• A THESIS WALKS INTO A DENTIST’S OFFICE

I have never been to Ichigaya Chocolate Square. I have only seen it on YouTube – 6,000 miles away. This bright, cheerful room on my screen while the world outside my window is dark by 4:30 P.M. and cold enough to make your teeth ache. 

It’s a former dentist’s office in Tokyo. No ring, mats on the floor. Wrestling action mere inches from the audience. A phone recording on the side. Sometimes there’s a live chat scrolling on the side of the screen.

The room is familiar. Not because I have been there, but because I have seen it before.

In a different form…

In a different country…

In a different language…

In a different pair of pants…

In a different century…

Let me explain.

Professional wrestling is an art form. That shouldn’t be a controversial statement, but it is. Say it out loud in certain rooms and you’ll get laughed at, or worse – you’ll get lectured. After all, wrestling is a bunch of assholes who decided the only way to love it is to tell everyone else they’re doing it wrong or not thinking about it in the right way. 

I’m not interested in such arguments. I’m interested in the thing itself – what it is, where it came from, why it still feels like it’s just getting started.

Because it is. It’s young – very young. And that’s the most interesting thing about it.

Wrestling as we know it is barely a century old. Most of those years were spent telling the audience it was something it’s not. 

This isn’t about what professional wrestling should be, but what it could be and what it’s becoming.

• AMERICAN KABUKI

Professional wrestling as we know it is an American innovation. It was born in the 19th century and, like most things American, its ancestry traces back to Europe – circuses and carnivals where traveling strongmen staged open challenges. Part sport, part spectacle, part con.

By the 1870s, it morphed from a rough sport to entertainment. By the 1880s, it had organization and champions. By the 1910s, Frank Gotch was a national star.

By the 1920s, the Gold Dust Trio – Strangler Lewis, Billy Sandow, and Toots Mondt – codified the form we know today. 

Before the 1920s, many matches were legitimate contests – grueling, methodical, and could last for hours. Fan attendance eventually plummeted. Mondt solved this by creating “Slam-Bang Western-style Wrestling.” It combined Greco-Roman wrestling, freestyle wrestling, catch-as-catch-can, boxing, and rough-and-tumble fightin’ with theatrical presentation. Instead of staying glued to the mat in holds, wrestlers started performing slams and armdrags. Mondt pioneered predetermined outcomes, time-limit draws, and no contests – allowing shows to run on tight, predictable schedules and building long-term narrative feuds. 

By the 1940s and ‘50s, the National Wrestling Alliance consolidated power across the territories, and television turned regional stars into household names.

But that’s just the American story.

In Mexico, Salvador Lutteroth’s EMLL (later CMLL) turned luchadores into national superheroes. El Santo and Blue Demon crossed over into films and pop culture. The mask became sacred. High-flying acrobatics came in the ‘50s and ‘60s, accelerating through the ‘70s and ‘80s. 

In Japan, Rikidōzan – a former sumo wrestler – founded the Japan Wrestling Association and became the father of puroresu. His angles capitalized on post-WWII anxieties: the heroic Japanese wrestler defeated the big, villainous foreigners. It was theatre – national theatre. It meant something to Japanese identity. 

After Rikidōzan’s death, his proteges split. Antonio Inoki founded New Japan Pro Wrestling and pioneered Strong Style – hard-hitting, legitimate. Giant Baba founded All Japan Pro Wrestling and eventually built King’s Road – a more deliberate style that emphasized emotional escalation and storytelling. 

By the 1990s, Mexican promoters had broken CMLL’s monopoly. AAA brought faster pacing and modernized trios matches. 

By the 2000s, wrestling was global. Influences from Japan and Mexico became more prevalent in the American independents. Some of those wrestlers made it to national television or influenced others who did.

All of that happened in about a century. 

Greek theatre had 330 years. Kabuki has been around for 400 years. Commedia dell’arte lasted for 250 years. They had generations of critics, theorists, and practitioners refine the craft. 

