Back with another DDT translation! But first, here’s a DDT match from the January 3 show, haha! This one wasn’t mentioned in the recap, but I think the story to it is pretty self-explanatory: Chris Brookes, a horrible man, faces Pokotan, DDT’s beloved mascot. There’s even Japanese commentary!
Translating the January 7 show was fun! Also a little confusing, haha! my main question in this one came from Daisuke Sasaki’s comments leading up to his title match with Minoru Fujita.
Here was how the recap described it:
バックステージで佐々木は「あれが藤田ミノルだ。俺が望んだ闘いだ。俺の何個も上を行ってる汚い野郎だ。コンディションがどうとか、たぶんあれはウソだ。アイツは昔より強くなってる。自信なんかない。今日でさらに自信なくなった」と三味線とも思える弱気発言を連発していた。
The first thing that really confused me was “と三味線とも思える弱気発言を連発していた”. My best guess was that it essentially said: “He rapidly fired off a series of cowardly statements like a shamisen”. A friend of mine said she’d seen that same expression before, and that she thought my interpretation was basically correct, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the grammar in this, so I just tried my best.
The second thing that confused me was that I translated a few lines of this as Sasaki saying, “He’s probably lying about his condition. He’s stronger than ever”, but when I went to look at Ash’s (brief) translation of the comment on twitter, they interpreted it completely differently! Ash translated it with a completely different tone, and read it as Sasaki saying that Fujita was lying about Sasaki’s condition, not his own.
It’s one of those cases where it could go either way, because Fujita has talked about his own condition being poor, as well as saying that Sasaki is in poor condition, but the way the recap spun it, Sasaki seems to be afraid of him. I listened to it, and as far as I could tell, he didn’t say アイツ in the actual video, so I’m assuming the recap added it for clarity to avoid this exact problem, haha.
I think Ash might’ve just translated the text in the tweet without watching the full video and ended up misinterpreting it, but I’m also inclined to doubt my own translation, since I’m far less experienced 
. In any case, Sasaki’s character being how he is, either interpretation feels possible to me.
But the coolest thing that happened on this show was after Saki Akai and Maya Yukihi’s mixed tag match. Maya revealed that the reason she wanted to become a wrestler in the first place was because she was a DDT fan, and she met with Sanshiro Takagi about joining DDT, but he turned her down because he didn’t feel that DDT had the resources to train a woman wrestler. Shortly after that, though, Saki debuted in DDT. This was eight years ago. Maya went on to make her career in joshi wrestling, while Saki made a name for herself in DDT. But instead of respecting and admiring Saki, Maya resented her and felt ugly jealousy.
In response to this, Takagi apologized for his shortsightedness when Maya first wanted to wrestle for DDT, and he honored her request for a singles match with Saki by booking it for… DDT’s 25th anniversary show in Ryogoku!
It’s a really compelling story, honestly, and despite being a fan of Saki, I’m 100% behind Maya here. I hope she wins the match, but regardless of the result, I hope she finally gets to become part of DDT like she had wanted to be eight years ago. I think it’s a cool story for DDT to do for their anniversary show because it acknowledges their own shortcomings with regards to a lack of featuring women’s wrestling (they’re leagues ahead of many other companies, but they could’ve taken more strides and done it much earlier).
It’s also cool because of how long-term it is. Eight years, stretching back to the beginning of both women’s careers! I think we can all relate to Maya getting turned down from being able to live her dream, and carving out her own path for herself before finally fighting her way back to where she wanted to be at the very beginning.