quinine's bitter, sugar's sweet

original posts are tagged #ashtext, things i find and upload are tagged #ashuploads, responses to asks are tagged #askash, my edits are tagged #ashedit, my writing is tagged #ashwrites.

my hockey/baseball blog is @lovethygoalie. rpf/shoot name friendly provided you know how to keep it to fandom spaces only, although for the most part things here will be primarily kayfabe based.

content warnings i tag for:

blood, staplers, choking, light tubes, barbed wire, needles (this includes darts), syringes, skewers, open injury (this includes things that are scabbed over but still pretty gnarly) racism (and specifics therein, e.g. antiblack racism, antisemitism), misogyny, homophobia, transphobia i don't tag for alcohol in the general sense but i do tag "intox play" if you're sensitive to that

wrestlers are tagged with "w:[ring name]". i do my best to tag with correct spelling, which means diacritics. if you're filtering someone, make sure to use that spelling or it tumblr might not catch it. separate gimmicks have separate tags.

promotions are tagged with "p:[acronym]" or "p:[name]" if there's no good acronym.

stables/cults/tag teams/etc are tagged with "g:[group name]".

all relationships (feuds/alliances/friendships/whatever those two have going on) are tagged with "r:[name & name]". not always Shippy in nature, but i generally dont care if you rb stuff from me that way.

media type is separated out with "m:[media type]", if you're looking just for art/videos/translations.

pretty things i'd like to see various wrestlers in are tagged #wrestler dresses.

for an f'd up bosj (pt 1 | pt 2) - njpw.com | may 2025

MAO: That's it. I'm not normally one to focus on anything. I played a little baseball, but wasn't really into it, and I was in band at junior high. I was a bit of a sickly kid, I had asthma and whatever.   I would try and improve my lung capacity. And then, I guess I was one, two months into junior high? My friend was watching wrestling and he showed me some stuff. I just thought it was sick, and little by little I found myself being a big Makabe fan. Then I started playing Fire Pro-Wrestling on the Game Boy Advance, and seeing the moves in that. Figuring, 'ah, maybe I can give that a shot'.   --Quite daring of you to give it a shot. MAO: The first thing I tried was La Magistral.

--So now here you are representing DDT in BOSJ. You were on the Despe Invitacional card back last June, and you've been talking about wanting to be in the tournament since then. MAO: Well, I am with DDT, there's matches there and it's a lot to ask for time off to do something like this. --Obviously you have your own commitments. MAO: So I thought I needed to put it in the universe and have DDT warm up to the idea. I talked about it any chance I could; if I was asked what my goals and dreams were I would say 'to be in the BOSJ'. You know, it's the first time in my career I've been open and persistent about saying something about that- I wasn't even talking the same way about being KO-D Champion. --And it paid off with the DDT office? MAO: Well, I was pretty persistent with the office as well. Any DDT social occasion I'd bring it up.

MAO: [...] Match wise, I'm not great with the Mexican wrestlers... --You aren't too confident when it comes to lucha libre, then? MAO: If I'm honest, yeah. My roots are in that lucharesu, Japanese lucha mould. Like Universal, Michinoku Pro, that through line, right? Thing is, it's kind of an uncanny valley. Like the two styles are a lot alike, but there are big differences, and the differences are something I'm never comfortable with.

MAO: Well, [El Desperado]'s been a big booster of mine, but I'm not sure why.

--I see. Up next in Nagoya May 25, Nick Wayne. MAO: Another friend of mine.  --You've got a lot of friends (laughs) MAO: Nick came to DDT in 2023, and we wrestled a few times. Went to see the baseball in the Tokyo Dome together as well. And in America, I went to his birthday party one time. He was about 16, 17? I remember wrestling him when he was younger and cutting his eyelid, he was bleeding buckets with his mom right there. I was like 'sorry, I'll make sure I look after him when he comes to Japan'. It happens though. This is my first singles with him, but I've tagged with Despe and with Mike Bailey to face him and his partner Jordan Oliver. It'll be good to face him in a singles, while he's fresh.

