Flupke's Month in Wrestling: November 2022 (Part Three)
DDT - EVE - Tokyo Joshi Pro
Front Matter
We’re doing things a little differently this month. Other writing commitments have left me unable to keep up with my usual newsletter output, so I’ve handed over the reins to a bunch of other writers I admire. On Wednesday, George Twigg discussed the influence of Giant Baba’s booking model on current-day Tokyo Joshi Pro. Yesterday, I unveiled the first episode of Be Careful Lulu Pencil!, a manga project with art by Anthony Hardman and words by the leader of the Pencil Army herself.
For this final piece, I’ve invited Sarah Kurchak, author of I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder; and Andrew Key, one of my favourite writers on film, whose novel Ross Hall was published earlier this year, to contribute reviews of wrestling matches. Sarah regularly writes excellent pieces about pro wrestling and has guested on here on more than one occasion; Andrew self-confessedly knows “less than nothing about Japanese women’s wrestling”, so I thought I’d experiment by giving him a match I figured anyone can get behind. The results are published unedited and unfiltered below.
Finally, there’s a few hundred words by me, because I just couldn’t stay away, even though I’d said I would.
Each image used in this newsletter is linked to the Twitter account responsible for it: simply click through to bring up the original post. If you are a photographer whose image I have used here, and you do not grant me permission to reproduce your work, please let me know (Twitter: @oystersearrings) and I will remove it. Thanks!
写真家さん、ここにイメージが写すことが許可しなければ聞いて下さって私は大至急除きます (ツイターの @oystersearrings です)。ありがとうございます！
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Daisuke Sasaki vs Tetsuya Endo
03.11/ Yokohama Radiant Hall
When I was asked to contribute to this month’s newsletter, I had all sorts of grand visions of dedicating my paragraphs to some sort of wrestling-adjacent minutia that I feel deeply passionate about. Miu Watanabe’s line drawings, which are sketched with even more intensity than she brings to the ring, were an early contender. So was Daisuke Sasaki’s glorious mane. But then a match that so specifically catered to my sensibilities unfurled in the early days of November and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to talk about anything else for the rest of the month. (And then I spent the rest of the month avoiding writing about it. But procrastinating and panicking that I can’t possibly make something perfect enough is my love language.)
One of the almost limitless things that I love about the dynamic between Daisuke Saski and Tetsuya Endo is how often it defies the expectations and conventions of wrestling storytelling. Back in 2016, Sasaki strutted into the ring during a tense moment between a young pair of tag team partners named Konosuke Takeshita and Tetsuya Endo like he was the devil at a crossroads, and offered the latter a place in his new stable, DAMNATION. In taking it, Endo was somehow rewarded with a misfit found family instead of a Faustian bargain.By traditional wrestling logic—hell, any wrestling logic whatsoever—Endo’s rising star should have sparked at least a little jealousy in his leader and triggered a power struggle at the top. But the two seemed content to co-captain the DAMNATION ship and co-parent the pervert alien child Mad Paulie for years. Even their brief blood feud in the fall of 2020 ended with a perversely heartwarming reunion. And when DDT forced DAMNATION to disband in 2021, they both seemed to settle into awkwardly ghosting each other instead of engaging in any typical blowoff. Which is how they remained for a full year. Until the DDT D-Ou Grand Prix 2022 forced them into the same block.
One of the almost limitless things that I love about DDT is how seamlessly it blends its disparate tones and influences in its product. There’s something for almost everyone on every card. Quite often there’s something for almost everyone in every match. But something had to give here. Either Sasaki and Endo’s ongoing history had to clipped and caged in order to appeal to a wider range of fans who weren’t invested in it—or even aware of it—or someone had to say fuck it and let those two tell a story that was only truly accessible to a portion of their audience. An impassioned subsection of the DDT audience who has sunk considerable feelings and merch money into these two wrestlers, but a portion nonetheless.
I’m so glad the right one gave and granted their encounter the time and space it needed to (d)evolve into an emotional battle between two people who know each other too well and still care too much to ever have a normal wrestling match. Because for everyone who saw a 30 minute bout with occasional good movez that overstayed its welcome, there was at least one other person who saw the wrestling equivalent of a closing time argument between two high level debaters who can still shoot off an eloquent and well-crafted argument, but are also going to sloppily lob some base insults at each other. For every person who saw a jobber wander into a match part way through to engage in some aimless interference, there was someone who saw a confused alien child who had come back to find his dads fighting. For everyone who saw a pointless draw, someone else appreciated an appropriately murky and provisional resolution between two people who are slowly coming to accept, for better and worse, that they will always care about each other.
