Originally published in Monthly Puroresu

…and notes on the Performative Economy of Desire

There’s something profoundly weird about explaining to people how you went from getting a degree to LA to Tokyo, willingly entering a Joshi pro-wrestling world full of glamor, raw emotion – and championship belts that mean more than meets the eye.

I was a typical suburban kid, had cable and caught the replays of Saturday Night Main Event around 1990, renting old WWF tapes from the local Blockbuster Video. I had an Ultimate Warrior backpack my first day of kindergarten; I can still feel the nylon on that thing and see the different pigments of neon when I think about it. The moment I remember being “hooked” was seeing Marty Janetty tossed through the barbershop window by Shawn Michaels. I was a big mark for Shawn, Bret Hart, Curt Hennig, Scott Hall & Kevin Nash and later Kurt Angle, RVD, Chris Jericho.

But I wasn’t one of those tape trader types. It wasn’t until later, after losing my best friend, that I discovered NJPW while watching his little boy. We needed something to uplift our spirits, so I was playing old Attitude Era promos when one of the Jericho vignettes auto-played in the build to his match with Kenny Omega at Wrestle Kingdom 12. It was like that barbershop moment all over again.

Yet when it first crossed my radar, I honestly thought Joshi puroresu was just more of Japanese “honey trap” culture. I admittedly misinterpreted all the waifu selfies and SNS gimmicks, writing it off prematurely as a form of entertainment designed for a specific crowd. Then I watched a Mayu Iwatani match and realized pretty quickly that Monthly Puroresu needed to cover the joshi; something special was happening, and in STARDOM particularly. This was still within our first year of existence. Our editorial advisor Fumi Saito discussed with me how MP could cover it fairly (while both catering to the intense online audience and being fair to the sport, culture and performers). He happened to have a lot of insight on the culture.

When I was first introduced to STARDOM’s production team in 2023, I thought I understood Japanese women’s wrestling. I was naive. What I witnessed over the next year-plus working behind the scenes revealed layers of complexity that most Western fans — and even many Japanese fans — never fully grasp.

Think about it: When was the last time you watched something and could simultaneously feel that you understood it completely, while suspecting you understood nothing at all? This is the paradox of joshi wrestling, particularly when viewed through Western eyes. The aesthetics are universally straightforward — it’s athletic women in colorful outfits engaging in combat theater — but the cultural subtext might as well be written in invisible ink.

Backstage Karma

During Issue #8 of our magazine, we interviewed both Rossy Ogawa and Giulia. I would later meet Giulia at a STARDOM house show, and like with many of the bigger names, she’s one of the most humble people you can meet in the business. Like many conversations between Westerners and the joshi performers, ours was nothing remarkable.

Since I get asked so often: “How did you end up working for STARDOM?”

The truth is Rocky Romero of NJPW called me in to do a FiteTV bit in 2020, and Monthly Puroresu was really gaining steam going into early 2021. Our magazine was the only social-first outlet with a traditional journalism arm that covered the Japan scene both in depth and breadth. Soon fans in Japan started following us, then wrestlers, and after I interviewed Yuji Nagata, it kind of opened the floodgates.

Mina Shirakawa was always bullish on my potential, and their PR team was very gracious. Sonny Gutierrez wanted to make sure the STARDOM brand was in good hands and approached me to gauge my interest (a couple of months before Marigold’s split from Bushiroad with Rossy).

As an honorary* Club Venus member, obviously I considered her as a collaborator with whom we could help make our separate dreams come true – her going to America to be a superstar, and me coming to Japan to travel, live life and find a wife. That’s exactly what happened. I’m proud of some of the creative we put together and even more proud of sharing a Tokyo Dome moment with her just before our respective departures from Bushiroad.

And as beautiful as she is, I was never really starstruck around Mina.

As an aside, there aren’t many people as critical to the rebound of Joshi pro-wrestling culture in the West  as Sonny, someone routinely misunderstood. He’s been a part of some of the most important decisions behind the curtain that would have a domino effect on who became big stars on American television — and he’s humble enough to never take credit. I hope he writes a book one day (would definitely be a lot better than this essay).

