“The Original Ninja From Hell” - The Exorcism Of The Great Muta
On February 21st, 2023, one of the most singular careers in professional wrestling will come to an end, with the retirement of Keiji Muto. One of the few Japanese wrestlers to crossover to the most dizzying heights of American wrestling, and to countless examples of non-wrestling media, Muto has held the trifecta of major heavyweight championships in Japan - New Japan Pro Wrestling's IWGP Heavyweight Championship, All Japan Pro Wrestling's Triple Crown, and Pro Wrestling NOAH's GHC Heavyweight Championship - along with a reign as the NWA World Heavyweight Champion, and a litany of championships and accolades; reigns with WCW, NJPW, AJPW and NOAH's Tag Team Championships, the Tokyo Sports Rookie Of The Year award in 1986, Wrestling Observer's Match Of The Year, Wrestler Of The Year, Most Improved Wrestler, Readers' Favourite Wrestler, and Best Wrestling Manoeuvre, all in 2001. He's appeared in movies, television, advertising campaigns, and video games. He is, evidently, a big deal.
But before the formalities of the final match and retirement show, there was January 22nd, 2023 to get out of the way - the final match, not of Keiji Muto, but of his demonic alter-ego, The Great Muta.
Questions Of The Self
Professional wrestling has long been an artform that deals with a conflict between permutations of the self. The very nature of kayfabe meant that, historically, the distinction between a wrestler’s persona inside the ring and their “real” life outside of the ring was intentionally blurred, and wrestling storylines routinely make use of this hinterland between selves, as wrestlers' personal lives and backstage gossip intermingle with the trials and tribulations of their TV persona, the wrestling ring a liminal space between the two. Sometimes the division is made explicit – a “shoot” promo, in which a wrestler is referred to by their real name rather than their given gimmick name, or the tradition in Mexico that when a luchadore loses their mask, the audience are told their full name, hometown, and number of years’ experience; a ceremonial shedding of not only the mask, but of the “self” it represents, laying bare the “true” self beneath.
Outside the realms of storytelling, the conflict continues in more mundane ways – wrestlers leaving a former employer forced to change their ring-name, because the name they have previously performed under does not belong to them, or the increasing number of wrestlers choosing to use their real names on social media, rather than the name they perform under. This conflict, or negotiation, of different selves is at the essence of pro-wrestling.
Sometimes, wrestling brings that conflict to the forefront - in WWE, the most recent examples are of the multiple roles portrayed by Bray Wyatt; the supposedly "real" self who returned to the promotion earlier this year sits alongside The Fiend, the host of the Firefly Funhouse, and perhaps whatever Uncle Howdy is. While often clumsily written and inadequately explored, what drama can be expressed through these characters is largely drawn out of how they interact with and contradict one another, far more than how they interact with other wrestlers' characters. It’s a dynamic that WWE have explored before, with The Fiend’s first opponent, Finn Balor, competing as his own alter-ego, “The Demon” for bigger matches, and Fiend antecedents Kane and Mick Foley both having explored the dynamic of having multiple personae, while still being acknowledged within the narrative as being the same person – the audience were always aware that the “Corporate” version of Kane was canonically the same character as his masked alter-ego, and the distinction between Mick Foley, Cactus Jack, Mankind and Dude Love became a significant part of Foley’s career, while all being recognised as facets of Mick Foley.
The Great Muta, then, inhabits a similar space. It's a mystical character - a spirit or demon - that seems to momentarily possess the body of Keiji Muto; we know that they are physically one and the same, yet they are treated as separate, distinct characters. That was most explicit in 1996-97, when Keiji Muto was briefly a babyface opponent to nWo Japan, while The Great Muta was a member of that same stable. It is testament to Muto's ability to convincingly portray both characters, and to make people believe in the reality of The Great Muta, that stories like this were treated with upmost sincerity, rather than as absurd jokes - it could bring to mind the Abyss/Joseph Parks saga in TNA, or Elias and Ezekiel in WWE.
