5-Star BOOK Reviews: Mitsuharu Misawa’s Books, Part II

There has been a lot written about pro wrestler Mitsuharu Misawa. He’s a legend to this very day, respected and revered over fifteen years after his untimely death. Though some voices have since come out criticizing his in-ring style and the creative decisions that led to it, the fact remains that Misawa is still highly regarded among both his peers and his fans. We’ve already covered his sad and unfortunate childhood, so let’s see how things go for him as he shifts from being a student and an amateur wrestler to a full-fledged pro.

You can read part 1 here.

Training

Misawa describes arriving at AJPW’s dojo in 1981 which at the time was an old building with mice scurrying everywhere owned by Jumbo Tsuruta who received rent money from the company. From the beginning there is a radical change in training that puts his body through different types of stress compared to his amateur career. In particular the weight training would be really tough and he describes feeling so exhausted afterwards that he’d find himself unable to sit down on Western-style toilets and having to crawl up stairs on all fours. The severity of the training depended on which senior ran them and his lightest days were when Shiro Koshinaka ran them since, after seeing everyone work hard, he’d have everyone play baseball to relax a bit.

Misawa’s first official match came surprisingly soon, only five months after he first signed with the company. This quickness was punctuated by the fact that Misawa saw his name on a card for an upcoming local show very early despite being a complete rookie (APOD: by comparison, Toshiaki Kawada wouldn’t even get a stamp or a sash when he appeared on shows). He also recalls being nervous during his initial interactions with Giant Baba because Baba was hard to comprehend and he couldn’t ask his boss to repeat himself. Within six months to a year Misawa sheds his initial nervousness and finds himself really enjoying his matches and then compared and contrasts amateur and pro wrestling once again:

“In amateur wrestling, you are taught certain techniques and have to execute them. In professional wrestling, during my young days, it was also important to be in the corner and steal techniques from my seniors. I could think for myself and choose moves that suited me. There were dreams and possibilities.”

Misawa reflects on the unusual degree of freedom he was given as a rookie. Unlike most everyone else, who was restricted in terms of offensive techniques to things like dropkicks and basic slams, Misawa found himself doing spinning attacks early on and also coming up with techniques of his own to try and keep having fun (APOD: This level of freedom is VERY important to Misawa and in fact serves as a cornerstone philosophy behind Pro Wrestling NOAH). At the same time it wasn’t all roses for him in training, especially on an emotional level. Even when he was still in high school he had moments of homesickness and worried about his mother especially given how hard she worked to raise him and his older brother. He also made very clear comments about his (biological) father, stating “That guy, if he comes, I’ll knock him out!”

In those early days Misawa, like all rookies, received a salary. Unlike most of them, however, Misawa was paid more, likely stemming from higher expectations and his unusually rapid growth as a performer. Whereas most received 50,000 yen Misawa received 70,000 (well, 63,000 after deductions). Misawa describes liking the travel and seeing different places but isn’t fond of the expectation of having to go out drinking with seniors. So much so that he more or less abolishes this practice once he establishes NOAH so that his rookies and attendants aren’t consumed by societal and peer pressure to do things they otherwise didn’t feel confident doing. Misawa also jokes that, as a younger man, he barely drank, which was at odds with how much he drank as he got older and more established.

DEPARTURE skips ahead to Misawa’s excursion to Mexico around the three-year anniversary of his debut. He and Shiro Koshinaka depart for Empresa Mundial de Lucha Libre (EMLL, before it changed from Empresa to Consejo ([CMLL]) where Misawa in particular is exposed to a style that, on the surface, seems more in line with Misawa’s natural strengths. However Misawa doesn’t speak fondly in his time in Mexico. He describes the wrestling style as “like a circus”, noted how he didn’t have any salary and had to get by on his own, and noted that the poverty gap was much wider compared to Japan. For example kids who couldn’t afford tickets would come up to him and offer to take his bag into the arena which would get them into the venue for free. He believes that the locals thought he and Koshinaka, as Japanese wrestlers, were wealthier than them and would thus play pranks on them which Misawa didn’t always appreciate. He continues with various complaints about wrestling in Mexico: the old and smelly buses, unusable toilets, terrible air quality from poorly managed cars, and the much harder rings that made training and bumping much harder on his body. He also bemoans the poor choice in ring name he gave himself (Kamikaze Misawa), but notes that at least it’s better than “Samurai Shiro”.

Tiger Mask II

Though he describes a few good things about living in Mexico (chiefly some useful skills about living alone and having a short-term girlfriend over there), Misawa’s foreign excursion is cut short after only five months when Baba calls him back. Upon his return to Japan Misawa meets Baba who hands him a mask and matter-of-factly tells him “wear this”. With this he would become the second iteration of Tiger Mask, a gimmick he would embrace for the next 5-6 years.

