A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex

by Chris Jericho

  So Lance and I arrived in Narita with no work visa, no idea who we were supposed to be meeting, no address for the company that had brought us over, and less than $200 (Canadian) between us. After making it through customs trouble-free (once again without having to utilize the Force), we were met by Ito, the FMW referee. He spoke English, but it didn’t matter to me, as I was practically fluent in Japanese after my in-flight crash course.

  The dictionary said that Konnichi-Wa meant “Good Afternoon.” I’d had problems trying to discern the correct pronunciation on the plane, but I figured it out and when Ito introduced himself, I practically shouted into his face, “Kone-Ikki-way!”

  He looked at me with a confused smile, so I said it again. “Kone-Ikki-way!”

  He explained that the proper pronounciation was Ko-Ni-Chi-Wah, so after five minutes in the country I’d already established myself as a patronizing, stereotypical, sanctimonious tourist, who said Good Afternoon at six o’clock at night and mispronounced it to boot. I was the bizarro Long Duck Dong.

  The drive from Narita to Tokyo was supposed to take two hours but took nearly four because of the bumper-to-bumper traffic. The rain pouring out of the sky made the Tokyo cityscape seem futuristic and straight out of Blade Runner: sleek modern skyscrapers with giant flashing neon signs illuminating highways stacked on top of other highways.

  We checked into the tiny Tokyo GREEN Hotel, which strangely had a BLUE logo. My room was the size of a walk-in closet, but it was my first free hotel room and it was amazing. I put on the kimono and slippers that were provided by the hotel and sashayed across the room like I was the Last Samurai.

  I didn’t want to waste a minute of sightseeing time, so I met Lance and Ito in the lobby and we hit the streets looking for sake and ninjas. We found neither, as all of the restaurants and shops were closed even though it was only nine at night. Finally we found a convenience store named Lawson’s Station. I was starving and some 7-Eleven style food, maybe a bean burrito and a Slurpee, sounded appetizing.

  Lawson’s Station offered neither. What Lawson’s did have were such delicacies as corn sandwiches, kumquats, packs of peas in a pod, boxes of chocolate on a stick called Pocky, and shrink-wrapped squid. They had everything...except for something I could eat.

  I settled on a can of Pocari Sweat (the all-time worst name for a sports drink) and a box of fried chicken pieces. I bit into the fatty piece of chicken and it was so spicy it burned the shit out of my mouth. The Pocari Sweat tasted like lime-flavored water and was no help in getting the fire out of mouth, so I bought a little plastic bottle of milk, downed it in one gulp, and barfed. It was soy milk or goat’s milk or mother’s milk, something other than cow’s milk and it tasted like piss.

  I thought I was going to come to Japan and experience screaming fans and ancient temples. Instead I stood in front of a convenience store puking my guts out in the pouring rain. I could have just spent the night drinking in Calgary and achieved the same results without having to take a sixteen-hour flight.

  We finally found a KFC and I was overjoyed. But when I bit into my chicken breast, I discovered a tiny brain behind the wing. I’m talking an actual gray matter brain with lines and ridges. I showed it to the manager and he and his employees huddled in a serious meeting before offering me a new piece.

  I’d had enough and asked Ito where McDonald’s was. He stared at me in confusion until he finally figured out what I wanted.

  “Ohhh you mean MAKUDONALDO!”

  That was the name of the famous burger restaurant that featured the red-haired clown mascot Donaldo MakuDonaldo. I ordered a potato bacon pie and a Teriyaki McRib and shut my mouth.

  The next morning, with the remains of the soy milk and Pocky still gurgling in my innards, the whole crew met in the lobby of the hotel and boarded the official FMW bus. That’s when I met Ricky Fuji, Fred’s illustrious connection to Japan. Unlike Fred he was friendly and down-to-earth. He also had waist-length hair and a strong desire to be Canadian.

  “I love Canada man. It’s my favorite place, eh. I wish I could live in Canada.”

  From then on we called him by his new Canadian name, Ricky McKenzie.

  He constantly bombarded me with a bunch of oh-so-Japanese-style questions, in that they made sense but really didn’t.