The adjustment to working for a Japanese company as a Westerner was massive.

Nobody spoke English except the E neXus V girls and Thekla. Later on, I found out Yuna Mizumori is much better at English than she gives herself credit for. Also, the future poster girl Miyu Amasaki spent a bit of time in England for a homestay. Poor girl was traumatized though – her host family made her eat macaroni for every meal. Maybe that’s why she never practiced much English when she got back home. Still, she tried, and we enjoyed some fun conversations as NEO GENESIS started to make its mark on the sport.

My Western friends often ask me what a typical day working for STARDOM was like, as if I spent my mornings riding a bullet train through cherry blossoms and my afternoons teaching wrestlers how to say “suplex” in English. The reality was far more mundane: managing relationships with Western press, managing video files from arena to bilingual copy editors, publishing content, and writing as many tweets as possible within my content verticals – usually from the gym. I tried to get the office ahead of the curve by offering more translated video content, thinking we could produce talent in the office to help them express themselves better to our Western audience. But I was always told the idea was good, without ever getting that initiative off the ground.

Beyond the Ring: Joshi’s Cultural Imprint

What I’ve come to call the “Performative Economy of Desire” is something outsiders often miss. The relationships between our wrestlers and their fans expose the fragility of traditional Japanese masculinity. I remember watching from backstage as our top stars would switch personas instantly – fierce competitors in the ring transformed into approachable, deferential women at meet-and-greets seconds later.

“Some of our fans, especially in STARDOM, are really crazy,” one of our most popular wrestlers confided in me after a particularly lengthy autograph session. But what choice do they have? Especially when they’re breaking in, those photo sessions and merchandise sales are how they pay their rent. Or save money for the inevitable recovery from injury.

This isn’t simply entertainment, but a carefully orchestrated economic exchange. I saw how Japan’s economic realities intersected with clearly defined social expectations, creating these intricate transactional relationships. Many of our wrestlers came from backgrounds with limited career options. Others were well off and started wrestling as children with stage moms so they could build an audience before venturing into other forms of entertainment.

The most frustrating part of my job was dealing with Western fans who continued to hate me based on easily disprovable rumors. They watch our shows, observe these dynamics, and completely misinterpret what they’re seeing. Trying to educate Western wrestling fans – be it from an editorial perspective like at Monthly Puroresu, or from a brand perspective like at STARDOM – is a unique challenge. If they think they know everything, how can you serve up content that’s useful? Podcasters posing as “experts” simply don’t understand Joshi wrestling at a high level.

These poseurs often publish fan-driven narratives that take root versus thinking more critically, coming to Japan and requesting media credentials to develop a more critical eye.

It’s the wrestling equivalent of music critics who’ve never played an instrument explaining why Radiohead’s time signatures are revolutionary – they’re not wrong, exactly, but they’re operating at a level that would never pass muster in a real editorial environment.

As with other pop culture industries, these engagement ninjas enter a world of their own without actually going on scene or or asking the questions to discover the truth and reality of joshi puroresu. They analyze matches with the confidence of Dave Meltzer after half a dozen Red Bulls, but couldn’t tell you the first thing about the economic reality of being a mid-card talent in Osaka on a Tuesday night.

The modern wrestling commentariat exists in a perpetual state of Schrödinger’s Kayfabe – simultaneously believing they’re too smart to be worked while being worked at a deeper level they can’t perceive. I’ve seen matches where STARDOM specifically engineered storylines that would trigger precisely the type of “insider” podcast analysis that would drive engagement without revealing anything substantive. Nobody in “wrestling media” is deconstructing the magic while actually advertising the next show.

Maybe they’re okay with this; I don’t know. It may be a happy existence.

But at the promotion it’s still meta-kayfabe – the real money is in convincing people they’ve seen behind the curtain when they’re actually looking at another, more convincing curtain.