Wrestling had about a hundred years and spent most of it pretending it wasn’t theatre.

Wrestling hasn’t had time. It’s fought for every inch of self-knowledge it’s earned. And it’s still fighting. That’s why it’s messy and contradictory. That’s why it’s still evolving.

The modern foundations are American, but wrestling itself hasn’t been just American for a while now. It’s Mexican. Japanese. British. It’s a global art form with roots in a carnival tent and lineage that stretches back to ancient Greece.

But it’s still young. 

• GENEALOGY OF SPECTACLE

Professional wrestling has inherited and borrowed. Every art form does, but wrestling’s family tree is stranger than most.

The theatrical genealogy here is one of convergent evolution – different forms solving the same problems with the same tools. Structural parallels are not causal claims. 

Greek Theatre (550-220 BC)
Active period: ~330 years

• The Chorus: The Greek chorus was a collective body – typically 12 to 15 masked performers – who sang, danced, and commented on the action throughout the play. They were not just spectators – they inhabited the stage, exchanged dialogue with protagonists, and created the emotional weather. Wrestling’s commentary team has a similar position: part of the show while narrating it. Sometimes crowds don’t agree with wrestling’s chorus.
• Agon: A debate or contest between a protagonist and antagonist. The chorus often is the judge. There are rules, structure, a beginning and an end. Wrestling has face/heel feuds with angles, trash-talking promos, and the match. 

Commedia dell’arte (1545-late 1700s)
Active period: ~250 years

• Stock characters: Pantalone (miserly Venetian merchant), Il Dottore (pedantic scholar), Il Capitano (braggart soldier revealed as a coward), and the zanni – servants including Arlecchino, Brighella, and Pierrot – who schemed and manipulated. These characters were recycled into endless plots. Wrestling has the same: arrogant champions, plucky underdogs, and monsters – among just a few.
• Lazzi: Rehearsed bits of comic business. Signature spots. Things the crowd knows are coming, but they want it anyway. Some actors became famous for their trademark lazzi. In wrestling, you see this in The People’s Elbow or The Flair Flop. Or when someone hits their catchphrase in a promo. Anticipation intensifies rather than diminishes. 
• Improvisation Within Structure: Commedia had a scenario, not a script. They improvised action and dialogue within a plot outline. Actors tailored performances to different audiences. Wrestlers have a finish, planned spots, and a general match structure (ex. – the 7 stages). There’s often room for improvisation. While some wrestlers map a match move-to-move, others prefer to call it all in the ring.
  

Kabuki (1603-present)
Active period: 400+ years and counting

• Mie: The held pose. The moment an actor freezes and the audience explodes. Wrestlers do this in entrances, staredowns, and moments before a signature move or finisher.
• Onnagata: Men playing women – not by realistically imitating them, but through hyper-stylization. Exóticos in lucha libre are structural cousins, but not identical. Exóticos are hyper-masculine men performing exaggerated femininity. 
• Hanamichi: The walkway through the audience. Wrestling has the ramp or aisleway to the ring. It serves the same function: the entrance is not a means to an end, but a performance in itself. 

French Café-Concert (1848-1914)
Active period: ~70 years

• Venue Is The Vibe: The café-concert was part tavern, part theater. Patrons sat at tables, drinking and smoking, while performers worked inches away. There wasn’t a proscenium. This is exactly what Baka Gaijin and ChocoPro do in their small Tokyo spaces – no ring, no barriers between wrestlers and audience.
• The Economics of Access: The café-concert wasn’t just a venue, but a business model built on intimacy. The ticket was nominal or free. The money came from drinks. ChocoPro and Baka Gaijin invert this – tickets are the main revenue, and the bar or the room is part of the show. But the logic is the same: accessible, informal, and built around a social experience rather than a spectacle you watch from a distance. 
• Spectacle Varié (Varied Show): The café-concert didn’t just have one act. It mixed songs, comic monologues, and short plays.
• “Low Art” Dismissal: Critics and elites dismissed café-concert because it was outside of more formal venues. This is criticism often levelled at no-ring shows by purists. Dismissal becomes proof of life.

