This is just the first of a new series of reviews in which I, hunktears, editor of Fanfyte, review wrestling photobooks. I’m going to keep doing them whether you like it or not, but I hope you like it. On a personal level. That’s my wish from me to you. Happy New Year.
No one was more excited for The New Japan Pectoral Encyclopedia than yours truly. I mean, maybe someone was, but it’s definitely very close and I’m willing to fight for my spot as number one most excited. I ordered it off of Japanese Amazon for ¥1500 and it arrived within a week. What a perfect present for me.
Cleavage, or First impressions
The book is cute. Softback with a glossy cover picture of Kota Ibushi’s torso, it’s about the size of a CD jewel case, maybe a little bigger. I’m still starting out in my journey of collecting wrestling photobooks, so I checked out the publisher to see if they’ve done anything else. Rittor Music seems to mostly do sheet music and music magazines. I’m assuming their working with Bushiroad on Bang Dream! sheet music books is what brought about this New Japan deal. One look at the pages inside, and you can tell this is their first foray into beefcake publishing. There’s a digital grain and dullness in color that pervades the print job. As someone who doesn’t speak Japanese so pretty much just buys these for the photos, this was a real bummer. I had been hoping for some good titty pictures.
The feeling out process
Still, I’d already paid for it (about $25 total with shipping), so I figured I might as well try to figure out what else was going on other than the disappointing image quality. The book consists of 20 wrestler profiles, four in-depth sections about bodybuilding, and a couple of sections that look like photos that were taken from wrestlers’ Instagrams and Ameblos. One of the social media sections is purportedly about nutrition, while the other is just cute pictures. The four in-depth sections are SHO talking about bodybuilding, YOH talking about bodybuilding, Taiji Ishimori talking about bodybuilding, and a conversation between Manabu Nakanishi and Satoshi Kojima (not Togi Makabe as I had originally reported) about bodybuilding. This was as far as I could get unassisted.
Stripping away the language barrier
After a couple of attempts to translate sections of the book radical by radical, I remembered the Google Translate app I put on my phone years ago and never used. It has a few settings that connect to your phone’s camera. The ones where you take a photo translate the text into a big block, though, and that’s wasn’t super helpful to me. The live translate option just superimposed English words over the Japanese ones, which was pretty cool. I just had to make sure to hold really still as the software processed what it was looking at and sorted through different translations. There is definitely a better way of doing this, but I figured the method that was already on my phone was probably good enough.
Finally getting my hands on that tight, firm pectoral information
I wish I could publish a full translation of everything in the book, but that’s definitely copyright infringement and also my translation is definitely bad, since it’s just automatically done by Google. That said, the profile section of the book is super endearing. Each of the 20 profiles consists of a close up pectoral photo and a questionnaire (along with important biographical data).
This is how Ace of the Universe Hiroshi Tanahashi answered the pec questions:
Favorite part of chest: I think the balance between depth and spread is good. My pectoralis major is vertical. Because the width is short, I am proud of muscles like manga.
Chest care: Because bleeding can occur with chops, etc., thoroughly disinfect. Tan and brown.
Winning fashion for showing chest: Just like women have knitwear, men want to say tank tops. However, I think white plain t-shirts are the strongest.
The ideal chest: Thickness, spread, blood vessels and muscles like Kenshiro in Fist of the North Star.
The most popular “winning fashion” answer was a tight shirt (Hiroshi Tanahashi, Togi Makabe, Kota Ibushi, Juice Robinson, Yuya Uemura, Will Ospreay, Robbie Eagles, Lance Archer) followed by a shirt with a bunch of buttons undone (Kazuchika Okada, SANADA, Yota Tsuji) or no shirt at all (Jay White, Tama Tonga). The most perverted, however, was Taichi, who recommended wearing a parka over bare skin and then unzipping it. This is a concept that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Editor’s note: I have since been informed that “parker” does not mean “parka” but in fact means “hoodie,” so Taichi was saying that the best way to show off your pecs is shirtless under an unzipped hoodie, not a parka. So his answer was not, in fact, perverted as much as it was simply a solidly reasonable sexy answer.
In addition to the pec questionnaire, each wrestler lists their height, weight, birthday, zodiac sign, blood type, shoe size, finishing moves, hobbies, favorite foods, favorite music and charm points. This stuff is all way more interesting to me than bodybuilding advice, so it was what I really focused hard on reading. It paid off. The profile section conveys a tremendous amount of charm and personality, even after it was mangled by Google Translate.
More Pro Wrestling:
- An Oral History of Dave “The Animal” Batista’s Dick
- The Supernatural Powers of Keiji Mutoh
- 2019 in Wrestling: Antonio Honda is Wrestler of the Year
I’m sure someone out there on the wide Internet has translated all of this (please comment with a link if you know of one!), but for the curious, here are some highlights:
- Naito has the smallest shoe size listed.
- Ibushi lists “eccentric” as his charm point, so it’s good that he’s self-aware.
- Juice Robinson is proud of his “sensual and juicy nipples” as well as his “gentle eyes.” Again, great that he’s self-aware.
- Hiromu Takahashi compares his chest to the face of Domo Kun, which I will never be able to unsee.
- Okada’s favorite music is still the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Sting even though it is 2020. His favorite food is ice cream.
- SANADA claims to wash his chest with a horse hair brush. The only hobby he lists is “suits.”
- EVIL says he likes the thickness of his chest and refuses to answer any further questions except for his favorite music, which is his entrance theme.
- El Desperado answers no questions at all except for hobbies (fishing, cooking, live music) and the one about favorite foods. His are bagels and tacos. Literally same.
- Minoru Suzuki is a very scary guy who doesn’t want to talk about clothes or muscles, but he does want you to know that his favorite foods are fried chicken and chocolate cake.
All in all, I’m glad I bought it. No, it’s not the nicest book in my collection, and no, the information inside isn’t lifechanging, but it wasn’t too expensive, and it is an encyclopedia of pecs put out by New Japan Pro Wrestling just in time for the holidays, right before their biggest event of the year. It is a book about muscleman titties, and that’s enough to make me display it on my bookshelf with pride.
