Made it to level 52!
Technically I made it there before the end of 2022, hence why this post is before the promised yearly wrap-up post! It is also very, very late! Oops 
! The reason is a combination of me trying to finish up my last few weeks of work while also having family visiting and then going right from that into watching a billion Japanese wrestling shows during the first week of January…
In any case, this post is here now! And the next one will be here soon? Ideally?
I spent just over fourteen days on the last level. I’ve contemplated speeding up a bit after other things in my life calm down for me, but I’m currently leaning toward just continuing at the rate I’ve been doing. I’m not in any real rush to finish WK, at this point.
My burned item count as of the beginning of this level: 4964 (and 3663 on KW!)
Fun encounters with Japanese outside of WaniKani:
To kick off イッテンヨン week, one of my friends organized a stream of rare Golden Lovers matches that aren’t currently available on streaming sites (my friend got some of them from buying limited run DVDs). He also subtitled parts of the matches, which was really, really fun. Parts of the Golden Lovers lore have sort of been lost over time, at least in the English-speaking fandom, due to a combination of the non-archival nature of wrestling storytelling on top of the language barrier. It’s really the work of fans helping keep the story alive over so many years.
I didn’t know, for example, that the infamous Kota Ibushi vs Kenny Omega vs Michael Nakazawa vs Danshoku Dieno match where the Golden Lovers have their first kiss was actually an Ibushi produce match (so he was the person who planned/booked it). Basically, Dieno (who employs a lot of forced kissing in his moveset) wins the match by forcing Kenny and Kota to kiss each other, and then while they’re “distracted”, he hits his finisher on Nak and pins him. Afterward, the Golden Lovers kiss each other again, willingly, haha. Then Kenny high fives Dieno on their way out, which is hysterical.
Dieno gets maligned a lot by western fans due to his gimmick (weaponized gay sexuality, basically, including moves that look a lot like sexual assault), but he’s a wrestler whom my own opinion on has changed a lot as I’ve learned more Japanese, and as I’ve been able to understand more what he’s actually trying to do with his wrestling. A lot of western Golden Lovers fans get hung up on the fact that their first kiss in that match was technically nonconsensual, but I don’t think that’s exactly what was going on there, and isn’t how it was meant to be read.
Dieno wrote a book actually, which just came out, and my friend has been reading it, and he described it to me in such a way that it made me really interested in checking it out. More on that in a bit, haha.
I actually had another sort of small breakthrough while watching Dieno’s 20th anniversary show at the end of 2022, which was a VOD show, so I had no live translation for it, and had to rely on just a summary of the event from a fan account plus my own listening comprehension. In that show, they had a match where Sanshiro Takagi, the 大社長 himself, fought in a handicap match against like five wrestlers, and there was a stipulation where every number counted in each pin attempt (plus counts outside of the ring and any other count in the ring…) got added up and whoever lost the match would have to buy that many copies of Dieno’s autobiography. I was proud of my ability to actually hear and understand the cumulative count totals that they announced periodically throughout the match! It was a very entertaining show that ended with both of the men in the main event, Dieno and Muscle Sakai, getting pinned by Dieno’s beloved dog Haku, who was then declared the winner of the match.
In any case, watching old Golden Lovers stuff is fun and nostalgic because they get up to so much nonsense in DDT, but it’s also sort of like slowly digging a knife in your chest, knowing where things end up going for them. Stuff like Kenny saying a bunch of mushy stuff in Kota’s 10th anniversary show in 2014 and talking about how he’ll follow Kota wherever he goes (shortly before Kenny himself leaves DDT to follow Kota to NJPW). Reminded me of the comment Kenny made in NJPW years later in 2018, a few months before he left for AEW, wherein he said that no matter where he goes, no matter which country he goes to, the Golden Lovers will always fight with the same emotion and one heart. And, well… 
We ended the stream by watching the Golden Comeback video that NJPW put out, which is basically about the Golden Lovers starting to work together again after reuniting (in 2018). At the beginning, Kenny takes out a rare Kota Ibushi shirt that he got by bidding in an online auction, which Kota is amused and touched to see. He and Kota wear matching versions of that shirt (in opposite colors) to their first match back as a tag team. That shirt actually just reappeared years later in AEW in their last show in 2022. Kenny wore it to the falls count anywhere match he was in, making Golden Lovers fans cry all around the world, haha.
Moments like that, you realize that Golden Lovers fans are actually getting an entirely different experience than normal people, watching his work. All of these little details that are completely pivotal to the actual intentional story he’s telling, but so easy to miss if you don’t look for them.
