Excerpt 2

“PURORESU, KAMPAI!!”

Two hours before the match was set to begin I walked into the lobby of Korakuen Hall and asked a man for the locker room. He pointed down a flight of stairs. I walked down and saw a large wrestler wearing a gold turban and a black and yellow warm up suit loosening up with various kinds of stretches. A Japanese man stood outside the door giving off an air of importance.

“What’s his name?” I asked the man.

“That’s Tiger Jeet Singh.” I had heard of this big Indian wrestler before and had seen his picture in the wrestling magazine. I asked the guard if I could speak to Tiger. He nodded towards the entrance.

“Excuse me Tiger?” I said.

“Yeh, whadda you want?” he scowled. I told him my name and asked if I could interview him. He threw a few more questions my way then agreed to sit down and answer some questions.

Tiger Jeet Singh had wrestled in Japan for 22 years, one of the longest of any foreigner in Japan, mostly as a freelancer. He was the first pro wrestler in Japan to defeat 14-time sumo grand champion Wajima. He didn’t waste any time telling it like it is.

“The American wrestling right now is all entertainment,” he said. “Very clearly it’s all showmanship. Japanese people don’t believe in that. They believe in the real thing. If they ever catch you doing that hanky panky that they’re doing in America, they’ll throw you out of here. They expect you to come here and fight. They don’t believe in the phony thing.

“See, they take it as a sport. Even if you get beat, the other man might get up and shake your hand and say ‘I beat you but you are the better man than me.’ They give you respect.” Tiger went on to explain the concept of the “sell.” In American professional wrestling, when one wrestler throws a punch or executes a move, the opponent must “sell” the move to the crowd by acting as if it really hurt. Even if the punch never connected the opponent must “sell” it to the crowd. Otherwise the entire farce is exposed.

“If the Japanese fans see a wrestler trying to “sell” a move,” Tiger said, “there’ll be no demand for you. You’ll starve to death.” Which meant that in Japan wrestlers had to go at each other hard and for real. Tiger explained how seriously the Japanese take their fighting.

“One of my friends was a wrestler and he was a big bugger and he couldn’t take the punishment in Japan. He left. When you train for wrestling in Japan, it’s just like the Army. You get up at 7am. You eat for one hour, relax then train for two to three hours, eat again, then sleep, then train again for four hours. And this guy couldn’t take it because he’d been living in America.” Tiger was explaining about the dojo, the gym where wrestlers train. A dojo, though, is no ordinary gym. When a wrestler enters a dojo he is making a lifelong commitment. Many enter a dojo when they are teenagers. At first they are treated no better than slaves, catering to the older guys, putting up with abuse. They also cook, clean, set up the ring and control the crowds at matches.

The dojo is also open to foreign wrestlers who can come and train while they’re in Japan. Tiger’s son had trained for six months in the dojo of Antonio Inoki, one of Japan’s wrestling legends. Tiger said he wrestled Inoki 16 times.

“He was the best I ever wrestled,” he said. “He believes in hard training. When he walks into the dojo people stand at attention. Nobody monkey’s around. They have respect for the big wrestler. And the big wrestler expects it.” Tiger then explained how truly hard core the Japanese wrestling fans can be as well.

“Some people hate me in the ring but they love me outside. They’re dying to buy my merchandise, they’re dying to wine and dine me. I slap a lot of my fans. When I’m sitting in my dressing room, I don’t want anybody coming and disturbing me. I’ll kick the shit out of them. But they’ll still worship me. You don’t have to knock anybody out on purpose. You can end up in big trouble. They won’t sue you, but there’s a lot of mafia here also. They’ll kill you. You have big strong mafia in wrestling. Today the boss of Chiba Prefecture, he’ll be here. Another group of mafia are coming from Hokkaido. They’re my biggest fans.

“If I slap some Japanese lady or man, they won’t wash themselves for weeks. Because they’ll say, ‘Tiger slapped me there.’ This is the respect they have for you.

“I have one fan who’s been following me for the last 15 years and I beat the shit out of him because I didn’t like his attitude, how he was approaching me. And still he keeps coming up to me. So finally I have to give up. I mean how much can you beat up somebody? This is how it is in Japan.” Tiger told me to make sure I watched him after the show was over, to follow him when he left the dressing room and went to this car.

“The Japanese incorporate martial arts, kick boxing, judo, karate plus wrestling. The competition is tough here because they start at a very young age, six or seven. The fans like to see competition. It doesn’t matter in Japan if you win or lose, as long as you put up a good fight.” –The Iceman, a masked American wrestler.

Whether it be the intense clean pro wrestling with holds being applied or the extremely violent brawls with every object in the arena a potential weapon, it was clear the Japanese fans demand that the wrestlers give it their all. NOW was definitely one of Japan’s smaller promotions as the arena was only slightly more than a quarter full and the show had a low rent, cheesy quality to it. But the fanatics out on that Monday night got everything they came for. In one of the eight matches, two Japanese wrestlers went at it for over half an hour in a fast paced, old time wrestling match that had lots of martial arts maneuvers and over 15 near pin falls. The action was hot and the crowd cheered wildly when it was over. The two wrestlers even shook hands.