--Even though you're not from NJPW, you have so many connections to everyone in this tournament, it's a surprise you haven't been in it already. MAO: Too kind. Not feeling like an outsider is a sign I've gained enough respectability over my career so far. I've earned my way in so now I need to make the most of this. --So, any final thoughts?  MAO: Well, first thing is to survive B Block, and that's a difficult task any way you look at it. It isn't just about strength, it's about making the absolute most of MAO. I do that, and there's the potential of the finals in Ota, and there's the potential of the IWGP Junior Heavyweight title. I really want to win this as a DDT representative, and as a DDT representative, to be a regular within NJPW as well. That's the level of presence I want within New Japan, that they'd call me and ask me to be there whenever I'm not booked with DDT. --A unique setup. MAO: Let's help each other out. And you know, right now, I team with KANON in Strange Love Connection- I'd love to bring that team to NJPW as well, and have that take over.

when to hit your boss with a van - originally in rs japan, translated by johnny of headmeetschair.com | july 2019

MAO says that as a boy, he would “space out, no matter what you put in front of [him].” But with that match, he’d finally found an obsession. He started watching random wrestling matches on YouTube. MAO: Soon I wanted to start wrestling myself. Shocking, right? In [popular wrestling video game] Fire Pro Wrestling’s character edit mode, you could watch move animations frame-by-frame, so I used that for research. All throughout middle school, pretty much all my friends and I did was pretend to wrestle.

MAO: That match sure didn’t feel like anything a mature, upstanding adult would do! It hit me right in my childish heart. And all of DDT’s events were like that. They went beyond just being fun to watch. It really looked like the wrestlers were fighting to make sure that anyone who saw them would really, truly enjoy it. That’s why I wanted to join, so I could try and shine like that, too. I never thought about joining another promotion. Not once.

MAO: Ever since around the time I debuted, DDT’s kept up their usual big spectacles, but they’ve also sped their shift towards a more athletically-inclined “Strong DDT.” [Konosuke] Takeshita’s at the heart of that. It’s a natural development for a promotion that’s trying to mature. On the other hand, though, I’m sure there are a lot of fans who’re afraid that DDT’s usual layer of bullshit, for lack of a better term, has been spread thinner than before lately. Bullshit like in the weapon rumble that shocked me so much back in the day. And I’ve felt that dilemma myself. [...] MAO: If the fans aren’t getting all the bullshit they want, I figured it’s up to us, the younger up-and-coming DDT wrestlers, to pile it on thick again. But then, our generation doesn’t have it as together as those above us, huh? You can’t just be taught bullshit. So I knew I had to force Takagi’s hand. I had to make him feel that DDT bullshit I loved so much directly on his skin. Who’ll do it if I don’t? With that mantra in mind, MAO began gunning directly for Takagi. He launched a campaign of absurdity through hardcore and street wrestling matches, hoping to stir memories of “the old DDT” in his boss. This came to a head at a 2018 event at Shin-Kiba 1st Ring, when MAO commandeered a company van and hit Takagi with it in the middle of a match. His absurdly violent behavior made headlines online.

Of course, “bullshit” isn’t the only thing MAO is after. As anyone who’s seen his one of his matches knows, MAO is an exceptionally skilled wrestler, even under the normal rules. Moonlight Express, his tag team with Mike Bailey, is widely praised as reminiscent of the Golden Lovers, the classic DDT team of Kota Ibushi and Kenny Omega. MAO: I braced myself for the Golden Lovers comparisons the moment I started tagging with Bailey. It’s an honor, of course, but I knew if we kept them in mind, we’d just become a boring rehash. I want to take back “the old DDT,” but not like that. And Bailey doesn’t want that either.

