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Paper short abstract

When studying the history of women’s pro wrestling, I discovered erotic reports in the 1950s about my informant, a former wrestler now in her nineties. She denies the reports' accuracy. Drawing on this case, my paper explores the relationships among archives, oral history, and historians’ ethics.

Paper long abstract

Seventeen years ago in Tokyo, I made friends with Ms. Igari Sadako (b. 1932), the first Japanese female pro wrestler active from 1948 to 1959. Having been trained by her older brother, vaudevillian Pan Igari (1923-1986), she told me a lot about her experience as a pro wrestler, which began as the “comic boxing and wrestling” show at clubs on US military bases and shifted to sports entertainment at strip theaters and then arenas for a Japanese audience. Shortly after, I began researching the history of women’s pro wrestling more extensively for my book project. While collecting relevant primary materials, however, I encountered two problematic reports. One is a 1950 news article with a picture of her, half-naked, posing as a boxer next to her brother, a referee. In 2024, when I showed this to Ms. Igari, age ninety-two, she jokingly wondered why she was not wearing a bra in the photo, but when I did this again later, in the presence of other male friends, she claimed it was not her. Another is a 1954 sports news article saying that one wrestler’s breast was exposed during a match. When I asked her if that had really happened, she immediately denied it. Later, however, I found an interview in a 1955 magazine in which she and her fellow wrestlers proudly talk about that accident as proof of their seriousness and enthusiasm.

Though I excluded these cases from my book, they led me to reconsider the relationship among archival materials, informants’ testimony, and historians' ethical responsibility. When informants were involved with erotic labor as young women, to what extent can historians make what these women were doing open to the public? Had they been more socially accepted, would the informants have reacted differently? If we manage to persuade the informants that their actions were respectable, aren't we essentially altering our research results according to our preferences? This paper will expand and complicate these questions by drawing on scholars across different fields, including Miyamoto Tsuneichi, Yang Hyunah, Hokari Minoru, and Jack Halberstam.