September 21, 2001 in Tokyo, Japan
後楽園ホール Kōrakuen Hōru
WITH ONLY FOUR SHOWS REMAINING IN THE RINGSBOX THAT IS ITSELF A GIFT HOW BLESSED MUST WE COUNT OURSELVES TO DISCOVER AMONGST THIS SLIM NUMBER OF THE YET-UNWATCHED A 後楽園ホール KŌRAKUEN HŌRU WHICH IS TO SAY THE PUREMOST OF ALL JAPANESE PROFESSIONAL GRÆPPLINGS AND 格闘技 KAKUTOGI and, what's more, to find one so very strange in its graphics? This BATTLE GENESIS Vol. VIII, though it be colour-commented (I have never thought much of "commentated") upon by both Gong Kakutogi's Hideyuki Kumakubo (and RINGS Japan's Hiromitsu Kanehara), sees WOWOW Exicte Match's Kenichi Takayanagi nowhere near its humble yet thrilling ringside area, look:
He's just not there! That is because this is not a WOWOW presentation but instead one of FIGHTING TV SAMURAI! which, though dedicated to the fighting arts, and able, is unquestionably no WOWOW in terms of taste level (what is [nothing {could ever be}]). Is this merely how this lone, low-key 後楽園ホール Kōrakuen Hōru is to be broadcast? Or is this a grim forerunner? Has the WOWOW television deal, so vital to this Fighting Network from its 1991 outset, soured beyond resweetening? You will recall, perhaps, just before we outpaced the Wrestling Observer Newsletter online archives (updated weekly, and yet not weekly enough [what could that mean]), Dave Meltzer noted that WOWOW was cutting back slightly. Has it cut back completely? What a shame that would be: as both Fighting Network RINGS and WOWOW celebrate their respective tenth anniversaries (I saw a vignette about the WOWOW tenth) that all would crumble like the crumbly parts of the Colosseum depicted in the FIGHTING TV SAMURAI! opening graphic captured above which whirls into view almost exactly like the Virtua Fighter 4: Evo/Virtua Fighter 5 stage of the same broad nature (this is weird because in just the last few days I have been thinking I should hook up my PS3 for the first time in probably four years and play some VF5 maybe [I use Goh because like me he does judo but he is good at it and so this for me is escapism]; I have of course played VF4: EVO on PS2 more recently than that because of how it is the best and how I like things that are that way). Between this Kenichi Takayanagi-free, non-WOWOW broadcast, and the grim fact of only three shows left in the RINGSbox after this, I worry. How do you think Akira Maeda feels about it?
It is hard to get a read on him here, isn't it. I don't know why this occurs to me now for the first time, maybe because I am thinking of the end a little (the RINGSend), and maybe because of the Colosseum graphic calling to mind the brief K-1 Romanex era, but I guess it totally makes sense that Maeda would, in time, head-up HERO*S given that K-1's Kazuyoshi Ishii worked for Maeda in RINGS from 1991 pretty much right up until the start of K-1, right? Also, still with the Colosseum graphic, I am thinking about how for a while in PRIDE it said Virtua Fighter 4 on the mat, and also that Virtua Fighter's international judo assassin Goh very much anticipates John Wick, and, now that I check dates, Bary Eisler's John Rain, too (I have probably mentioned those novels in these pages before, and while I read them all whilst sleep-deprived and so cannot really remember enough about them to know if they were any good, I do remember that I read a bunch of them, which surely counts for something).