What separates these engagement farmers from actual journalism isn’t access – though that helps – but the willingness to question your own assumptions. I watched one online personality with ~30,000 subscribers walk right past Miyu Yamashita in the hotel lobby of WrestleCon because she wasn’t wearing her ring gear. The same guy later recorded a 90-minute episode breaking down her character motivation. The disconnect between virtual expertise and physical reality in wrestling media might be the perfect metaphor for our current epistemic crisis – we’ve created a system where being confidently wrong generates more value than being cautiously right.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

To wit: I remember one American documentarian who visited backstage, watching our wrestlers meticulously prepare handwritten notes for fans who purchased premium merchandise packages. He gushed about how “empowering” STARDOM was for women. I bit my tongue. What they saw as empowerment, I recognized as a well-oiled machine, part of the broader emotional strip mining and idol culture. Western consumers romanticize these dynamics through a lens of exoticism, misinterpreting transactional intimacy as feminist agency. They consistently fail to recognize the underlying economic pressures and structural inequalities at play.

The “kawaii” culture that pervades joshi puroresu masks deeper power imbalances that Western audiences simply don’t comprehend. I watched as our marketing team deliberately leaned into these misunderstandings – it was good for international expansion. Working in the office, I saw the numbers. Western fans do not support STARDOM financially, as loud as they may be online. But Japanese fans do.

One night after a show in Nagoya, I shared a meal with one of our veteran wrestlers. She had just spent countless hours practicing in the ring, taking photos with male fans, wrestling a very intense & hard-hitting match, and smiling through exhaustion.

“Do you think they know?” she asked me.
“Know what?” I replied.
“That this smile is how I paid for my mother’s hospital bills last year.”

That moment crystallized everything I had observed. The performance extended far beyond the ring, and the stakes were much higher than championship belts. For many of our wrestlers, this was about economic survival in a society that offers working-class women few alternatives.

Moving On, New Beginnings

Why did I ultimately decide to part ways with STARDOM? They offered for me to come back another year at the salary of an average janitor in Tokyo – less than a line cook. The current office regime simply doesn’t have a vision for how this product is perceived and can expand internationally. A lot of the talent sees it, feels it when they go to the U.S., but leadership isn’t as amused, or so it seemed to me.

That said, I think President Okada has done a fine job as a 30-something guy with the impossible task of taking over from Rossy Ogawa and putting together good Creative. From my perspective, he’s done a great job, really better than anyone could have expected.

I’m happy I was a part of the first year, and while at times he saw me as a thorn in his side – an unnecessary English language task item on his impossible list of weekly STARDOM duties – I felt a certain mutual appreciation. I just don’t think with his insane weekly schedule it was very easy to absorb my ideas, much less give direction.

There’s a weird contradiction at the heart of this entire experience: a form of entertainment that’s simultaneously authentic and manufactured, empowering and exploitative, traditional and progressive. And perhaps that’s what makes joshi wrestling so fascinating – it’s a perfect metaphor for the contradictions of modern Japan itself, a culture that can appear both completely transparent and utterly impenetrable, depending on which angle you’re viewing it from.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

As I reflect on my departure from STARDOM, my phone hasn’t stopped with DMs from wrestlers, podcasters, and wrestling personalities. This is, of course, the wrestling equivalent of leaving a party at exactly the right time – when people still wish you’d stay but haven’t yet discovered you’ve been drinking all their canned highballs.

It’s humbling, but what excites me most is what lies ahead.

I returned last week to join the Wrestle Universe team as a commentator for “Meiko Satomura: THE FINAL” on April 29. It was a historic sendoff for one of joshi puroresu’s most influential figures. This opportunity felt like the perfect bridge between worlds: honoring the traditions I’ve come to appreciate while continuing to serve as a cultural translator for Western audiences.

In professional wrestling, as in life, timing is everything.

What seemed like an ending has revealed itself as merely the conclusion of chapter one.

The connections forged in the Korakuen Hall hallways, the knowledge gained in those late Tokyo nights, and the relationships built with talent across promotions have positioned me at an unexpected intersection of East and West.

Sometimes you have to leave the territory to truly understand its value.

And sometimes, that’s exactly when they call you back – but on different terms. The canvas awaits, and this time, I’ll be back in the headset.

* Obviously wasn’t actually an honorary member of the stable, but I shared the broadcast booth with Waka Tsukiyama and Xena a few times and got to know Maika better than I did most of the Japanese girls backstage

Art by Peatzilla