Kiyoaki Yatsu, the wrestler who put money into Antonio Inoki's Anton Hiesel business, says he is still waiting to be repaid. The venture's huge losses set off the 1983 New Japan Pro-Wrestling coup, an internal revolt that drew in both wrestlers and front-office staff.
Yatsu was on his third training stint in the United States at the time, working southern territories including Dallas, Florida and the Mid-South under the ring name "Tora Yatsu." Had he been in Japan, he said, he would have joined the rebellion. "If I'd been in Japan then, I think I would have signed the blood oath, and I wanted to," he said.
In Japan, discontent among wrestlers and staff had been building. On June 1, 1983, Riki Choshu and Animal Hamaguchi held a news conference to announce they were quitting New Japan and going freelance. The next day, Inoki was knocked out by Hulk Hogan in the final of the first IWGP League, an incident remembered as the "tongue-out faint."
Yatsu said news of the knockout reached him quickly in Texas. "I thought, that's Inoki for you — it had a huge impact on the public," he said. "In terms of his windmill theory, it's about whipping up a gale to make something a talking point and turning a minus into a plus. After all, he really was taken away by ambulance and hospitalized."
The blood oath
A coup then broke out, led by Kotetsu Yamamoto and New Japan sales director Naoki Otsuka. A petition dated August 24, 1983, titled "pledge of unity" and sealed in blood, carried the names of wrestlers Yamamoto, Tatsumi Fujinami, Choshu (then wrestling as Mitsuo Yoshida), Osamu Kido, Kuniaki Kobayashi, Killer Khan (Masashi Ozawa), Mr. Takahashi (Teruo Takahashi), Katsuhisa Shibata, Masanobu Kurisu and Haruka Eigen.
It also bore the names of sales staff Otsuka, Mitsuhiro Anzai, Katsumi Hironaka, Minoru Yoshida, Kazuyoshi Kato, Masaharu Ito, Toshihiro Saito and Fumihiko Uei.
Yatsu noted that Killer Khan had signed. "So he was wrestling in Japan at the time," he said. "If everyone's gathered like that, I suppose that's the way things were flowing. If everyone was unhappy, a coup or a split was going to happen sooner or later."
The account is an excerpt from "Testimony: Antonio Inoki and the 1983 New Japan Pro-Wrestling Coup," published by Takarajimasha.