I watched SO MANY other shows, but I will try to restrain myself to only talking about Japanese breakthroughs, haha. One of them that was very fun was the BJW and DDT 年越し crossover show which happens every December 31. I normally don’t watch these because they don’t air on Wrestle Universe, but a friend found this one, uh, elsewhere, and another one of my friends was actually at the show in person, haha, so I watched it on a whim, and it was extremely entertaining, and I think it might be one of my favorite shows of the year? I was almost entirely on my own, as far as translation went, but I was able to translate the rules for the matches for my friends, and even caught a few lines on commentary and such. I couldn’t catch Antonio Honda’s ごんぎつね story, but I could tell that the story Jaki Numazawa countered him with was an 浦島太郎 story, haha.
It was my last day of work, so I was especially feeling the 年越し spirit. I really like that word for the concept, honestly! I think it embodies the feeling very well.
The first wrestling show that I watched in 2023 was NOAH’s New Year show on January 1. This show was part of Keiji Mutoh’s retirement tour, and had a bonkers main event wherein the Great Muta faced WWE’s Shinsuke Nakamura. Normally WWE doesn’t let their wrestlers do things with other companies, so this was a treat. I had a lot of fun watching the show because I realized that my kanji knowledge had gotten good enough, I could read most of the wrestlers’ names now, and could read most of their Abema rating scores without having to screenshot them and look up kanji/words.
The Muta vs Nakamura match was a lot better than I was expecting. Nakamura’s entrance was amazing and beautiful, and it made me so sad that he was going to be headed back to WWE afterward 
. The match itself had an incredible finish, wherein Nakamura, well… he, uh, kissed Muta and sucked Muta’s poison mist spray out of his mouth before Muta could use it on him, then he misted Muta with his own poison and got the win. This kind of thing just happens sometimes in wrestling.
Unfortunately the match itself got somewhat overshadowed by Muta’s post-match comments, which were in English, and which featured a homophobic slur. There was a fair amount of debate online about what he had actually said, but it’s fairly unmistakeable if you actually watch the video. I got curious and looked up what shupro had for their transcript of what he said, and it is, uh, not entirely accurate, I don’t think.
Here’s a clip of the promo (warning: slurs!), and here’s what shupro had:
ムタ「ヒーイズグッド、シンスケ・グッド。メイビー、ヒーイズ・クリア、ヒーイズ・パーフェクトベイビー。バイバイ、シンスケ。ノーモア。オッケー。サンキュー。サンキュー。バイバイ。ニッポンブドウカン、バイバイ。サンキュー。シーユーヨコハマ！」
Going from the high of that kiss to getting slapped in the face with the reality of homophobia was not exactly the most fun mood whiplash of my week, but, well, Mutoh was already my least favorite still active old man in プロレス.
My next show after that was DDT’s January 3 show, which was a blast. I think I caught part of one of Antonio Honda’s Gon the Fox jokes, haha. Yuki Iino kept getting wheeled out of the match and wheeled back in wearing increasingly less clothing (he started from open back underwear and went even less clothes from there, somehow), and Honda kept telling his Gon the Fox story (it’s always a dirty joke. I can understand it maybe about 5% of the time), and in the last part, he talked about お年玉, only I think he pronounced it おとしたま. I was pretty sure it was meant to be the same たま that’s in 金玉, and sure enough, when they wheeled Iino out again, he was wearing nothing except for an お年玉 envelope that was covering up… well…
On イッテンヨン (1.4, January 4) proper, I watched two shows! The first was TJPW’s former biggest show of the year, which was just a total joy from start to finish. I’ll talk about this one in much more detail when I finish translating it, but for now, the biggest highlight for me is that we’re getting part two of my favorite feud in TJPW, Yuka Sakazaki vs Mizuki. This was basically exactly what I was hoping for, so I’m thrilled! I love tag teams! I love it when tag partners love each other! I love it when they have to fight each other anyway, but still love each other…
The other show I watched was NJPW’s Wrestle Kingdom show. It was my first time watching NJPW since, well, what the company did to Kota Ibushi last year. He was actually at the very center of the Kenny Omega vs Will Ospreay match, even though he wasn’t actually there. The build to the match had a lot of stuff going on (some of it better executed than others), and on the surface it was about Kenny leaving NJPW to Ospreay (and Jay White, and Kota) when he left for AEW, and Ospreay failed to live up to his expectations, so Kenny came back to “save” the company. But the actual core of the matter was that Ospreay had injured Kota in their Wrestle Kingdom match four years earlier, which meant that he and Kenny never got to say goodbye to each other before Kenny left.
