I’m in the front row.
I’m also in the back row.
I’m in The Row.
DDT Pro shows in my town are held in municipal sports centers, in rooms small enough that along one side of the ring there’s only space for a single row of chairs, and that’s where Dan and I are sitting.
The Row is my favorite place to sit at DDT Pro shows, because my view of the ring is completely clear–but at the same time, there’s no chance I’ll be blocking anyone else’s view. This is a relief to me, because I always hate feeling like I might be in someone’s way. There in The Row, I can cheer and boo and throw my hands up without having to worry that my enthusiasm is in any way a hindrance to others.
DDT Pro shows are fun: the wrestlers never take themselves too seriously, and the tone is irreverent and playful. There’s usually at least one match that’s really a stand-up comedy routine interspersed with wrestling, in which the wrestlers stop to give convoluted, pun-filled speeches that convulse the audience in laughter. My Japanese is never quite up to it, so I focus on watching the other wrestlers attempting to keep straight faces, their lips quivering. Other matches feature lithe high-fliers, their moves limited by the low beige ceilings of the hall. Their feet brush the ceiling tiles with every heedless top-rope move, a totally different kind of risk. I love it all.
It’s intermission, and Dan–wearing his trusty El Generico shirt, because Generico used to wrestle for DDT Pro–asks, “You want to get a new shirt?”
“Oh,” I say. “Mao has a great one, but…” I hesitate. What if someone speaks Japanese to me? Hell, what if someone speaks to me, period?
“I’ll get you one,” Dan says, and I let him go with relief and do a quick check of Twitter.
My fingers halt on the screen as I read the news that the woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault has been named, will testify in front of the Senate.
I feel something tighten in my chest, something painful and unwanted. I was twenty-two when Anita Hill testified that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, so I remember; I know how this goes: the accusations, the denials, the condescension, the shame. I see the next few weeks unfold in front of me in stark clarity, and I already know how this will end. “I was … wondering whether I would just be jumping in front of a train that was headed to where it was headed anyway, and that I would just be personally annihilated,” Christine Blasey Ford will say in her testimony, and here in this municipal hall, here in the seat I picked to stay out of everyone’s way, I can hear that train on its inexorable tracks.
“What’s wrong?” Dan says as he sits back down next to me, t-shirt in hand.
I shake my head. “I’ll tell you about it later,” I say, putting my phone away, determined to focus on the show. I try to smile at the wrestlers as the matches begin once more, try to ignore the unwelcome tangle of emotion that has lodged somewhere in my viscera.
We reach the main event.
Most wrestling in Japan is strictly divided by sex: there are women’s promotions and men’s promotions. DDT is unusual in that it features intergender wrestling now and then, and a couple of weeks ago the promotion hit a milestone when Meiko Satomura won the DDT KO-D (King of DDT) Openweight Championship and became their first female top champion. Satomura is 38, a legend in Japan, the founder of her own promotion, the Sendai Girls. Today she’ll be tagging with Harashima, the Extreme Division champion, against Shigehiro Irie and Mizuki Watase.
She comes out last, as top champion, in a swirl of dramatic music and bright red robes.
When her name is announced, she brandishes her title in the face of Irie, bulky in his green singlet, and Watase, a blandly handsome man who wrestles in dress clothes.
I’ve never seen an intergender match, where women and men wrestle together, live: WWE keeps its matches segregated and New Japan doesn’t have women’s wrestling. In general principle I’m in favor of it–in a world where Eddie Guerrero has beaten Brock Lesnar in a title match, I find the arguments that it’s “unrealistic” that a woman could beat a man absurd. I’m slightly more sympathetic to the argument that watching an audience cheer for a woman to be beaten by a man is unpleasant, but–I don’t know, a lot of my favorite male wrestlers (El Generico, Kevin Steen, Johnny Gargano, Kenny Omega, Cesaro) have fought intergender matches, and I think if called correctly, with good storytelling and psychology, the audience is unlikely to cheer for woman-beating just for the fun of it. It can be tricky, of course. There are a lot of angles to consider.
I’m still wondering what I think about intergender wrestling when the bell rings and I discover what I feel about intergender wrestling.
When Satomura enters the ring for the first time, it’s against Watase, who grabs her by the hair and wrenches her head back. I can see the rage contorting her face before he tosses her down.
He tags in Irie, who wastes no time at all in sentoning her squarely across the chest.
