Credit: Dangerous Minds / Joyful Violence

Japan is a culture of extremes. It’s one of the reasons why said culture is exoticised in the West so much. When they tell a story, there are no half measures. It’s either one of the most deadly serious things you’ve ever seen or doesn’t exist.

There are few better examples of this than their professional wrestling culture. The sport is massive in Japan, boasting a rich cultural history that can match any other country in the world, save for perhaps Mexico. For the most part, mainstream grappling in those territories is treated like a proper sport. It’s much more serious than the soap opera storylines of WWE, with a focus on technical ability, along with strikes and holds that are much more real than the stage combat you might see at WrestleMania.

Then, there’s Yoshihiko. He represents the other side of the coin. Because just as Studio Ghibli give the world Grave of the Fireflies and My Neighbour Totoro on the same double bill, wrestling in Japan gets precisely as silly as it does serious. Yoshihiko is a beloved champion for the company DDT Pro-Wrestling, or Dramatic Dream Team, as it was called on its founding in 1997. A recurring character who’s guaranteed a huge crowd reaction and has held a number of their title belts over the years.

Yoshihiko is a blow-up sex doll.

To be clear, I’m not at all speaking in character here. Yoshihiko isn’t a wrestling character where a human being is playing a blow-up sex doll. That would be weird, but not all that much stranger than Mark Callaway playing The Undertaker, an undead wizard wrestler or Glen Jacobs playing Kane, his demon brother. Yoshihiko is a blow-up sex doll that gets puppeted to the ring by the DDT backstage team, then thrown into a match against their opponent, who then essentially wrestles themselves for 20 minutes.

In a way, Yoshihiko is the ultimate test for a professional wrestler. Not because they’re some fearsome competitor (I really can’t stress enough how much she’s literally a sex toy), but for a very different reason. It’s a common compliment to an extremely talented wrestler that they could “get a great match out of a broomstick,” and Yoshihiko is essentially forcing all those people to put their money where their mouth is. This, of course, means that this blow-up doll has wrestled some of the best in the entire world in her time.

She’s shared a ring with Kenny Omega, Kota Ibushi, Minoru Suzuki, Speedball Mike Bailey, Chris Brookes, Konosuke Takeshita and dozens more over her 20-year career in Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom. What’s more, a ring general like her has to have the championship gold to match, and she’s more decorated than hundreds of her human counterparts. Specifically, DDT’s Ironman Heavymetalweight Championship is her territory, having held the belt 22 separate times.

Speaking as someone who’s been a fan of professional wrestling for longer than I care to admit, I’ve seen a lot of silly shit in this industry in my time. The vast, vast majority of it makes me despair that I ever fell for this deeply cursed pastime in the first place, but Yoshihiko, weirdly enough, is not one of them. Yes, it’s a little grotty, it’s a wrestling sex toy, how could it not be? But it still lands on the charming side due to how hard everyone involved, from the audience to the wrestlers, has to commit to the bit.

Once that disbelief has been suspended, you’d be deeply surprised at how invested a crowd can get in Yoshihiko’s plight. Of the winces of genuine pain that comes from seeing some dastardly villain bend twist her wrist far beyond the point where a human’s would snap like a twig. In all, she’s the ultimate example of how wrestling, at the end of the day, is violent clowning. Both in terms of the performance art definition of the term clowning, and in the more modern definition of the term.

After all, what else can you describe a musclebound man in his pants pantomiming getting hit in the bollocks by a blow-up doll but clown behaviour?