Kenny did some of his comments before the match in Japanese, continuing to use his connection to the country and to the Japanese fanbase to get one over Ospreay. There was a funny moment when he asked the translator to translate them into English for Ospreay, haha. Lots of opportunities for me to get a little more Japanese practice in, though I’m looking forward to him facing someone I actually like next time. With Ospreay, I’m not that motivated to want to put in the extra effort haha.
Kota Ibushi tweeted his support (link is to a translation) at Kenny before the match, which completely bodied me while I was watching TJPW and almost made me cry, haha.
Kenny’s entrance in the match was incredible. He entered to 片翼の天使, which is of course the namesake for his finisher, though I don’t think he had ever gotten the chance to enter to the actual song until now. I tried to read the words onscreen during his entrance, but it was a little hard to read them, so 片翼の天使 was the only thing I could read, haha. Apparently the rest of the Japanese text was lines from Sephiroth in the game.
In the match itself, Kenny came down on Ospreay like a vengeful angel. It was extremely brutal and I had a hard time watching it, my dislike of Ospreay notwithstanding, but the finish of it was one of those wrestling moments that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Kenny hit Ospreay with a kamigoye (Kota’s finisher), and then went from that right into a one-winged angel (fitting!) for the win. It felt explicitly like he won by getting vengeance in Kota’s stead (and hopefully bringing Kota some closure for the NJPW chapter of his career).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the match was instantly a critical darling and is currently getting rated extremely highly, which is both a blessing and a curse to me because I can’t stand Will Ospreay. I do appreciate, though, that once again, you can’t watch any of Kenny’s best work without getting the Golden Lovers story deeply intertwined at the very core of it. He’s the best wrestler in the world, and all of his best matches are about the power of gay love (and sometimes gay vengeance). As I heard someone once say, “in wrestling, you can choose to be whatever you want to be, and Kenny Omega chose to be in love.”
I passed out at 6am haha and woke up to two really sappy tweets from both of the Golden Lovers. Here is what Kota said in response to the match/finish, and here was Kenny’s response (links to translations). And here, at last, the actual reason I started learning Japanese is paying off 
.
“待ってて” and “俺はいつまでも待てる” might be one of the most romantic exchanges I’ve ever seen in my entire life?? And the “ゴールデンラバーズは終わらない” .
I guess in a weird way, there is one positive that it has taken this long for them to be able to get back together. I got into the Golden Lovers story (and from there got into pro wrestling as a whole) in 2019, started learning Japanese at the very end of 2020, and have only just started to reach a point with the language where I feel like I can actually genuinely appreciate things in the original Japanese.
I saw this fanmade Kenny Omega trivia quiz on twitter by one of the popular English to Japanese fan translator accounts. I did it on my phone the night after Kenny vs Ospreay without using Yomichan or any dictionaries or lookup tools (though I did look up the Japanese names to a few of the answers that I knew in English), and I managed to get 8/10 correct, haha . The only question that I couldn’t figure out was number 8, but that’s because I never watched Kenny’s twitch streams. And I straight up didn’t know the answer to number 10, though I could read the question just fine. Once again, my domain-specific vocab knowledge was the only thing that saved me here. I saw a few more quizzes of this type done by other Japanese fans for their favorite wrestlers, but the only other one that I tried was an AEW one, and the trivia was too hard for me (genuinely an impressive feat, considering how much AEW content I’ve watched and how much background company knowledge I have) so I did quite poorly 
.
The day after イッテンヨン is NJPW’s New Year Dash show, which has traditionally been a pretty fun one, because it sort of sets up all the storylines for the near future. I watched this show, too, though I still don’t have plans to tune into NJPW more than occasionally in the future. The show had a mystery card (so we didn’t know any of the matches going in), and the main event ended up having a really fun surprise, which was that Kenny and Kazuchika Okada teamed up together!
I’m not sure how to convey just how strange and unlikely that duo was, but trust me, it’s not something that felt like it could have ever happened before that exact moment in time. It was really cute, though, because they’re clearly friends in real life, despite their characters having one of the most famous rivalries in wrestling and being opposite in alignment for most of their careers. They both looked really happy to do that match together, and there was a particularly fun moment where Kenny called him “Kazuchika” and the fans audibly reacted to that haha (despite not being allowed to cheer).
They won their match (unsurprisingly!), but Kenny left before they could close out the show together, which made me sad. Next time, maybe. またね!