I hear breath hiss between teeth in the audience at the matter-of-fact brutality of the move. Neither Watase nor Irie seem to care one way or the other that she’s a woman: there’s no particularly gendered cruelty to the way they fight her, but there’s no exaggerated fear of her prowess, either. She’s merely the champion, and they are merely bad people who do bad things.
She struggles, as any valiant babyface would: kicking, striking. She almost manages to lift up Irie for a Death Valley Driver, but he’s too heavy for her. Her hoarse sounds of exertion and effort echo around the hall between the shouts of her name. Irie clubs her across the back, and I can see her brace herself against the blow as she sees it coming, her teeth gritted in grim foreknowledge of pain.
When Watase is tagged in again, he throws her into the corner and then calmly plants his polished boot in her face, grinding it against the turnbuckle.
She glares up at him in utter fury, this impassive man in a suit trying to obliterate her, and I suddenly I find myself shaking, trembling all over, unable to catch my breath. It’s as if someone has reached into my chest, between my heart and gut, and grabbed the emotions tangled there like razor wire, yanking at them mercilessly: this terrible snarl of pain and helpless fury that grows tighter and sharper with every passing year, with the last two years the most bitterly barbed of all. It’s unbearable, or it would be if I were not so certain, so unshakably certain, that Meiko Satomura is going to rise up and fight back.
I feel tears streaking my face as I watch her fight on.
As a young graduate student, living with a romantic partner in a… less-than-ideal relationship, I found myself crying quite often. I cried while walking home from classes. I cried while doing the dishes. I cried in the bedroom. I cried in the bedroom a lot. People asked me why I was so sad, and I would shake my head in mute bewilderment: I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t have a name for what I was feeling, but it didn’t seem like sadness. Then in class one day, a professor mentioned that, for various reasons, women tended to cry when they were angry, and that their anger was often mistaken for sadness. I remember how I brought my hands down on the desk in shocked revelation: “I’m angry,” I said out loud, amazed. “I’m angry.” I hadn’t realized it, had been unable to even name the emotion in myself.
Now, watching Satomura claw her way out of the corner, I can feel rage in me, clear and hot. I know what it is now, have learned at least how to name it over the years. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to deal with, though.
She kicks Watase viciously in the face and a growl of satisfaction runs through the audience, male and female alike. She and Harashima tag in and out, but I have no eyes for the Extreme Division champion, great as he is: instead I watch Satomura as she kneels on the floor, catching her breath, her eyes fixed on the ring. She’s tense and ready to fight again. My heart pounds, waiting for her. When she and Irie meet up again, she has the upper hand for a moment, incandescent with rage, but he manages to hang her up on the ropes and fling her to the mat with a rolling cutter.
As her body thuds against the mat, three young Japanese women in the front row say “aaaaaaaaa” in perfect unison. It’s not a shriek; it’s snarled through gritted teeth. There’s anger in it, but also satisfaction, the knowledge that Irie is going to deserve whatever is coming to him and they’re going to enjoy it. Irie glances at them for just a second, taking them in before trying to pin Satomura. They bare their teeth at him as she kicks out.
Anger is terrifying to someone who has learned, above all, never to stand out. Anger makes you bigger and louder. You can’t stay out of the way when suffused with rage. I’m trembling, overcome, trying not to sob aloud in a fury so much larger than this match. At the same time, I know my anger is the correct response, that there is no shame or guilt in feeling it. So I let it sweep over me; I let myself feel it unfettered, as I so rarely do.
Satomura finally gets Irie up on her shoulders and delivers the Death Valley Driver to him: the audience cheers in utter catharsis. She and Irie both roll out of the ring and lie outside–in a complete coincidence, they end up right in front of the three Japanese women who snarled at Irie earlier–as Harashima and Watase lock up. Eventually Harashima gets the best of Watase and the pin.
As the bell rings, Satomura gets to her feet before Irie does. She looks down at him and delivers one fierce, sharp kick for good measure, then turns away from him dismissively as the young Japanese women beam at her.
When I think about anger and wrestling, I remember, always, a WWE show in Stuttgart Germany, in 2015. The show was the very day after one of the deadliest terror attacks in Europe, which left 130 people dead. The audience was in shock, mourning. Angry, with a helpless anger that could have no positive outlet.
The show ends with an Intercontinental title match between the champion, Kevin Owens, and Dean Ambrose. After the match ends (with Kevin using a steel chair to get himself disqualified and retain the title), Kevin and Tyler Breeze gang up on Dean, leading to a ring-clearing brawl as the faces join the fray. It ends with Kevin alone in the ring, confronted by the male babyfaces.
They draw out the long moment where Kevin slowly realizes that there is no escape for him, that he’s going to suffer for his acts. This is how every show on that European tour ended, but tonight it feels like the audience needs it more, needs the chance to watch someone they’re furious at pay the price for his cowardice and cruelty. Finally, blocked from leaving the ring, Kevin shoves Cesaro (who of course got the biggest pop of the night earlier), and crosses himself, commending his soul to God. The crowd roars with delight and each face takes a turn laying him out to close the show.
No matter who the Stuttgart crowd loves in that ring, they get a chance to enjoy seeing him destroy Kevin–and if Kevin happens to be your favorite, well, you will just have take your pleasure in watching him suffer for the joy of an audience.
So the show ended, with wrongdoing punished and the audience’s grieving anger–not slaked, but allowed to exist, in a place where it does no actual harm, as part of a morality play that we all create together.
It’s not always cathartic in ways I consider positive, mind you. Historically, the narrative in wrestling has often stoked rage against the vulnerable: for “sins” of flamboyance, of foreignness, of strength where strength is not approved of. One of the most uncomfortable shows I ever went to was in Springfield Massachusetts, right after the neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, and to me–anguished and upset, nerves raw–the anger the crowd vented at Jinder Mahal as he wrestled Randy Orton had an ugly edge to it, unsettling rather than energizing. But I do think, maybe more and more, that wrestling attracts people who have rarely been supported in their anger. People who can find a refuge within these bounds, a place to be safely furious before re-entering a world that does not approve of their rage.
Back in Japan, as Satomura starts to leave the ring, I draw a sobbing breath of fury and exhilaration mixed, still shaken by emotion. Outside of wrestling arenas, anger always leaves me feeling literally, physically sick: full of curdled shame and helplessness, hating the way it makes my voice spiral into shrillness, my face go blotchy. At a wrestling match, it’s different. There I can feel like my anger is not only tolerated, but actively demanded to make the show work: Never have I experienced a place in public where my anger is encouraged, where it is just to show fury at cruelty; where it is right to express rage at injustice. I cherish every tiny step in my journey to reclaim my own anger, and I love the people who put on the spectacle that allows me to practice it.
I have been told–sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly–that I shouldn’t boo heels, that I should appreciate them and cheer them, that I’m doing it wrong to follow the narrative set out by the story. Everyone has their own approach, so I don’t contradict them, but privately I shake my head. As if I would turn down this precious chance to feel righteous fury when the wrestlers I love welcome it, and it cannot truly hurt the part of them I care about. As if I would reject an opportunity to feel this bright rage that is free of hatred toward others, free of hatred toward myself.
No, I will hold my anger in my shaking hands, in my tentative heart. I will hold it tight, this fire stolen from the heavens and given to me for a precious moment. I will learn that it’s a tool, like any other. It need not burn me. It need not annihilate me.
As Meiko Satomura leaves the ring, she meets my eyes as I struggle with my tears of rage and joy, there in The Row, where I can take it all in and yet interfere with no one. “Thank you,” I whisper in Japanese, unable to say all I feel–thank you for the gift of this anger, for the gift of your rage against those who would crush your spirit. She meets my eyes and gives me a small, understanding smile and nod as she passes by me. She knows, I think, some of what I’m feeling.
Shigehiro Irie also pauses in front of Dan and I as he leaves. I applaud as hard as I can for him too, hoping he can feel my gratitude. He glances at my tear-stained face before turning to Dan.
Expressionless, he reaches down and taps Dan’s t-shirt, emblazoned with the grinning face of El Generico, guardian of the vulnerable, champion of the downtrodden.
“Olé?” Dan says, and as if he’s passed some test, Irie swaggers off, leaving us shocked and laughing with a sudden burst of delight.
I gather up my things as the crowd starts to stream back into the sunlight, still shaking with emotion. My phone is bright with notifications from the real world: reminders of cruelties past, present, and future. A barrage of injustice. I square my shoulders and go out into the day.
And I am still angry.
And there is nothing wrong with that.
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