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ROUND FOUR

Two hundred forty pounds. Barrel-chested. Serious. No hint of fragrance to be found. In most ways Rikidōzan couldn’t have been more different from George Wagner. Yet, as the “Human Orchid” bloomed over American pop culture during the 1950s, retired sumo wrestler Rikidōzan grew to an even greater stature in Japan. An honest-to-goodness icon. How? By capitalizing on anti-Western sentiment and mollifying the depressed spirit of a people decimated by war.

Television, timing, theater, and good ol’ jingoism proved more potent for Rikidōzan than “Gorgeous” George’s “Chanel No. 10.” Then, after he had acted as savior to a people that loved him only because they did not truly know him, the blade of a yakuza gangster’s six-inch hunting knife plunged into Rikidōzan’s battle-hardened abdomen. His untimely demise in 1963 unveiled a face long shrouded in secrecy.

Kim Sin-rak arrived in Japan in 1939 at the age of fifteen after a touring scout signed him to one of the several licensed sumo houses in that country. At Tokyo’s Nishinoseki stable, Sin-rak, strapping young man that he was, received the shikona (ring name) “Rikidōzan,” which fittingly translates to “Rugged Mountain Road.” It was decided that this new identity also required an elaborate fiction. The public wasn’t considered capable of accepting a nonnative Japanese rikishi, let alone a Korean, beating their own in sumo. That’s how Kim Sin-rak from the South Hamgyong Province in northeast Korea, a citizen of the Japanese empire, became Mitsuhiro Momota, pure-blooded Japanese son of Minokichi Momota, the Nagasaki-based scout who discovered him. Years later, well into his incredible pro wrestling stardom, Rikidōzan felt his background, if revealed as false, would have cost him much of his fan base—basically halving the country of Japan—such was the breadth of his popularity and the pervasiveness of anti-Korean sentiment among the population following the annexation of Korea in 1910. It wouldn’t be officially revealed until 1978, and even then many hagiographies glossed over or ignored the truth of Rikidōzan’s heritage and rise to fame.

The same year Rikidōzan began his journey up the difficult sumo ranks, Isamu Takeshita became the third president of the Japan Sumo Association. Fluent in English, Takeshita enjoyed quite a life. A half century before passing away at the age of eighty, Takeshita set up President Theodore Roosevelt with a judo and jiu-jitsu partner, Yamashita Yoshiaki, who at the president’s request taught technique at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he interacted with an assortment of styles including catch-as-catch-can wrestlers. In fact, the pinning of Yoshiaki led the Naval Academy to hire a wrestler rather than a jiu-jitsu man to teach young midshipmen. Still, Takeshita’s diplomatic transaction blazed a trail for four Kanō Jigorō students, including the supremely influential Mitsuyo Maeda, throughout the Americas in the early 1900s. Their efforts created the conditions for the proliferation of Japanese submission arts that are essential to the way the world understands and applies martial arts today.

Takeshita made five trips to the United States between the Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt administrations. During a summer radio broadcast from San Francisco in 1935, six years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he proclaimed, “No Japanese warship has ever crossed the Pacific except on a mission of peace. No Japanese soldier has ever come to these shores except on a similar mission.” Yet the retired admiral, who received a Distinguished Service Medal from the United States for his actions in the Japanese Imperial Navy during World War I, played a significant role in militarizing Japanese youth and sports in the ramp-up to war in the Pacific.

Joseph Svinth, for the Journal of Combative Sport, noted, “The fascistization of Japanese sport was among [Takeshita’s] duties in these positions, and during the late 1930s Takeshita was responsible for organizing regular foreign exchanges with Germany’s Hitler Youth.”

Takeshita’s considerable influence and fondness for sumo helped it grow into a national sport, but even he fell short in shielding the country’s indigenous wrestling style from the impact of war. As the empire churned in the years leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese life was essentially co-opted by the military. School-aged children were prescribed a physical education curriculum that translated directly to war fighting. Sporting arts were derided as unnecessary, and budō—the martial ways, specifically the Japanese martial arts spirit—was consigned to hand-to-hand fighting. The central authority for Japanese martial arts, the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai, was controlled by the Imperial Army, which promoted boxing because of the belief it engendered the right kind of spirit, while downplaying Kanō Jigorō’s Kodokan judo, which was thought to be too sporting. Kendo and sumo were simply impractical. Boxers such as Tsuneo “Piston” Horiguchi remained busy competing, and, like some sumotori, participated in war bond drives. Athletes in the East and West were useful for this sort of thing, as manipulating sports into effective propagandist tools was hardly new.

