Blood, sweat, and tears
The art of extreme wrestling
VISITORS by the American photographer Nick Karp follows a group of wrestlers as they travel to Japan in 2023. Its climax is a tournament at the historic Korakuen Hall in Tokyo, the first venue of its kind to play host to an independent wrestling organization. The trip, under the watchful eye of promoters GCW (Game Changer Wrestling), culminated with a book published early in the spring of 2024 but began its life in less certain times during the pre-vaccine period of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Karp had traveled throughout the United States in 2020, attending wrestling events and death-matches known for their grim reality, happening in secret as the country and the world wrestled with the pandemic. Those early trips resulted in Death in Covid—a book which captured all the uncertainty and frustration. If those photographs teeter on the edge of separation and meeting in secret, VISITORS grapples with what followed and thoughts of what it means to be a part of something far greater; what it means to finally belong.
The cast of characters is strong: Joey Janela walks bare-chested in an EDGLRD demon mask which, like the Harmony Korine film that recently featured it, suggests he performs with both pure vibe and trepidation. 1 The book also features Jimmy Lloyd, Jordan Oliver, Gringo Loco, John Wayne Murdoch and Blake Christian behind the scenes and in the ring alongside their Mexican counterparts Ciclope, Miedo Extremo, El Hijo del Vikingo and Violento Jack. When they finally arrive in Japan they are met by some of the biggest names in Japanese wrestling. There is Jun Kasai, dubbed the ‘Crazy Monkey’ or ‘Kyoen,’ in Japanese, who signals victory with a fork embedded in the soft skin of his forehead. There is Mitsunobu Kikuzawa also known as ‘Kikutaro' and formerly ‘Ebessan’. Others make appearances – Masashi Takeda, Takayuki Ueki, Takashi Sasaki, Abdullah Kobayashi, Daisuke Masaoka and Toru Sugiura – but it’s Rina Yamashita, Maki Itoh, and Unagi Sayaka, that hit the hardest, existing in a liminal state of entertainment struggling for recognition, alongside the Russian-born American ‘queen of independent wrestling’ Masha Slamovich and the effervescence of Allie Katch & Effy, one of the few—if not the only—gay wrestling tag-teams to currently compete.
Their otherness and queer expression means VISITORS also pinpoints their place within wrestling and the wider martial art community, an appearance that at times seems spectral by comparison with ‘houmonsha’ written in Japanese characters over the book title adding to the suggestion that these guests were not invited, but are welcome nevertheless. Fragmented images and book edges painted blood red nod to the visceral mess of every match. Shards of fluorescent glass bulbs and lengths of barb wire cut through the theatricality of every bout.
Just as visually graphic but far less gruesome is the first photo book by the acclaimed Japanese photographer Daidō Moriyama tagging alongside another fringe community. Japan, A Photo Theater (1968) followed Tenjō Sajiki, a traveling theater, directed by the playwright Shūji Terayama. Street performers, strip clubs, and “fetuses in formaldehyde” were bound in Moriyama’s photographic bondage. Years later he remarked the outside world was naturally fluid and messy. Wrestling that into a theme, as he put it, is near impossible — as if a single group of images could ever explain such energy. 2 Instead, Japan, A Photo Theater massaged what it captured with a photographic style that also illustrated the mood of this country post Second World War as it fought for its identity during allied occupation amid the noise and grit of redevelopment.
With that came violence. 1968 was a year of rioting; in Paris, London and throughout America. Japanese students barricaded themselves within their university and fought armed police while local villagers east of Tokyo railed against authorities when their farmland was seized to build Narita airport in support of the US military. Moriyama, Terayama and others questioned what it meant to be free when left utterly powerless in the face of such blind authority. “Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets" (Sho o Suteyo Machi e Deyō) (1971) and “The Boxer” (1977) were two films Terayama directed to explore how the typical Japanese family also battled the changing times and new-found wealth, with the boxing ring at Korakuen Hall at the heart of each film and every character wrestling for recognition.
More than just a ring, Korakuen Hall was (and remains) a space of beginnings and of endings. It was built in 1962 as a home for Martial arts but in the late 1970s also became known for hosting alternative live music from around the world. Bands who played there zigzagged a way through punk — The Stranglers and Thin Lizzy; Simon & Garfunkel (believe it or not); Einstürzende Neubauten; Nick Cave and Cocteau Twins all performed. Auto-mod, formed in Tokyo, was a local band that took its cues from the theatricality of New Wave, ending its 13-day tour in 1978 at Korakuen Hall by declaring the band dead and buried as the guitarist played his instrument with a razor blade.
