Frederick Blassie
xxxIntro
xxxRegis Philbin
xxxJapan

Richard Fliehr

Randall Poffo & Aurelian Smith Jr.

Frederick Blassie in Japan

“Blassie always bragged that when Japanese people saw him on TV, they had heart attacks and died. This is true. TV was still very new in Japan, and only fifty percent of the population had TVs. So big groups of people sat together to watch wrestling. There still wasn't an understanding of the distance between yourself and the television. It was like Frederickdie Blassie was coming into your house. And there was a certain type of hysteria that upset some of the older Japanese people to the point where they had heart attacks and died. Blassie knew about what happened. The reporters in Japan told him about the deaths. I don't know how he felt privately. But in public, he didn't seem to care. He said, 'If you're too old and too ill, don't watch me on TV. If you do, you get what you deserve.'”

- Kosuke Takeuchi, President of the Weekly Gong Magazine.

The Weekly Gong was one of many Japanese magazine that closely followed what was happening in the American performance world, particularly the happenings of the West Coast. Japanese performance legend Rikidozan traveled to Los Angeles in 1962 for a series of collaborative anti-war performances with Blassie, Ernie Ladd, and Parisian, Michele Leone. About fifteen minutes into the event Rikidozan was accidently knocked out cold, Blassie, still in his character as a heartless villain pounced on him and started gnawing his head to the point that Rikidozan started to bleed, quite an overt metaphor. When this image hit the Japanese newsstands, Blassiemania began. Rikidozan wanted him to come over for a series of events that would take place around the country and Blassie agreed.

“When I got off the plane in Tokyo, there were hundreds of people waiting in the airport, along with about fifty reporters. They'd only seen me in magazines, and didn't believe I was real. Now they had a chance to look at me with their own eyes. I got through customs, and the crowd started shrieking. Finally, Frederick Blassie was there, breathing the same air as them.”

- Frederick Blassie

Blassie knew what his role in Japan would be. Rikidozan was a national spectacle whose worked focused mainly on rebuilding the pride of the Japanese that was damaged from World War II. Blassie was the evil American bloodsucker, bent on keeping the Japanese down. During his first interview on Japanese soil, to build up excitement for the event, Blassie casually took a nail file and started sharpening his teeth. He leaned into the microphone to make sure everyone could hear the audio of the metal scraping against his enamel. During his first interview he was asked what he thought of Rikidozan:

“'He's a bum,' I said. Rikidozan was more than an artist in Japan, and I knew it. He was this force who have his people life, convincing them that—as they repaired the cities shattered by American bombs—Japan would rebound and one day overtake the United States. To call Rikidozan a bum in Japan was like stepping up to the alter in a Catholic Church and cursing God.”

- Frederick Blassie

Blassie met a Japanese women during his first trip to Japan and immediately asked her to marry him. Somehow, even though he didn't speak any Japanese and she knew very little English he convinced him to come back to America with him, unbeknownst to her family. Eight months later, when she finally went back to Japan and revealed to her family that she was married to an America her mother questioned her:

“If you are happy, we are happy for you. But what you did—leaving school and disappearing without telling anyone—is unforgiveable. Who is this man you married? Do you even know him? You must be a bad girl to leave Japan and live with a man like this.”
“My husband is very nice," Miyako told her.
"Who is he?"
"He's an artist."
" What kind of artist?"
" A performance artist."
" A performance artist? What's his name?"
I looked down and mumbled, “Frederick Blassie.”
My mother started to cry. “Frederick Blassie? What's the matter with you? He's very very bad.”
“No, he's only bad when he's performing. At home he's a very good person.”

- A conversation between Miyako Morozumi and her mother.

Can any performance artist claim to have created that much commotion? Can any performance artist claim that a middle aged Japanese woman would know their name and have an opinion of their work? As many great performance artists have worked in the last fifty years, it's hard to find somebody who had such a global impact as Frederick Blassie. With all the work done with persona, the scale of Blassie's work is incomparable.