Togi Makabe talks more about his relationship with food
Kemuta Otsubo’s hit 2019 book ‘Wrestler Meshi’ collected a series of interviews with current and former wrestling stars about their relationship with food. Continuing his candid conversations with the best in the ring about their life and meals outside of it, Otsubo sat down with Togi Makabe to talk about sweets, meats and instant noodles.
–Last time we talked a bit about how you’ve been eating a lot of burgers lately. I know you’re also into instant noodles.
(pictured: AceCook’s Super Cup MAX size Spicy Yakisoba)
Makabe: Haha! I used to eat a lot of instant fried noodles when I was a student. After that, I really didn’t for the longest time, but lately I’ve been doing a lot of media shots and that’s given me this really irregular schedule, y’know? So one time I was home early and I figured i7d eat something real quick. It hit me, like ‘man these things have gotten a lot better over the years!’ (laughs).
–Things have evolved with instant food.
Makabe: Back in the day, you had PeYoung and UFO. Like, those two brands. But now you have all these seasonings, flavours, oil noodles… Speaking of which, that reminds me of a story.
–An oil noodle story?
Makabe: It was over 20 years ago, I was still in the Dojo. When you’re living in the Dojo, you have to do laundry for all the senior guys on the roster. Wash their ring gear and stuff. We were in Nagano. Matches finished at 9, so the earliest I could start doing laundry was, what, 9:30, 10? So I go to the hotel front desk and ask where the nearest launderette is, and do all the washing there. Now, the deal was that while you’re doing the laundry, you eat dinner; otherwise with all that fatigue, on top of being beat up from your matches, you’re gonna collapse.
–No rest for the wicked, or Young Lions.
Makabe: So there was a ramen place near the launderette. They had ‘oil noodles’ on their sign, and I was like ‘the hell is that?’ I’d never seen it on any menu before.
–They became more fashionable, but I’d imagine they were quite rare in Tokyo 20 years ago.
Makabe: I gave them a shot, expecting some sort of oily sauce, right? But there’s no sauce with oil noodles. And these noodles were f’n amazing! But when I went back to Tokyo I couldn’t find them anywhere. It was years later I found them, and then they’re everywhere, instant and everything. I got into oil noodles before it was cool, dammit! That’s the sort of great discovery you make when you live on the road!
He’d just go ‘Makabe, c’mon, we’re eatin”
–Since we’re talking about your Young Lion days, we have to talk about Riki Choshu. You were Choshu’s attendant after Yuji Nagata went on excursion to WCW, and you had that position for two years. Nowadays, Choshu has a very different character on social media and YouTube, so lots of recent fans of his don’t know how scary a man he used to be.
Makabe: He wasn’t that guy dancing on TikTok, for sure! He was still wrestling then, and you did not want to be near him before a match, trust me. Wouldn’t say a word. Complete silence, and I’d have to lay out his T-shirt, his tights, sandals and a bath towel in the locker room. In that order! God help you if you screwed it up!
–So did you eat with him after the matches?
Makabe: Yeah. He’d just go ‘Makabe! C’mon, we’re eatin” and off we went. You gotta remember, he was a product of his generation, y’know. He really didn’t get to eat much of anything when he was a kid. So he really wanted to make the young guys eat.
–It wasn’t just his direct juniors, but he’d take a lot of the younger wrestlers to eat, right?
Makabe: Right. There weren’t many like him, who’d really take care of everyone like that, not just the people he liked or was closer to.
–What did you eat together?
Makabe: It was all meat! I remember going to a Korean barbecue place in Yamaguchi once. He went ‘oi, Makabe, try this’, and it was amazing, but I felt this real pressure to eat. I was packing it all in, and it was like gum in my mouth, y’know? I nearly choked getting it all down.
The Dojo, too, that was a lot of meat. That guy used to just eat two expensive platters of beef. Salt and pepper, fry it and wolf it down. But with an egg yolk, grated radish and Asian barbecue sauce, on some rice? That’s eatin’!
–And Choshu liked it too?
Makabe: It was his favourite! He’d say he lived to eat that stuff. But he never had vegetables! Just all that meat and then working out, that’s how you get the Choshu bod! (laughs)
The meat was one thing, but the wine…
–Did any of your other seniors take you to dinner? Or drinks for that matter?