Despite its many faces, Korakuen was still always a training ground for wrestling. The extravagant Antonio Inoki and boxer Muhammad Ali even used the hall to train together before their infamous bout at the Nippon Budokan arena in 1976. If Korakuen was a symbol of alternative underground culture, someone like Inoki was its champion. The Tokyo-based painter Tomoo Gokita cites Inoki as his greatest inspiration, a wrestler who made a name by rebelling against the sport. Born Kanji Inoki in Yokohama, 1943, Inoki was one of seven children. His father had been a member of the Home Ministry of Japan and later the Liberal Party, the country’s first postwar ruling government; he died when Inoki was only 5 years-old. With the aid of Inoki’s grandfather, Jiro Sagara, the family left Japan for Brazil in search of opportunity as many did in the early 1950s. Having passed through the Panama Canal, Jiro stopped briefly at Puerto de Cristobal to buy fruit. That impulsive purchase led to dysentery and Jiro died on board the ship before it reached its destination. Inoki and his family were forced to settle in unfamiliar surroundings. He worked the coffee fields and wrestled to build his strength. By the time they returned to Japan a decade or so later, Inoki found himself referred to as the Brazilian, encouraged to embrace his exotic past despite being Japanese and was christened Antonio in the process — now a visitor within his own country and his own sport. As a young school boy, Gokita watched old footage of Inoki wrestling in the 1970s and was instantly struck by the intense rebelliousness of this extraordinary being. “Professional wrestling is a profoundly mysterious form of entertainment different from pure sports or mere drama,” says Gokita. “Inoki vehemently countered the general public’s perception of professional wrestling as bogus. I’ll make the world recognize whatever I want!” 3
That rebelliousness is reflected in almost every drawing and painting by Gokita ever since his first major exhibition at Tokyo’s Parco Gallery and the small book that accompanied it, Lingerie Wrestling (2000). It was a mishmash of found imagery, from glossy magazine cut-outs to beer commercials, soft pornography and garage rock, shown as fragments of calligraphy, line drawings and his earliest attempts at ‘painting'. It made for a new, noir-like style as disturbing as it was humorous. Lingerie Wrestling also hinted at stories concealed within the outline of a face or figure cut through with a stray brush stroke or pen mark. Like Moriyama before him, the idea of fabricating any clear theme was far from Gokita’s mind. “Lingerie Wrestling doesn’t have any story. It is really like a diary I kept when I was poor. There was no plan … Every day, I draw things I like to draw, as well as things I care about.” 4
It’s a sentiment that also courses through VISITORS. Bravado in the ring is countered by quiet moments backstage, shown in no particular order. A look of apprehension is seen in the solitary figures of Rina Yamashita and John Wayne Murdoch as they individually wait to go out. It makes for a combination that echoes Gokita’s ambiguous paintings as well as the much earlier candid imagery of German photographer Theo Ehret. Ehret served in the German Navy during the Second World War before moving to America in the 1950s, around the same time as Inoki. From the early 1960s until the mid 1980s Ehret shot everything related to wrestling, from its architecture to the Olympics. When a magazine suggested he take pictures of women wrestling on shag pile carpet his photographs of apartment wrestling shifted the focus from wrestling towards soft-erotica, no doubt fueling Gokita’s own book and his love of subculture. Although a far cry from these black and white photographs, Karp pictures wrestlers, for the most part, in color captured in a fugue state with Joey Janela in his EDGLRD mask seen celebrating all of wrestling’s pageantry and violence only to be unmasked moments later as he battles on stage before an audience.
VISITORS will leave you breathless. The book and exhibition tour, which stopped at New York, Atlantic City, and now Tokyo, brings the project full circle. It follows a rich tradition of performance and rebellion set against the backdrop of politics, the pandemic, and social unrest. As the blood and barbed wire settle, one wishes the parts rioting in Britain today would remember the likes of Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks and Kendo Nagasaki (whose real name was, in fact, Peter) fighting in jest to be heard, and be seen in homes up and down the country on Saturday afternoon television and the World of Sport.
Nick Karp “VISITORS”
at Trunk(hotel) Shibuya, Tokyo
August 12–14, 2024
A version of this essay was originally published as “The Art of Extreme Wrestling” by Orange Crush to mark the occasion of Nick’s exhibition in Tokyo.
AGGRO DR1FT, dir. Harmony Korine (EDGLRD, 2023)
Ivan Vartanian, “Daido Moriyama The Shock From Outside” [Interview] Aperture, Summer 2011 https://issues.aperture.org/article/2011/2/2/daido-moriyama-the-shock-from-outside
Interview: “Broadcasts: Musing | Tomoo Gokita.” https://www.blum-gallery.com/broadcasts/musing_with_tomoo_gokita
Tomoo Gokita, Lingerie Wrestling, Little More, Japan, 2000.