Many of the fans had obviously come just to see Tiger Jeet Singh, who wrestled in a tag team bout with Kendo Nagasaki against two American wrestlers. Most of the match took place in the audience with the wrestlers slamming each other with chairs, pipes and tables in a raucous display of pure violence that had me buckled over laughing. Tiger bled horribly from his forehead and his entire face was covered in blood. The crowd screamed, hollered, laughed and ran away from the brawl in their midst like little children.

I was enjoying the action when, about thirty minutes into the show, I was approached by a young Japanese man wearing a business suit. He spoke very good English. He was intrigued because I was the only foreigner in the arena and I was taking pictures.

He said his name was Masa., the same name as my long time friend Masa, with whom I was staying in Tokyo. Basically this Masa was “the Man.” If you were doing a story on Japanese professional wrestling you simply couldn’t invent a better person to know. By day he was a mild mannered postal worker. By night he was a wrestling fanatic.

Masa carried a small photo album containing pictures of himself posing with hundreds of foreign wrestlers who have wrestled in Japan over the years. Masa spoke very good English, probably, I figured, for no other reason than he wanted to be able to converse with the foreign wrestlers who come to Japan. In his briefcase he carried a pile of copies of a wrestling insider magazine from the States. There were wrestling promotions every night of the week in and around Tokyo, Masa said, and he went to most of them. He said that in one month’s time, he’d be taking his paid leave and be going to the States to attend a wrestling fun week in Tennessee organized by an American promoter. A bunch of big name wrestlers were scheduled to be on hand. Masa and the rest of the fans could play volleyball with the good guys, have a barbecue with the bad guys, party, get autographs and attend wrestling shows. This guy was clearly hardcore.

After the show I went downstairs to the locker room with Masa. He waited outside as I approached Tiger. Tiger’s forehead was covered in bandages where he had been bleeding profusely. He told me to go outside in the car park and to watch what happens when he leaves.

A group of about 15 people had been waiting for him in the parking garage hoping to get his autograph or picture. Tiger walked over to his gray Mercedes, waiting for his driver and entourage to come from the dressing room. The fans had been standing about 20 feet away and slowly started to creep ever closer. They approached Tiger gingerly, as if they were in the midst of a god. It took several minutes before one man, dressed in a business suit, stepped forward. He bowed low as if he were standing before the Emperor. He held out a pen and a piece of paper.

“Please Mr. Tiger, sign please,” the man said, still staring at the ground.

“Where’s your t-shirt?!!” Tiger roared as he slammed the man across the chest with the back of his large hand. The man fell back several steps and then apologized to this god in his midst.

“Very sorry, so sorry,” the man said while bowing several times. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out 2,000 yen ($18) and handed it over to Tiger. Tiger pocketed the money, then reached into a gym bag and pulled out a Tiger Jeet Singh t-shirt. Tiger snatched the guy’s pen and signed the t-shirt and gave it to the man.

“Thank you very much Mr. Tiger,” the man said, retreating backwards and bowing profusely at the same time. “Mr. Tiger, number one. Thank you Mr. Tiger.”

The next person up was a teenager who proceeded to have his hair yanked by Tiger. He also bowed profusely and thanked Tiger for abusing him. This bizarre scene went on for 15 minutes with people getting shoved, yelled at or hit simply for asking for Tiger’s autograph.

“Sometimes I just look somebody in the eyes and yell at them, ‘Shut up!!’,” Tiger said just before he climbed into his Mercedes, “and they pee in their pants.” It was all I could do to keep from peeing in my pants with laughter.

“I beat up one guy 14 times,” he said. “I finally gave up and now the guy doesn’t come around anymore.” With that he climbed into his Mercedes and sped out of the parking garage.

I followed Masa out of Korakuen Hall and through the noisy arcade next door all the while shaking my head in disbelief at what I had just seen. We pulled up at a busy fast food restaurant. I ordered ramen noodles. Masa ordered “soft cream,” a soft ice cream cone. Masa then told me the story of Riki Dozan.

“Puroresu,” as the Japanese pronounce professional wrestling, first made its appearance in Japan just after World War II. The godfather of Japanese puroresu is Riki Dozan. Dozan, who was born in 1924, was actually a Korean, Kim Sin Nak, who had grown up with the Japanese name, Mitsuhiro Momota. Koreans in Japan are severely discriminated against and most change their names. Still even with a Japanese name, the young Momota suffered prejudice at the hands of his schoolmates. His circumstances led him to become a moody, ill-tempered youth and he was even abandoned by his own parents.

Seeking an outlet for his bitterness, he journeyed to Tokyo at the age of 13 and joined a sumo wrestling dojo. He went through three years of incredibly difficult training, getting up at 2:00 AM to work out in the cold, catering to the needs of the senior wrestlers, suffering through punishing and brutalizing workouts, before having his first match. He became a ferocious wrestler. He had blown up to 300 pounds, by regularly downing 18 bowls of rice and an entire case of beer in a single sitting, but still was quick as a hungry cougar.

 

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