Makabe: Oh, we’d go out a ton, but man, I couldn’t keep up with any of those guys when it came to drinking! Yuji Nagata, Manabu Nakanishi, they’d have me licked! Kazuyuki Fujita was a big drinker, too!
–All big college amateurs, so there might have been a big college drinking culture at play there.
Makabe: But they’d treat me well. I remember one time Nagata took me for steak. And we went to this place with real nice steak, but it wasn’t just the meat… After we ate came the wine, and then more wine, and then more wine and all that nice steak went straight down the toilet, Nagata cackling all the time! He was a bit of a mean bastard, but at the same time, he was real good to me, especially when I couldn’t leave the Dojo. Gave me a break every now and then.
–Are there any really good places you remember from doing local spot shows?
Makabe: Usually being on the road after the matches means meat! Lots of Korean barbecue, steak as well… When I was a student, I spent a lot of time down south in Hakata, so Fukuoka, right? And the food there is amazing. Kebab places there… They call them chicken skewers, but they’d have pork ribs out of this world.
–What’s the best place to eat down there?
Makabe: There’s a place called Okamoto that’s famous. Great food, and a lot of celebs and sports people show up there. A few years back, this was before he started playing with the Yankees, the owner introduced me to Masahiro Tanaka.
–The baseball pitcher? A big star.
Makabe: Another place that comes to mind is in Shikoku, Matsuyama hotel does amazing sea breem with rice soup. Ehime is famous for breem. I love food from western Japan. Even the same stuff you get in Tokyo hits different there.
–The things you learn on the road!
Makabe: There’s no better life! Especially for a sweets guy like me, all the local treats!
I ate a lot in GBH, most of it meat
–In the ’00s, you got together with your partner Tomoaki Honma, Shiro Koshinaka and Hiroyoshi Tenzan to form Great Bash Heel, GBH. At one time it was the biggest faction in NJPW, but now it’s just you and Honma. We see you together in the ring, and on TV, but do you eat a lot together as well?
Makabe: The Kokeshi guy? Heheh, we eat a lot, yeah. But he’s been body building lately, so he’s a little fussy. Me, I want food that gives you horsepower man! Meat and rice! But him, if he has meat he won’t have rice. He won’t just pack away all that stuff! But that’s the right way to be, for sure.
–He came in as a freelancer initially, and in an underdog position a lot of the time.
Makabe: Right. His position coming in, he had to look after himself and work hard on his look, too, otherwise he’d have been gone, man. His work ethic is the reason he’s survived as long as he has. The guy’s an idiot, but nobody works harder, haha!
–What was it like when GBH first started?
Makabe: We ate a lot, all together. You kind of have limited choices of eating buddies when you’re heels. But y’know at the time, business wasn’t good, and we were trying to take action and make things move. There was a lot of tension, a lot of stress, and we’d have to blow off that steam together. Most of it meat.
–Did you talk shop while you were eating, or?
Makabe: Between matches, it would depend on who I was speaking with, but when we were on tour, when the matches ended, that was it. When we got in the building, before the matches, that’s all business, but when the matches end, then you’re in relax mode. No shop talk.
–Talking to other wrestlers it always seems as if anti establishment guys and heels tend to eat with one another more than babyfaces do.
Makabe: Yeah, perhaps. When you’re on the hontai side of things there’s more security, but when you’re a heel, there’s the need to have solidarity. You’re there because you have something that you need to achieve together and you want a united front, to get things moving in your direction. There isn’t that sense of urgency when you’re in the establishment.
–Maybe you need to rally the hontai together and go for a session (laughs)
Makabe: You’re not wrong! Sometimes you see a different side of someone that way. Sometimes I take the Young Lions out to eat. I’m a good senpai, huh? But right now with all this COVID stuff, you can’t really go out to eat. Everyone’s goin’ stir crazy. I remember I took (Yota) Tsuji and Gabe (Kidd) to Omotesando to a sneaker place, and said I’d buy them some shoes.
–That’s really kind of you!
Makabe: Yeah, well, I said ‘hurry up and pick before I change my mind. Gabe, he held back, but Tsuji? Man, I thought the kid would come back with a 20,000 Yen pair of kicks or something, and he chooses a pair worth 50 grand (500 USD)! Goddamn! But ‘OK, fine, fine’…
–It’s a hard life!