But where did The Great Muta come from? This violent, face-painted, poison mist spraying, evil force wasn't invented out of whole cloth. It first emerged not in Japan, but in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1989. But to understand how he got there, we need to look back even further.
Antecedents
Wrestling has a long and storied history of problematic portrayals of other races and cultures, and a tendency towards Orientalism dating back to the late 19th Century, when wrestling on both sides of the Atlantic was beset with "Terrible Turks" - wrestlers from the Ottoman Empire (or, in some cases, allegedly Parisian dockworkers who happened to look the part), allegedly undefeated favourite grapplers of the Sultan, dressed up in pointed shoes, elaborate facial hair, and bedazzled entrance robes. The most famous were Yusuf Ismail and Ahmed Madrali, but you couldn't move for Terrible Turks in wrestling's first golden age. They relied on a fabricated, romantic ideal of the mythical East, born of western imperialism, that was in equal parts fascinated and repulsed. The West borrowed and mimicked art and architecture, and bastardised Eastern culture and religion into a grab bag of New Age and Spiritualist beliefs, while also typifying the people they were stealing from as irrational, animalistic brutes. The Terrible Turk was the perfect example - glamorous, exotic, and heralded with talk of royal connections, but an immoral, cheating fighter once the bell rang.
While Terrible Turks largely fell from favour after the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, they remained a recurring gimmick trope on a smaller scale into the 1930s, with some sticking around as late as the 1960s, and the UK's short-lived and confusingly named American Wrestling Association even using the Terrible Turk name as late as the early 1990s. The hallmarks of the gimmick had a long afterlife, though, with The Iron Sheik resembling a Terrible Turk far more than a modern-day Iranian Olympian, and the Original Sheik, Ed Farhat, borrowing liberally from the same wellspring of Orientalist inspiration, modelling his character on the Rudolph Valentino silent movie The Sheik, which deals in the duelling attraction and repulsion that characterise most Orientalist narratives. Farhat's persona trod similar and familiar ground - supposedly a wealthy man of means, yet also a gibbering and uncontrollable lunatic, a violent and almost sub-human caricature, yet one who dressed in finery and preceded every match with prayers to Allah. Characters like The Sheik, and his nephew Sabu (acknowledged as Sheik's nephew, yet billed as from India rather than the "Arabia" of his uncle, you figure it out), in many ways transcended their clumsy racist origins, to become respected and revered, with little mention that they were supposed to be mysterious foreigners - the turbans and pointed shoes the only remaining clue.
The Mystical East
As wrestling rolled on into the mid-to-late 20th Century, American and European fascination with The Other drifted from the Middle East towards Japan, only heightened by World War 2 casting them as the latest villain du jour. American wrestling had been turning more towards gimmicks and stereotypes since the 1930s, with wartime accelerating that trend as able-bodied wrestlers were called up to serve and promoters were left with aging veterans, unskilled amateurs, and Jack Pfeffer's "freaks" to pad out their cards, and the advent of television in the 1950s meant that those gimmicks had to be bigger, bolder and, for lack of a better term in a black and white era, more colourful than ever before. The easiest option, with a scrapbook of broad stereotypes to choose from, was a dastardly foreign menace, particularly with memories of the war still fresh in people's minds, and the Cold War and Red Scare amping itself up. No American wrestling show was complete without a goose-stepping Nazi, or a bearded Soviet brute.
Against that backdrop of shallow jingoism, it's little surprise that Japanese wrestlers were dealt a less than culturally sensitive hand too. Japanese wrestling had been a point of fascination in Europe and the Americas intermittently since the turn of the century - Sorakichi Matsuda sought, unsuccessfully, to introduce catch wrestling to his homeland, and mixed it up with all the top fighters of the late 19th Century while doing so, and jiu-jitsu pioneers like Taro Miyake and Mitsuyo Maeda travelled the globe trying to spread their discipline, but were never shy of deploying old carnival wrestling tricks, or entering the pro-wrestling ring when money was tight. In their time, they were objects of fascination, but after the events of World War 2, the idea of presenting Japanese competitors as noble and dignified athletes would have seemed preposterous to American promoters.
