ILLUSION

BML ILLUSION
Korakuen Hall, Tokyo
11th September 2005
att. 2048

I'll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and, uh... and, uh... heartless manipulators, about music... that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it's a... it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll. [...] And that music is so powerful, that it's quite beyond my control. And, ah... when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Iggy Pop, 1977

On April 9 2017 the artist Katsuyori Shibata died upon the completion of his gesamtkunstwerk in front of 6000 paying guests in Fukuoka, Japan.

Wrestlers are not supposed to end their careers with one gigantic trauma suffered on the stage where they perform their fake endeavours. Wrestlers are supposed to accumulate a thousand indignities until they cannot perform at all, even with recourse to strong painkillers. 

In a moment of pique caught between the ecstasy and frenzy of art and life, Shibata (nom de guerre: THE WRESTLER) delivered a headbutt to his opponent. It landed so hard that it caused Shibata to suffer from a subdural haematoma and has never wrestled a professional match since.

This will be a short blog of eight entries covering the eight shows that the wrestling promotion Big Mouth Loud ran. We will cover its genesis and death in due course.

The ace of Big Mouth Loud was Katsuyori Shibata.

BE MAD WITH ATTACK

After a brief graphic indebted to the nu-metal so rife in this decade of aesthetic patchiness, we cut to an empty ring. Triumphalist music heavy on the parping plays and a man synonymous with such sounds appears: Akira Maeda, in the wilderness after the closure of Fighting Network RINGS a few years earlier.

A brief sidebar to see where Maeda's head was at four years prior, courtesy of Dave Meltzer:

He [Maeda] tried to pull the film out of the cameras of the Tokyo Sports reporters that were shooting him and broke some cameras. It is expected there will be some legal problems stemming from this and Riki Choshu set up a second meeting with the New Japan front office where they decided against working with Maeda because of that incident. It's expected that many mainstream publications that don't cover pro wrestling will cover this as a news story because of Maeda's old celebrity name. Maeda will also likely not be allowed to attend the Sapporo Dome show because of the incident. Always nice for a guy to do things like that running a company about to go under, just weeks after the domestic dispute charge in the U.S. There is a pattern of very violent and irrational behavior of people whose wrestling companies are on the way down. Wrestling Observer, 23rd July 2001.

Then, another old hand of the work/shoot axis appears: Masakatsu Funaki, half-a-decade on from being choked into his first retirement from fighting by Rickson Gracie. He looks fantastic in a crisp white suit and shakes hands with Akira Maeda, to which the crowd gasp: ooooooh! they say, acknowledging the tempestuousness of their public split 14 years previously.

And then, in what must be a calculated move, we see Kazuo Yamazaki at the announcing position. They show stills of Yamazaki in UWF, at its opening show in 1988, and not any of his other moments from a storied career.

Without belabouring the significance of this, the three people we have just seen (Maeda, Funaki, Yamazaki) represent the three-way split that occurred after the UWF broke up in 1990. Are BML trying to position themselves as the true spiritual heir now that RINGS, PWFG, and UWFi have been lost to real fighting? Let us press on to find out.

The answer is quickly discovered as further UWF connections are quickly made. Karl Gotch-trained UWF original Yoshiaki Fujiwara takes on Gotch-trained UWF original Osamu Kido. Their combined 111 years perform a technical pro-wrestling (rather than say the now fleshed-out realness that worked shoot has progressed to) match to a gritty-if-ponderous 15 minute draw (**). Nobody quite goes mad with attack.

There is an omen unheeded during this match. Kido rams Fujiwara's head into the connecting bit of metal between the turnbuckle pads and the corner posts three times, causing Fujiwara to bleed in the same manner that truncates the career of our blog hero.