“Deep down, I’m an extremely ordinary guy,” MAO says. “That might be why Takagi and his DDT bullshit was so appealing to me.” With his breezy smile hiding a heart full of strength, madness and—yes—bullshit, he’s the one to lead DDT to a new world.

planetawrestling.com, w/pep s caro (pt. 1 | pt. 2) | july 2025

MAO: So, in terms of big goals, I don’t really have long stretch 10 year goals. But what I feel is the right thing for me at the moment is what I would probably be doing at that specific time in my career.

MAO: In the beginning, I did not want to do any of the idol stuff with NwA. But you know, because during the time, there was not a lot of opportunities for the younger guys to wrestle the main card because that’s what DNA was for. But thanks to NwA being a thing, we had opportunities to wrestle in the actual DDT shows. So, I didn’t like the idol stuff, but you know, since I got the opportunity to be on the show, I just tried to do my best. I think I learned a lot from Makoto Oishi because he’s one of the the guys you could say helped to build the junior style in Japan. Since he was based in KAIENTAI DOJO, which again leads back to the TAKA Michinoku style which I grew up admiring.

MAO: When you talk about MAO, like one of the most, you could see even the most important thing that helps build the career as to what MAO is right now is Moonlight Express. Because I really feel like I grew the most as a wrestler during that time. And around 2019, we spent about two months together in a tour in England. And, you know, without this, without this team with Mike Bailey, in a sense, I wouldn’t have the universalism that I have right now, you know, about bringing my style around the world. So, without Mike Bailey, there wouldn’t be MAO today. My fondest memories with Mike Bailey would probably be again, the two months we spent in England together.

I teamed with Shunma to win the KO-D Tag Championship. We had a lot of defenses, and in the end, just recently, you know, I helped To-y to establish himself as a wrestler. So, I feel like I have accomplished what I needed to be doing with the unit. So, in that way, I feel like I graduated from The 37KAMIINA. But, we’re still very good friends, and even once a month now, we still hang around, you know, to have a meetup overnight, like, having sleepovers together.

Pep: Another is undoubtedly the King of DDT 2024 tournament. You won it in 2024, after defeating Kazusada Higuchi, Chris Brookes, and Daisuke Sasaki. What did winning it mean to you? What do you consider to be the toughest match of the tournament? MAO: I entered the King of DDT as Universal Champion, and I managed to go all the way to the finals and winning the finals as a Champion. So, the momentum was really insane in my favor. And because now I did my best as a champion, it led to this result. So, for the toughest match, it was against Poison Sawada JULIE’s out of the very first round because he’s an icon of DDT’s past and he has a very unique style. So, you know, putting that style against my very unique style was fun as well. And to come come out on top of that, it felt very special for me.

But there’s one time when Yoshihiko got beaten up so badly but then he just came from the heavens, just fall all the way down for the winning save. Yoshihiko is incredible! Pep: And Yoshihiko is kind of a legend. What an honour to be champions together, right? MAO: I’m very glad that people learn to love about DDT, learn to know about DDT thanks to the tours with Yoshihiko. I’ve said this in previews interviews but I consider myself “The Soul of Universal”. So, it’s kind of my mission in life to bring DDT to the world. And I felt like this period with Yoshihiko is one of his biggest highlights of my career so far.

MAO:When KANON was still in DAMNATION T.A, you could say I felt a bit like it’s a waste that KANON was inside there because he has a much more bigger potential waiting for him and it was just about the time when I left The 37KAMIINA, so when KANON was like removed forcefully from DAMNATION T.A, so the timing was perfect. [...] Pep: KANON is also a student of TAKA and values his work so I though it might be another reason that brough you together. MAO: You could say like right now, that the TAKA Michinoku connection is a thing, but like, it’s not really the biggest thing that is connecting us. It was more like, in a sense, my mouth was in The 37KAMIINA. I felt like I was holding back in a way. And KANON was also holding back when he was still in DAMNATION T.A. So now that we are free, and you know, we are our own man, we can just do whatever the hell we want. And it’s truly like that. You can see that also with things like our entrance theme song.