Dwindling resources, intensifying attacks from American B-29 Superfortress bombers around Tokyo, and a closely guarded military project halted sumo competition ahead of the summer tournament of 1944. Young battering ram Rikidōzan was close to touching its upper echelon before he and his stable were pulled into the war effort, apparently assigned to factory work during this time. Stories exist that he punched American prisoners of war whose output in forced labor camps wasn’t sufficient, though the veracity of the reports is unclear. Other rikishi, such as members of the Tatsunami stable, provided labor services like digging up pine roots that produced oil used for fighter plane fuel.

As responsible as anything for the abbreviated sumo season was a secret Japanese initiative with the goal of producing 10,000 bomb-dropping balloons, the Fu-Go Weapon, capable of hitting the continental United States directly from Japan or from warships in the Pacific. According to a 1973 report for the Smithsonian Institution by Robert C. Mikesh, Tokyo’s main sumo stadium, the Ryōgoku Kokugikan, was among several sports arenas, music halls, and theaters the military used to inflate and test thirty-three-foot-diameter balloons designed to deliver a payload of four incendiary bombs and one thirty-two-pound antipersonnel bomb. The Japanese hoped after catching strong winds from the west, America’s wooded areas would explode in raging forest fires, tying up critical resources and causing a panic among the civilian population.

For logistical, morale, and propaganda reasons, the American military worked with the media to keep information of potential balloon damage from reaching Japan, all the while stunting a potential hysteria on the West Coast. On May 5, 1945, Elsie Mitchell, age twenty-six, and five children from her husband’s church—Edward Engen, Jay Gifford, and Joan Patzke, all thirteen years old; Dick Patzke, age fourteen; and Sherman Shoemaker, eleven years old— were killed during a fishing and picnic excursion near Bly, Oreg., when a balloon did as intended. These casualties, the only ones in the United States that were a direct result of foreign enemy action, prompted the U.S. government to cease its censorship on the topic.

The U.S. Army also responded to the balloon threat via the Firefly Project. Conscientious objectors (group CPS-103) and the first all-black battalion of paratroopers, the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, better known as the Triple Nickles, were dispatched to the Pacific Northwest in case these fire balloons lived up to their billing. Despite the precaution, the 555th wasn’t called to smoke jump into a balloon-produced fire. There was concern among military brass that the Japanese might float germ or chemical warfare to American shores, but from November 4, 1944, to August 8, 1945, two small brush fires and a momentary loss of power at a plant in Hanford, Wash., were the only recorded incidents of property damage, according to the Smithsonian Institution report.

The situation at Hanford Engineering Works, however, could have been catastrophic. Uranium slugs for the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, Rikidōzan’s adopted hometown, were produced there and the balloon bomb triggered the reactor’s safety mechanism. The fail-safe system had not been tested, and everyone was relieved when it worked as designed. The reactor remained cool enough not to collapse or explode—ensuring the Fu-Go Weapon would be remembered as no more than a missed Hail Mary attempt by Japan to turn the tide of the war.

The end of hostilities and subsequent allied occupation did not immediately return Japanese life, including the martial arts, to their premilitarized social order. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, instituted numerous edicts, among them directives aimed at removing and excluding militaristic and ultranationalist persons from society. Schools that briefly resuscitated martial arts instruction after the end of the war stopped, and the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai was shuttered. The tangled mess resulted in a purge of people apparently sympathetic to the defeated Japanese Empire, many of whom were seemingly connected to the Butokukai that had been corrupted under the fascist regime. This was the crux of the General Headquarters budō ban that lasted until 1950—not the shelving of martial arts, per se, just their perversion.

Under Takeshita’s leadership, sumo was not targeted by the Allied Powers’ budō prohibition. Speaking on the seventieth anniversary of the end of the war, Sokichi Kumagai, seventeen years a top-ranking sumo referee, or gyōji, told the Mainichi, a major daily Japanese newspaper, that he received word to reconvene with his stable and get touring again soon after Japan’s surrender. “The biggest problem was securing enough food for the wrestlers, who were all voracious eaters,” Kumagai said. The tour was called komezumo, or “rice sumo,” and in lieu of money, spectators were required to offer a payment of rice. “At the time we toured in groups of related stables,” Kumagai told the paper, “and all the groups toured in areas where rice farming was common.”

Soon enough the sumo association issued a notice that a Grand Sumo Tournament would be held in Tokyo in November 1945. Though his reputation remained strong and positive, and he was unaffected by the Butoku Kai purge, Takeshita announced plans to step down as the head of sumo when the honbasho ended. Rikidōzan had earned a spot in sumo’s top division, the makuuchi, and reached the sport’s third highest rank, sekiwake, by the time Takeshita passed away in 1949. He competed until September 1950, and, citing financial reasons, retired.

