Cheki, Cheek to Cheek: A Theory of Joshi Puroresu in the Age of Oshikatsu

By: Thom Fain

There is a moment, somewhere near the end of every Tokyo Joshi Pro-Wrestling show, where a wrestler who has spent the previous twenty minutes attempting to murder another woman with a forearm strike will sit at a folding table and pose for a Polaroid. Not a digital one — an actual Fujifilm Instax square, with all the washed-out chromatic ambivalence of a photograph your aunt took in 1998. The wrestler will sign it. She will hand it to a stranger. The stranger will leave the building feeling, in some small and probably embarrassing way, beloved.

This is called a cheki and is, depending on which century of pop-cultural history you grew up inside, either a quaint Japanese fan ritual or the most psychologically efficient delivery system for parasocial intimacy ever devised. I am leaning, hard, toward the latter. I think the cheki is a small but crucial piece of evidence that joshi puroresu — the umbrella term for Japanese women’s professional wrestling — has, almost without anyone in the West noticing, become the most functional idol industry in Japan. 

 

This is, of course, an absurd thing to say. But absurd things are usually the only ones worth saying out loud.

2.

To explain why a sweaty woman in neon hair handing you a Polaroid for ¥1,500 is culturally interesting, you first have to explain idol culture itself, which is the kind of project that tends to end careers in the cultural-studies department. The short version: in 1972, a fourteen-year-old named Momoe Yamaguchi placed second on a TV talent show and, more or less by accident, invented a new genre of celebrity. She had a husky voice and an inscrutable affect, and Japan, then mid-economic-miracle, decided that this combination was exactly the thing it wanted on television every night. She was the first “idol” in the modern sense — a young performer whose primary product was not a song or a film but a relationship.

By the early 1980s, Seiko Matsuda had refined the formula into something pinker and more durable, and by 1985 the eleven-member group Onyanko Club had broken the formula open by suggesting you didn’t need one idol when you could have eleven. Onyanko Club introduced the “graduation system,” in which idols ostensibly age out of the group, which is the closest thing modern Japan has produced to an officially sanctioned metaphor for life itself. (The Comm goes deep on the genealogy, if you have the appetite for it.)

The big mutation came on December 16, 2005, when an unknown group called AKB48 was scheduled to perform at their Akihabara theater and the equipment broke. Rather than send everyone home, the staff improvised a meet-and-greet: the audience of fifty or so was invited up to shake the members’ hands. (AKB48 Wiki preserves the institutional memory.) This is now called akushukai, and it changed everything. AKB48’s official slogan — and I mean this without irony — was “idols you can meet.” Not idols you can watch. Not idols you can stream. Meet. Shake hands with. Speak to for ten seconds, possibly more if you bought enough single-CDs to redeem additional ten-second tickets, which fans absolutely did, because once you have invented a market for ten seconds of human contact you have invented capitalism’s most efficient product.

Skip ahead twenty years. As of 2025, roughly fourteen million Japanese people — about 11% of the population — engage in something called oshikatsu, which translates approximately to “the lifestyle of supporting your favorite.” On average, an oshikatsu participant spends ¥250,000 a year on their oshi. That is roughly $1,600 USD spent annually on a person they may have technically met for ten seconds. Japan Today did the dirty work of tallying the survey numbers, if you care to check my math.

At this point, I want to be si[er clear: in and of itself, this style of fandom is not reserved for weirdos. Or rather — it is weird, but only in the way that any modern relationship between a consumer and a piece of intellectual property is weird. Check your cupboard; you probably own a coffee mug with a cartoon character on it. This is the same thing, just calibrated for Tokyo real-estate prices.

3.

Now consider professional wrestling.

I am willing to assume that you, the reader, hold professional wrestling in roughly the same regard as I hold my own opinions about jazz: you respect that it exists, you don’t want to be rude about it, and you are confident you will never need to think about it for more than four consecutive minutes. That’s fine. But it is worth understanding that wrestling is structurally identical to idol pop. Both are scripted entertainment products that pretend they aren’t. Both rely on charisma over technique. Both demand from their audience a complicated, half-knowing emotional investment in performers whose lives are to some degree fictional. Both build long-running narratives around individual personalities. Both ask: do you believe in this woman?

