stable, provided labor services like digging up pine roots that produced oil used for fighter plane fuel.
As responsible as anything for the abbreviated sumo season was a secret Japanese initiative with the goal of producing 10,000 bomb-dropping balloons, the Fu-Go Weapon, capable of hitting the continental United States directly from Japan or from warships in the Pacific. According to a 1973 report for the Smithsonian Institution by Robert C. Mikesh, Tokyo’s main sumo stadium, the Ryōgoku Kokugikan, was among several sports arenas, music halls, and theaters the military used to inflate and test thirty-three-foot-diameter balloons designed to deliver a payload of four incendiary bombs and one thirty-two-pound antipersonnel bomb. The Japanese hoped after catching strong winds from the west, America’s wooded areas would explode in raging forest fires, tying up critical resources and causing a panic among the civilian population.
For logistical, morale, and propaganda reasons, the American military worked with the media to keep information of potential balloon damage from reaching Japan, all the while stunting a potential hysteria on the West Coast. On May 5, 1945, Elsie Mitchell, age twenty-six, and five children from her husband’s church—Edward Engen, Jay Gifford, and Joan Patzke, all thirteen years old; Dick Patzke, age fourteen; and Sherman Shoemaker, eleven years old— were killed during a fishing and picnic excursion near Bly, Oreg., when a balloon did as intended. These casualties, the only ones in the United States that were a direct result of foreign enemy action, prompted the U.S. government to cease its censorship on the topic.
The U.S. Army also responded to the balloon threat via the Firefly Project. Conscientious objectors (group CPS-103) and the first all-black battalion of paratroopers, the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, better known as the Triple Nickles, were dispatched to the Pacific Northwest in case these fire balloons lived up to their billing. Despite the precaution, the 555th wasn’t called to smoke jump into a balloon-produced fire. There was concern among military brass that the Japanese might float germ or chemical warfare to American shores, but from November 4, 1944, to August 8, 1945, two small brush fires and a momentary loss of power at a plant in Hanford, Wash., were the only recorded incidents of property damage, according to the Smithsonian Institution report.
The situation at Hanford Engineering Works, however, could have been catastrophic. Uranium slugs for the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, Rikidōzan’s adopted hometown, were produced there and the balloon bomb triggered the reactor’s safety mechanism. The fail-safe system had not been tested, and everyone was relieved when it worked as designed. The reactor remained cool enough not to collapse or explode—ensuring the Fu-Go Weapon would be remembered as no more than a missed Hail Mary attempt by Japan to turn the tide of the war.
The end of hostilities and subsequent allied occupation did not immediately return Japanese life, including the martial arts, to their premilitarized social order. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, instituted numerous edicts, among them directives aimed at removing and excluding militaristic and ultranationalist persons from society. Schools that briefly resuscitated martial arts instruction after the end of the war stopped, and the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai was shuttered. The tangled mess resulted in a purge of people apparently sympathetic to the defeated Japanese Empire, many of whom were seemingly connected to the Butokukai that had been corrupted under the fascist regime. This was the crux of the General Headquarters budō ban that lasted until 1950—not the shelving of martial arts, per se, just their perversion.
Under Takeshita’s leadership, sumo was not targeted by the Allied Powers’ budō prohibition. Speaking on the seventieth anniversary of the end of the war, Sokichi Kumagai, seventeen years a top-ranking sumo referee, or gyōji, told the Mainichi, a major daily Japanese newspaper, that he received word to reconvene with his stable and get touring again soon after Japan’s surrender. “The biggest problem was securing enough food for the wrestlers, who were all voracious eaters,” Kumagai said. The tour was called komezumo, or “rice sumo,” and in lieu of money, spectators were required to offer a payment of rice. “At the time we toured in groups of related stables,” Kumagai told the paper, “and all the groups toured in areas where rice farming was common.”
Soon enough the sumo association issued a notice that a Grand Sumo Tournament would be held in Tokyo in November 1945. Though his reputation remained strong and positive, and he was unaffected by the Butoku Kai purge, Takeshita announced plans to step down as the head of sumo when the honbasho ended. Rikidōzan had earned a spot in sumo’s top division, the makuuchi, and reached the sport’s third highest rank, sekiwake, by the time Takeshita passed away in 1949. He competed until September 1950, and, citing financial reasons, retired.
Rikidōzan’s improbably important pro wrestling journey began in construction. According to Robert Whiting’s book, Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan, a sumo fan, tattooed yakuza gambler Shinsasku Nita, maintained “special connections inside the GHQ.” Those relationships led to projects at U.S. military camps, some of which Nita hired Rikidōzan to supervise. The wrestler’s English improved and he enjoyed the nightlife in Ginza. One evening, according to Whiting, Rikidōzan found himself on the wrong side of an altercation with a Japanese-American Olympic weightlifter, Hawaii’s Harold Sakata, who earned a silver medal at the 1948 Games in London, and, later, appeared opposite Sean Connery’s version of James Bond as Auric Goldfinger’s hat-throwing henchman Oddjob. Sakata and Rikidōzan quickly worked out their differences, and the former sumo wrestler was integrated into a touring group of American pro wrestlers who had been sponsored by the Torii Oasis Shriner’s Club of Tokyo. Before heading to the Korean Peninsula, where fighting was underway between U.S.- and Chinese-led forces, former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis joined seven wrestlers, including Sakata and Iowan Bobby Bruns, in entertaining U.S. servicemen while seeking to raise $50,000 for crippled children during a three-month tour of Japan.
Like the Imperial Japanese Army, Americans usurped the old sumo venue, which had been repaired after U.S. firebombing destroyed its huge iron roof. Rather than testing weapons, Occupation forces renamed the building from Ryōgoku Kokugikan to Ryōgoku Memorial Hall and staged events—the first bits of Americana introduced to the Japanese that hadn’t fallen from the sky. American-style pro wrestling, the kind “Toots” Mondt had established in the 1920s, was officially introduced to the Japanese on Sunday, September 30, 1951, the same month the country returned to the League of Nations after signing a peace treaty in San Francisco.
Rikidōzan debuted in late October, feeling his way through a ten-minute time-limit draw against Bruns. Sergeant Clarkson Crume, for Stars and Stripes, noted that Rikidōzan had lost six inches off his waist since meeting Sakata and the boys, and was “surprisingly good for someone who has been wrestling only three weeks.” The squat Japanese grappler hung around the tour through December 11, karate chopping and running over the opposition—a sampling of the hard style that became his trademark. Winter’s harshness cut the wrestling program short, but the expedition paid off because Bruns had found a twenty-year-old, 265-pound man who would spearhead the rapid expansion of the “sport” in Japan.
The following February, as a naturalized Japanese citizen—important since status as a North Korean would have made travel to the U.S. problematic—Rikidōzan departed in good shape, down thirty pounds, ready to learn the pro wrestling business. He landed in Hawaii, one of the nearly thirty territories encompassing the National Wrestling Association, and was coached by Bobby Bruns. The NWA-affiliated promotion in San Francisco also gave him plenty of opportunities to step into the ring. Rising from the ashes of the Gold Dust Trio, the NWA attempted to control and organize talent, produce strong champions the public would support (despite knowing that wrestling was more show than competition), and seize the larger space of wrestling. NWA representatives in Honolulu (Al Karasick) and San Francisco (Joe Malcewicz) arranged the historic “Shriners” tour of 1951, and envisioned Japan as a place well worth expanding to.
Rikidōzan made them look smart.
Intent