Vaudeville (1880s-1920s)
Active period: ~50 years

• Variety Bill: A series of unrelated acts. Vaudeville had 7 to 10 acts building to a headliner. A standard line-up had an opening “dumb act,” a second act of any type, a third to “wake up the house,” a fourth as first solid punch, a fifth as knockout before intermission, a sixth to sustain impact, the star in the seventh spot, and then a chaser to play as audiences exited. Wrestling cards are the same: opener, undercard, midcard, upper midcard, main event. Depending on the show and production, there are backstage segments and vignettes. Various booking theories dive into what makes a good opener, what a midcard should look like, and how to build to a main event. 
• The Circuit: Vaudeville acts toured constantly. Same routine, different town, night after night. Wrestlers did the same in the territories and on house show loops. Same match, different crowd that didn’t see it the other night. 
• The Heat: Vaudeville audiences were drawn from the working class – many of them immigrants. They were not uniformly rowdy – the Keith-Albee circuit enforced “polite entertainment” – but the form was popular, participatory, and working-class in a way polite theatre wasn’t. Wrestling crowds are rowdy in a specific way – participatory, call-and-response. They cheer. They boo. Wrestling crowds are among the last places where such energy survives.

Musical Theatre (1927-present)
Active period: ~100 years and counting

• The Spectacle: Entrances, lighting, production. Yet the best of both know that spectacle without story is just noise.

Wrestling is an orphan. It has the blood of Greek theatre and the manners of carnival. That’s why it’s defensive and flinches when you label it. But it’s also why it’s free. It can borrow from all of them and answer to none.

The forms don’t die. They just move. The café-concert didn’t disappear – it moved to a former dentist’s office in Ichigaya and a bar in Shimokitazawa. Commedia didn’t die – it put on a mask and learned how to dropkick. Kabuki didn’t fade, but became the entrance ramp. Wrestling is where old forms find new life. 

The audience was never meant to be passive. Greek theatre had the chorus. Commedia had direct address. Vaudeville had hecklers. The crowd was always part of the performance. Wrestling didn’t invent that – it inherited it. But it’s one of the last places where it still exists in its rawest form. The crowd isn’t watching – they perform too. That’s older than theatre – even older than art. It’s just what humans do when they gather around a fire and tell stories. 

These are branches of the same tree – a human need to gather in a room and pretend. To watch someone be someone else and feel something real. Wrestling is a branch – a late bloom, a strange fruit. But it belongs.

• CASE STUDIES

A note before we begin: I can’t cover every promotion, wrestler, and angle. I have watched many matches, but can’t write about every little thing. There will be big omissions. I won’t apologize to anyone since you probably think AI writes everything at this point in history anyway. 

But seriously – if I missed your favorite thing, tell us down below or on social media. Maybe we want to watch it? I’ll watch it.

• DDT Pro Wrestling: Cultural Puroresu

DDT is the easiest to call theatrical because they call themselves theatrical – Dramatic Dream Team. They have had matches in bookstores, campgrounds, and moving trains. The Iron Man Heavymetalweight Championship can change hands anywhere, anytime – and has been held by inanimate objects. This isn’t sport so much as performance art with suplexes.

It’s been called “cultural pro wrestling.” That’s a fancy way of saying, “We’re going to do whatever the fuck we want. You’re going to like it.”

In 2017, DDT finally made it to the Tokyo Dome – the biggest stage in Japan. After twenty years of working small rooms, they were finally there… with zero fans in the building. Just one match: Sanshiro Takagi – the owner and founder – versus Minoru Suzuki. Falls count anywhere, the entire Tokyo Dome as their ring.