The new archetype for the Japanese wrestler was a cowardly, vicious, and deceitful sneak, prone to attacking opponents from behind and bending the rules, and capable of unimaginable cruelty. While Japanese pro-wrestling grew to unimaginable heights thanks to Rikidozan and the JWA exploiting their own post-war Jingoism, presenting Rikidozan as the national hero reclaiming Japan's pride by defeating dastardly Americans, most American promoters couldn't afford, or didn't care to, book stars of Rikidozan's calibre. In fact, why bother spending money to fly wrestlers in from Japan at all? To that end, any number of Hawaiian and Asian-American wrestlers were given new "Japanese" identities.
One such wrestler was the Filipino-American Rey Urbano. The son of a successful Manila businessman, Urbano excelled at American football and Judo in high school, and served in 1st Filipino Infantry Regiment during the Second World War, seeing action in New Guinea. Upon returning to America and enrolling in college, Urbano fell in love with wrestling - college, catch-as-catch-can, Greco-Roman, Sumo, and ultimately professional wrestling, he wanted to learn it all. His father tried to lure him back to the Philippines, with the promise of a career acting in the movies of his cousin, Manuel Urbano, who under the stage name Manuel Conte had directed a critically acclaimed biopic of Genghis Khan in 1950, but Rey Urbano wanted none of it. He was hooked on wrestling, and was ready to go pro.
First wrestling as a babyface in Hawaii and, in a sign of wrestling's problematically fluid approach to racial identity, wrestling on Indian reservations as "Kickapoo Rey", he was soon repackaged, dressed up in a robe and wooden sandals, and trading in his wrestling offence by karate chops and throat thrusts, going by the name Taro Sakuro, or the spectacularly unimaginative Tokyo Tom (a name also used by Antonio Inoki during his first American excursion).
Tokyo Tom brought Urbano more success than he had ever seen under his real name, allowing him to mix it up with some of the stars of the day, as a regular in Dory Funk Sr's Amarillo territory, but in the late 1960s, his career was seemingly cut short. He had survived stabbings and assaults from enraged wrestling fans, but a routine check-in with doctors while wrestling in Texas revealed something more life-threatening - a brain tumour, that doctors were convinced meant that he would never wrestle again.
Somehow, Urbano was able to pull through and, after five years away from the ring, began to plan his return. Only this time, he wouldn't be Tokyo Tom.
Urbano returned to the ring in 1972 as The Great Kabooki – a brutal “Japanese” warrior drawing on inspiration somewhere between myth and Hollywood stereotype, expanding the overtly Asian coded dress of "Taro Sakuro" to include a painted white face, arched black eyebrows, and the ceremonial scattering of salt to purify the ring before contests, a ceremony he would make a mockery of when invariably using that same salt as a weapon to blind his opponents. It was a character pulling together the anti-Asian sentiment of mid-20th century America, and the fascination of the “mystical East” from half a century before, to craft an otherworldy, unknowable figure, in much the same way Kendo Nagasaki did in the UK at a similar time.
Approaching 50, the new persona allowed "Kabooki" to hide behind smoke and mirrors and all the tricks of the trade that he could muster, to disguise that he was aging and slowing down. He worked primarily for The Sheik in Detroit, a reliable villain and heater, battling the likes of Bobo Brazil and Haystacks Calhoun to warm them up for the promoter and top star, but that meant there was a ceiling on his career prospects - with another vicious foreign menace holding the booker's pencil, the pursestrings, and with a stranglehold on the main event picture and the United States Championship, there was little hope for The Great Kabooki to share the spotlight with The Sheik. And so, once again, he retired.
Urbano took a few odd jobs - working in catering, and even developing ideas for new board games for a time - but he couldn't shake the itch. In 1978, he once again returned to the ring, wrestling for Angelo Poffo in his outlaw Tennessee territory, ICW. He continued to compete until 1983, battling the likes of Poffo's son Randy Savage, and teaming with Ratamyus, a mystical and occult character that borrowed liberally from Kabooki and The Sheik, but shorn of their more overtly racist and Orientalist origins - a combination that was starting to pay dividends for Kevin Sullivan elsewhere.