Pep: When I asked El Desperado about you before [BOSJ], he said “I don’t think there’s anybody in wrestling who more embodies the spirit of doing exactly what you want to do”.

Pep: Moving away from wrestling, could you tell us about your hobbies? What do you like to do in your free time when you’re not in a match? MAO: When I’m not wrestling that day, I’m probably you know working on my band stuff. And when I’m not doing that, I’m just chilling at home. Thinking about wrestling. Just thinking about something. Whether I’m chilling at home, chilling in the park, chilling in the sauna, chilling while on a drive, I’m always thinking about something. Instead of just sitting down and just not doing anything, I’m always thinking about something. Pep: We know you’re passionate about music and that you have a band, DOS QUATRO. What’s your creative process like when making music? What do you find in common between making music and wrestling? MAO: In DOS QUATRO, we do performances and how we perform hardcore music, obviously it’s heavy. But even so, we choose something a little different from what regular hardcore music sounds like. It’s our unique style. The structure of my music and how I structure my matches, you can see that it’s almost the same. I have my own unique style, whether I’m performing music or in the wrestling ring.

anywhere and everywhere: an interview with ddt's mao (wrestleinn.com, kay quinn) | may 2023

Q: Alongside Shunma Katsumata, you currently hold the KO-D Tag Team Championships. What would you say are your unique strengths as a tag team?MAO: Whatever type of match we’re in the two of us always have the most fun. I usually call ShunMAO “4th Grade”, but that’s because ShunMAO is akin to kids who are amazing at wrestling. The naivete of it.

Q: Who would you want to challenge you for the tag team championships if you could choose freely and what kinds of stipulations would you want for that match?MAO: MAO & Mike Bailey vs MAO & Veny and Shunma Katsumata & MAO in a 3 way tag match.

Q: You’ve been referencing My Chemical Romance since participating in GCW’s recent “Emo Fight” event. What is your favourite My Chemical Romance song?MAO: It’s probably “Welcome to the Black Parade.” When I was a high schooler, there were days I didn’t want to go to school. I’d listen to it once in the morning and think “Well, I’ve died once” and then head to school. I love “Dead!” too. The opening solo guitar always changes in a live performance, so it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

q&a with mao, on freedom and life philosophy (monthly puroresu, thom fain and r. faliani, translated by ash mann) | august 2023

Monthly Puroresu: We saw you saying a lot of things about Tetsuya Endo as champion. What do you think of his title reign until now? MAO: It’s definitely not going to be interesting. That’s for sure. Endo stands for the Universal Belt as to only defend it in the DDT ring, but I believe that the Universal Champonship should be much bigger than that. Yes, you can defend it in the DDT ring, but you also have to get out, explore the world and defend it elsewhere as well.

Monthly Puroresu: [...] You had a phrase that was “Life is hard, be harder”. Is that phrase in some ways inspired by your hardcore punk background? MAO: It’s actually from Brody King’s band. It’s a phrase from all their songs. The chord really strikes with me because life really is hard. So the best way to go about it is just become harder yourself. Monthly Puroresu: That’s really a great philosophy. It also helps you understand DDT’s way of doing things. Now that we’re into the punk rock topic, do you think that that’s the reason why DDT is so fitting for people like you or your 37Kamiina partners? MAO: Well, it’s probably only like me and Daisuke Sasaki in DDT, because they aren’t really like, influenced by music per se.

Monthly Puroresu: Can you tell us about how you feel in the ring like the artist known as MAO and why you might be such a good candidate for us to interview on this concept of freedom? MAO: My head is empty. I don’t really think a lot about it, I don’t really think about my future at all. I’m just all about, blank hair and just talking bulls***t the whole time on Twitter and in the ring. I’m just expressing my personality and my style. My emptiness. What you see here is what you get in the ring.

MAO: For me, my life is all about enjoying myself. Whether I’m training, building my body, or spending time with my friends, I think that you’ve got to enjoy whatever you’re doing, regarding every aspect of your lifestyle. I try not to do what I don’t like.

