Joshi Puroresu 101
I’m a long-time fan of professional wrestling. One of the few things I actually do remember doing in Primary One was listening to my friend rave on and on about how great the Ultimate Warrior was. I actually preferred Ted Dibiase, aka The Million Dollar Man and Randy Savage, the Macho Man back then, but hell, I didn’t know too much. Back then, the closest I ever got to the WWE (then known as the WWF) was at the Parkway Parade Ken-Air Funway video arcade.
The game known as WWF WrestleFest. But that is another story for another day.
But right now, what I really want to talk about is Japanese pro wrestling, also known as puroresu. And in particular, an aspect of the industry which is almost a sideshow novelty in the U.S., but a serious business in the Far East. The female wrestling phenomenon known as joshi wrestling. In particular, the federation known as GAEA.
Wednesday night is usually my WWE RAW night, but Arts Central was showing a documentary about entitled “Under The Sun: GAEA Girls”. Now at that moment, I knew little about GAEA, its history or its wrestlers. In fact, my knowledge of female wrestlers were limited to the one I’d seen in the WWE, Bull Nakano, and to a lesser extent, the Jumping Bomb Angels and Megumi Kudo, whom I discovered via a wrestling game in 2001.
The Gaea Girls documentary showcased the lifestyles of several wrestlers under the GAEA banner — how they lived and trained in the school run by veteran wrestler Chigusa Nagayo. In particular, the focus lay on young hopeful Saika Takeuchi, who has spent a year training and is preparing for her graduation test. Passing the test will allow her to debut at the upcoming GAEA show, as a full-fledged professional wrestler.
The 104 minute long documentary takes us through the training schedule of the women, including sparring, squats, dips and a grueling form of the push-up. Along with Saika Takeuchi, there are two other women who join the training, but these two are unable to handle the fear of seeing the borderline cruelty in the sparring ring. They soon quit and run away in shame.
Anyway, to cut the long story short, Takeuchi, despite being unable to handle the physical exertion of the wrestling match, eventually manages to win over the hearts of the head trainer Chigusa Nagayo and the owner of GAEA, Yuka Sugiyama. She finally realises her dream of becoming a professional wrestler.
If there’s one thing I never quite comprehended about wrestling, it’s the concept of “selling” and “stiffness”. When you “sell” a punch or a kick, you act as if the blow did the damage it was meant to do. It may look fake, but there are often times when the blow connects and the reaction to the pain is automatic. “Stiffness”, on the other hand, indicates how much a wrestler is actually pretending to hit. Japanese wrestlers in particular are known for not pulling their punches. It often reaches a point when a scripted fight might actually hurt one or both wrestlers because of how stiffly they work. The flipside, of course, is that if you’re not stiff at all, then your moves don’t even look realistic.
In particular, Saika Takeuchi tries to make the dropkick her signature move. The dropkick, one of the basics of any professional wrestler’s moveset, is basically a high double-legged kick to the chest of the opponent. Ideally, this should take down the opponent and stun them momentarily. At least, that’s what professional wrestlers make you think. In the documentary, junior trainer Meiko Satomura lambasts Takeuchi for her pathetic dropkicks during a sparring session between the two. Despite Takeuchi’s continued attempts, Meiko simply refuses to “sell” the move. Instead, she just stands there and berates the rookie for not putting effort into her moves. As punishment, Satomura unexpectedly demonstrates a stiff dropkick on Takeuchi, tearing the skin of the younger woman’s lower lip.
Now that… I wasn’t prepared for.
Professional wrestling has, despite its many connections to drug abuse and alcoholism, always prided itself on tradition and respect, and punishes severely those who take it lightly. It is exactly this that makes it so menacing. It is exactly this that attracts me to it.