It was during that final comeback run of The Great Kabooki, in 1981, that Gary Hart and World Class Championship Wrestling took inspiration from the twilight years of Rey Urbano, and gave the name The Great Kabuki to a Japanese journeyman wrestler named Akihisa Mera, already a veteran of the JWA, having debuted in the mid-60s.Under the tutelage of Gary Hart, this new Kabuki became even more of a mystical figure than his predecessor, with long hair, a dark, painted face, pre-match nunchaku demonstrations and, most famously of all, with the mysterious ability to spit a mysterious liquid, or “poison mist”, that was used to blind and disorient his opponents. Alternately booked from Japan, Singapore, or simply “The Orient”, Kabuki stretched the stereotype of the Oriental other so far as to have concocted the possibility that he could have a distinct physiology, literally able to secrete poison. Perhaps adding to that sense of unknowable mystery, former AJPW wrestler Haru Sonada, a regular tag partner of Kabuki under the name of “Magic Dragon”, would often portray Kabuki in Mera’s absence. Sonoda, sadly, would pass away on South African Airways Flight 295 in 1987, en route to his honeymoon.
While The Great Kabuki went on to have a long and storied career in his own right, wrestling his final match in September 2018 at the age of 70, perhaps his most significant legacy is in the continuation of the Kabuki gimmick, by Keiji Mutoh, as The Great Muta. Initially introduced to American audiences as the son of Kabuki, Muta took the mysterious Kabuki image to new extremes, crafting a more manifestly demonic, supernatural character, less beholden to western stereotype, pulling from pop culture and Japanese folklore to create a mythology all of its own.
The anti-Japanese sentiment of the war had given away to a new economic anxiety. Japan was now America's ally, and prodigious growth after the war years had seen them become a veritable manufacturing and economic powerhouse on the global stage. Americans were, quite frankly, scared. They no longer feared the vicious tactics of Japanese soldiers, but economic domination in the marketplace - Japanese companies were buying up American assets, car manufacturers, even familiar parts of the New York skyline, purchased by Japanese real estate conglomerate Mitsubishi Estate in 1989. Japanese technology was winning over western consumers, while pop-economy and science books were rushed to market predicting a coming trade war, and speculating darkly about Japanese ruthlessness in and out of the boardroom. Even into the 1990s, as Japan's economic bubble had begun to burst, films like the inexorable Michael Crichton-penned Rising Sun demonised Japanese people as immoral gangsters looking to seize influence over American business by any means necessary. Even far better films like Die Hard and Blade Runner deal with American anxiety over Japanese cultural and economic domination - with Die Hard's Nakatomi Plaza, and Blade Runner's recurring use of Japanese names and cultural influence in a western setting.
American audiences needed a new kind of Japanese villain and, somehow, the overt mysticism of The Great Muta was able to meet that demand. He was introduced to WCW by Hiro Matsuda, a legendary wrestler, trainer and promoter, who, in 1987, was benefiting from the wave of resurgent American anti-Japanese sentiment. Presented as a wealthy Japanese businessman, Matsuda not only managed but "purchased" the Four Horsemen, renaming them the Yamazaki Corporation, in a none-too-subtle nod to fears of the loss of American businesses and institutions to Japanese investment. Two years later, with the Horsemen reformed as a babyface act, Matsuda formed the "J-Tex Corporation", another nightmarish vision of Japan-American collaboration, built around Terry Funk, Dick Slater, Buzz Sawyer, The Dragonmaster (Kazuo Sakurada, a JWA veteran and former Sumo wrestler, who, borrowing the "Kendo Nagasaki" name, had his own version of the facepaint and poison mist act going on in Memphis in the early 1980s), and most of all, The Great Muta.
