The spotlight is now on medical regulation in Japan
Published by Zach Arnold on June 18th, 2009 in Current Events

 Print |  Email |  RSS

When 46-year old professional wrestling legend Mitsuharu Misawa died last Saturday in Hiroshima due to spinal cord damage in an in-ring tag match, it was one of the biggest tragedies in the history of the professional wrestling business. Misawa, the aging veteran who should have already retired from wrestling, continued wrestling for his own promotion, NOAH, in hopes of his shows continuing to attract fans based on his star power. Unfortunately, Misawa’s body was a ticking time bomb. With friends stating that he had neck, shoulder, and waist damage from all the years of bumps and bruises he had endured as a wrestler in All Japan & NOAH, it was a miracle that Misawa managed to not be wheelchair-bound. His body had endured significant damage of the course of three decades worth of grueling matches.

For such a ‘fake sport,’ wrestling has had an awful lot of physical tragedies and a body count that is horrifying to any rational-thinking human being. MMA fans may be wondering what the connection is here between the death of Mitsuharu Misawa, the Japanese fight business, and MMA in general. It’s a long story to tell, but I will try to tell it as shortly as I possibly can.

Despite Japan’s reputation as a country with top-notch medical equipment and facilities, the country also has had as much of a reputation for being the place to go where fighters fight when they can’t get medically cleared elsewhere. No American commission would allow fighters to enter into a ring all jacked up on vicodin or oxycontin. In the MMA world, we have seen fighters who fail drug tests in the States get offers from Japan to go fight in the wild west environment that is the fight game there. Boxing, pro-wrestling, and MMA are all different and unique worlds, but for the Japanese fans the respect for each athlete in each profession is the same — very high. Go pick up a newspaper such as Tokyo Sports, Nikkan Sports, or Daily Sports and you will professional wrestling covered the same way any other real sport would be covered in terms of seriousness. Japan’s reputation of being an outlaw country in terms of wrestlers, boxers, and MMA fighters is well known — just ask Don Frye and Gary Goodridge. Frye’s bouts earlier in this decade in the PRIDE ring are the stuff of legend — he wouldn’t quit to Ken Shamrock’s heel hold and he all but admitted that he was blocking the pain of Hidehiko Yoshida’s submission attempt with some pharma aid.

The death of Misawa in Japan was front-page news in all the major sports and entertainment publications last Sunday. The fact that his in-ring death was taped by Samurai TV made it even more tragic. Misawa died in the ring after getting back-dropped on his head. It would later be reported that his head was severed from his spinal cord. The aftermath of the back drop was shown on Nippon TV — the entire CPR resuscitation process, the use of a defibrillator, and the arrival of the paramedics to stretcher out a man who had died in the ring. I challenge anyone who is a pro-wrestling or MMA fan to watch this footage and attempt to not shed tears. You can’t do it.

The back-story of the years of abuse that Misawa’s body endured actually has great parallels to the MMA business in Japan. In 1997, PRIDE took off with Nobuhiko Takada vs. Rickson Gracie. One year later, PRIDE 4 occurred with Takada vs. Rickson in the re-match at the Tokyo Dome. The rise of MMA was starting to overshadow Japanese pro-wrestling and it left wrestling promoters with a major dilemma — how do you combat a sport that is so exciting and so real? Remember, pro-wrestling’s reputation in Japan is legitimate, so MMA threatened the business in many different ways. PRIDE managed to suck the life out of Japanese wrestling by using pro-wrestling style production and storylines and applying these tactics to real fights. The end result was the creation of a product that became the biggest MMA organization in the world outside of UFC.

