Junzo Yoshinosato

[KinchStalker]

Junzo Yoshinosato (芳の里淳三)

Profession: Wrestler, Executive, Commentator (Color)
Real name: Junzo Hasegawa (長谷川淳三)
Professional names: Junzo Yoshinosato, Yoshino Sato
Life: 9/27/1928-1/19/1999
Born: Ichinomiya, Chiba, Japan
Career: 1954-1973
Height/Weight: 174cm/84kg (5’9”/185lbs.)
Signature moves: Small package
Promotions: Japan Wrestling Association, International Wrestling Enterprise (as commentator)
Titles: Japanese Light Heavyweight [JWA] (1x), Japanese Junior Heavyweight [JWA] (1x)

Junzo Hasegawa, or Yoshinosato, carved out a niche as one of puroresu’s earliest junior heavyweights, but for better or worse, his legacy is defined by his career as a JWA executive and its last president.

Yoshinosato during his sumo career.

The fourth son of a farmer-fisherman, Junzo Hasegawa was an athletic child. He aspired to enter sumo, and would do so despite his small size by getting in through wrestler Kamikaze Shoichi. Hasegawa joined the Nishonoseki stable, for which he debuted under his family name in January 1944. As this was the twilight of the Pacific War, Hasegawa was among a group of fellow Nishonoseki wrestlers, led by their master Tamanoumi, who worked hard labor for food in an Amagasaki munitions factory. (Tamanoumi would be charged as a war criminal for this, and his reputation with the Japan Sumo Association never recovered.) When the Great Tokyo Air Raid reduced Nishonoseki’s headquarters to rubble, the stable rented a room at the Shinmonji Temple, where they would remain until 1950. Hasegawa devoted himself to training, and in 1947, he received his first shikona: Kamiwaka, derived from the rikishi who he had idolized in his youth. Despite his frame, Junzo became noted for his technical skill and a particular prowess at the beltless underarm throw known as sukuinage. In 1949, as the sumo schedule returned to three tournaments, Kamiwaka was promoted to the second-highest division, juryo. Another promotion to makushita would follow at the start of the decade, but he struggled and was demoted in 1951. It was after this knock down back to juryo that he debuted the shikona that would stick: Yoshinosato Yasuhide.

Yoshinosato was not among those that started puroresu, but he made an early career change. Junzo had become disillusioned with Nishonoseki and its turmoil. His beloved Kamikaze was retiring to become a sumo commentator. Tamanoumi had passed the stable down to Saganohana in 1952, and his policy of encouraging his makuuchi to take on disciples had led to the departures of Ōnoumi and future yokozuna Wakanohana. Despite all of this, Yoshinosato was held down in juryo. Despite notching one of the strongest showings of his career in the spring 1954 tournament, where he went 11-4, he retired afterwards.

Noburo Ichikawa, the victim of puroresu’s first documented shoot incident.

Yoshinosato would go to his former senior and join the JWA. Depending on the version of the story, he either had one day of training before his debut, which was against Teizo Watanabe on September 10 in Osaka, or first met Rikidozan at the show and had been booked on the spot. Either way, it is the fastest turnaround time in puroresu history. Three months later, he worked on the December 22, 1954 show at the Kuramae Kokugikan. This show is well known for the main event, in which Rikidozan shot on Masahiko Kimura. Far less known, at least in the West, is that it wasn’t the only shoot incident on the card, or even the most upsetting. At what the Toshiyo Masuda serial Why Didn’t Masahiko Kimura Kill Rikidozan? alleges was his boss’s order, Yoshinosato beat Noburo Ichikawa, a 38-year-old judoka who had joined Toshio Yamaguchi’s All Japan Pro Wrestling Association, into unconsciousness with “several dozen” strikes. Masuda’s serial claims that Ichikawa suffered neurological damage from this assault and died in 1967.

In October 1956, Yoshinosato entered the light heavyweight bracket of the interpromotional Japanese Weight Division Championship tournaments, which were a means for Rikidozan to delegitimize his regional competition and scout talent worth poaching from them. After wins against Toa Pro Wrestling’s Genji Umehara, fellow JWA member Toshikazu Higa, and Asia Pro Wrestling’s Kiyotaka Otsubo, Yoshinosato faced his coworker Isao Yoshiwara to crown the first Japanese light heavyweight champion. At the Ryogoku International Stadium on October 23, Junzo won two straight falls, first with an abdominal stretch and then with an armbar. On November 30, Yoshinosato wrestled a champion vs champion match against junior heavyweight champ Surugaumi, which went to a draw. While Surugaumi’s title reign would end to Michiaki Yoshimura the following year, Yoshinosato held onto his belt for the rest of the decade. Like the junior title, which was also only contended between native talent, the light heavyweight belt was essentially abandoned after the turbulence of the late fifties showed that the JWA could not draw with anything but Rikidozan versus foreigners. In November 1958, Yoshinosato accompanied Rikidozan on his first trip to Brazil, working shows with him for a month as JWA shows drew all-time lows without their ace.