SO ANYWAY it is pretty dark to be unWOWOWed if even temporarily (wait, have we entered . . . have we entered NONON?) but the FIGHTING TV SAMURAI graphics, it must be said, are certainly going for it, and look pretty great if paused at the height of their art:
And a dimly lit 後楽園ホール Kōrakuen Hōru still looks like a dimly lit 後楽園ホール Kōrakuen Hōru, so I think we're going to be okay (for now):
HIDEO TOKORO WHAT ON EARTH I had no idea Hideo Tokoro of all people had ever RINGSed but I am delighted to learn that I have been an ignorant mess (now enlightened). Hideo Tokoro is a tiny little fellow with like a million fights, and he wins about half of them, and he continues to have them (in RIZIN [where else]) despite being literally older than me (so dark), and he enjoyed a fair bit of fame (or maybe he didn't enjoy it, maybe it was a curse to him) at the height of the Japanese network-television kakutogi boom where HERO*S played up a fighting janitor gimmick, not in the sense of the super friendly janitor at our gym ("ayyyy budday") who asks questions about judo and likes to talk about how he did Kyokushin in Québec years ago (what's up, Pierre, this blog post is for you pal [a terrible gift, I owe you more than this; forgive me]), but in that he was a professional fighter who still worked as a janitor because he was a tiny broke everyman. In his long (and darkly ongoing) career, he has lost to Kiyoshi Tamura (perhaps we will revisit this in detail at a later date) and Kron Gracie (dreamy son of Rickson), beaten Rumina Sato and Royler Gracie, and fought Royce Gracie to a draw (Royce had like forty pounds on little Tokoro, couldn't finish, and didn't win the decision because he insisted on no judges, quality work Royce [will he demand no judges in his $1.15 million fraud case where he {allegedly} and his wife the doctor {allegedly} claimed low-income benefits whilst {allegedly} hiding money in off-shore accounts {allegedly}? or in his divorce case where he demands spousal support and that his wife pay all his attorney's fees because I guess maybe {this is mere speculation on my part} all the {alleged} off-shore money they {allegedly} paid no tax on was maybe just hers or maybe he has forgotten how to get it or something? Who can say. Also never forget he tested for higher levels of Nandrolone than the lab's equipment could reliably register after he fought Kazushi Sakuraba THE WONDERFUL KAZUSHI SAKURABA, and then, in the course of denying everything, alleged a vast conspiracy and also demonstrably lied about his weight which is possibly even lower please never forget these things I beg you]).
HIDEO TOKORO THEN and his opponent this day is Naoyuki Kotani (RODEO STYLE), who we saw win twice at BATTLE GENESIS Vol. VI, first over Kiyohito Sugata by hitting, and secondly over Tashiro Nishiuchi by the nobler method of ude-hishigi-juji-gatame. Kotani, like Tokoro, goes on to fight an awful lot, but I think he is now finally retired after three fights in the UFC (the last was in 2015, so we [he] are [is] maybe safe now). Kotani enters to Rammstein's "Du hast" and then, I think, probably gets the best of the waza-rich first round. I don't know if this really has anything to say to us about anything but the edges of the canvas still say WOWOW so there is hope. In the second round, Tokoro comes reasonably close to a hiza-juji knee-bar finish but Kotani escapes and then hits him in the face which is not a valid waza here. I am having a quick look at Tokoro's early-career record (consulting his wikipedia page, which draws heavily on my own book, so this is at least a little absurd to do) and I see that he comes into this match having had seven matches (three wins, four losses) in a number of one-night tournaments (or maybe the were several-night, but he had more than one match per show, I mean to say) for Titan Fighting Championship, which I don't think I have ever heard of before. Tokoro spends an awful lot of time on his back! That's not how I think of him necessarily but it is possible and even likely that I am remembering him wrong. He has a lot of nifty little entries into ashi-kansetsu-waza (leg bone-locking techniques broadly) so the match stays interesting throughout even though it is fairly one-sided as regards position. In end, Naoyuki Kotani takes the decision (one judge had it as a draw) and "Du hast" resounds once more and it seems weird to me we are far enough along (in time) for "Du hast" to even be and yet I just checked and it had in fact existed for four years already. Great opener! Before moving on we should note that the tag-team shoot-græppz match in which Tokoro partnered with Kazushi Sakuraba and drew against Kiyoshi Tamura and Wanderlei Silva in RIZIN was excellent and it figured into my 2016 Wrestling Obvserver Newsletter year-end awards ballot but it did not even receive an honourable mention; I think maybe we should discuss that match in depth, too (in due time).
In another battle of genuinely tiny people we have Takumi Yano and Goro Kobayashi and I am pretty sure the non-Kenichi Takayanagi on commentary says one of them is a judo sandan? Yano, an odd little fellow with strange kicks and who turns his back in weird ways, fights in socks with little toes in them so it's probably not him but what do I know. Also Kobayashi has pretty aggressive takedowns. But who knows! Yano jumps on Kobayashi's back and puts him very much out with 裸絞 hadaka-jime and then immediately begins 活法 kappō, "resuscitation techniques." As a wikipedian (or wikipedians) note, "A tradition in some Judo schools involves teaching kappo to all new shodan (black belts). This instruction is followed by a session where each of the shodan choke someone, are choked themselves, and resuscitate someone using kappo." That has never been the practice anywhere I have been but anyone who has græppled for any appreciable length of time has almost certainly been on one end of kappo or the other at some point. Also there is also a method for the groin.
