週刊プロレス No. 2122
林下 / 朱里 reminded me of a couple things: that wrestling’s really good, and that if I pay attention (instead of doing reviews on the side like usual), I can generally follow the gist of all the commentary and in-ring promos, and that’s cool!
Per the latter point, I think I should try to make more of an effort to set aside more time for watching stuff in Japanese where I’m not exercising or doing reviews, and for the former I should get back to reading magazines!
The first thing in this one is a big long retrospective feature about Naito’s career on his 15th anniversary, complete with interviews, reflections, photos, and a nice letter from Hiromu. This would probably be great if I was a huge Naito fan, but I tend to like my wrestlers more hammy and emotional than cool and apathetic, so although I have nothing against him he’s never been my favorite.
The general arc of his career (stardust genius → snubbed by the fan poll → ingobernables) I think is about as famous as any storyline is to overseas fans, so it wasn’t hugely new ground, but it filled in some details, like apparently he was a very confident rookie, didn’t find the New Japan Dojo tough after training with Animal Hamaguchi, doesn’t really go in for senpai/kouhai hierarchies, and is a dyed-in-the-wool fan of specifically New Japan.
There’s an ad for some kind of Minoru Suzuki vs. Kento Miyahara thing as an Amazon Prime exclusive??
I would actually love to see a match between those two, but as far as I can tell the ad is wildly misleading and it’s a six-man tag. And I assume it’s region-locked anyway, since in the past no matter how many times I pressed the buy button, Japanese amazon refused to grant me its streaming tokusatsu riches.
Here’s an interview that’s pretty heart-breaking given recent circumstances:
: (
岩谷 キッドがいなくなったら自分はだらけてしまうので、タッグベルトを持って、つなぎとめたいですね。
キッド 私は常に麻優さんの隣にいますけどね。何があっても。
rough translation: “Mayu: I’d get lazy without Kid around, so I want to hold the tag belts so we’re stuck together. Kid: I’ll always be beside Mayu anyway. No matter what happens.”
In all seriousness though, I like the foreshadowing, and I hope that the Oedotai storyline goes well for Starlight! The interview made her sound very much plucky and determined, in fun contrast to Mayu’s laid back personality.
ジュリア’s column talked about two mentors who helped get her to a turning point from crying on the train home that she wasn’t the wrestler she wanted to be, to where she is now (Mio Shirai, who I’d never actually heard of before and is Io’s sister! And Hideki Suzuki, an indie wrestler who was a columnist in the magazine recently before heading to America).
That’s interesting in itself, but in talking about her limited MMA experience, she also gets the closest I’ve seen in Japanese so far (reading relatively official sources like this magazine and Mayu’s book, not online sources) to directly describing what, you know, makes pro-wrestling pro-wrestling:
MMAは相手の技を受けるのではなく、よけて、殺す気で自分の技を出しに行くような。同じ闘いだけどプロレスとは全くの別物。 。。。
「プロレスは信頼関係が大事」ってよく言うよね？ この言葉、すごく誤解してる人も多くて、「だから選手たちは皆仲良しじゃないと！」とか言ってくる人がいるんだけど。違うよ、ルールを守るって意味で信頼関係が必要なだけで。MMAだって目に指突っ込んだりはしないでしょ？ そういう信頼関係。
Roughly translated:
“in MMA you don’t take your opponent’s moves - you dodge and try to viciously reply with your own techniques. It’s also a fight, but it’s a different beast than pro-wrestling. … ‘Trust is important in pro wrestling’ gets said a lot, doesn’t it? There’s a lot of people who completely misunderstand this, and say stuff like ‘that means all the wrestlers are friends!’ - not at all! It just means that to establish rules you need a relationship of trust. There’s no eye-gouging in MMA, you know? It’s
about that kind of trust.”
I haven’t mentioned Visualist in these, but every issue there’s a mildly risque model photo of a woman wrestler, with very silly purple prose captions describing like for example, Risa Sera staged with carefully arranged smears of dirt as though she were gardening in a bikini for some reason.
It’s more cheesy than really objectifying or offensive to me, but I do have mixed feelings about it. Anyway, there’s a separate collected volume on sale now so there’s a brief feature about that. I’m somewhat tempted, just because hey – cool photos of cool wrestlers I like. But eeehhh… even as tame as it is it maybe feels slightly sleazier than I’m ready to go wrestling-merchandise-wise. Probably the only reason I don’t have that Roppongi 3K modeling book, or more pictures of Tanahashi, come to think of it.
The history column talks about a “任侠秘話” about Pat Patterson and Inoki, which made me very confused because I was expecting a story involving the yakuza, but it meant LITERAL 任侠 and was just about like, how Pat Patterson was nice to Inoki at various times. Oh well.
Mutoh’s column talked about 武藤チルドレン, wrestlers he’s trained or mentored over the years and geez yeah, I didn’t read it very carefully but if half the names I saw mentioned were 武藤チルドレン it really is an impressive group.
Coming back to this after a bit of a break reminds me of why they give the advice of sticking with one source for a long time: I noticed word look-ups have dramatically reduced for these over the months, from several a paragrah to like, 0-2 an article. I can see a lot of places I would have looked stuff up if it weren’t for SRS reviews in the meantime as well: いわく, for example, and the ever-frequent 醍醐味.
Noticing progress like that reminds me of @fallynleaf 's study log, in a good way!
(but anime goes after the 2nd game)
And like I said above, I really do need to get better at reviewing my highlights as I’m reading instead of after I finish a book.
I personally really like the tropes she was built from, but I was afraid she might be especially hard to withstand, even with what counts as Danganronpa “norm” 