Throughout the 90s, Misawa and his contemporaries wrestled brutally physical matches. They wrestled hard and aggressive at every house show and big TV taping. There was no letting up. You had a big injury? You worked through it. No complaints and no whining. You did whatever you needed to do, including using pain killers, to keep slogging through your work schedule. The history of pain killer abuse in wrestling is legendary and it’s use in MMA no doubt exists in a big way. As PRIDE started to gain steam in the late 90s, All Japan Pro-Wrestling was facing declining crowds due to a lack of push on Nippon TV and a lack in manufacturing new star power within the company. With these problems at hand, Misawa decided to up the ante and make wrestling more dangerous. His major fights against the likes of Kenta Kobashi and Toshiaki Kawada featured head-spikes and bumps at awkward angles that looked so dangerous to the average fan. “How do they make it look so real?” Unfortunately, that style was real. The bumps were real. The physical damage was real. And the wrestlers paid a heavy price for it.

PRIDE, more so than anyone else, relied on major star power and a healthy portion of it came from the wrestling industry. As PRIDE’s strength grew, pro-wrestling’s strength declined in Japan. This would turn out to be a vicious cycle because without pro-wrestling manufacturing new Japanese stars, PRIDE found itself working with aces that were all gaijins. With wrestling fading, Misawa and other legendary names from the 90s continued to hang around the business, working the same physical style in their late 30s and 40s as they did in their mid-20s. The beatings were so immense and so physical. Yoshihiro Takayama, who made a name for himself with a violent slugfest against Don Frye, ended up going to the hospital after a match with Misawa at Budokan. Takayama would end up suffering a stroke in the New Japan ring against Kensuke Sasaki. The rise of MMA and the decline of pro-wrestling ended up creating an incredibly violent atmosphere for big wrestling matches, just to try to compete for the same kind of media attention that MMA received.

Once PRIDE died a couple of years ago, the MMA business for the most part collapsed and the pro-wrestling business was left without much television support at all. In March, NOAH lost their deal with Nippon TV and all of the broadcasting rights fees that came along with. One report, by the Yukan Fuji publication, estimated that rights fees were anywhere from 150-200 million yen per year (around $15-20 million USD). Facing no broadcast rights fees, a terrible economy, a roster racked full of injuries, and a situation where creating new stars became very difficult, Mitsuharu Misawa continued to wrestle — at age 46. The man who was NOAH’s President, matchmaker, and veteran wrestler all rolled into one faced so much stress on his body that it would be difficult to see how any athletic commission would have ever let him pass a physical. However, Japan is the wild, wild west — there are no rules.

Misawa’s death along with the CPR footage airing on television has shocked an entire nation and a huge international audience. Keiji Mutoh, a longtime rival of Misawa’s during the 90s, said that it was time to consider creating a regulatory body to oversee the health and safety of pro-wrestlers. Now comes word that the Liberal Democratic Party, which has a famous former pro-wrestler in Hiroshi Hase as one of its members, is going to call up several big names in the fight game to testify before political committees on what needs to be done to ensure the safety of wrestlers and fighters in Japan.

This is not a pro-wrestling story, as some would like to make you believe. This is much, much bigger than that. What happened last Saturday night with the death of Misawa will have an effect on the way business is done in Japan. There is sentiment right now for implementing new medical regulations and better-trained ring doctors and medical trainers at events. For years, people have cracked jokes about ring doctors at fighting events being ‘mark doctors’ who are all-show and no-go. Even with the best medical doctors available on hand, there was no way that Mitsuharu Misawa was going to be revived. He reportedly suffered a heart attack after his spinal cord was severed. We have seen some massive beatings in Japan and fighters who had no right being in the ring continuing to get booked without any recourse whatsoever against the promoters in charge. We’ve seen freak show match-ups in which you wondered when someone would get hurt or get killed. With Mitsuharu Misawa’s public in-ring death last weekend, the public spotlight in Japan is now on the way wrestlers, boxers, and MMA fighters are taken care of. The debate will start on what kind of medical regulations are needed… and it’s a good debate to have. Unfortunately, it’s come about a decade or two too late and a lot of athletes have paid a physical price that they will have to endure for the rest of their lives.