  “You like rock ’n’ roll sex music?”

  “You like Richie Sambora’s hat?”

  “Do you know any hockey players’ wives?”

  “Do you like jeans?”

  “How many pairs of sunglasses do you have?”

  Ricky also sported one of the biggest fanny packs I’d ever seen. The fanny pack was a wrestler’s fashion staple in the ’90s, and my neon green pack was no slouch, but Ricky’s pack covered half his torso. He’d look through it for a pack of cigarettes, a pair of chopsticks, a monkey wrench. I’m not kidding about the monkey wrench, by the way.

  Once again the power of music was universal and because he liked heavy metal as much as I did, we became instant friends. One night he took me to see a band called the Privates play at a small club. I was amused at how polite the Japanese rock fans were. They didn’t make much noise and just watched, clapping politely when the song ended. I soon learned it was the same way with Japanese wrestling crowds.

  When we arrived at the arena in Kanagawa for the first night of the tour, Lance took a look at the list of the evening’s matches taped to the wall and his face dropped.

  “This is terrible.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re not on. It’s our first night in and we’re not even on the show.”

  I looked at the card and sure enough the names Chris Jericho and Lance Storm weren’t on the list. But the names Clise and Runce were—and that was us.

  Like Cher, no last names were necessary. It was just CLISE and RUNCE. Clise was a bad phonetic translation of my name with the R sound not being pronounced the same way in Japanese, but I’d been called worse. I was once listed on an ad in the Calgary Sun as Chris Cherrykoo.

  I also noticed that Clise and Runce were written across from Onita’s name, which meant that we were in the main event of the show. Excited by the huge opportunity we suited up in our fancy new multicolored Sgt. Pepper ring jackets with green and black Rockers rip-off tights, both made by Lenny St. Clair’s mom.

  I threw a few warm-up kicks and said the same prayer that I said before every match. I was almost ready to rock.

  I had one more task before the match, and when I went to drop the kids off at the pool I was agog (great word) when I saw the toilets in the bathroom.

  They were nothing more than porcelain-covered holes in the ground, and the idea was to squat a few inches above the “toilet” and let it rip. To me, the bathroom is supposed to be a sanctuary, but there’s nothing relaxing about straining your legs in a crouch while trying to get the job done.

  After a while I became smart enough to look for a handicap stall, or a Western Toilet. The Western Toilet didn’t feature cowboy hats or lassos, just a good old North American dumper. So did the handicap stall and they both featured a diagram on the wall of a stick man sitting on a stick toilet, showing people how to use it.

  If you don’t know how to use a toilet...

  I got the job done and hit the ring for the main event of Sudden Impact and Mark Starr vs. Onita, Sambo Asako, and Ueda, a kickboxer who wore boxing gloves during the whole match.

  Lance and I made our big entrance by vaulting up to the top rope and back-flipping into the center of the ring. I remembered asking Shawn Michaels back in Winnipeg how to do a back flip and him telling me to get up there and just do it. I’d practiced back-flipping a few times in Calgary but this was the first official voyage. So I got up there and just did it, flipping backward with so much force that I over-rotated and landed on my ass. It was a complete embarrassment, made even worse by the platoon of magazine photographers who captured me falling on my posterior for posterity and the sour look on Lance T.’s face.

  I
got over my embarrassment when Onita got into the ring. It was a sobering experience to be standing across the ring from the boss of the company and one of the biggest stars in all of Japan.

  Atsushi Onita had started FMW after becoming unhappy wrestling for All Japan, when he rallied a few sponsors and formed his own company. FMW was the first company to promote such delicate displays as electrified barbed-wire matches and exploding-ring death matches.

  Onita’s build was fairly dumpy and he wasn’t much of a wrestler, but he had unbelievable charisma and personality. After his matches the fans would storm the ringside area as he doused himself in water while grabbing the microphone. He would then cut a long promo, bursting into tears every time. He became famous for his crying and the fans cried along with him, because he proclaimed himself to be a warrior for the people, with his tears signifying his fighting spirit.