I’m hoping that 2023 has only good things in store for both of the Golden Lovers. We’re certainly off to a good start, though!
みんなの日本語 Lesson 47 – Lesson 48
I… did not finish lesson 47, unfortunately! I was way too busy. I’m going to try to catch up soon, though! After this week, things should be much calmer, and I’ll have a lot more free time. My current goal is to finish MNN by the end of February, and I think I’m on track to do that!
I updated the MNN kanji by WK level spreadsheet with the lesson 48 kanji!
Reading/Listening:
Spanish (Listening: Frontera Verde and Bob Esponja) (Reading: Sí, sí es contigo)
I finished Frontera Verde! Overall, I think I liked the show, though I definitely had parts where my comprehension was only so-so, haha! It didn’t help that the ending was a little bit strange, but, well, I’m not sure that understanding more of the series would have helped me there. I also watched the behind the scenes feature that Netflix had for it.
I started reading Sí, sí es contigo by Calle y Poché, which is a book I had earmarked for adding to the library’s Spanish language collection before I left. I saw it on recommended lists of LGBTQ books in Spanish, and it looked like it would have a lot of everyday vocabulary and be a bit less, well, literary, for lack of a better term, haha, which might make it more accessible to me. I haven’t read enough of it to have formed a real opinion of it yet, though.
I completed my fall listen every day challenge with a perfect score for both languages once again! Still have not yet officially signed up for the winter read every day challenge, though I’ve been informally doing it every day on my own. Hopefully going to set up my summary post in there soon!
I slightly cheated on 大海原と大海原 volume 3 by reading 女装してめんどくさい事になってるネクラとヤンキーの両片想い 3巻 instead. Oops ! I’ve been reading it much more extensively than I’ve been reading 大海原と大海原, and I guess my brain wanted something lower effort, so I gravitated toward that manga instead.
Here are all the TJPW translations I completed:
2022.12.15 TJPW Angel and Rabbit — (7 words added)
2022.12.24 TJPW せ〜の、メリークリスマス！2022 — (7 words added)
Currently working on translating TJPW’s イッテンヨン show, and then I will have two (much shorter) VOD shows to work on immediately afterward, haha.
My wrestling deck contains 1,173 words now. Though 173 are still not in circulation yet, haha. But I finally did it! I officially learned 1,000 pro wrestling words by the end of 2022! It’s amazing how much of a difference even that few words makes, in terms of overall comprehension of that particular domain. I’m glad I didn’t give up on mining words in Anki, though I remember having moments near the beginning of 2022 where I was tempted to.
New resources:
As I mentioned earlier, I’m thinking about eventually getting a copy of Danshoku Dieno’s book! It’s titled “イロモノの野望 透明人間と戦ってわかった自分の商品価値の上げ方”, which I saw translated as “The Eccentric’s Amibiton: What I learnt from fighting the Invisible Man on How to Increase my Value”.
According to my friend who is currently reading it, it reads more like a self help guide than an autobiography (he said “doesn’t feel scammy…yet”), and there’s “a lot about Dieno’s identity as a #gaymer and his brand and all that, and how you really need to stick with yourself in wrestling as an openly out queer wrestler because otherwise you will just be annihilated.”
I was a little surprised to find out that it actually gets into the LGBTQ stuff, though I think that’s super cool. Apparently Dieno also just openly breaks kayfabe all throughout it, haha, which I guess makes sense if he’s talking about this as a business, but it’s also a bit shocking for me, considering how protected kayfabe typically is in Japan, and how other Japanese wrestler autobiographies usually skirt a very fine line with the topic.
My friend said the difficulty is a little easier than other wrestlers’ autobiographies because it’s broken up into chunks with checklists and underlined stuff and such, and is meant for a less attentive audience than a more in-depth book. There are sections that are only like a paragraph long and then it’s onto the next part. So that sounds promising! I’ve tentatively marked this down for buying and reading in 2024, but who knows, haha, I might get curious and start reading it earlier, or progress faster in Japanese and feel ready to read it sooner than I expect.
Next steps:
My goal right now is to finish catching up on all the stuff I fell behind on while I was so busy! I’m prioritizing the translations and progressing in MNN, in addition to the usual steady progress in WK.
I’m also going to hopefully get that 2022 retrospective post up soon! I’ve been looking forward to writing it! 
Onward to level 53! 行くぞ！
Jan
Jun
… Well, no, but it was nice to have one small victory, haha. 飯伏選手の日本語がわかるのはまだまだです… 