- Sarah Kurchak
Rika Tatsumi, Yuki Aino & Max the Impaler vs. Raku, Pom Harajuku & Aja Kong
09.10 / Tokyo Dome City Hall
“Hey Luke, Apologies for writing this late. I think I’m coming down with something and I haven’t been sleeping particularly well recently, so maybe I’m not in the best mindset to watch this and respond to it with any kind of sophistication. Or maybe, actually, this is the perfect frame of mind to be in for something like this.
As I’ve told you before, I know less than nothing about Japanese women’s wrestling, even after watching GAEA Girls at your encouragement. When you asked me to respond to this match you wrote that “what goes on in this match transcends linguistic and cultural boundaries”, and so, as you requested, I watched it with Japanese commentary. I’ll admit that about two-thirds of the way of the way through I felt so confused by what I was supposed to be getting from the fight that I switched to the English commentary. But this didn’t help me much either — I just heard two guys yelling a lot. They seemed to be really enjoying the wrestling, though, so good for them.
What was going on here? I suppose this match — or piece? artwork? fable? — is about oppositions: large/small, old/young, brute strength/intelligence, cuteness/monstrosity. I also suppose that the trajectory of the match could be described as a parable of Fear Overcome. Presumably all six of the wrestlers involved have character arcs and backstories, though what any of these are is totally opaque to me from this match alone, and presumably we’re supposed to see Pom’s eventual willingness to hit Max the Impaler with a bin as a sign of personal growth and triumph.
I found it hard to really get to grips with what the other four people were doing, what their specific roles were in the structure of oppositions that was playing out here. There were a lot of reversals. There were points at which I could feel a narrative emerging and then points at which I felt lost in whatever was unfolding; perhaps I could have been more patient with all these reversals of fortune, but I felt like not a little of the match was padding there to stretch out the main theme: Pom’s Courage.
I could feel myself looking for a simple, straightforward meaning, partly because I assumed that if you were asking me to watch this particular match, you thought there was something that anyone could get out of it. The subtleties — the small moments that got both the Japanese and English announcers so pumped — were lost on me. I don’t know; it was weird. I was confused; usually I like aesthetic confusion, but maybe this felt like if I wanted to really get to grips with it I’d have to invest a lot more time and energy. I think the closest comparison I can think of is actually when i saw some Kabuki in Tokyo and was left feeling like I would need to spend way longer thinking about it than I had if I wanted to make much sense of it.
Would watching this match persuade me to watch more Japanese women’s wrestling? No idea. I can see why people would enjoy this. My short-lived interest in professional wrestling more or less came to an end in about 2002, but it overlapped with the WWE Attitude Era. Max the Impaler reminded me of The Undertaker if he’d been into Crass instead of Metallica. That’s about the extent of my frame of reference.
Hope that’s something useful for you,
A”
- Andrew Key
Millie McKenzie vs. Miyu Yamashita
Charlie Morgan vs. Emersyn Jayne
14.11 / 229 The Venue
This month I attended a live wrestling show for the first time since January 2020. It’s a date that feels both a lifetime away and three seconds ago. Old friends reunited and jumped back into conversation as if none of us had been away, and yet there was a feeling that we’re living in a completely different world now, for all the efforts at continuity. Looking back at the period of time where I went to every major EVE show I could make - starting in early 2017 with Meiko Satomura’s first appearance in a UK ring, and running all the way through to Wrestle Queendom 3 where me and Jackson taught Maki Itoh a new rude gesture (see below) - it’s hard not to see myself as a wildly different person now to the person I was then. My last Resistance Gallery show happened two months into a job I’ve now been in for four years. I’ve been through three courses of therapy and a global pandemic. British wrestling completely shut down for the best part of a year, and its fanbase suffered a massive crisis of confidence following the revelations of the Speaking Out movement. You can recreate the conditions in which all sorts of things flourished - a circle of friends, a reliable supply of unforgettable weekends, a vibrant women’s wrestling promotion with beloved home talent and tentacles spreading across the globe - but you can’t go back to how it was before.
What’s striking, looking back, is the sense of momentum that animated wrestling in the UK pre-COVID. EVE wasn’t my first experience of live British wrestling - PROGRESS was already beginning to peak in terms of hype in late 2016, and I caught, and fully lost myself in, shows in Manchester and Sheffield that winter. But that EVE show was the first big IRL gathering of a group of like-minded wrestling fans that I’m still happy to consider some of the finest friends I’ve made online. These get-togethers quickly became one of the main reasons for attending EVE weekends in the first place; our numbers swelled and soon included fans from Germany, Denmark and Singapore. The whole thing felt like a movement - even as fans including myself began to sour on PROGRESS and its creative direction, EVE continued to go from strength to strength, and then upstart promotions like Schadenfreude & Friends came along to keep the ball rolling. It didn’t matter if not everything connected because there was always some new excitement just around the corner.