Here is (future) Wajyutsu Keisyukai Brightness founder Hidetaka Monma in his first match of professional fighting (I assume he is being paid?) against Hiroyuki Ito who I am learning just now through ineffectual google searching shares his name with someone who worked on a number of Final Fantasy games (I only ever played the first one, and not much). Ito is cornered in part by Hiromitsu Kanehara and so I am inclined towards him. Before the bell even sounds, Ito rushes across the ring and is immediately taken down and the referee is like "gentlemen, please" and they are returned to their corners and the bell is properly rung and the contest is truly joined. Monma is much more aggressive in his submission attempts but Ito is wily so we have a very even contest; I am torn a little with regard to the commentary in that I think it is a little bit too yelly and yet the things being yelled are often the names of waza I recognize and so on the whole I guess I would say it's pretty good but I would also say that I miss Kenichi Takayanagi. Monma wins the split decision (in the sense that one judge thought it was a draw) in this spirited bout of nearly-all-græppling. I think it is an appropriate result!
Future-Tsuyoshi-Kohsaka-pal Hirotaka Yokoi, garbed in Tamura-esque brilliant red, defeats Masaya Kojima by the very straight arm-lock of 腕挫腕固 ude-hishigi-ude-gatame (arm crushing arm hold; it's not the most descriptive description) in 2:12 not because Kojima tapped, I don't think, so much as because the referee was pretty sure the arm was broken so he reached down to see about it and it kind of flopped and so that is IPPON. Interestingly (to me), Yokoi took himself out of mune-gatame/side-control and back into niju-garami/half-guard to apply the hold.
GENKI SUDO! THIS IS EVEN MORE SURPRISING TO ME THAN HIDEO TOKORO! We have encountered the great poet-souled Genki Sudo once before in these pages (Colosseum 2000), but I definitely had no idea he had ever properly RINGSed. He is a seemingly lovely man who dances like a robot and who has a pop group now (I think he is still doing that) and is apparently enormously skilled in calligraphy and he is of the view that We Are All One:
His entrances were usually elaborate and often really good once things really networked-off for him a few years later; there is a compilation of them at this link. Here he arrives strapped into a smoke machine:
As pleased as I am to see Genki Sudo, this entrance feels totally out of place in RINGS, as does Brian Lo-A-Njoe's where he comes in in a ski mask with his hands chained. I loved this stuff in PRIDE and K-1 but the RINGS ethos is different and the tone struck here is not decorous with it. Sudo finishes an omote-sankaku-jime triangle choke that he was nearly slammed out of in a delightful little sprint of a match (2:17) but I am telling you these entrances were incorrect in this context. (Genki Sudo does this entrance and three shows later they're out of business am I wrong [yes].)
It occurs to me that Genki Sudo was never in a Fire Pro game, I don't think.
Yasuhito Namekawa is again hard for me to recognize with his blonde hair but he looks good, I am not suggesting he change it. His opponent is Dexter Casey, who enters to "Get Ur Freak On" whilst on commentary nearly every martial art gets listed, which suggests Casey is either a lifer or a dilettante, depending on how you look at it. He flexes his pecs an awful lot, this Dexter Casey, in what I am pretty sure is a visual allusion to the work of Dick Vrij. Namekawa is described here as a gurappurā which we can confirm from through all we know of him from before and also through his 1:44 win by juji-gatame, that finest waza, which is loudly announced by its fullest and truest name, 腕挫十字固 ude-hishigi-juji-gatame, before Namekawa breathlessly addresses the crowd. They love it!
A nice little show! With some nice surprises! And also some things that totally look like the end! Let's meet again soon to further encounter this strange looming doom! Until then I thank you once more for your time and for your attention to these matters.
I BET DAVE MELTZER WILL HAVE A LOT TO SAY ABOUT IT WHEN THE OBSERVER ARCHIVE CATCHES UP--BE SURE TO CHECK BACK IN LIKE A YEAR AND A HALF!
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