Directed by Kim Longinotto, co-directed by Jano Williams. Produced in Great Britain with financial support from the BBC. 2000. 106 minutes. Distributed in the US by Women Make Movies. Featuring Chigusa NAGAYO, Meiko SATOMURA, Saika TAKEUCHI, and Yuka SUGIYAMA
Notes prepared by William W Kelly
Above: Akira Hokuto rakes her nails across the forehead of Lioness Asuka. Her tag team partner, Nagayo Chigusa, is in the background. This 1999 match was the long-anticipated reunion of two wrestlers who formed the wildly popular Crush Girls in the 1980s
I have never personally found wrestling, boxing or other pugilistic sports to be compelling; indeed, I find the violence to be cruel and gratuitous. Among these sports, though, professional Western-style wrestling does hold a certain analytical fascination because it is so “ambiguous.” It is indeed physically demanding on the competitors—often brutally so. However, unlike amateur wrestling (of Western, Greco-Roman, and other forms) and Japanese sumo (both professional and amateur), matches are almost always rigged and their outcomes predetermined (though perhaps “choreographed” is a more charitable term).
Pro wrestling thus pushes the limits of what we might call sport (as organized physical competitions). It is organized like a sport (with matches, teams, tournaments, and titles) and it requires well trained, highly skilled athletes, but is it a sport? Not really. It elides sporting practices and show business in a gaudy, immensely popular, and hugely profitable form of entertainment. This has been as true for Japan as for North America during the second half of the twentieth century. Both men’s and women’s wrestling have been professionalized and commercialized, and the distaff side has been much more prominent and popular in Japan than in North America during those decades.
Professional Western-style wrestling has been a mass entertainment in Japan from the early 1950s (although it has an earlier pre-WWII history as well). Men’s professional wrestling was the biggest sport in 1950s Japan, and even more than baseball it was the vehicle for early television’s rapid spread. Women’s professional wrestling (known in Japanese as joshi puroresu) developed more slowly and more unevenly, but it too has been enthusiastically received in arenas and on television.
This is a documentary about a group of professional women wrestlers in Japan known as GAEA Japan, done by two award-winning videographers, Kim Longinotto and her frequent collaborator, Jano Williams. Over twenty years, the prolific and innovative Longinotto has produced a stunning set of wide-ranging documentary pieces. Since teaming up with Jano Williams, a longtime resident of Japan, their Japan titles have included “Eat the Kimono” (1989, a focus on the avantgarde dancer Hanayagi Genshu); “The Good Wife of Tokyo” (1992, in which Kazuko Hohki, frontwoman for the eccentric London-based band The Frank Chickens returns to Japan to marry her English boyfriend of ten years); and “Shinjuku Boys” (1994, about the female regulars of Tokyo’s “New Marilyn” nightclub, who dress and live as men). The pair also produced “Dream Girls,” the 1994 documentary on the Takarazuka Review, and there are some compositional, thematic, and stylistic continuities.
“Gaea Girls” does offer a portrait of one Japanese sporting spectacle—and certainly a sharp contrast to the other sport we consider here, professional baseball—but it is of even greater relevance for the concerns of our course because it largely ignores the wrestling bouts themselves and the rivalries and politics. Rather, Longinotto and Williams locate themselves almost entirely behind-the-scenes: the preparations, the hard training, and life at the group’s rural camp. There are only occasional glimpses of the arena fights under the bright lights, loud music, and screaming fans, which are the ultimate aim of the wrestlers. This daily routine is punishing, as much on the spirit and psyche of these young women as on their bodies. More than bones are broken in the ring. Dreams are shattered and spirits are crushed.
The Gaea Japan training camp is a large prefab hut in an undisclosed location in the middle of farm country—a clear contrast and intended distance from the distractions of the big cities. (We are shown occasional short segments of local farmers going about their work). Dominating the hut is a full size wrestling ring, which is surrounded by mats and folding chairs, a communal kitchen and eating area, and a bunk bed sleeping area for the wrestlers. It is a Spartan environment for sleeping, eating, and practicing, not unlike training facilities in many sports. It is home (and workplace) to about ten wrestlers, women in their late teens and twenties, all aspiring to win a place on the Pro Wrestling circuit.
