A half a block off the Azabu High Street stood a nondescript little eatery that operated for years under the grandiose name of The Palace Restaurant (in English in the original). Palatial in name only, the establishment presented a somewhat murky interior to any passerby who might have been curious enough to peer in the window. On a dingy wooden stand on the sidewalk, a menu (again in English) advertised a selection of dishes that could have come from just about any roadside diner anywhere in America. Alien and for the most part unappetizing to the average Japanese palate, the menu presumably served more as a reminder of the predilections of the restaurant's proprietor than as a true enticement to most of the neighborhood’s residents. And yet behind that American-style menu and the restaurant’s unprepossessing façade lay the story of a gaijin personality familiar throughout Japan. For this modest little “palace” served over the years as the informal headquarters in Japan for one of pro-wrestling’s greats – another displaced New Yorker – whose actual name was the comfortingly middle-of-the-road sounding Dick Beyer, although he was far better known in wrestling circles, and more broadly and lastingly in Japanese popular culture, as The Destroyer.
Indeed, while peering inside for the first time after noticing this unassuming little restaurant, I was struck to see, prominently displayed near the entrance, a collage of photographs of a somewhat outlandish looking masked figure who, I subsequently discovered, hailed from a small town near Buffalo, New York, and who had garnered fame and fortune in Japan in the 1960’s and 70’s. Considered “one of the most famous American wrestlers to have worn a mask” (according to Wikipedia), The Destroyer was born on July 11, 1931. Nothing in his upbringing in a rural backwater in upstate New York in the years before WW II seemed to predestine him for an illustrious career in the country whose surprise attack on Pearl Harbor occurred when Beyer was just ten years old.
Sports, on the other hand, were definitely in his blood. Beyer’s father was a minor league baseball pitcher and, in the years right after the war, young Dick was to become a campus jock at Syracuse University, playing on the varsity football and wrestling teams. After earning a Masters Degree in education, he took his first steps in the ring as a professional wrestler in 1954, fighting initially under his real name.
When a fateful turn in his career brought him to Japan a little less than nine years later to fight his first match with the legendary Rikidozan, a former sumo wrestler whose conversion to professional wrestling had marked the beginning of the sport’s popularity in Japan, Beyer had already adopted his signature white and red mask and had gained a modicum of celebrity in the ring as The Destroyer. Little did he realize at the time that this first match in Japan in 1963 – and a later rematch that same year watched by an astonishing 70 million TV viewers at a time when the country’s total population was just over 100 million – was the beginning of what would become for him a lifelong connection to the Land of the Rising Sun.
Initially, when I observed that the interior of The Palace had been converted into a virtual shrine to the memory of the wrestler’s career, complete with multiple dog-eared photos and plastic bobble-head dolls, I had assumed that it was because the restaurant’s proprietor, Takeo-san, was a die-hard fan. The somewhat gangly, graying Takeo-san, his head adorned with a bandanna reminiscent of those worn by kamikaze pilots during the war, was manning the grill behind the restaurant’s counter when I first ventured inside, as his wife Miwako-san sat on one of the diner-like stools chain-smoking cigarettes. It was easy enough to imagine both of them surrounded by a raucous crowd watching the historic match on a black and white television set in the narrow, smoky confines of the restaurant, as had occurred in dozens of the shops, restaurants, bars and private dwellings in Azabu Juban on that evening in 1963.
However, as I was to learn, the couple were not the committed wrestling fans I thought they were; indeed, they had actually managed to miss seeing the famous match pitting The Destroyer against the Japanese wrestling hero – which would have placed them in a decided minority among the adult population of Japan. The Destroyer’s connection to the Palace Restaurant was in reality far less straightforward and less obvious, more intimate and personal – which was also to make it for me an even more fitting testimonial to the memory of the time this fellow ex-pat had spent in Japan. And, some fifteen years after the wrestler’s sayonara appearance in 1993, at the iconic Budokan stadium in the heart of Tokyo, this enduring connection was still much in evidence at The Palace Restaurant in Azabu Juban – just as The Destroyer’s fame in Japan has yet to wane, even to this day.
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