


Today, wrestling and anime are so enmeshed it’s hard to tell which group is borrowing from which. How many of those people also watch wrestling? Probably a lot,” he said. “Every weekend when a new episode of Dragon Ball Super comes out, the site freaks out. Nate Ming, Customer Support Lead at Crunchyroll, the media site where Dragon Ball Super is currently streaming, corroborates this. Based on Akira Toriyama’s 1984 comic, Dragon Ball and its offshoots remain some of the most popular anime today. Like with wrestling matches, Dragon Ball shows use fights as storytelling rather than filler in between.
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“A lot of shounen anime, with one on one battles and a narrator announcing each fighter’s moves as a storytelling device, a lot of these things took root in pro wrestling.”ĭragon Ball, a Japanese cartoon franchise about fighters with larger-than-life personalities squaring off against one another in ever riskier battles between good and evil, follows where professional wrestling left off. “For people who are fans of, say, Dragon Ball Z, that’s a storyline that is recognizable,” said Surat. Everyone held out hope that ‘when Rikidozan comes back, he’ll save the day’ and sure enough he would. Every now and then he would go away for a while, say to train or recuperate, and an evil foreigner would come beat up all of Rikidozan’s friends one by one. “Rikidozan would defeat his opponents and subsequently make friends out of many of them. Daryl Surat, a Japanese pop culture writer for Otaku USA and host of the podcast Anime World Order, explains it thusly: Rikidozan’s career rose to prominence at the same time that television sets became widespread in Japan, in the mid ‘50s, and viewers would tune in every week to catch a match in what was becoming a predictable but enduring storyline. Rikidozan’s bouts followed a feel-good storyline which ensured that no matter how much humiliation the smaller-statured 5’9” wrestler endured at the hands of his dishonest, foreign enemies, he would always justly triumph in the end, and, it followed, so would Japan. It didn’t matter to onlookers that Rikidozan was of Korean origin himself, or that the “evil Americans” he battled were often a pair of Canadians, or that the wrestling matches were scripted from the beginning. Perhaps that’s why all eyes were on Rikidozan when he made his debut, presenting himself as a nationalistic Japanese hero who beat up the big bad American invaders. In a country with a post-war paper shortage that made books scarce, there was little amusement for people to look to in order to lift their spirits. Through brute strength and a nationalistic fighting spirit, this man not only became famous worldwide, but unwittingly laid the foundation for an entire genre of Japanese anime with his career. The story begins with Rikidozan, Japan’s first modern professional wrestler.