In Japan, this overlap is not theoretical. It’s just the historical fact pattern. The first true joshi puroresu superstars were Jackie Sato and Maki Ueda, who debuted in 1976 as the Beauty Pair. They wore matching outfits. They released pop singles. They sold out arenas. Their core audience was schoolgirls who saw them — accurately — as athletes who happened to be teen idols. By the mid-’80s, Chigusa Nagayo and Lioness Asuka — performing as the Crush Gals — would generate prime-time TV ratings that contemporary observers compared, only slightly absurdly, to Hulk Hogan’s run in 1985 America. The Crush Gals were not selling 24-inch pythons. They were selling friendship.

This is the pre-history. What’s happened in the last decade is the re-history: a generation of joshi promotions has consciously rebuilt the wrestler-as-idol package, with the explicit benefit of two things the Beauty Pair didn’t have — streaming video and a globalized internet of people who were extremely lonely during 2020 and 2021.

4.

Disclaimer: A former employee of STARDOM, I left on good terms in Spring ’25 to pursue senior-level opportunities, freelance broadcasting, and the relaunch of Monthly Puroresu. My unique perspective includes work broadcasting for TJPW in ’23 and Sendai Girls Pro-Wrestling, Marvelous, and Marigold all in the past year. 

Five promotions are globalizing Joshi’s unique form of oshikatsu this most aggressively: World Wonder Ring Stardom, Tokyo Joshi Pro-Wrestling, Marvelous That’s Women Pro Wrestling, Sendai Girls, and Dream Star Fighting Marigold. Each represents a slightly different position on a sliding scale between “athletic competition” and “Polaroid factory.”

Tokyo Joshi Pro-Wrestling is the purest case of this crossover phenomenon. TJPW is operated under the DDT Pro-Wrestling umbrella, which is itself owned by CyberAgent, which is itself a Japanese internet conglomerate that also owns several actual idol groups. (The corporate flowchart here is its own kind of poetry.) In May of 2017, TJPW held an audition specifically to assemble an in-house wrestling-and-idol unit; four women were selected, trained for half a year, and debuted as the Up Up Girls with a musical performance on December 4, 2017. They had their actual in-ring debut a month later. They sang first. They wrestled second. They are now expected, depending on the show, to do either or both, sometimes in succession, occasionally in main events. The current and former lineup has rotated through Miu Watanabe, Raku, Hikari Noa, Shino Suzuki, Pinano Pipippi, and others — changing personnel, in proper idol fashion, with at least one official graduation.

If you have never watched a small woman in a pink leotard sing a J-pop song with full choreography and then, thirty minutes later, attempt a German suplex on someone twice her size, I would gently suggest that you have under-lived your life.

Stardom is the more complicated case, and probably the more important one. Founded in 2010 by the longtime promoter Rossy Ogawa, it spent its first decade as a scrappy independent operation; in October 2019, Bushiroad — the trading-card-and-anime conglomerate that also owns New Japan Pro-Wrestling — acquired it for what the English-language wrestling press described as a strategic play to capitalize on the post-WWE Women’s Revolution moment. (WWE itself, reportedly, tried to buy Stardom first. Ogawa said no.) Under Bushiroad, Stardom retained its existing house style — neon hair, pop entrance themes, photobooks, calendars, very long merch lines after every event — while gaining the financial back-office to actually export the product.

Joshi as an export is having, as the kids say, a moment. And it is quantifiable. In October 2021, Bushiroad president Takaaki Kidani publicly stated that the Stardom World streaming service had nearly 10,000 subscribers, of whom roughly 33% were international. Although I can’t speak on current subscriber numbers (See: Disclaimer above), this public number suggests one out of three subscribers has been watching from a country where joshi puroresu had no broadcast presence at all. That is a serious diaspora.