At the center of the film and at the center of GAEA Japan is Nagayo Chigusa, at once the founder of the group, its superstar wrestler, and the exacting and manipulative head coach of the other girls. (She alone doesn’t live at the camp, but arrives each morning by car.) Nagayo herself is vulnerable; she is 33 at the time of filming, an old timer in a world of injury-shortened careers. She’s still a top star but under challenge. Early in the film, she is shown having been demoted from group presidency because of a title bout loss and having to risk extinction of her name in a rematch against a former partner and then arch rival, Lioness Asuka. But Nagayo is uncompromising, with herself and with her wrestlers. “Tough love” is a tame phrase for the demanding regime that she presides over. There is constant violence
Much of the film deals with the trials and tribulations of several new girls who are being allowed to try out for the group. There are no formal sections to this long documentary, but the stories of these tryouts suggest to me a informal division of the film into two parts of roughly equal duration. This is also a convenient way of dividing our viewing over two class sessions
Part One: Two Failures
The first half of the film deals particularly with the mixed efforts of two recruits. The first, Saika Takeuchi, offers some insight into teenage motivations for such an unorthodox pursuit. We know nothing of her background, although we may presume she has a basic high school education and few opportunities besides low-paying menial jobs. “I want to be something.. I want to be noticed,” she insists to the camera, and sees in her pro wrestling stars women who are just that. She has been at the camp for some time, aiming for a sparring test that will qualify her for a professional debut. Wakabayashi, the second, is actually back for another tryout after having given up once before. Nagayo is brutally frank with her and dubious of her chances. Indeed, Wakabayashi cannot keep up with the steady diet of calisthenics administered by the older wrestlers (the camp reminds me of an artisanal workshop, with a hierarchy of a master craftsmen, several subordinate journeymen, and even more apprentices).
We see the rising star Meiko Satomura sparring with and injuring Takeuchi, prompting a tirade by Nagayo against both of them. Sometime later is Takeuchi’s test, which requires her to take on five of the older wrestlers in a non-stop series of one-on-one matches. It is footage not for the squeamish, and Takeuchi takes some real beatings, the last of which is administered by Satomura. She seems to be no match for the other wrestlers; all of her blows and body kicks are fall harmlessly, while she herself is pummeled. Afterwards, Nagayo is unsparing. Takeuchi whimpers, bloody and tearful, while Nagayo slaps her repeatedly and spits out that she’s no good, that she’s of “no use to her,” that she should go away and give it up. Takeuchi can say nothing in defense.
Meanwhile, Wakabayashi has been watching and loses what little resolve was left in her: “Watching the sparring, all my feelings went away.” And so does Wakabayashi herself, slipping off.
Part Two: Success
Takeuchi is given a second chance, and is allowed to return to prepare once again for the debut test. Meanwhile, a third recruit, Sato, a young wisp of girl, comes with her mother seeking a chance. Nagayo is alternately friendly and stern in warning both mother and daughter of what lies ahead. And indeed, Sato proves as unprepared as Wakabayashi for the intense physical demands. She too cannot stomach even watching Takeuchi take her lumps in the ring and soon decides to quit. Nagayo is merciless and won’t let her leave gracefully. Sato finally runs off in disgrace.
The main story line of the second part, though, follows Takeuchi. She certainly has a high tolerance for absorbing punishment, although I am continually puzzled by her total inability to speak out for herself. On the day of her debut test, a small press group arrives for a perfunctory interview and then it is into the ring for four matches against the oldest wrestlers: first, Kato, then Satomura, then Uematsu, and finally Nagayo herself!
This is a harrowing extended scene, as much for the encounter with Nagayo afterwards as for the punishment she takes in the ring. Why did you give up? Nagayo asks repeatedly. Does wrestling frighten you?
Still, Nagayo decides that Takeuchi has passed the test, and a debut is set for one of Tokyo’s main wrestling forums, Korakuen Hall, on October 23. We see Takeuchi fitted for a costume and given a new hair style. The match itself is against none other than Satomura, and in the audience is Takeuchi’s nervous mother.
Despite its length, “Gaea Girls” is a much more narrowly focused (claustrophobic?) documentary than “Dream Girls.” The camera seldom leaves the camp interior, and the videographers use what we might call deadpan objectivism, never inserting themselves, seeming to let the camera passively absorb the unfolding events. Near the end of the film, however, in the midst of Takeuchi’s debut preparations, we are shown one of the very few direct interviews. This is a long and quite revealing account by Nagayo about her family background (an abusive father whose beatings left her both physically tough and emotionally scarred) and her philosophy of teaching and her view of wrestling. In a sense, I suppose, the interview is redundant because she articulates (well) a sense of herself that we have already largely gathered from her actions to that point.