Sanshiro Takagi’s thesis: pro wrestling is show business. If that’s true, then anything can be wrestling. A PowerPoint presentation. A blow-up sex doll with an officially listed height, weight, and blood type – an absurd bureaucracy. None of this should work, but it does.

DDT proves wrestling can happen anywhere. The ring is optional. The venue is optional. The rules and conventions are bendable. All you need are performers and people willing to watch. The rest is just geography. 

The crowd is in on the joke. They came for the joke. 

• ChocoPro: Serial Intimate Theatre

ChocoPro happens in a former dentist’s office converted into a dojo by Emi Sakura. No ring, a mat on the floor, wrestlers inches from the audience. If you’re in the front row, you might act as the ring ropes at some point, pushing wrestlers back into the action.

Compared to a ring, the match geography has its own vocabulary – the window, the alleyway, the door, the mats, the walls. The wrestlers know how to play each part of the room, bouncing off walls and using the window frame as a top rope. The room isn’t a limitation, but the point. 

Emi Sakura founded the promotion – originally Gatoh Move – in 2012. When COVID hit in 2020 and the world stopped, Emi started ChocoPro on YouTube – free, no paywall, and a live chat scrolling on the side of the screen. 

You have Mei Suruga – The Apple Goblin with her apple song – one of the breakout stars. Sharp, funny, and vicious. There’s Baliyan Akki, the English voice who seems like a genuinely affable dude, bridging the audience. Chie Koishikawa’s running and screaming fills the space.

Then there’s the fans. You will see regulars in the audience. Sponsors are taped to the wall and read during the show. It’s not just a room, but a community.

Character development stretches across months – even years. You see big emotional beats, friendships, and tears after matches. They feel real because they were built over hundreds of episodes. It feels like watching a family. 

ChocoPro proves wrestling doesn’t need scale. It doesn’t need arenas or pyro. It works at the size of a living room, when it’s just a few people in a room, breathing the same air.

• Baka Gaijin + Friends: Barroom Vaudeville

Baka Gaijin runs in Shimokitazawa. I’m told that’s like Tokyo’s Williamsburg. I believe everything everyone tells me, so sure. The name translates to “stupid foreigner” – a reclaimed slur.

They run at ARENA Shimokitazawa – a bar. The mat space is smaller than most bathrooms. Chairs surround the mat. About 50-60 people pack the space. Most of them seem to be young women. 

Chris Brookes runs it – wrestler, promoter, alcohol connoisseur. My kind of guy. He sets the tone. Chris started Baka Gaijin in December 2022 – a double anniversary celebrating his 15th year in wrestling and Drew Parker’s 10th. Two guys came together and threw a party with a little help from their friends.

The shows are a mix – wrestling, comedy, weird bits, kaiju. Café-concert meets vaudeville and runs up a bar tab. 

Mr. Bueno defeated Mr. Malo in a Mask vs. Mask match. Malo was unmasked. Underneath the Malo mask was… a Mr. Bueno mask. Malo was Bueno’s brother, thought to be dead for years. That’s the shit you see in a small black box theatre and think, “That was weird and beautiful, and I don’t know what it meant, but it was fun.”

The ceiling is a part of the action because the bar is part of the show. All of it. Everything is part of the show.

Baka Gaijin proves wrestling can share the stage with comedy and kaiju and beer and bullshit and still be wrestling. And still be itself. 

• Deathmatch: Grand Guignol

The Grand Guignol was a theatre in Paris – 1897 to 1962. They specialized in naturalistic horror and gore. They had a resident doctor on staff to treat the audience members who fainted every night. The rest of Parisian theatre dismissed it as low art. It was also incredibly popular. People came back for more. 

Deathmatch wrestling has the same impulse: what happens when the violence is extreme, but the audience can’t look away?

FMW in the ‘90s had explosions and the melodrama of sacrifice. Atsushi Onita put himself in exploding rings and made people cry with him. ECW took that, brought it to Philadelphia, and turned it into working-class opera. Fans chanted “ECW” like a civic ritual. 

