi Fujinami and the future Killer Khan. While no footage of this survives now, journalist Kagehiro Osano recalled Eigen’s memorable interference in a 1971 match between Giant Baba and The Destroyer, whom Eigen hit from behind with a chair to cause to lose by countout. As he remembers, Eigen was shown on the receiving end of the figure-four leglock on the next TV episode. He never entered that tournament himself, but he did earn the chance to participate in the third and final NWA Tag Team League in 1972, where he teamed up with Mitsu Hirai.

Eigen was one of the very last wrestlers to be sent on excursion before the JWA collapsed. His destination: the NWA Central States territory, where he worked as the Great Togo. Alongside friend and fellow JWA export Katsuji Adachi, then working as Tokyo Joe, he won the promotion’s tag titles in March 1973 against Bob Geigel & Rufus R. Jones. They held them for five months before defeat came at the hands of Roger Kirby & Lord Al Hayes. [Note: Wikipedia and Cagematch both claim that Eigen worked a brief stint as the Great Togo in Tennessee in 1979, but I am absolutely certain that this was not him.] Eigen chose to join New Japan Pro-Wrestling through Sakaguchi when he returned home in October. In a company brimming with so many young lions, Eigen had a vital part to play as a veteran worker in the lower part of the card. Kuniaki Kobayashi later recalled that, alongside Shoji Kai (that is, Kitazawa), Eigen was his favorite to work with at first. Haruka was greatly respected among the roster and eventually became the president of the wrestlers’ association (representing the talent as a whole, but not like a union: it's a Japanese corporate thing).

He participated in all four iterations of the World League tournament, and performed in the prelim rounds of the three MSG Series tournaments as well as the 1978 Pre-Japan Championship. In his early NJPW tenure, though, Eigen was most often seen on television in Inoki’s corner. Osano once asked Hisashi Shinma why Eigen “was always seen in dangerous places”, such as Inoki’s matches against Pak Song and the Pehlwans, to which Shinma replied that Eigen “was a sturdy man”. It is believed that Eigen may have gotten New Japan in touch with his old pal Adachi, now known as Mr. Hito, in 1979. That summer, New Japan made a trip to Calgary and essentially stole the territory from the IWE, in what Mighty Inoue suspects was Hito’s doing to strike back at rival Calgary booker Tetsunosuke Daigo. In 1980, Eigen received something of a push in interpromotional matches against the International Wrestling Enterprise. On March 31, 1980, Kokusai booked Korakuen for a major show propped up with extra network funds. In the first of the night’s four title matches, Eigen & Kengo Kimura challenged Animal Hamaguchi & Mighty Inoue for the IWA World Tag Team titles on Kokusai’s major March 31 show. This match would end in confusion as Hamaguchi slipped on a beer bottle and received a concussion when taking a tope from Kengo. The belts were vacated, and in June, a rematch with Strong Kobayashi in Kimura’s place saw Eigen win the only Japanese title of his career. They dropped the belts back two weeks later.

The new decade saw Eigen help contribute to a new style called hyokin puroresu, or funny pro wrestling. Elements of comedy were nothing new in pro wrestling, or indeed puroresu, but there was something different about what Don Arakawa began doing at this time. Eigen was his perfect straight man, and the two even made guest appearances on a wrestling-themed segment of the Fuji TV variety show Hyokin Tribe, where they played JWA referee Oki Shikina and Rikidozan.

In the summer of 1983, NJPW nearly fell apart in the wake of a shareholder’s report which revealed that Inoki had misappropriated company funds to pay off the massive debts incurred by Anton Hi-Cel, a Brazilian biotech startup he had spearheaded in the early decade. On July 29, Eigen was part of a meeting in Toyama to plan a coup. Kotetsu Yamamoto advocated for the ousters of Inoki, Sakaguchi, and Shinma, and the establishment of a new company named after their television program, World Pro Wrestling Ring. WPWR would have had Yamamoto and Tatsumi Fujinami as president and vice president, while Eigen would have been a managing director alongside top sales executive Naoki Otsuka. However, the rest of the parties involved in that meeting—Satoru Sayama, his manager Shunji Koncha, and salesmen Fumihiko Uwai and Minoru Yoshida—were more interested in forming a private production company that would allow wrestlers to compete in multiple promotions.

