Toshio Yamaguchi

[KinchStalker]

Toshio Yamaguchi (山口利夫)

Profession: Wrestler, Promoter
Real name: Toshio Yamaguchi
Professional names: unknown
Life: 7/28/1914-4/1/1986
Born: Mishima, Shizuoka, Japan
Career: 1951-1958
Height/Weight: 180cm/115kg (5’11”/254lbs.)
Signature moves: tackle
Promotions: All Japan Pro Wrestling Association/Yamaguchi Dojo
Titles: none 

Now too often forgotten, Toshio Yamaguchi was a puroresu pioneer whose All Japan Pro Wrestling Association was a significant regional promotion.

Yamaguchi (right) in Hawaii in 1951. Masahiko Kimura is right next to him. (Image credit: Facebook user Ryosuke Ratel Nasa)

Before the war, Toshio Yamaguchi made his name as a skilled judoka, first as a member of Waseda University’s club, and then as an employee of the South Manchuria Railway, where he was nicknamed the Manchurian Tiger. He entered the original incarnation of the All-Japan Judo Championships four times between 1935 and 1941, notching third and second-place in his division in 1936 and 1937. In 1939, he made a brief switch into sumo and entered the Dewanoumi stable. Due to Yamaguchi’s pedigree, he was initially allowed to compete in the makushita division as a makushita tsukedashi, but a poor showing in his debut tournament led him to be demoted. After a second tournament, in which he competed as Daigoro Yamaguchi, he was drafted and forced to retire. I don’t have anything on Yamaguchi for the rest of the forties, but in 1950, he was a founding member of the International Judo Association.

I plan to someday cover the IJA, often called Pro Judo for short, in detail for a PWO thread or blog post. But to summarize, it was a brief yet significant antecedent to puroresu. As Kodokan shifted its strategy to promote judo as an amateur sport—a desperate measure to survive under American occupation, and to get judo back into the phys-ed curriculum—Tatsukuma Ushijima sought to pave another road on which impoverished martial artists could make a living as sports-entertainers. IJA events, which began in April 1950, offered judo matches with loose rules. Draws and decision wins were out: joint techniques and bodyslams, in. Entertainers like Keiko Tsushima, who you may know from Seven Samurai, and Koji Tsuruta also sang and danced in segments of these shows. Behind the legendary Masahiko Kimura, Yamaguchi was the IJA’s second strongest judoka. That June, the two signed a contract to work in Honolulu in October, but a lawsuit from the IJA kept them in Japan until the following year. By that point, though, the Association’s support from construction company Takagi Corporation had been withdrawn, and it hadn’t held a show in two months. Kimura went in January to hold a seminar at Hawaii University. When Yamaguchi arrived the following month, the two appeared on shows promoted by the Matsuo brothers while being trained in pro wrestling by their manager, Rubberman Higami. After they were finished with the Matsuo contract, Kimura and Yamaguchi began work for promoter Al Karasick, who would spearhead American pro wrestling’s export into Japan through the Torii Oasis Shriners Club tour of the late year. Over the next year, Yamaguchi and Kimura wrestled in North America and Mexico, as well as compete in their original sport on a famous trip to Brazil. In April 1952, Yamaguchi even teamed up with Rikidozan on a California show.

Back in Japan, both Yamaguchi and Kimura participated in Osaka juken shows, which pitted judoka against boxers of foreign descent. These had a decades-long history, and had most notably been held to promote boxing in the 1920s, but the juken revival was the responsibility of future joshi promoter Morie Nakamura. In July 1953, news of the formation of the Japan Wrestling Association triggered further development. On July 18, less than three weeks after the JWA had been established, a juken show at the Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium, which was a charity event for Kitakyushu flood victims, was headlined by a judo vs sumo match in which Yamaguchi fought the retired rikishi Umeyuki Kiyomigawa. According to a column called “The Birth of Kansai Pro Wrestling”, written by former Mainichi Shimbun sports head Katsuhisa Tanaguchi for Hiroshi Tazuhama’s 1975 book 20 Years of Japanese Pro Wrestling, the origins of the All Japan Pro Wrestling Association laid in a translation of the Mainichi article on the show. It piqued the interest of a GI stationed in Osaka at the time, who approached Yamaguchi and claimed that he was the manager of a wrestler named Bulldog Butcher who wanted to wrestle him. (In reality, Butcher was his commanding officer.) Yamaguchi was initially uninterested, but the proposal caught the ear of Shotaru Matsuyama, the head of a local yakuza gang called the Sarae-gumi. Matsuyama went to Mainichi to make a formal request to hold this show, and this led to the formation of the All Japan Pro Wrestling Association. (Yamaguchi had first suggested a regional name, like Kansai or West Japan.)