Big Mouth Loud shows keep rattling along after being clipped for TV. Two former BattlArts guys clown each other with some hard shots delivered as stiff strikes and wrestling moves rather than real fighting techniques (ie. no one tries to defend anything). Fujiwara-trained Daisuke Ikeda pins Katsumi Usuda in 5 minutes with a brainbuster (**3/4). It's quick and merciless. Ikeda chins Usuda with a closed fist at one point and seems charmingly pleased about it. Sadly we won't see Ikeda and his scruffy charms here again.

In a post-match interview Ikeda uses a phrase the commentators have been using a lot: bachi-bachi. Here is the best explanation of this, from a preview of Bryan Danielson vs. bachi-bachi proponent Munenori Sawa in EVOLVE back in 2009:

So what is Bachi-Bachi? It is based around relentless kicks, hard strikes, punishing suplexes and an eclectic variety of submissions.

To me it seems like a style somewhere in the region of worked-shoot but more fake, and in a way that attempts to blind you to the 'holes' in the style by adding more rawness and intensity. People will run the ropes and do slightly co-operative moves, but they'll do them after roaring a lot. That's our working definition and if you know anything about Katsuyori Shibata you can understand why he might be the right guy to steer this ship.

The next match sees contemporary New Japan mainstay Tomohiro Ishii take on U-Style trainee and former New Japan young lion Hiroyuki Ito. Ishii here has hair and is stockier than his current 2018 vintage; more muscular, and is dressed like Masa Saito. He does a couple of snappy little kicks and attempts a choke but he mostly keeps it within his woodshed of Tenryu- and Choshu-indebted pro-wrestling. 

Ito, on the other hand, has the snappy and hard kicks of former mentor Kiyoshi Tamura. In a good (***1/2) ten minute match, Ishii gets bust open at the nose in beating Ito after suplexing him a bunch of times onto his head and then finishing it with a Boston Crab. Ito gets up a couple of times and roars back into the match, but Ishii is a ten year veteran at this point and he ain't losing to this kid whatever style this is. That said, if you were guessing which of the two was going to be getting 5.5 stars for a wrestling match in 2018, you wouldn't automatically expect it to be Ishii based on this match alone.

Like Ikeda before him, you won't be seeing Ishii here again. Another legend, Ishii's mentor, drops by: Riki Choshu, looking like a sun-tanned otter. 

Choshu brings a trainee (Takashi Uwano, doing himself absolutely no favours by dressing exactly like 1992-vintage Kenta Kobashi) along as tag partner. They face Buck Quartermain and Steve Madison, guys who scraped into WCW, Impact, and WWF as job guys, but never cracked the ceiling.

In a ten minute match (*1/2) Choshu tags in once to do some kicks and fall over. He breaks up a pin later but ultimately leaves Uwano to have a colourless 2-on-1 in a perfunctory All Japan cosplay. There's strikes and yelling, but not a lot of charisma. We'll see none of these four here again as Choshu returns to New Japan and takes Uwano with him. Madison pins Uwano after a lariat.

Before the next match I consulted the oracle (TOM) and asked "why is it that I am supposed to hate Gerard Gordeau?" TOM replied:

the reason is his blinding of yuki nakai but while obv terrible it really does add to his lore/appeal

Which is pretty much a perfect answer, thank you TOM. After the oracle and our friends considered the rumour that Gordeau is a Nazi (he has a swastika on his arm, perhaps part of an elaborate Yakuza-aesthetic tattoo? It is unclear, though his Roman salute at UFC 1 does also colour things somewhat) I sit to watch a gi-clad Gordeau take on Enson Inoue and Gordeau is going for the eyes to get some heel heat. This, not long after booting Inoue in the head before the opening bell, cements the Dutch savateur as a right rotter.

There are clues that this may be the case when clothed, but when Gordeau's gi comes off it is clear he is not in the best fighting shape of all time. Anyway, Enson overcomes blindness to tap Gordeau inside 3 minutes (**1/4) and TOM considers purchasing one of the bracelets Enson Inoue has a sideline in.

The semi-final of the evening sees shoot-style veteran (even by this point) and now resident of Canada (where he trains at the BattlArts gym in Mississisauga under the management of Anthony "Santino Marella" Carelli) Yuki Ishikawa take on his former BattlArts rival Alexander Otsuka. 