By the summer of 1960, though, Yoshimura was ready for a promotion to the heavyweight division. Yoshinosato challenged him for the junior title, and a match was booked for the Taito Ward Gymnasium on August 19. While three hours of Yoshimura footage circulates on tape, little of Yoshinosato’s work is known to survive. This means that our only knowledge of his style in the ring comes from written coverage of the time. Fortunately, the Showa Puroresu zine reproduces an evocative report of this match from Pro Wrestling & Boxing magazine. It describes the 61-minute draw, which was officiated by none other than Rikidozan, as a lively, then grueling affair. The smaller Yoshinosato is described as a scrappy, unscrupulous challenger. The title did not properly change hands, but with Yoshimura’s promotion, Yoshinosato was awarded the junior title by default. His light heavyweight title was won by Isao Yoshiwara in a subsequent tournament.

Yoshinosato left for the United States alongside Shohei Baba and Yukio Suzuki in June 1961. Although he worked for NWA Hollywood and in the Northeast like them, his two years abroad were most notable for a stint as a stock Japanese heel, Yoshino Sato, alongside Tojo Yamamoto in Tennessee. This would influence him when he returned home, as he took to wearing “rice-field” tights while using his geta (wooden sandals) as a weapon. He returned in September 1963, just months before Rikidozan's death. When that came on December 15, he got a promotion. Yoshinosato was one of the four wrestlers rapidly promoted to an executive position, alongside Toyonobori, Kokichi Endo, and Yoshimura. At first, they were named directors, while widow Keiko Momota assumed a figurehead position as company president.

Yoshinosato, Toyonobori, Endo, and Yoshimura in a famous photoshoot after Rikidozan’s death.

This was a deeply turbulent period in puroresu, as just five months after Rikidozan’s death, the death of commissioner Bamboku Ono dealt almost as severe a blow as that had. Without the flagrantly yakuza-tainted politician to act as a buffer against law enforcement, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police set their sights on the JWA as part of the first Operation Summit. The top shareholders were ultranationalist fixer Yoshio Kodama and top yakuza godfathers Kazuo Taoka and Hisayuki Machii. Not only did they step down in 1965, as Keiko and managing director Hiroshi Iwata did the same, but the JWA was also forced to cut ties with all but seven of the local promoters they sold shows to. Toyonobori was promoted to president, with Yoshinosato as his VP. Junzo would be forced to pick up his slack, as Toyonobori was less interested in doing his job than in betting on horses with the company safe as his piggy bank. Yoshinosato continued to wrestle in this period; in fact, footage from a May 1964 tag match broadcast on G+’s 2019 JWA program, as seen in this screencap, is the only surviving tape of him that I am aware of. (Unfortunately, I have not found a copy of this as of writing.) In August 1965, he wrestled his last significant matches abroad. Kim Il, or Kintaro Oki, held his first South Korean tour with the support of the JWA and the resentful cooperation of native wrestler-promoter Jang Yeong-chol. Kim defeated Yoshinosato in the final match of an eight-man tournament to be crowned the first Far East Heavyweight champion.

Hasegawa and Endo with Sam Muchnick in August 1967.

As the year came to a close, Toyonobori fell out of favor with his fellow executives and left. When this was publicly acknowledged in early 1966, Yoshinosato was named the new JWA president. While he would receive the nickname Geta President, he wouldn’t be attacking people with his sandals much longer, as Hasegawa scaled back his appearances until wrestling a final match on August 1, 1967. The first year of his presidency saw the emergence of two competitors, Toyonobori’s Tokyo Pro and Yoshiwara’s Kokusai (IWE). By the time of his last match, though, Tokyo Pro had fallen apart and Antonio Inoki had returned to the JWA. Hasegawa steered the company during its second golden age. In the year to come, Baba and Inoki would begin their run as Japan’s most iconic tag team, while the JWA went to war against Kokusai. The competition led the company’s Nippon Television program to be upgraded from biweekly to weekly, with the extra broadcast money in tow. They would go even beyond that in 1969, when Endo successfully maneuvered his way into getting a second network deal with NET TV.