The AJPWA's first show was at the Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium on December 8, 1953. Two months later, they beat the JWA to the punch with puroresu's first television broadcast. On February 6 and 7, 1954, they booked the OPG for two well-drawing shows sponsored by Mainichi as well as the Manaslu mountain-climbing team. (Hey, whoever wants to help you promote your show.) These shows were broadcast live in the Kansai and Tokai regions as an experiment by NHK. Twelve days later, Yamaguchi began work on the JWA’s first tour alongside others in his organization. The AJPWA resumed work in April, although records of its shows are inadequate. When Kimura challenged Rikidozan in the paper that autumn, Yamaguchi threw his hat into the ring by stating his challenge to whichever man won. On December 22 at the Kuramae Kokukigan, on a show where AJPWA wrestler Noburo Ichikawa was brutally beaten by Junzo Yoshinosato, Rikidozan shot on Kimura in the main event. On January 26, a JWA-AJPWA joint show saw Yamaguchi challenge for the Japanese Heavyweight title. Unlike with Kimura, Yamaguchi's title shot was all business, and he even lost two falls to the champion, albeit by countout. This was the last heavyweight title match between two natives for 18 years, until Rusher Kimura challenged Strong Kobayashi for the IWA World Heavyweight title in July 1973.

The first of the AJPWA's famous pool shows.

While it was completely dependent on American servicemen for opponents—the only foreign professional wrestler who worked with them was PY Chang, the future Tojo Yamamoto—the Association distinguished itself with gimmicks. The AJPWA was puroresu's first, and for decades, only intergender promotion, and also featured midget wrestling. The Association also held shows at Osaka's Ogimachi Pool, starting with a televised one on September 25, 1954. While they did not invent the wrestling show-in-water, which had roots in the 1930s, the AJPWA's Ogimachi shows were the first such events in puroresu, and they predated FMW's revival of the gimmick by over thirty years.

Trouble came in 1956. The same year that Rikidozan’s patron Shinsaku Nitta died, the first omen of a three-year decline that nearly killed puroresu, Matsuyama fell ill and withdrew his AJPWA support. Yamaguchi and his faithful, which did not include Kiyomigawa, left Osaka that summer for Toshio's hometown of Mishima, where they ran shows in poverty under the Yamaguchi Dojo banner. (The Osaka market would be filled by the short-lived Toa Pro Wrestling, formed by Korean-born Daidozan.) That autumn, Yamaguchi had his last significant matches in the Japan Weight Class tournament. Held by the JWA to delegitimize its regional competitors and scout talent that were worth poaching, the tournament saw Yamaguchi advance to the finals of the heavyweight division, which was meant to set up a Rikidozan title defense that was never booked. After their first match went to a draw, Yamaguchi lost the final by countout to former yokozuna Azumafuji. After this, four of his wrestlers were raided by the JWA: Michiaki Yoshimura, Kanji Higuchi, Yuichi Deguchi, and Hideyuki Nagasawa.

According to Showa Puroresu, Yamaguchi Dojo was dissolved in September 1957. Yamaguchi retired the following year, holding two last Osaka pool shows on May 31 and June 1 with guests ranging from Yoshimura to Kimura. He died in his hometown of heart failure in 1986.

 

Yamaguchi sits with the AJPWA roster.