(A short and necessary correction to the conventional wisdom on Stardom’s economics: the most recent Bushiroad fiscal disclosure puts the entire combined sports division — NJPW plus Stardom — at roughly $43 million in annual revenue and $1.2 million in annual profit, down slightly from the prior year. The real Stardom-only number is harder to isolate, but Bushiroad’s most recent quarterlies show Stardom growing year-over-year while NJPW drags. Wrestlenomics has the granular reporting, and it is the kind of analysis that exists almost nowhere else in English.)

In February 2024, Bushiroad fired Ogawa over allegations of poaching talent for a rival promotion called Dream Star Fighting Marigold, which he then promptly went and founded. This is, in itself, a deeply joshi-puroresu plot beat — the founder, betrayed, leaves to start his own thing, taking some of the talent with him. Mayu Iwatani, a generational performer and the longtime emotional center of the Stardom roster, eventually followed. But Stardom under Bushiroad has continued, and it remains the closest thing Japanese women’s wrestling has to a flagship.

STARDOM Breaks Another Record as it Draws 8,015 Fans To ALL STAR GRAND QUEENDOM 2026

There are smaller yet notable promotions like World Woman Pro-Wrestling Diana, sitting at the opposite end of Stardom’s spectrum: smaller, with a longer institutional memory, a roster that mixes legends with twenty-somethings, and an honest-to-god in-house idol unit called Shiratsumekusa, operated under Diana’s official “entertainment division.” One of Shiratsumekusa’s members is Haruka Umesaki, born in February 2001, who has held the WWWD World Championship twice and who, in her parallel idol life, was previously a member of a local idol group sponsored by the city of Ushiku. She also wrestles for Stardom under the name Karma. The cross-pollination, in other words, is no longer subtext. It is the literal corporate organization chart.

5.

Here is a question I keep coming back to: why does this work?

I don’t mean why does it work commercially, although that’s a fair question. I mean why does it work emotionally — in the way that almost no other entertainment product in 2026 does. Most modern entertainment is built around what marketers call “engagement,” which is a euphemism for “we have observed your eye twitch.” Joshi puroresu is built around something older. It is built around showing up.

There is, I think, a single concept that explains this: synchronicity. Both wrestling and idol culture happen in real time. They are not retroactive. A wrestler’s career and their birthdays, debuts, injuries, returns, championship wins, eventual graduations all happen at the same speed as your life. The relationship is not mediated by the product. The relationship is the product. When Maki Itoh — the most internationally famous TJPW wrestler of her generation — finally signed with Stardom in 2025 after her TJPW contract expired at the August 23 Korakuen Hall show. 

Yet for the kind of fan who had been buying her photo cards since 2018, it carried roughly the same emotional weight as a friend changing jobs. (Maki Itoh, for the unfamiliar, is a five-foot wrestler who debuted as a failed J-pop idol, decided to weaponize this fact. She’s now extremely fluent in English profanity. And Itoh is, very possibly, the only joshi wrestler making her name outside of American television that your roommate has heard of.)

These are all aspects of the culture that the West has slowly started to figure out. Joshi puroresu is neither sport nor soap opera. It is a long-form parasocial novel in which the protagonists also break each other’s noses. The post-match Polaroid is the closing punctuation on each chapter.

6.

A confession: I have spent maybe fifteen hours, total, watching the comments sections under joshi puroresu YouTube videos. (This is a less embarrassing thing to admit than it should be, given my profession.) The comments are predictably international — Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, occasional German — and predictably effusive. People have favorite finishers, favorite ring gear. People also like to defend their favorite wrestlers from internet criticism with the unhinged conviction of someone defending an actual sister. They will turn on you if you appear to stand in the way of the ascent of their favorite, and I have unfortunately been on the receiving end of these sharp-pointed internet knives. But I digress.

What we don’t often see is the kind of detached connoisseurship that defines fandom in more sports-centric theater like MMA. We don’t often see people talking about technique in the abstract, although my broadcast colleague Stewart Fulton is very good at it (which gives our Wrestle Universe broadcasts a unique flavor).