The Great Muta was a sensation, with a terrifying and captivating character combined with an athletic and dynamic wrestling style that blew the minds of American fans just as the Cruiserweights of WCW would in the following decade. He was capable of startling movements, bursts of speeds, and athletic moves like his signature Moonsault that were unlike anything that WCW's audience had seen before. He was an instant hit, and a perfect foil for WCW's facepainted emergent hero, Sting. Over time, he became so popular for his clear ability that it was almost impossible to keep him heel - but rather than switch to a babyface role in the United States, he returned to Japan, where he continued to alternate between Keiji Muto and, for special matches, the Great Muta persona.
In Japan
Back in Japan, The Great Muta gimmick was a sensation. No longer coloured with xenophobic overtones, the mystical and folkloric elements of the character were brought to the foreground, giving it a depth lacking in many of his forebears and imitators. That depth allowed the Muta character to explore ideas well outside the usual scope of Japanese wrestling storytelling, but also to indulge in spectacular acts of violence, like in an infamously bloody match with Hiroshi Hase.
The perfect marriages of the two came in two matches - one against Jushin Thunder Liger, and one against Hakushi. Jinsei "Hakushi" Shinzaki's gimmick was of a wandering pilgrim, painted in Japanese kanji to protect him from evil spirits. A force for good, he was the perfect counterpart to Muta, and when they met in 1996, the match was predictably heated, and obscenely violent. Hakushi was covered in blood, and seemingly banished to the afterlife when Muta painted the kanji for death - in Shinzaki's own blood - on the gravemarker Hakushi carried with him to the ring. When Hakushi eventually resurfaced, it was in Michinoku Pro. Brought to the ring in a coffin, he emerged, zombie-like, still wearing the blood-stained ring gear from his match with Muta, for a match against the WWF's Undertaker, acting as a guardian of the underworld. Unable to defeat The Undertaker and win back his life, Shinzaki was supposedly interred in the mountains, the Hakushi that we see today simply a manifestation of his restless, wandering spirit. It's a story that few in wrestling could pull off, but the allure of the characters in play made it work.
That same year, the Great Muta and Jushin Liger crossed paths. It was a rare clash between arguably the biggest names of the junior heavyweight and heavyweight divisions, and Liger almost immediately seemed outclassed by his larger opponent. An aggressive Muta attacked Liger with foreign objects, tore at his mask and bodysuit, and brawled outside of the ring. When Muta attempted to remove Jushin Liger’s mask, though, he was caught off-guard with a spray of the poison mist he had made his signature, as beneath his mask Liger revealed a demonic painted face. This incarnation of Liger came to be known as Kishin Liger, a mirror of Muta, a demonic form. NJPW’s website explains;
The name Kishin carries with it connections to deities, but also personal transformation. Its kanji 鬼神 can be easily translated as ‘fierce god’, and can also be read as onigami (the god of the oni demons) or kijin. The word carries with it an idea of totality, a universal spirit of all creation both living and dead. It can also suggest the idea of extremely powerful latent ability, traits that Kishin Liger has clearly demonstrated.
Other wrestlers had mimicked Muta’s demonic persona in contests either against or teaming with him – Atsushi Onita as The Great Nita, Seiya Sanada in TNA as The Great Sanada, and Akebono as Muta’s kayfabe son in HUSTLE, The Great Bono – but none had the significance, or the lasting impact of Kishin Liger.
Part of the mythic appeal of the Kishin Liger persona is that it was used so sparingly – Liger would not revive the character again for a decade, and has only appeared in the facepaint four times in total.
In his most recent appearance, Kishin Liger has been willingly drawn out by the taunts of Minoru Suzuki. Suzuki unmasked Liger, and in an interview claimed that he didn’t want to wrestle, “the bastard under a mask”, but “the other one. The real you.”. When Kishin Liger emerged, it was with a spray of poison mist, and an attempt to drive a metal spike into Suzuki’s head, both reminiscent of his first appearance, and of the Great Muta at his most violent and uncontrollable.
