Mr. Hayashi

[KinchStalker]

Mr. Hayashi (ミスター林)

Profession: Wrestler, Referee
Real name: Koichi Hayashi (林幸一)
Professional names: Koichi Hayashi, Ushinosuke Hayashi, Tor Hayashi, Taru Hayashi, Mr. Hayashi
Life: 5/17/1942-11/4/1999
Born: Koto, Tokyo, Japan
Career: 1959-1991(?)
Height/Weight: 176cm/98kg (5’9”/216lbs.)
Signature moves: Karate chop, neckbreaker
Promotions: Japan Wrestling Association, All Japan Pro Wrestling, Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling (as referee)
Titles: none

After a lengthy but unremarkable career as an undercard wrestler, Mr. Hayashi made a noted transition into refereeing.

An only child raised by a single mother in eastern Tokyo, Koichi Hayashi entered sumo in 1958. First joining the Oitekaze stable, he left to join the spinoff Magaki stable upon its formation the following February but then retired to join the Japan Wrestling Association in November 1959. The following year, Hayashi invited his former stablemate Hiroshi Ueda to join him. Hayashi’s earliest-known match is a June 9, 1960 loss against Kiyotaka Otsubo; an inauspicious start for a frankly inconspicuous career as a wrestler. Hayashi entered a tournament just three months after his debut to determine the JWA’s light heavyweight champion, after Junzo Yoshinosato had received Michiaki Yoshimura’s junior title, but in the first round on September 30—the same day Shohei Baba and Kanji Inoki made their debuts—Hayashi lost to tournament winner Isao Yoshiwara. Anecdotes on Hayashi from this period remark on a penchant for oversleeping and disdain for training, but interestingly, they also suggest that he saw Rikidozan as a father figure. By 1963, Hayashi had adopted the ring name that would follow him for the rest of his JWA tenure: Ushinosuke Hayashi. Anybody familiar with puroresu of the time will know that such a ring name would have only been bestowed upon him by Toyonobori. In fact, Hayashi became part of Toyonobori’s posse, the Hayabusa Corps, in the post-Rikidozan era. At some point, he also became Yoshinosato’s chauffeur. Hayashi would wrestle for the JWA through the end of 1972, when he was part of the last crop of talent sent overseas by the dying promotion.

Six months before his AJPW debut, Hayashi meets with Jumbo Tsuruta, Mitsuo Hata, and Yoshihiro Momota in Florida.

For the next three years, Hayashi wrestled overseas. First, in EMLL, he wrestled alongside Kantaro Hoshino (as Yamamoto), and his excursion even began with a program against the NWA Light Heavyweight champion, Ray Mendoza. While Hoshino returned to Japan to join NJPW that autumn, Hayashi just went north. From 1974 through mid-1976, he wrestled across the southeastern United States, mostly for CWF, GCW, and Mid-Atlantic. He appears to have returned to Japan in late 1975, as a gap in Cagematch records is backed up with a contemporaneous Gong interview with Isao Yoshiwara. I do not know whether Hayashi had sought a job with Yoshiwara’s IWE, as he may have just been in the fold due to his association with Yoshinosato (who was then working for the company as a color commentator), but by the following year, he was back Stateside. In February, he was photographed in Florida with Jumbo Tsuruta. Just a few months after that photo saw print in Monthly Pro Wrestling, Hayashi debuted for All Japan Pro Wrestling on the Black Power Series in August 1976.

Hayashi counts a pinfall for a young Mayumi Ozaki.

After Mitsu Hirai’s retirement in 1978, Hayashi became the seniormost wrestler in the company; by the end of his career, he was the seniormost active wrestler in Japan. No footage of his work survives, but it reportedly had some comedic elements. Hayashi even wrestled in pink trunks, predating Haruka Eigen by a decade. He participated in the opening battle royal of the 1979 Pro Wrestling All-Star Dream Match show. Shortly before the end of the 1982 Excite Series tour, on a house show in Akita, Hayashi injured his left knee and ankle during a match against Mitsuo Momota. He would never wrestle again. Two days later in Nagaoka, he debuted as a referee, and had officially begun in that capacity fulltime by the start of the following tour. In most of the time since Jerry Murdock’s 1976 firing, Joe Higuchi and Kyohei Wada had been AJPW’s only referees. Hayashi would overtake Wada in the hierarchy, making regular appearances on television. (Unbeknownst to Baba, Hayashi would supplement his income with part-time janitorial work at a theme park.) On the final show of 1983, under the last two matches in that year’s Real World Tag League, Hayashi officiated Ric Flair’s NWA World Heavyweight title defense against the Great Kabuki. In the early years of Weekly Pro Wrestling, Hayashi also wrote a column in which he reminisced on his JWA days.

According to an April 1988 article in that magazine, Hayashi may have borne some responsibility for Baba’s decision to send Tarzan Goto on excursion in 1985. Goto had complained about Hayashi eating his food in the dojo refrigerator, and had vowed that, if he became head of the dojo, he would get Hayashi fired. Hayashi then turned to Baba and claimed that Goto, in fact, had been eating the food, framing his junior to save his job. When that fiscal year ended the following spring, though, Hayashi himself would be laid off, alongside wrestlers Ryuma Go, Apollo Sugawara, and Masahiko Takasugi. Much as the acquisition of the Calgary Hurricanes made those three redundant, Hayashi’s place as second referee had been taken by Tiger Hattori. Unlike the Kokusai Ketsumeigun trio, he at least received a respectful sendoff through a retirement ceremony at AJPW’s April 1 show. Hayashi found continued work as a referee with Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling when it opened that summer, but I do not know if he stayed with the company through its dissolution, only that he did not work for either of its splinter promotions. (Cagematch claims that Hayashi worked until 1998, but it erroneously states that he worked for AJW, not JWP, so I do not trust it.) He died of a heart attack in 1999.