In EVE, the booming fan culture was further fed by booking that rewarded long-term investment and elevated new stars, even as imports (Kris Wolf, Aja Kong, Hana Kimura, Chihiro Hashimoto, Tsukasa Fujimoto, Mei Suruga) were more often than not the thing that got me in through the door. 2017-2019 were also my peak years on so-called “Joshi Twitter”, and although I spent relatively little time talking online about wrestling from outside Japan, there were EVE matches featuring domestic talent that worked on my feelings than almost anything I absorbed through Samurai TV or Nico Pro: Sammii Jayne vs Charlie Morgan at Wrestle Queendom 1, Jetta vs Kasey in the SHE-1, the Morgan vs Kay Lee Ray title match where Nina Samuels cashed in. And then of course there were clashes featuring talent I’d first discovered in a Japanese context, but which had an unmistakable flavour because they happened in ResGal: the first singles match between Emi Sakura and Meiko Satomura in seven years was almost unbearably electric in such an intimate venue; Kris Wolf’s retirement show, which played out as a kind of amateur theatre experiment structured around wrestling matches, couldn’t really have happened anywhere else.
Everyone with a niche passion knows how intense it can be meeting fellow fanatics out in the open. There might be a faltering quality to the early conversations, because people that share special interests aren’t always that similar in other respects. But once the ice is broken, you feel like you’ve found your tribe. This is a double-edged sword. Wrestling can be an emotionally draining spectacle, and it’s beautiful to share those experiences with people that feel as strongly about them as you do. But it can also foster an us-against-the-world mentality. I think my years of existing deep within the joshi fandom rabbit-hole made me feel like more of an outsider than I actually am. A wrestling weekend shocks all your senses and makes you feel powerfully alive and you come away thinking that this is the number one thing that makes life worth living. Then, if you go through periods of bad fortune or bad mental health, it can leave you feeling like this is the only thing that makes life worth living. I’m happy to report that I don’t feel like this anymore. There are thousands of things that make life worth living, and wrestling is merely one of them.
Three years away from that momentum allowed for a proper mental reset, and I came to this show needing less from it than I had previous EVE shows. I felt almost zero FOMO about skipping the evening show, even when I saw pictures of Hyper Misao riding a souped-up Boris Bike into a pile of steel chairs (compare and contrast this with my hot feelings of regret about missing Lulu Pencil’s match three years ago). Unlike previous years, I was unbothered about meet-and-greets, because I’ve learned to accept that wrestlers are humans and performers and that their other-worldly power is concentrated on the stage. A bumbling exchange in Japanese with Miyu Yamashita won’t cure all my ills, although I did congratulate Rin Kadokura on her marriage. I’ve attended more real sports this decade than fake ones, and I went into this show treating it more like a cricket match than the personal emotional cataclysm that was Wrestle Queendom 1. A nice afternoon out at the matches.
But then - the feeling came back. It first hit me when Miyu wrestled Millie McKenzie. I dreamed about Aja Kong’s entrance at York Hall for literal months before it happened, but here it wasn’t the entrance that got me so much as the wrestling itself. The feeling of being gripped by the outcome of a contest, the raw amazement of watching two great athletes doing impossible, terrifying things with their bodies. Millie’s spear to the chest which looks like it ought to have caved in Miyu’s ribcage. You wince and you shout and you let your most visceral feelings find a voice and a presence in the room. Not all the matches on the card elicited this feeling, but it was definitely there in the main event, where the two rivals from the main event of Wrestle Queendom 1 were brought back together in a hideous No DQ match. I’ve heard people remark that structurally this match was a complete mess but that’s not what mattered to me in the moment - what mattered were that my reactions were real, and unfiltered, and more or less out of my control.
Throughout the show, a guy sat next to me kept trying to launch quips and get himself over like BritWres crowds used to be notorious for in the old glory days, but that’s never what any of this was about - it turns out that what kept me coming back to live wrestling was that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when for a split second you truly, unselfconsciously believe that your hero is doomed, or that they’re finally about to vanquish their foe, or that both will die trying. Well-executed hardcore matches always cut to the quick in this respect, because there’s no easy way to turn off that part of your brain that reacts with shock and concern when someone gets hurled into a pile of drawing pins right before your eyes. Catalogue the specifics of the 2010s BritWres boom period all you like, but it turns out that what me and my friends were imbibing all along was the grand old tradition of Being Wrestling Fans, just like the grannies at World of Sport tapings, or the territorial-era fans watching their guy challenging Harley Race for the belt, or the ancient Greeks, presumably.
- Flupke