But Nagayo’s story does raise for me one of the deeper questions of the film—not raised by the videographers, who deliberately avoid all overt analysis, but certainly posed by the personalities and the setting. That is, just what is the complex of institutional circumstances and individual character types and social relation patterns that render the GAEA camp at once so generic of sport training regimes and yet so distinctive? How much of this is Japan? gender? the peculiarities of professional wrestling? that moment in GAEA history?
Several foreign reviewers of the documentary have complained that it offers no context for understanding the world of joshi puroresu. Even more than wrestling here, this Japanese wrestling world is divided into competing groups (called “promotions”). The number of groups has varied from a couple to twelve or more. GAEA Japan is one such promotion group; others at the moment include JWP Project (Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling), LLPW (for Ladies Legend Pro Wrestling), Jd’ Beauty Athlete, ARSION Hyper Visual Fighting, NeoLadies, and OZ Academy. Each group maintains a roster of wrestlers, produces its own matches and tournaments, and often claims separate “championship titles.” Only occasionally are there special interpromotional bouts. A group is usually centered around one or two star wrestlers; most groups have short organizational lives, and there is much switching back and forth of wrestlers.
Nagayo Chigusa was born in December, 1964 and made her wrestling debut in 1980. Throughout the 1980s she wrestled individually but was even better known as one of the Crush Girls, an immensely popular tag team of Nagayo and Lioness Asuka (seen below). The Crush Girls won several championships before the two retired in 1989 (the main promotions at the time required their wrestlers to retire by age 26, although most were forced to leave earlier because of injuries).
The Crush Girls, Nagayo Chigusa and Lioness Asuka, put away an opponent.
Both Nagayo and the Lioness came out of retirement in the 1990s, a decade that turned away from earlier career patterns and featured much instability. In 1995, Nagayo founded GAEA Japan with Kaoru Maeda and Bomber Hikaru. In 1999, not long before Longinotto and Williams started filming, Lioness Asuka joined GAEA but snubbed Nagayo by starting a rival faction, the SSU (Super Stars Unit), with several other well-known stars. This was the background to the matches at the beginning of the film; on April 4, 1999, Lioness Asuka defeated Chigusa to win control of the company, but Chigusa later got revenge on Asuka in the rematch. (The SSU then fragmented, with various factions forming since then and wrestlers on both sides switching sides, reminding us of the centrality of melodramatic narrative flows in the attractions of this and other spectacles.)
The documentary, particularly in conjunction with Sharon Mazer’s case study of men’s professional wrestling in the US during the same decade, raises a host of provocative issues.
- Sincerity and simulation seem to operate here on multiple levels. What is the effect on the women themselves? Do they know when others are sincere? Is it disorientating?
- The grueling training is both empowering and disempowering.
- What is the line here between legitimate and necessary training and testing and illegitimate abuse? Who should be determining this?
- There is an irony in the need and desire by the would-be recruits to be noticed, and that is that the more they remain and rise, the fewer are the people who can really appreciate what they have done and who they are.
- It is true that the results of matches are determined in advance and even their courses are choreographed. But this does not lead to the conclusion that everything is fixed and the women have “no control.” We must distinguish between individual training and careers, in which there is intense competition with uncertain outcomes, and the match performances. It is like a play, then, in which there may be intense competition to read for and win a role–in a play that follows a written, pre-formed script.
- Nagayo is the prime mover—the star wrestler, the manager, the coach. This should remind us that the original sports relationship was that of older players training and disciplining younger players. Note conditions in the nineteenth-century English public schools, when teachers came to delegate considerable authority to senior student prefects. The rise of coaches and managers was actually a modern move. [It is ironic that amateurs were accorded self-regulation while professionals were thought to need managers, but the reason is “class.”]
- Both the extreme violence and the fact that the actors/athletes are female seem at wide variance from mainstream society. This touches on a debate of wide salience in sports studies: are sports “a world apart” from the larger society, or are they a “microcosm of that society”? What does GAEA Girls suggest?
current GAEA Japan stars: — Sugar Sato (left), Chikayo Nagashima (center), Meiko Satomura (right)
Some additional resources
For an interview with Kim Longinotto by Philippa Bourke on indieWIRE, see http://www.indiewire.com/film/interviews/int_Longinotto_Kim_010425.html
The official GAEA Japan site has lots of up-to-date information on the promotion, its units, and its wrestlers:
http://www.gaea-inc.com/index-e.html
http://www.gaea-inc.com/index-j.html
Two fanzine sites with an obsessive take and some information on the history and organization of women’s pro wrestling in Japan are: