The Smack Down on Ojika

What further corner of the world could possibly be host to a professional wrestling extravaganza, than my small island, barely hanging onto an archipelago in the East China sea?

I suppose beefy men in a mirage of pseudo personalities (and their pseudo costumes to match) could wander around and find a home in, say, Timbuktu.

That just might be as strange as having twenty men and women (of varying shapes and sizes) come to and fling themselves around in the center of my town gym - which is more typically (and daintily) home to badminton competitions and table tennis practice.

So, yes, the PURO-WRESU crew came to town. The company boasted a big and brawny headliner (Kensuke! Kensuke!) to draw in the crowds. It certainly worked. The 600 seats were filled when the fireworks started to fly.

The youth (and the not so youthful) of Ojika salivated over Kensuke and his performance (which lasted all of two minutes) during the main bout for weeks and weeks after the episode.

The town's mascot (a rotund simile of a deer) joined in on the festivities as well. The poor sucker from the town office encased inside that packaging of brown "fur" and planetary-sized head had an awful time manipulating the ropes of the ring to climb inside.



Here, the aforementioned youth, raise their arms with cheers of glee as the wrestler in the wring toss out soft-balls stenciled with the company's name.











Some elementary students with their autographed soft balls after the main event.















There was plenty of action in the ring. And...

Plenty of action out of the ring.

Here, "Handsome Joe" pins his opponent in one of the final matches of the event. Handsome Joe wasn't all that handsome, but he had an attitude to compensate for what he might have been lacking in the good looking department.

All in all, the event was a big success. It wasn't so much the number of spectators, or the layers and layers of theatrics performed in and out of the ring, but it was seeing the looks on the faces of my fellow community members that made the whole three hour spectacle worthwhile.

Who wouldn't laugh while 600 people from a rural fishing community were shuffled from their seats, under cries of danger, just to have men go leaping into their still-warm folding chairs? I'm amazed that the feeble, welding canes and crutches, weren't mauled in the bedlam.