Toshio Komatsu

[KinchStalker]

Toshio Komatsu (小松敏男)

Profession: Referee, Announcer, Executive (Sales)
Real name: Toshio Komatsu
Professional names: not applicable
Life: 3/3/1925-unknown
Born: Kochi, Shikoku, Japan
Career: 1954-1966
Promotions: Japan Wrestling Association, Tokyo Pro Wrestling, All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling (as executive)

One of the JWA’s first referees, Toshio Komatsu transitioned into announcing in the early sixties before retiring to become a promoter.

The fourth of eight children born to a Kochi realtor, Toshio Sento took the family name Komatsu when he entered school. Like just about all of his family, Toshio was a sumo fan, and competed in local tournaments alongside his eldest brother behind their mother’s back. Upon graduating junior high, he moved to Tokyo against his mother’s will to join a stable. In March 1941, he joined the Nishonoseki stable despite being far under the required weight at the time: a traditional measurement equivalent to about 73kg (160lbs). Komatsu claimed that he failed the first measurement, but that Oyama Oyakata had told him to try again, and that Oyama then recorded what the scale had measured at the moment he had jumped onto it. Sumo only had two tournaments a year at this time, so Komatsu had little experience before he was drafted. In September 1942, he was sent to the Malay peninsula as a private in the 44^th Industry Regiment, and served as a light machine gunner. He did not see any battles himself, but he may have narrowly avoided death. An order to report for a cadet examination had separated him from his platoon just before they set out to attack a group of “communist bandits” in Johor Bahru, who had prepared to fire at them from the opposite bank.

After the war, Komatsu remained in Malay as a laborer until he was demobilized in December 1947. He had given up hope of entering sumo shape again; as a matter of fact, a rumor that he had been killed in a Korean riot on his way home had spread amongst his former stablemates. He first found a job in Kochi, where he had first set foot back home, but after six months, he spent two years in Kyushu, where he worked in a coal mine. Upon his return to Kochi, an acquaintance from Yokohama reintroduced Komatsu to his former Nishonoseki stablemate Rikidozan. By this time, Rikidozan had retired from sumo to work for the construction company of patron Shinsaku Nitta, for which Komatsu would also work. Komatsu was in attendance when Rikidozan wrestled his first match against Bobby Bruns: “Riki-san was wearing a yukata with a large lobster pattern dyed on it as a gown, and within five minutes his belly started to ripple, which kept me on the edge of my seat.” When Rikidozan left for Hawaii in 1952, Komatsu was the one who babysat Yoshihiro and Mitsuo Momota.

Komatsu continued to work for Nitta Kensetsu for the rest of the fifties, as he spent six years building pavilions for fireworks shows in the Ryogoku river festival. He even hired trainees at the Riki Gym, led by a young Hisashi Shinma, to serve as nightwatchmen and prevent theft. However, Rikidozan would “forcibly recruit” Toshio in the spring of 1955. He was initially promised a job as a clerk, but second referee Yoshio Kyushuzan was weary of officiating all but the last two matches of each show. So Komatsu became the JWA’s undercard referee. Five years later, he was forced to take the job that would make him famous. In the JWA’s early years, they had hired a freelance announcer, one Mr. Sakae, to call most matches. This ended on May 11, 1960, when Sakae received a telegram to come home. Rikidozan made Komatsu take his place on the spot.

Komatsu modeled his calls after Naoyoshi Akutsu, a boxing announcer that the JWA had borrowed for big matches. It was rough at first. When the JWA began broadcasting weekly at the Riki Sports Palace, Toshio thought he looked “as if his face was on fire” and began practicing with a mirror. He also made various mistakes, such as calling Mr. Atomic “Mr. X” and announcing Kiyotaka Otsubo as “Tsubo-yan”. He claimed that he once made the latter error three times in a row, and if the translation is correct, Otsubo mooned him in response. Komatsu's was not a pretty voice, but it had power, and the “Komatsu bushi” became the most iconic puroresu call for decades. He appeared in commercials for Mitsubishi appliances where he called product models “in the red and blue corners”; Komatsu was the only announcer to appear in commercials until Kero Tanaka in the 1980s. Nowadays, his greatest legacy is calling the last surviving Rikidozan match: against the Destroyer, on December 2, 1963.

Komatsu continued as an announcer until a shift to the sales department in 1965, upon which he was replaced by Nagaaki Shinohara. When the Tokyo Metropolitan Police cracked down on the JWA, they did not just pressure the top shareholders with criminal ties to resign. They also forced the company to purge all but seven of the local promoters that they had sold shows to. The JWA could no longer run many of the buildings that they had built their circuit on, and the department scrambled to find new connections. Komatsu flew back to Shikoku Island, where a close friend of his brother was the head of the Kochi Shimbun newspaper’s sports department, and through that connection he won the support of the island’s newspapers. Despite this success, Komatsu left the JWA that summer. He was unable to keep up with the sales quotas that the top executives had enacted “only out of immediate greed”. (I suspect this was a dig at Kokichi Endo.) After that, Toshio would spend the next decade as an independent promoter, although he briefly returned to announcing for Tokyo Pro Wrestling. Komatsu spent the first two years in Tokyo, where he organized jazz and group sounds concerts. He claimed that he had promoted concerts by nearly every major band in the latter genre, “except the Spiders”, but his calls on other promoters to help him build a tour circuit were abandoned by his would-be partners. After cleaning up that mess, Komatsu would eventually return to the wrestling business, and settle in Kochi: “[…] I knew I could not betray [wrestling], and it eventually helped me to stabilize myself mentally and financially.” The 1979 Monthly Pro feature reports that Komatsu refused to gouge ticket prices on his shows; the best seats were always six thousand yen, and every seat below sat at a fixed rate. In 1972, he was one of the first promoters to give New Japan Pro-Wrestling any proper support. Eventually, his reliability got him a job with the Matsunaga brothers, who entrusted him with setting up AJW’s western tours. On January 11, 1980, Komatsu picked up the house mic one last time for Jumbo Tsuruta’s NWA United National title defense against Billy Robinson.

Komatsu attends AJW's February 1979 Budokan show.