  People bought his shtick hook, line, and sinker and chanted O-NI-TA! while Joan Jett’s version of “Wild Thing” blared throughout the arena. He ended up becoming a cultural phenomenon and a senator in the Japanese Diet. Not bad for a marginal wrestler with only one move.

  Once the match started, I got stuck working mostly with Ueda the kickboxer. He didn’t seem like he had any interest in being there and didn’t seem to have any interest in pulling his punches and kicks either. He was basically kicking the shit out of me. But one of the rules of FMW was that there were no rules, so I thought, “Fuck this guy,” rolled to the floor, and got a chair. It was Shane Croft in Calgary Part 2—The Return.

  When I brought the chair back in the ring, he made the mistake of turning his back on the pretty boy. When he turned around, I hit that sumbitch in the head as hard as I could. He dropped like a sack filled with more potatoes (stiff shots) than he’d hit me with earlier. He could’ve killed me in a real fight, but just like in my encounter with Bruiser Bedlam, my attitude was if I’m going down I’m taking someone with me.

  Much like in Mexico, the Japanese were notorious for taking liberties with the foreigners. If you fired back by taking a few liberties of your own, you earned their respect and it was pure business after that. The rest of the match went fine and Onita ended up pinning Mark Starr. He hadn’t pinned one of Sudden Impact because he wanted to see what we had to offer. It must not have been enough because we didn’t work with him again for the rest of the tour.

  I knew that pro wrestling (or Puro-Resu as they call it) was big in Japan, but I didn’t realize just how big until I got there. There were over a dozen different companies operating on an island the size of Montana. Clips of the matches ran nightly on TV, while results from the previous night’s matches were listed in the national newspapers next to the baseball scores.

  There were two wrestling-heavy newspapers, Tokyo Sports and The Weekly Fight, as well as two glossy first-class magazines that featured some of the best sports photography I’d ever seen. They were called Weekly Gong and Weekly Pro Wrestling, which everyone called Baseball Magazine because it was published by a baseball magazine company. Got that?

  There was something that made perfect sense about calling a wrestling magazine Baseball Magazine in Japan. After all, this was the home of television shows named Heavy Metal L-Game and Space Runaway Ideon and baseball teams called the Nippon Ham Fighters and the Hiroshima Carp. The majority of the Japanese media and high-school-educated people could speak just enough English to where it made just enough sense to not make sense. I call it Japanglish.

  It was a thrill to see a full-page color spread in the magazines of Sudden Impact’s debut in Japan. The pictures were amazing action shots of the unique moves that we were doing and the text called us Canada’s Steiner Brothers. That was high praise, as the Steiners were two of the biggest gaijin (foreign) stars in Japan and a great team.

  After an unimpressive debut in FMW (the Curse lives on), Sudden Impact worked mostly in the first half of the future shows. But that really wasn’t a surprise, as our technical style didn’t fit in with the barbed-wire, bombs, and bloodbaths mind-set of Onita. We stood out in FMW, but not necessarily in the best of ways.

  Most of the shows had between 1,000 and 3,000 fans in attendance and even though they were the largest crowds I’d worked in front of, I was surprised at the fans’ lack of reaction. It was just like the Privates’ concert that Ricky had taken me to—the fans watched politely and didn’t say a word for most of the match.

  I’d be dismantling my opponent’s arm with an impressive array of holds and submissions while crickets chirped in the audience.

  “Do I suck? Why is nobody saying anything?”

  Then I’d do an acrobatic move or a simple amateur wrestling takedown and the fans would explode with an OOOOOOHHHHH! Then they would go quiet again.

  I realized that the fans weren’t bored, but were merely watching intently. They understood the moves and the reversals of moves and appreciated the craft of the business. They respected the art of wrestling, and since there wasn’t much of it in FMW, they appreciated our work.