More than anything, what we see is people talking about her. We see them remembering that she got hurt last August, that she’s just come back, that her entrance theme is new, that she cried after winning.

The vocabulary is closer to fan-fiction than to combat sports. 

(I will not link to a specific YouTube comment, because the second you cite a single anonymous comment as representative you have committed an act of journalism so cheap that future generations will feel embarrassed on your behalf. Please, take it from me. The commenters are extremely earnest. They are pretty hardcore and introverted on average and this is their favorite medium of expression. I mean, they are buying merchandise via specialized international shipping services that hardly have the ease of Western shopping apps.)

The Western fan is, I have come to believe, a genuinely interesting cultural object here. 

She is not the same as the early-2000s anime fan, who was working from a position of permanent cultural disadvantage — bad subtitles, illegal downloads, no access to creators. Do you remember waiting all night for the next episode of She has, instead, Stardom World, WRESTLE UNIVERSE, and Diana’s own streaming offering… sometimes subtitled, all uploaded live or within days of broadcast, all functionally identical to a Netflix subscription except that the people on the screen will, eventually, sign your Polaroid in person. She is buying the same product the Japanese fan buys, on roughly the same timeline, with roughly the same level of access, for roughly the same price. The only difference is that to attend a cheki session she has to fly to Tokyo or luck into her favorite wrestler visiting America for WrestleMania week.

7.

I am going to risk a sociological claim here, the kind I would normally bury under three layers of qualifier. Here it is: joshi puroresu is, right now, the healthiest version of idol culture currently functioning in Japan. The mainline pop-idol industry — the lineage that runs from Onyanko Club to Johnny’s to AKB — has spent the last decade getting consumed by a slow drip of scandals and structural failures, in a way that is not in scope for this essay but is in the scope of any honest cultural ledger. (Unseen Japan has done sober reporting on the dark side of oshikatsu, which I’d suggest anyone reading this piece eventually look at.)

The wrestling version, by contrast, has retained the original promise of the form. You can visit Marigold at Korakuen Hall to watch a real performer, doing real labor, in front of you, now — without quite as much of the asymmetric exploitation. The labor is brutally physical, and there are absolutely critiques to be made of it, but a wrestler is at least the protagonist of her own career in a way that most pop idols simply aren’t. She picks her look. She negotiates her contracts, and as we’ve seen with Mayu Iwtani, MIRAI and Utami Hayashishita and the aforementioned “Cutest in the World” Maki Itoh —  she leaves a promotion if she wants to. The graduation, in joshi puroresu, often looks like a business decision. In idol pop, it often looks like an HR maneuver.

This is not a moral defense of professional wrestling, just my observation about which structure of fame currently leaves more dignity intact for the famous person.

8.

Let me try to land this somewhere.

If the post-match Polaroid is the closing punctuation, then what is the sentence? The sentence, I think, is something like: there is no longer a meaningful difference between watching someone perform and being a participant in their life. This was always implicitly true of fandom — Beatlemania, Elvis, the screaming-girls-at-Shea-Stadium of it all — but it has been made explicitly true by the streaming-plus-meet-and-greet architecture that AKB48 figured out in 2005, that the Up Up Girls inherited in 2017, and that Stardom and TJPW have, in different ways, scaled up to meet the demands of an internet-native global audience.

Ten years ago the Western pro-wrestling fan was a person who watched WrestleMania and bought a t-shirt. The Western joshi fan, today, is something else. He is buying photobooks (a Saki Kashima signed-cover edition, A4, fifty-four pages, priced not unreasonably). He is attending cheki sessions. He is following individual wrestlers on Instagram and translating their stories with browser plug-ins. He is, in the most literal possible sense, a participant in another person’s career. He is also, very probably, the future of how international audiences relate to performers — not just in wrestling, not just in Japan, but in everything.

This is a real thing that is happening, slowly, in a small corner of the entertainment economy that almost no one writes about. I find it more interesting than most things I am paid to find interesting. So, these are the reasons I think the cheki is going to outlive the algorithm. 

I would not bet against the woman in the neon hair.