Then CZW and GCW. Modern deathmatch. Carnival reborn. “Step right up! See the human body destroyed!”

Nick Gage – The King of Ultraviolence. Started in CZW in 1999. Became the face of GCW. One of two wrestlers to win the big three American deathmatch tournaments. He was pronounced dead on a flight to the hospital. He’s been in jail for seven years. He came back. The MDK Gang – Murder Death Kill – chants his name. Jon Moxley once said, “He has the number one talent you need. It’s not biceps. It’s not abs. It’s the ability to connect. Vince McMahon would fucking kill to have one person with that connection to the audience that Nick Gage has.”

Jun Kasai – The Crazy Monkey. Look at the man’s back. The scars all over his body – accumulated since his debut in 1998. A contact makes his left eye look constricted. It’s an eerie, unsettling visual. And it’s not just bullshit aesthetics because then you see him doing this crazy shit. His body is a map of ultraviolence. Then you hear the crowd – piping hot, chanting his name when “Devil” hits. Now he wears those scars like a gentleman wears a suit, treating destruction as etiquette.

The weapons are props. Fluorescent tubes. Razor blades. Bamboo skewers. Glass. Thumbtacks.

It proves wrestling can be ritual horror theatre. It’s the descendant of Grand Guignol with Kabuki’s violent stylization and the carnival’s promise of danger. The audience isn’t just watching violence. They’re watching a catharsis.

• Hyper Misao and HYPE: Avant-Garde Conceptual Theatre

Hyper Misao debuted in 2015 – the New Hero who protects the love and peace of Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling. She wears a mask and cap. Before wrestling, she wrote tanka poetry under a pen name. 

In other words, she is an artist who happens to wrestle. And once a year, she produces a show called HYPE!.

HYPE! Is not a wrestling card. It’s a play – a theatrical performance with wrestling integrated. It’s a metanarrative wrapped in a wrestling show. 

The shows happen at Kitazawa Town Hall, where a sold-out room comes to watch a play that happens to have wrestling.

Each HYPE show has a protagonist. Misao builds the story around them, gives them the lead role, then steps back. Yuki Aino was the main character in HYPE! 3 because she always helps others stay calm and never prioritizes her own passions. So Misao made her the protagonist of a wrestling show. That’s not booking, but direction. 

The stories are wild. HYPE! 2 was a dream journey with magical heroes, ganguro gals, a suspicious host club, heavy metal, a talking battle fairy, and Aja mother fucking Kong. HYPE! 3 was a play about pro wrestlers defeating an alien invasion. HYPE! 4 saw a mystical shrine with pro wrestling goddesses. 

If deathmatch is Grand Guignol, Hyper Misao is avant-garde cabaret. She’s not blowing up the ring, but the form. She’s proving that wrestling can be conceptual theatre – not just narrative or spectacle, but idea-driven art. Wrestling can stage philosophy. 

• WHAT A WORLD CAN HOLD

Let me guess what you’re thinking.

“You probably liked The Shockmaster.”

No.

“Beaver Cleavage. Judy Bagwell On A Pole. Katie Vick. You probably thought those were brilliant.”

No.

“You’re just making excuses for bad wrestling. You’re one of those people who thinks anything is art if you squint hard enough.”

No.

The Shockmaster debuted in WCW – a promotion that was trying to be serious. They wanted you to believe in the drama and care about the stakes. So they put a guy in a glittery stormtrooper helmet, had him go through a wall like the Kool-Aid Man, and expected you to take him seriously.

It doesn’t matter that he tripped by accident. The gimmick was always going to be ridiculous. The only question was whether the audience would laugh with it or at it. WCW wanted them to take it seriously. The fans laughed. That’s not a mistake, but a category error. They built a world that couldn’t hold what they put in it. 

The case studies I wrote about work because they exist in worlds where they make sense. DDT can wheel out someone in a giant panda suit and put titles on chopsticks because DDT is a promotion where that’s possible. 