  A majority of the fans wore nice clothes or suits and it seemed like going to the matches was a prestigious event, like going to the opera. They really paid attention to the story and intensity of the performances. When the match built to the end, the secret was to incorporate a bunch of false finishes (“2 counts” as Wallass and I had called them), to which the fans would count along, “One, Tuuuu, OOOOOOOOOHHHH!” Then they would give a round of quick applause and silence themselves again. When a match really got cooking, the buzz would pick up until the crowd was screaming and clapping along with every move. It took a while to get used to it but once I did, I got addicted to the unique reactions and began to custom-build my matches in order to get the maximum reactions out of the fans.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE DOM DELUISE OF WRESTLING

  It seemed to me that Japan as a country had Americanized itself as much as possible. But walking around Tokyo was like traveling through a funhouse where everything inside was slightly warped.

  There were MakuDonaldo’s and Domino’s everywhere but the Japanese versions had a weird taste. People walked the crowded streets in sixty degree weather wearing expensive downhill skiing suits as a status symbol. Guys would dye their hair blond to stand out but would end up with a creepy burnt orange hue instead.

  I wanted to ingratiate myself to the Japanese people as much as possible so I informed anybody that would listen that I was a huge fan of the Japanese metal band Loudness. But while Loudness was cool to me, they’d seen better days in their home country. Proclaiming my loyalty to Loudness was like going to the States and saying I was a huge Dokken fan.

  But I figured everyone would be impressed by the fact that I had all of their records and knew the singer’s name was Minoru Niihara. Finally I was told to step out of the 1980s and get into the 1990s scene and was turned on to Japan’s biggest rock band, X.

  They had sold out the Tokyo Dome for a reason—they were amazing. My Clive Davis of Winnipeg tendencies resurfaced and I made it my mission to spread the X gospel to all of my metal friends back home.

  It was a pleasant surprise to find out how big the metal scene was in Japan. Grunge was taking over America and slowly killing hard rock, but in the Orient I could spend hours at Shinjuku Tower Records checking out all of the new metal releases.

  I also discovered that the Japanese versions of CDs from all of the biggest bands included bonus tracks, stickers, and other special treats that you couldn’t get anywhere else. The CD booklets contained exclusive pictures, lyrics, and liner notes written by the bands and translated into Japanese. Fourteen years later, it was a thrill for me to handwrite the liner notes for the Japanese pressing of Fozzy’s All That Remains.

  While I spent hundreds of dollars on CDs, I also spent hundreds of dollars when Ricky took Lance and I to a place known as a lobby bar. It was basically a fancy lounge with the gimmick of being waited on head to toe by beautiful Filipinas. No gaijin were allowed in without a Japanese chaperon but on
ce we got inside, the girls showered me with back massages, poured my drinks, and fed me like I was Jerichus Caesar. Then we danced the night away (I wore my neon green fanny pack the entire time) to the most annoying Japanese pop music I’d ever heard. But the girls could move and they even taught me the Lambada (that’s the Forbidden Dance!). They treated me like I was King Stud, but just when I thought I was about to have my Pocky played with, the girls escorted us to the door and bid us konbawa. Instead of receiving a happy ending, I received a bill for $500.

  Turns out it was the girls’ job to hang out and flirt with the customers, while pouring as much whiskey as possible. They got a commission on each $250 bottle that we drank. For that type of cash, they could’ve at least given us Caviar.

  In the BTWF days, Wallass and I had read a list of Japanese wrestlers in a magazine and had seen the name Tarzan Goto. How could you be Japanese and have the name Tarzan? From then on the mere mention of the mighty Tarzan elicited gales of laughter. Lo and behold when I arrived in FMW, who was the number two man behind Onita? Tarzan Muthafuckin Goto!

  He was a short, fat, stocky beast with no front teeth and a face only your mum could love. He also had no problem beating up fans if the opportunity presented itself—like when someone clapped him on the back as he walked to the ring.

  When a foolhardy fan did just that, Tarzan promptly punched the sorry bastard in the face. Then Goto chased the guy through the stands, grabbed him, and threw him out of the building. In the States if you even look in a fan’s general direction, you can be sued. In Japan to be attacked and beaten by your favorite wrestler was a badge of honor, something to brag about to your friends.

  But I’m sure to be decked by a guy named Tarzan Goto was a lot more credible than getting the crap kicked out of you by el Pandita. That’s right, I said el Pandita. That’s Spanish for Little Panda and English for Worst Gimmick Ever.