perhaps or perhaps not the only quasi-literate high-school dropout to do so. And Zappetti, not knowing who to bribe in the new order and reduced to running slot machines and the ‘onlies’ at the Hotel New York (the seedy bordello for GIs on R&R from Korea, where trade had also fallen off with the end of the Korean War), found himself drawn into the murky world of professional wrestling – yet another dubious area of US–Japan commercial intercourse – and then, in turn, into armed robbery.
GORGEOUS MAC
It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which professional wrestling captured the imagination of the post-Occupation Japanese public. Suffice it to say that the sport, one of the very, very few where Americans routinely went down to defeat at the hands of smaller Japanese, electrified the nation as nothing else had in the postwar history of Japan. Not only did it single-handedly resuscitate the wounded Japanese national psyche, still smarting from defeat in war and stung by the ongoing unofficial occupation of their country by the Americans, but it also jump-started Japan’s fledgling television industry. Almost overnight, the phenomenon spawned dozens of books by serious historians and sociologists and clearly demonstrated for the first time since the war just how strongly the Japanese clung to their ideas of being Japanese.
The
puro-resu bumu
, as it was called, officially began on the night of February 19, 1954, with an unprecedented and highly dramatic tag team match held in Tokyo, pitting two professional wrestlers from San Francisco – the Sharpe Brothers, Ben and Mike, against a twenty-nine-year-old retired sumo wrestler of some repute named Rikidozan and his partner, ten-time national amateur judo champion Masahiko Kimura.
It wasn’t the first professional wrestling match held in Japan; there had been a handful of exhibitions before the war. But most Japanese had preferred their own ancient sport of sumo to the sort of gouge and bite practiced by the Westerners. Sumo was a sport that dated back to the fourth century in which wrestlers wearing topknots and clad only in loincloth-like garb tried to force their opponents out of a small dirt ring. Size, weight and strength were key factors (wrestlers were routinely expected to eat themselves into obesity), and the matches were filled with pomp and ritual tied to Shinto, Japan’s native religion of nature and ancestor worship. The combatants purified themselves in sacred pre-bout rites, which included tossing salt.
This time, however, it was different. The Sharpe Brothers werethe reigning world tag team champions. Ben at 6′6″, 240 pounds, and Mike at 6′6″, 250 pounds, had defended their joint title successfully for five years running and both, still in their twenties, were in their prime. They were bona fide world stars, and the fact that athletes of their magnitude had been persuaded to come to an impoverished country like Japan was considered a major coup – in those days, Japan ranked so low on the list of places to tour internationally that a visit by, say, the Belgian foreign vice minister made headlines in Tokyo. In the weeks leading up to the Sharpes’ arrival, newspapers were filled with stories about them. Tickets were sold out well in advance, and so were the rights to televise the bouts on Japan’s two fledgling TV networks – the quasi-national NHK and NTV, Japan’s first commercial station.
Rikidozan was half a foot taller and some fifty pounds heavier than Kimura at 5′8″, 170 pounds, but when the capacity crowd of 12,000 people at Kokugikan sumo arena in Eastern Tokyo saw the four combatants together in the ring for the first time, they emitted a collective groan.
‘Those Americans are huge,’ said the ring announcer. ‘How can they possibly lose?’
The symbolism was all too painfully clear, as one Japanese journalist wrote later of the event. ‘The difference in physical size, especially in Kimura’s case, triggered
GORGEOUS MAC
It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which professional wrestling captured the imagination of the post-Occupation Japanese public. Suffice it to say that the sport, one of the very, very few where Americans routinely went down to defeat at the hands of smaller Japanese, electrified the nation as nothing else had in the postwar history of Japan. Not only did it single-handedly resuscitate the wounded Japanese national psyche, still smarting from defeat in war and stung by the ongoing unofficial occupation of their country by the Americans, but it also jump-started Japan’s fledgling television industry. Almost overnight, the phenomenon spawned dozens of books by serious historians and sociologists and clearly demonstrated for the first time since the war just how strongly the Japanese clung to their ideas of being Japanese.
The
puro-resu bumu
, as it was called, officially began on the night of February 19, 1954, with an unprecedented and highly dramatic tag team match held in Tokyo, pitting two professional wrestlers from San Francisco – the Sharpe Brothers, Ben and Mike, against a twenty-nine-year-old retired sumo wrestler of some repute named Rikidozan and his partner, ten-time national amateur judo champion Masahiko Kimura.
It wasn’t the first professional wrestling match held in Japan; there had been a handful of exhibitions before the war. But most Japanese had preferred their own ancient sport of sumo to the sort of gouge and bite practiced by the Westerners. Sumo was a sport that dated back to the fourth century in which wrestlers wearing topknots and clad only in loincloth-like garb tried to force their opponents out of a small dirt ring. Size, weight and strength were key factors (wrestlers were routinely expected to eat themselves into obesity), and the matches were filled with pomp and ritual tied to Shinto, Japan’s native religion of nature and ancestor worship. The combatants purified themselves in sacred pre-bout rites, which included tossing salt.
This time, however, it was different. The Sharpe Brothers werethe reigning world tag team champions. Ben at 6′6″, 240 pounds, and Mike at 6′6″, 250 pounds, had defended their joint title successfully for five years running and both, still in their twenties, were in their prime. They were bona fide world stars, and the fact that athletes of their magnitude had been persuaded to come to an impoverished country like Japan was considered a major coup – in those days, Japan ranked so low on the list of places to tour internationally that a visit by, say, the Belgian foreign vice minister made headlines in Tokyo. In the weeks leading up to the Sharpes’ arrival, newspapers were filled with stories about them. Tickets were sold out well in advance, and so were the rights to televise the bouts on Japan’s two fledgling TV networks – the quasi-national NHK and NTV, Japan’s first commercial station.
Rikidozan was half a foot taller and some fifty pounds heavier than Kimura at 5′8″, 170 pounds, but when the capacity crowd of 12,000 people at Kokugikan sumo arena in Eastern Tokyo saw the four combatants together in the ring for the first time, they emitted a collective groan.
‘Those Americans are huge,’ said the ring announcer. ‘How can they possibly lose?’
The symbolism was all too painfully clear, as one Japanese journalist wrote later of the event. ‘The difference in physical size, especially in Kimura’s case, triggered
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