In an arresting image of Kishin Liger’s face from that final appearance, I am reminded of the late work of the great dancer Kazuo Ohno, an artist synonymous with the post-war Japanese dance form, Butoh. Butoh, like professional wrestling, entered Japanese culture in the 1950s, part of a new era struggling to find expression in a Japan increasingly defined by the stagnation of tradition, and the imposition of American occupation and dominance. Butoh was subversive, and sought to sever ties with both western and Japanese traditional forms of dance. It dealt in cultural taboos, and is often characterised by dancers in full bodypaint, hands twisted into claw-like positions, and jerking, uncomfortable movement, accompanied by grotesque facial expressions, creating the image of distress, of the dancers being moved against their will. Ohno was perhaps the finest practicioner of the form, using Butoh to challenge the unspoken rules of tradition, and to tackle gender and sexual norms, often appearing androgynous or in exagerrated drag. Ohno continued to dance into his 90s, and after he could no longer walk, focusing increasingly on facial expression and increasingly expressive hand movements, still making public appearances up to his hundredth birthday, before passing away in 2010 at the age of 103.
Ohno, like Great Muta, and like Kishin Liger, was able to bridge gaps between the absurd and the profound, taking material that in another’s hands would be ridiculous or comical, and transforming it into a striking, powerful image. Dance and wrestling alike are at their best when an epic narrative is expressed by just a few seemingly simple gestures, where physicality stands in for words, and the self is subsumed into the moment – Keiichi Yamada becomes Jushin Liger becomes Kishin Liger becomes the story, and in fleeting gestures we see those points in conflict. Butoh, and the career of Kazuo Ohno, like the persona of Kishin Liger, was born of a national, cultural need to create a distinct identity – Butoh in its relation to Japanese national identity in flux after World War 2, Kishin Liger as the ongoing negotiation of Japanese identity through the Western gaze, a reconfiguring of the xenophobic stereotypes that birthed The Great Kabooki in the early 1970s, refined across the decades, across multiple performers, arriving at the distinctly unique image of the paint-smeared face of Kishin Liger in 2019, and of The Great Muta's retirement performance in 2023.
Exorcism
And so, we come back to the final match, The Great Muta's retirement. There, he teamed with old rival Sting and AEW's Darby Allin against Naomichi Marufuji, Hakushi, and AKIRA. Everyone in that match owes something to the legacy of MUTA, with all but one of them - Marufuji - not regularly competing wearing facepaint of some description, and even Marufuji adopting demonic face and bodypaint for the occasion. Before the match, Muta's team were joined by a frail Great Kabuki for a pre-match photo.
The match itself was far from a classic - with both teams having a combined age of over 150 years, it was often a plodding and slow affair, but that was never the point. This was a match, as much as any match has ever been, dependent on pageantry and imagery. Anyone expecting a masterpiece from a 60 year old, one month away from retirement, Great Muta - who appeared in a wheelchair for post-match comments - is looking in the wrong place. What it did give us was spectacular entrances, powerful images, and a reprisal of that brutal battle between Muta and Hakushi, revisited here to surprising effect.
On paper, one would have expected much of the heavy lifting of this match to fall to the sprightly 43 year old Marufuji and the 30 year old Darby Allin, with much of the high spots and dangerous bumps falling on the reckless and daredevil Allin's shoulders, with maybe a nod to Sting, who has reinvented himself as a spectacular risk-taker in his twilight years. Instead, the most shocking and death-defying moment of the match came from Hakushi, launched off the apron and sent flying over the guardrail and on to a seemingly unprepared commentators' table in spectacular fashion. From there, he was strangled, stabbed, and brutalised by Muta, and at one point, in the grimmest and most memorable image of the match, allowed his own blood to pool into his cupped hands, which he then brought up to his mouth and drank.
In the end, Hakushi was defeated, The Great Muta victorious in his final appearance. Perhaps it was that corruption, imbibing his own blood, that prevented the White One from being able to exorcise his greatest evil.
Note: Parts of this post first appeared on imaintainthedoublefootstompissilly.com, in an essay on Kishin Liger, and ideas of the Self.
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