This isn't bachi-bachi. It's a more methodical affair. There's a solid balance between the well-drilled grappling, striking, and suplexing with a dash of reality of BattlArts' signature stye, alongside a soupçon of pro-wrestling silliness (Otsuka, who is very strong, does the Big Swing for about 8 rotations). Ishikawa wins a solid (***1/4) match by suplexing 'The Diet Butcher' on his head a couple of times and then choking him out. The referee waves it off.

AND SO THE MAIN EVENT

At this stage in his career Katsuyori Shibata was a wild-eyed boy who has just walked out of his role in New Japan Pro Wrestling where he was positioned as one of the three names that would lead the company into its next great era. He'd score a draw against company ace Yuji Nagata, overcome G1 Climax mainstay Masa Chono, down legend Genichiro Tenryu, and beat former IWGP Heavyweight Champion Tadao Yasuda inside 90 seconds. 

There are also the politics, which are thorny and complex, and we'll go over where Shibata may have fallen in the whole Inokiism debacle in future entries. Whatever reasons exist to tie Shibata to New Japan, they were not enough. Despite his father being an employee of New Japan since the day it opened, the ties could not compete with the burning feeling inside.

Shibata had a reputation for being something of a dick with pretensions of being a real fighter. So who better for Shibata to commence his campaign than Kazunari Murakami? The man who is the ne plus ultra of being a wrestling dick with real fighter stripes. Look, even his face is more dickheaded.

Cagematch commenter isalrightnow said this about Murakami and I find I cannot disagree:

The style that Murakami indulges in, that other shooter-types do, is not for everyone. I can understand most of the low ratings here. With that said, if you at all like shoot-style, you're looking at one of the best to ever do it in Murakami. His aura always manages to bring such gravitas to whatever match he's involved in, it always ends up feeling like a real fight, sans script, sans spots, all the crap stripped away, leaving only two dudes fucking each other up. With Murakami, I find myself viscerally reacting to a lot of what he does, it provokes such an excitement that can't be found for me in the types of wrestling that those who rate him lowly would likely prefer. Plus, he keeps his stuff short, something that a lot of people could learn from.

In 9 minutes and 44 seconds they pack a lot into a hot match (***3/4). Marukami kicks Shibata down in the corner and rides him like a Segway. 

Shibata boots Murakami out of the ring in revenge. They grapple with serious intent. They go strike-for-strike with defences down. Maeda watches on, unimpressed.

when is dinner

For much of the match Shibata is a match for Murakami's cruelty. Shibata stays hot and never lets up, an emblem of the company's signature style.  Murakami knocks him out of the ring, so Shibata dives back in and applies a hard rear naked choke. 

Shibata stands on Murakami and hits three diving double foot kicks to a seated Murakami, causing him to bleed around the mouth. The intensity of his violence is matched by the projection of his selling.

But, in a surprise, Shibata loses his first match in the company built around him as figurehead. In a closing stretch comprised of the two men going kick-for-kick, Murakami just overpowers Shibata and gets a three-count.

This is the classic way of booking a young pup; losing to a main adversary before going away and learning the tricks that will see them defeat and ultimately surpass them. 

Where the IWGP World Heavyweight title would change hands 15 times between 2003 and 2006 as chaos reigned in New Japan, this was a return to a purity that some might call "punkish": a simplicity with all of the undertones of individuality and freedom that that suggests, consuming its performers completely.

There are no titles and no competing egos. Just self-expression. Unfortunately, Big Mouth Loud didn't stick around long enough for Shibata to gain meaningful revenge or get chance to expand his repertoire.

As the credits roll, Marukami talks to the journalists after the match after Shibata refuses to speak.

Big Mouth Loud seems like a lot of fun. It's an intense style and an hour of it with a bit of pageantry is probably about right.

NEXT: Shibata vs. Satoshi Kojima!