In wrestling, you have shows with shoot-style rules. Bloodsport, UWFi, RINGS. A contract with the audience says a sudden strike or submission can end a match. You wouldn’t throw a lucha match into Bloodsport. You wouldn’t throw a deathmatch into a shoot-style show. You wouldn’t have a guy cut another guy with glass and then expect the crowd to care about a technical sequence minutes later. The rules are different. The world is different. 

One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is trying to be everything to everyone. Absurd gimmicks often flop in mainstream wrestling because a serious match with a serious storyline is usually around the corner. They are presented side-by-side when they don’t belong. The audience doesn’t know what to feel because it goes against the established world. So they feel nothing. Or they laugh. Or they change the channel.

But here’s the complication: sometimes the world is wide enough to hold the absurdity. Danhausen is a guy in face paint who curses people and demands a blimp. He was a cult favorite on the indies, then went to AEW – a promotion that originally promised a sports-based presentation – and never got a real opportunity. He was used sparingly with no consistent role. 

Now he’s in WWE. Danhausen is one of the top merchandise sellers in the entire company. He’s on ESPN. He uncursed the Knicks before they won the NBA Finals.

Plenty of people still don’t get him. Some fans think he’s overexposed. But WWE – a company whose most legendary character is a zombie – is one of the few places where he can succeed without breaking the show. The world is wide enough to hold him and the main event scene at the same time. AEW’s world wasn’t.

Same guy. Same gimmick. Different world. 

Think about it in theatrical terms. You have a play set in the Wild West. You’ve established the world, time, costumes, dialects, architecture, technology. Then, in the middle of the second act, an army tank rolls in and blows something up. Or an actor walks on stage in modern clothing and talks about their 401(k).

It doesn’t matter if the tank is cool or if the modern clothing is fashionable. It doesn’t belong in the world you built. It breaks the contract. It throws everything off.

That’s what The Shockmaster is – a tank rolling into a Western. It’s not bad because it’s absurd, but because it’s absurd in a world it wasn’t built for. 

The case studies in this essay work because they’re not trying to be everything. They’re trying to be one thing and follow that identity. They know what they are and the world they’re building. And they stay in it. 

That’s the difference between a Shockmaster and a Yoshihiko or a Danhausen. One is a choice that breaks its own world. The other is a choice that is its own world. 

• THE GAP

So what do you do with all this?

I watch ChocoPro and Baka Gaijin on my tablet and wish I were in the room. That’s a personal gap of mine – not just the one between what wrestling is and could be, but where I am and where the thing happens. Six thousand miles and a screen. 

I’ve watched Japanese wrestling for over twenty-five years. FMW Tokyopop tapes. The Ditch uploads. AJPW and NJPW compilation tapes. All of it from Minnesota. Watching Onita burn and Misawa triumph as if those things might as well have been on Mars. 

I watch and imagine what I would do there. I don’t say that out loud, but anyone would assume it. Performers watch performances and see themselves in them. 

It’s October 2026 and I’m 37. I turn 38 on November 29. Sagi-who-gives-a-shittarius. I still have a young face and a good head of hair, but my body is slowing down. Before I know it, life will have passed by, and I’ll be closer to death than birth. I’m young-ish. The “ish” does more work by the day. 

The people in this essay saw a room where nobody else saw one. They built something out of nothing. They did it because they couldn’t not do it.

Maybe that’s what it means to be young? Not the age – the wanting. Seeing something and not being able to look away, no matter how bittersweet. Knowing that you’re not there and might never get there, but watching anyway. 

When I started writing this, it began as a defense of the things I love and hold dear. The more I wrote, the more I wondered if I was arming myself for a fight that wasn’t happening. Or a fight I’d already won. Or a fight I was having with myself.

Maybe the haters would agree with me? Maybe they’re not haters at all? Maybe they just love it differently?

Wrestling is young. I’m young-ish. We’re all still figuring it out.

And that’s what it means to be young. 

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