The consensus among all of these Misawa writings and some of the “anthology” books like Ichinose’s Four Kings Bio is that Misawa hated this experience. Though he did it out of duty since it was his job he thought he was always considered the lesser iteration, a cheap replica that was always compared to the overwhelming success of the first. He wasn’t skilled in kicks so he had to attend dojos to learn how to do them properly, which to him didn’t make sense because while Sayama used kicks the actual manga character didn’t. He felt constant pressure to live up to the standards set by the original Tiger Mask in his professional life while also dealing with problems in his personal life as he struggled to find a place to live since most landlords refused to rent to “women in the entertainment business or wrestlers”. In other words, Misawa’s chosen profession made him an unstable tenant, even with Giant Baba serving as his guarantor.

As for whom Misawa looked up to and admired there are different accounts on this. In SUPREME Kagehiro Osano recalls interviewing Misawa’s classmates and hearing him talk about “Human Windmill” Bill Robinson and “European Emperor” Horst Hoffman during their earliest Japanese tours, which would’ve been around 1970. Misawa also showed respect for Tatsumi Fujinami because of his athletic and aerial skills which helped him stand out in the crowded martial arts-inspired field. Though Misawa doesn’t directly state who his favorite wrestler is or who inspired him to become a wrestler, a journalist does frame the question when he asks Misawa “whom does he respect?” and Misawa simply answers “Jumbo Tsuruta”. So from that we can infer that Tsuruta is the closest thing to Misawa’s personal favorite wrestler.

Misawa and Kawada

In DEPARTURE there’s an important aside as it pertains to Misawa’s relationship with Kawada. One of the reasons I started translating these books was to find the specific passage where Misawa is alleged to have stated that he intentionally antagonized Kawada to bring out his best in their matches. When I first got into AJPW my impression was that Misawa would goad Kawada into unleashing everything bottled up within during their matches so that they’d wrestle more intensely. Judging by how awesome their matches were it’s safe to assume that this trick worked and their matches came across as some of the hottest and most brutal matches of the past decades. But did Misawa actually antagonize Kawada for professional gain, or was there some underlying tension between them? The Misawa/Kawada friendship has been described as a cornerstone of Four Kings wrestling but many publications have cast doubt on the thick-as-thieves relationship between them. Kawada noted in his book that he was closer to Kodo Fuyuki and others during the 1980s and says relatively little about his relationship with Misawa.

Misawa, on the other hand, is a bit more direct with how he saw Kawada, and in his autobiography admits to being the instigator in a few confrontations and in some cases outright bullied Kawada in retaliation to Kawada allegedly talking back:

“Kawada came to the training camp a year after me, about six months after Mr. Fuyuki. I’ve known him since high school, so I was relentless from the start. He would talk back unnecessarily, so I would really knock him down and then kick him from the top of the stairs while he was curled up. Mr. Fuyuki was watching in shock. “Normally, you wouldn’t go that far,” he said. I wasn’t on good terms with Kawada, who was training with me. “It’s fine, this guy is,” I said. Maybe Mr. Fuyuki thought the same way. However, no matter how much Kawada was beaten, he remained unfazed.
During tours, when I went to the place where Tenryu was drinking, Mr. Fuyuki and Kawada, who were part of the “Tenryu Alliance,” would also be there, quietly sitting in a corner. The atmosphere was dark. Only Tenryu was lively, saying, “These guys are boring!” I would join in with enthusiasm. Back then, Mr. Fuyuki was like a borrowed cat in front of Tenryu.
But when the three of us—me, Mr. Fuyuki, and Tenryu—were together, we would bully Kawada relentlessly. “This is what’s wrong with you,” we would say, really going at it. Even so, Kawada remained unfazed (laughs).”

(APOD: Misawa frames this situation as two close friends getting into a scrap in high school and then some ~friendly~ teasing while on tour. However Kawada doesn’t say much about any of this in any of his direct publications or in other books in which he is referenced/interviewed. The only other person who claims to have seen any physicality between Misawa and Kawada backstage is Stan Hansen but I’ve checked his 2011 book and his two Japanese books and there’s nothing written beyond “they fought backstage”, which isn’t much since even friends will fight from time to time. But yeah, Misawa comes across as a bit of a dick for antagonizing Kawada and Kawada not hitting back. Maybe he knew he couldn’t because of the sempai/kouhai relationship, or maybe he didn’t want to publicly embarrass the golden goose. Whatever the case, Misawa’s friendship with Kawada would have its fair share of rough patches, especially as things grew more stressful and demanding for them both once the 1990s began).

Well this seems like a good time to finish this section. Misawa describes much of his early years in wrestling as filed with both optimism and disappointment. Though he had creative freedom when it came to matches he was also constrained by a gimmick he didn’t like but went along with it because it was ordered by Baba and it’s not like he was going to say no to such a direct order. Things weren’t easy for him as a young man in his early-to-mid-twenties being sent across the world to wrestle in a country and culture he didn’t understand while struggling to find a place to live and find stability in his already fractured personal life. And unfortunately it seems like baggage from his early years kept going as it affected his relationship with one of his closest friends. But as we get into the latter half of the 1980s we’ll see how things evolve for Misawa in all of these different facets of his life.

Thanks for reading.