Rikidōzan’s improbably important pro wrestling journey began in construction. According to Robert Whiting’s book, Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan, a sumo fan, tattooed yakuza gambler Shinsasku Nita, maintained “special connections inside the GHQ.” Those relationships led to projects at U.S. military camps, some of which Nita hired Rikidōzan to supervise. The wrestler’s English improved and he enjoyed the nightlife in Ginza. One evening, according to Whiting, Rikidōzan found himself on the wrong side of an altercation with a Japanese-American Olympic weightlifter, Hawaii’s Harold Sakata, who earned a silver medal at the 1948 Games in London, and, later, appeared opposite Sean Connery’s version of James Bond as Auric Goldfinger’s hat-throwing henchman Oddjob. Sakata and Rikidōzan quickly worked out their differences, and the former sumo wrestler was integrated into a touring group of American pro wrestlers who had been sponsored by the Torii Oasis Shriner’s Club of Tokyo. Before heading to the Korean Peninsula, where fighting was underway between U.S.- and Chinese-led forces, former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis joined seven wrestlers, including Sakata and Iowan Bobby Bruns, in entertaining U.S. servicemen while seeking to raise $50,000 for crippled children during a three-month tour of Japan.

Like the Imperial Japanese Army, Americans usurped the old sumo venue, which had been repaired after U.S. firebombing destroyed its huge iron roof. Rather than testing weapons, Occupation forces renamed the building from Ryōgoku Kokugikan to Ryōgoku Memorial Hall and staged events—the first bits of Americana introduced to the Japanese that hadn’t fallen from the sky. American-style pro wrestling, the kind “Toots” Mondt had established in the 1920s, was officially introduced to the Japanese on Sunday, September 30, 1951, the same month the country returned to the League of Nations after signing a peace treaty in San Francisco.

Rikidōzan debuted in late October, feeling his way through a ten-minute time-limit draw against Bruns. Sergeant Clarkson Crume, for Stars and Stripes, noted that Rikidōzan had lost six inches off his waist since meeting Sakata and the boys, and was “surprisingly good for someone who has been wrestling only three weeks.” The squat Japanese grappler hung around the tour through December 11, karate chopping and running over the opposition—a sampling of the hard style that became his trademark. Winter’s harshness cut the wrestling program short, but the expedition paid off because Bruns had found a twenty-year-old, 265-pound man who would spearhead the rapid expansion of the “sport” in Japan.

The following February, as a naturalized Japanese citizen—important since status as a North Korean would have made travel to the U.S. problematic—Rikidōzan departed in good shape, down thirty pounds, ready to learn the pro wrestling business. He landed in Hawaii, one of the nearly thirty territories encompassing the National Wrestling Association, and was coached by Bobby Bruns. The NWA-affiliated promotion in San Francisco also gave him plenty of opportunities to step into the ring. Rising from the ashes of the Gold Dust Trio, the NWA attempted to control and organize talent, produce strong champions the public would support (despite knowing that wrestling was more show than competition), and seize the larger space of wrestling. NWA representatives in Honolulu (Al Karasick) and San Francisco (Joe Malcewicz) arranged the historic “Shriners” tour of 1951, and envisioned Japan as a place well worth expanding to.

Rikidōzan made them look smart.

Intent on establishing a lasting pro wrestling promotion, Rikidōzan returned to his adopted country after a year and a half on the road. In short order, a pipeline of mostly large white men, presumably Americans but not always, journeyed overseas to lose—delighting Japanese audiences, most of whom remained ignorant that outcomes were predetermined. Rikidōzan’s affiliation with the NWA quickly lent credibility to him and his organization, the Japanese Pro Wrestling Alliance.

More important than NWA ties was the timing of his venture. As it had for wrestling and “Gorgeous” George in the States, television became an enormous driver for Rikidōzan and pro wrestling in Japan. Within a month of the JWA starting operations on July 30, 1953, commercial broadcast networks began distributing programming to Japanese households, which, no different than postwar Americans, purchased televisions in increasing numbers.

Rikidōzan’s first puroresu event hit airwaves on two networks, NHG and NTV, live from Tokyo, on February 19, 1954. Joining forces with Masahiko Kimura—a pioneering judo and mixed-style fighter three years removed from breaking Hélio Gracie’s left arm with a joint lock that was later named in his honor in front of 20,000 Brazilians—the pair competed in a tag-team match against the big-and-tall Sharpe brothers of Canada (to the Japanese, Ben and Mike Sharpe passed just fine for Americans). Three days of pro wrestling, all live on television, served as quite an introduction for Rikidōzan, the “ethnic hero” of Japan, whose ring formula evoked memories of the Second World War. With a twist.

“I get phone calls, letters telling me hit back when American wrestlers hit me,” he told the United Press during an interview in San Francisco in 1952. “Finally, when [they] hit dirty, I hit dirty, too.”