Eigen meets with fellow Japan Pro personnel, including Riki Choshu.

While no coup would ever fully happen, the idea proposed by the second group in that coup meeting anticipated what later came to pass. In early 1984, Otsuka was tasked with creating a production company, New Japan Pro Wrestling Entertainment, to retain the rights to the name. Eigen helped fund it, as did Katsushi Takeda. (While Takeda was originally an acquaintance of Eigen, Kagehiro Osano shot down the assumption that he introduced him to Otsuka, as he was also close with Fujinami.) NJPWE shook New Japan to its core when Otsuka decided to go ahead with an August show at the Denen Coliseum which NJPW had canceled (for a Pakistan tour) by selling it to AJPW instead. Eigen would be one of the fifteen wrestlers that decided to side with Otsuka that autumn and leave New Japan for NJPWE, which merged with Riki Production to form Japan Pro Wrestling. Takeda put up the capital for all of their contracts.

So it happened that Eigen started working with AJPW in 1985, and while he wasn’t a big star on the card, he had a very important role to play. As stated by Osano, Eigen was the one who participated in booking meetings with Baba, and as the different rhythms that had developed between NJPW and AJPW—"we rock, they waltz", as Choshu famously put it—clashed violently in the AJPW vs. JPW program, that made him very important. Due to Choshu’s infamous hostility towards the pro wrestling press, Eigen also took interviews from Osano for Weekly Gong at the time, and Osano even used Eigen to get Choshu to let him interview him. However, Eigen refused to speak with Weekly Pro Wrestling when JPW boycotted them for “disproportionate coverage” (read: giving NJPW/UWF the first three covers of 1986).

Eigen and Mitsuo Momota perform the “spit spot” in an AJPW match.

In early 1987, Eigen was the one who told Baba about JPW’s massive internal tensions, which centered around Choshu’s desire to jump ship back to NJPW. As the company fell apart, Eigen decided to remain with All Japan. While Baba did not share Eigen’s predilection for associating with yakuza, he did have great respect for Eigen’s connections and abilities as a promoter. These connections were so valuable that, in 1990, SWS attempted to sign Eigen as a full-time sales worker, but he refused despite a generous offer because he still desired to wrestle. Between the ropes, Eigen became a focal point of AJPW’s own comedic tradition, as the core member of the nominally heel faction Akuyaku Shokai. The Fami-Aku Showdown six-man tags with the Family Gundan became a beloved staple of the All Japan house show. While the overall highlight of these matches was always Rusher Kimura’s promo afterward, Eigen was the glue that held the matches themselves together. He was most famous in this regard for his "spit spot", in which Eigen would be clubbed in the chest while standing on the apron or leaning towards it on the ropes, which caused him to spit truly impressive loogies into the audience. Front-row spectators learned to bring newspapers and umbrellas to the show.

Eigen’s connections and sales acumen led him to a job as director and head of sales for NOAH. Due to the importance of this position, it is assumed that Mitsuharu Misawa had brought him on board with his plans to form the company early on in 1999. Inoki is said to have predicted NOAH’s early success when he learned that Eigen was joining them in this role. Sure enough, according to Ryu Nakata, Eigen used his pull to receive all the necessary computers and equipment to start the company for free. Eigen continued to wrestle until he turned sixty, at which point he pivoted fully into backstage work. In March 2012, Eigen and Nakata were forced to resign from the board of directors due to the revelation that they had been associated with yakuza; this seems to have been the fallout from a spiteful tell-all book penned by Jun Izumida after he was fired. Both were kept on as general employees, as Eigen continued to work as an advisor. After leaving work on November 28, 2016, Eigen collapsed in a sauna and died in a hospital shortly afterward.

Edited March 17 by KinchStalker
changing prose (I used "would be" way too much when I wrote this), adding detail on Eigen's apartment being used as a makeshift JWA dorm