Abstract
Of the five major regions where professional wrestling has an established presence as a global cultural phenomenon, the two most resilient traditions can be found in Mexico and Japan (Glenday 2014). For this reason, it should come as little surprise to encounter Transformed Bodies and Gender: Experiences of Women Pro Wrestlers in Japan, an academic volume devoted to Japanese women wrestlers. However, Keiko Aiba’s purpose for doing research on Japanese women wrestlers appears to be related more to sexual harassment and violence against Japanese women than to an ethnographic study of Japanese women wrestlers.
Examining professional wrestling as a vehicle for probing such a timely topic would be fascinating were it not for one major concern. That issue is the broken English grammar throughout the volume. The following are representative examples: “Are women pro wrestlers having physical vulnerability as physicalized normative femininity transformed by attaining combat skill?” (p. 135); “a strong persona has to be established to the extent that a wrestler graves their existence on the memory of the audience” (p. 167) and “Thus, this concept [grotesque body] was considered as not applicable to this study since this study adheres with the paradigm of the body of individual” (p. 174). Simply put, this book should not have been published without proper copy editing.
In what is to follow, the main arguments, as I read them, will be critically examined. First, a brief description of the contents. The book includes a forward by Amy Wharton, eight chapters, a brief afterword by the author, and the interview schedule.
Aiba’s data consist of semi-structured interviews with 25 Japanese women wrestlers, of whom three had retired, along with observations of several wrestling matches. The questions in the interview schedule tend to focus on the process of how the individual’s perception of their body changed from the period before joining a professional wrestling organization, during the training period, and as a seasoned professional wrestler. These questions are reflective of the author’s understanding of male violence against Japanese women. Apparently, the author views the primary cause for sexual harassment and violence against Japanese women resting, by and large, with the physical differences between Japanese women and men. For Aiba, on average, the smaller Japanese women were easy prey for the muscular and taller male aggressors. Therefore, the author looked for solutions to her central research question in the physical makeover of Japanese women.
Japanese women wrestlers were chosen because “wrestlers transform their bodies” (p. 4). Aiba points out that women Japanese wrestlers not only “have big muscles and a lot of fat” but are physically strong “to counter the violence against one’s body” (p. 4). Japanese pro wrestlers, then, become an object of study in her examination of sexual harassment and violence against women. That is to say, Japanese pro wrestlers exhibit a different body type from the “gendered physical socialization of [Japanese] girls and women” (p. 2).
The author devotes the central four chapters to a description of the history of women’s pro wrestling in Japan, followed by the training practices and personal experiences of the women Japanese pro wrestlers she interviewed. The majority of the book discusses pro wrestling as a “combative sport.” The author divides the history of women’s pro wrestling into two periods. The first or “boom” period ran from 1983 until roughly 1994. The second covers its decline from 1995 until today. Her periodization is incomplete. In regions where pro wrestling is a “culturally embedded spectacle,” its popularity follows the peaks and troughs of a wave rather than Aiba’s notion of boom and bust. Today’s popularity of women’s pro wrestling in Japan, or “joshi puroresu,” can be found in many federations, including the World Wonder Ring Stardom. As a recent article in Vice points out, “Japan has become a vanguard for a generation of ultra-talented female athletes in the wrestling business” (Winkie 2016).
Aiba correctly grasps the physicality, theater, and training required of the scripted professional wrestling matches. However, there remains much the author misunderstands about pro wrestling as a discipline. For one, the basic storyline of professional wrestling matches is not “the match represents a story in which Tamara fought hard, defeated Toyota and won the position of being the new queen of women’s pro wrestling” (p. 33). The basic or classic storyline of pro wrestling is a morality play of good versus evil and normally follows five main stages: babyface shine, heat spot, heat, comeback, and go home (Henricks 1974).
In addition, the author’s comparison of women pro wrestlers in Japan and Mexico suffers from a superficial reading of Heather Levi’s valuable book on lucha libre and its importance to Mexican national identity. For example, the author concentrates on the physical differences between “heels” and “baby-faces” in Mexican women wrestlers (pp. 56–57). At no point does the author refer to Mexican pro wrestling as lucha libre, nor does she refer to “rudos,” “technicos,” and “exoticos” as the three main characters in lucha libre.
Her discussion of the training process also suffers from no more than a passing observation of the strength training, drill techniques such as bumping and roll overs, and the differences between right- and left-handed wrestling holds. As someone who trained for over a year and a half to become a pro wrestler before entering the ring, Aiba displays only surface knowledge of the multifaceted discipline of pro wrestling. Since a good two-thirds of the book is devoted to pro wrestling, these and several other deficiencies call into question her understanding of the subject matter of professional wrestling.
If physical size differences between more muscular Japanese men and small feminine women matter, then Aiba sees transforming, where possible, the physical bodies of Japanese women as one solution to combatting sexual harassment and violence against women, by changing the cultural perception of women as petite and easy prey for men. She views pro wrestling as a combative sport but points out that “participating in sports other than combative sports is effective in avoiding being raped” (p. 116). The view that sexual harassment and violence are caused by physical differences between women and men is the main difficulty with the general thesis presented in this book.
With Aiba’s idea that sexual harassment (groping appears to be a major problem facing Japanese women) and violence against women in Japan are the result of physical aggression by the larger Japanese men on the smaller (“kawaii,” or small bodies) Japanese women (p. 168), there appears to be little room for a definition of power that does not include the primacy of physicality as the root cause of sexual harassment and violence. Hence, her focus on “transformed bodies” of professional wrestlers and her later preoccupation with “physical feminism” as a possible solution to rape and sexual violence.
In Aiba’s final chapters on “empowered bodies” and “physical transformation,” she uncovers inconsistent evidence among her Japanese professional wrestlers about how their “transformed bodies” did not automatically mitigate male violence against women. Transformed bodies by themselves did not appear to be a solution. To compensate, Aiba expands “physical feminism” to include not just participating in physical activities but also mental empowerment or “learning feminist philosophy, exchanging ideas and raising consciousness” (p. 205).
Overall, this is a disappointing read for both the treatment of women’s professional wrestling in Japan and for the limited view of the causes of sexual harassment and violence against women in Japan.