Unfortunately, this momentum would not be enough to sustain the good times forever. Suspicions of embezzlement accumulated as the seventies began, on top of a generally arrogant attitude towards the public and press and a lack of research on the foreigners they invited. (In a particularly notorious instance, the second NWA Tag Team League tournament lost a top gaikokujin halfway through the tour, as Cowboy Frankie Laine—the only returning entrant from the previous year—was deported for sexual assault.) As Hasegawa himself admitted later, he had never received the education to properly run a business at this scale and had worked most effectively in middle management. While he can absolutely be criticized for his incompetence, modern testimonies have suggested that subsequent depictions of his corruption and character were somewhat distorted. (One example was Mystery of the Orient: Kabuki, the final serial in Ikki Kajiwara’s Pro Wrestling Superstar Retsuden manga, which depicted Hasegawa taking money from the safe, as Toyonobori had, to drink in Ginza.) Whatever the case, the years of mismanagement culminated in the “phantom coup” of late 1971. While the most corrupt of the executive troika, Kokichi Endo, was successfully pressured to resign from his executive position, the managerial reforms fizzled out after Inoki and auditor Akimasa Kimura’s subsequent attempt to surreptitiously promote themselves to the top of the company.

It was this final era of the JWA that set Hasegawa’s legacy as a once successful, but ultimately incompetent and doomed promoter. With Inoki's dismissal, NET heavily pressured the company to allow them to broadcast Baba matches and restore their ratings. Baba was contractually exclusive to NTV and personally loyal to them, but Hasegawa decided to disregard that and force Baba to work on World Pro Wrestling. This led the company to lose both NTV program Mitsubishi Diamond Hour and Baba himself, as NTV sent feelers to Baba to head a new promotion, and Baba left the JWA that summer. The JWA lasted until the spring of 1973, held afloat by the NET deal that lasted through the end of the fiscal year, before it held a small set of shows afterward with personal funds. In its final months, Hasegawa again showed his failure as an executive. In the last months of 1972, NET arranged a deal where Inoki’s independent, debt-ridden New Japan Pro-Wrestling would merge with the JWA in April 1973. This could have saved the company, and it was put in motion as Inoki and Sakaguchi held a press conference in February. However, most had not signed contracts to NET when Oki came back from Korea and rallied most of the company to refuse this merger. Where a truly capable leader would have done whatever was necessary to make this deal go through, Hasegawa just went with Oki, and sealed his legacy forever. That spring, Hasegawa worked out a deal through Keiko Momota, now a director of All Japan Pro Wrestling, to have his remaining talent merge with the company. In Oki’s words, they were coming back to Rikidozan.

Hasegawa (front, center) at the press conference where the JWA announced its death by AJPW merger.

The man once known as Yoshinosato spent several more years involved in the business in some capacity. He was allowed to retain his membership on the NWA board as a condition of the AJPW merger. While he voted against New Japan’s membership in 1973 and 1974, he worked with the company for some months afterward, lending credibility to Inoki’s strategy to market himself as the best in Japan and blow smoke over a Baba match that would never happen. According to Shigeo Kado, Hasegawa had planned to loan the JWA’s World Big League trophy to New Japan for the 2nd World League tournament in 1975. However, as Kado claimed, he fell out with the company that spring when he was offended that they sent an executive, and not Inoki himself, to his house to discuss the matter. He would instead lend the trophy to AJPW for their Open League tournament that December. In March 1976, All Japan leveraged his credibility by having him tag along on the South Korean show where the All Asia Tag Team titles were revived. He served as a color commentator on second IWE program International Pro Wrestling Hour and can be heard calling Mighty Inoue's IWA title victory against Billy Graham in October 1974. Yoshinosato would serve as the guest referee for the famous March 28, 1976 match between Jumbo Tsuruta and Rusher Kimura. Two years later, he officiated the February 1978 match between Baba and Kimura, with his dubious refereeing blamed for one of the most humiliating finishes in the history of puroresu. (In fact, it is quite likely that Yoshinosato had suggested that finish himself, as it had been used five years earlier in one of the JWA's final main events.)

I do not know much about what Hasegawa was up to after this point, until the last years of his life. In 1996, the Rikidozan OB alumni association was formed, and he was named its chairman. According to Dave Meltzer’s obituary, the final show Hasegawa promoted was a benefit for the now-paraplegic Umanosuke Ueda. After suffering a stroke in March 1998, Hasegawa died in Yokohama of cardiac arrest on January 19, 1999.