Monday 16 June 2008

Snakepit Japan



Right next to my apartment is Snakepit Japan.
Here you can practice thai boxing and/or submission wrestling.
Submission wrestling is just a more modern, generic term really. Catch Wrestling is essentially what pro-wrestling was when it was real.

Long before they had thought about sports entertainment, pro-wrestling or "Catch" was a real art. Catch’s more modern lineages can be traced back to Billy Riley and the Snake Pit in Wigan England. From Billy Riley we have “God of Pro Wrestling” Karl Gotch who trained Antonio Inoki, Yoshiaki Fujiwara, Masakatsu Funaki and so on.

While less known than Gotch but no less amazing is Rileys other star pupil, Billy Robinson. Robinson was an amazing wrestler and had many legendary matches especially with Inoki. Robinson with UWF, UWFI veteran Yuko Miyato and Thai boxing champion Makato Oe run a gym in Koenji, Tokyo called the UWF Snakepit.

Part of the above information was taken from an interview with pro-fighter, Josh Barnett, himself a practitioner of Catch.

At the top are a few pics from outside that I took, and some from Snakepit's website:
http://www.uwf-snakepit.com/

Thursday 12 June 2008

Koenji Streets people as subjects




First two pics are near the station (South side).

Bottom is a mobile phone salesman scouting for business.
Just to add, the phone shop has since closed down. Quite a shame, because being in Koenji, it may have been the only mobile phone shop in the world that had a CD player outside playing death metal.