In the U.S., that was easy enough to understand because for years this had been wrestling at its core. The Gold Dust Trio played off stereotypes—religious, ethnic, or nationalist—and casting the likes of Rikidōzan as a villain was simply how it worked. But in Japan? He couldn’t accept such humiliation from gaijin. Surrender instead of victory meant reminding people of the Empire’s failure. Of the Americans’ bombs. The sun hadn’t set on the Japanese, Rikidōzan intended to say through his karate chops; that’s how he wanted to make people feel when he wrestled.

Pro wrestling and television produced prideful and harrowing moments for the Japanese. In the fall of 1955, a couple years after Rikidōzan captured the public’s imagination, an eleven-year-old schoolboy was reportedly killed when a fellow student landed a dropkick while imitating the American style of wrestling. Networks, which were saturated with wrestling at the time, created public service announcements essentially telling kids to cool it.

A growing fervor around Rikidōzan, and Kimura’s cemented reputation as one of Japan’s best fighters, prompted the media to speculate about what might happen if they were matched as opponents instead of teammates. The wrestlers paid attention and agreed it was a good idea to entertain this question. There was money to be made, and for the advancement of Japanese pro wrestling the match needed to happen. So on December 22, 1954, the first pro wrestling heavyweight championship of Japan was contested at the Kuramae Kokugikan, the home of sumo from 1950 until 1985. Without nationalist overtones, the contest between Rikidōzan and Kimura turned out to be a straight power play. Shifting from work to shoot, the former sumo man chopped the judoka to the floor, a double cross apparently justified by an errant kick from Kimura to Rikidōzan’s groin.

“The first bout was going to be a draw,” Kimura told Sports Graphic Number, Japan’s Sports Illustrated, in 1983. “The winner of the second will be determined by the winner of a rock-paper-scissors. After the second match, we will repeat this process. We came to an agreement on this condition. As for the content of the match, Rikidōzan will let me throw him, and I will let him strike me with a chop. We then rehearsed karate chop and throws. However, once the bout started, Rikidōzan became taken by greed for big money and fame. He lost his mind and became a mad man. When I saw him raise his hand, I opened my arms to invite the chop. He delivered the chop, not to my chest, but to my neck with full force. I fell to the mat. He then kicked me. Neck arteries are so vulnerable that it did not need to be Rikidōzan to cause a knockdown. A junior high school kid could inflict a knockdown this way. I could not forgive his treachery. That night, I received a phone call informing me that several, ten, yakuza are on their way to Tokyo to kill Rikidōzan.”

A strain of thought exists that suggests Rikidōzan’s stabbing death in 1963 was the yakuza catching up with him for the betrayal of Kimura, who, to the surprise of no one, never received a chance to wrestle or fight the former sumo stylist again. As with most things having to do with Rikidōzan, who he was and what he did relative to his public perception were very different.

Rikidōzan and American Lou Thesz wrestled to a sixty-minute draw in Tokyo’s first-ever “world title match” in 1957, scoring a record 87.0 rating on Japanese television—two of his matches rank in the top ten most-viewed programs in the country’s history and tens of thousands of people packed the streets to watch. His matches against Thesz, the only American wrestler Rikidōzan admitted to having respect for, represent the crowning achievements of his enormous ring success.

When Rikidōzan visited Los Angeles a year later to face Thesz—the best shooter in the world, a man chiseled from granite like Ed “Strangler” Lewis—the message was clear: If Rikidōzan could put up a fight against a man like Thesz, if he could beat Thesz and claim the NWA international heavyweight belt, which he did in L.A., well, he could do anything.

So too could the Japanese.

Not only had the face of Japanese strength adopted the American manner of wrestling, he adopted the American way of life and business. In L.A., Rikidōzan asked Gene LeBell, then twenty-six, to hold $15,000 cash in crisp $100 bills. “He said keep it until the match is over,” recalled LeBell. “I could’ve gone down to Mexico.” No matter what happened at the Olympic Auditorium that night, a top-of-the line Rolls-Royce was going to be purchased afterwards. Big money. Big cars. Big homes. Big deals. He operated in the legitimate and illegitimate consumerism that permeated Japan following the war. Rikidōzan put his name on nightclubs, hotels, condominiums, and bowling alleys. He also circulated among gangsters, and in some ways was one himself. When he drank too much he could become belligerent, a bully who ignored police summons.

Rikidōzan indulged in money, power, and influence. He was not who he was portrayed to be, and after his sudden death ten days before “Gorgeous” George Wagner passed away in Los Angeles, the pro wrestling business in Japan was left in shambles. It is testament to Rikidōzan’s massive influence that his death didn’t bring down pro wrestling altogether. Instead, his protégés rode the tidal wave and established important legacies of their own.