Monthly Puroresu: In terms of working for Sanshiro Takagi and the CyberFight staff, we often hear when we interview wrestlers on that side of the equation versus Bushiroad, they tell us how many constrictions they have and how strict the rules are on that side of things. Do you enjoy working for the staff there and is that one of the reasons you feel you can thrive as a championship title contender? MAO: It’s very fitting to this topic! It’s truly freedom working under Sanshiro Takagi and DDT because if I was in any other promotion, I probably wouldn’t actually be allowed to play in my own band. When you actually ask Takagi: “I want to play in this band”, he would be like: “Oh yeah, that’s great. Do it. It’s good for you.” He’s probably the guy with the most freedom in the whole company, actually. [...] So this freedom is essentially what equates DDT. DDT equals freedom basically. And when I was doing my training, when I was still working up my way up, whenever I tried something in the ring, none of my seniors ever said: “Oh, this is wrong, you can’t do this.” They’re all like: “Oh yeah, you should try it and experiment. See how far you can go with that.” That’s why DDT equals freedom.

MAO: A lot of people’s impressions of DDT is that they watch a Yoshihiko match or they watch the Campsite-Pro Wrestling match. If you ask maybe ten foreign fans, they probably would say one of these two. A lot of people recently have seen less of that aspect of DDT. So that’s why I do my best to appear in all the Street Wrestling shows as much as I can. Because I don’t want to destroy the dreams of the overseas fans that have this image of DDT.

So, of course, following the topics of freedom and your empty head, when you say that you have an empty head, can we use a metaphor, like an empty canvas for an artist where he can just do and perform at his best? MAO: I’m like a sponge – an empty sponge with nothing inside yet. So whenever I see something, I immediately get sucked into it. That’s how I just absorb everything; like a sponge. Even if I hear bad words or slang or swear words, I would immediately remember them. So yeah, we can use it.

Monthly Puroresu: To close the topic of empty heads and white canvas, is there any inspirations outside of wrestling that you use for your character and for your personality in DDT? MAO: I obviously get inspiration from animation, from games and from Japanese comedy shows. How close can all of these different ideas and inspirations fit into my vision of my character is? I get lots of input from so many of these different places. So it’s very difficult to really narrow down which of these different medias fit into my character. I actually do training in mixed martial arts and kickboxing as well. But if you see how the style works compared to how I’m actually in the ring, it’s not really a perfect fit. So even in these expects, I always wonder like how much of MMA and kickboxing can really fit into my character. So I really think a lot about working my character in the ring. Monthly Puroresu: You also mentioned on your Twitter profile that you learned your kicks in moshpits. So we can say that you’re like an experimental artist or an experimental genre of music. You blend it all together. You take influences from all different parts of Otaku, music and fighting culture, and blend it into this one beautiful art form. MAO: Even if it’s like the furthest thing you would see from wrestling, I can somehow connect it all the way back to wrestling. So if I would actually like call me a genre of music, I would think I’m shoegazing. Because it’s a lot of different sounds that don’t really mesh well together and there’s no sense of distance from when you hear it. But when you really just close your eyes, you can hear a very beautiful sound from that. So yeah, I’m definitely shoegazing.

mao feature wrestler's human stories (originally in weekly pro issue, translated by joe from lorecave.com) | december 2024

MAO grew up quickly as he spent his days outdoors. One day, during the time when he played a game of choosing strong insects to make them fight other insects, the “strongest praying mantis” he had singled out was waiting for him outside his house several days later. He was afraid it had come to take revenge, and the event traumatized him, causing him to become afraid of insects.

He joined a local youth baseball team, but this team was one of the leading teams in the prefecture. Even now, looking back, the training was incredibly harsh, so much so that “it wasn’t at a level that elementary school kids [should endure]”. He played third baseman, and on many days cried due to the cruel fungo hitting practice. Even so he did his best playing baseball, although he had actually been feeble from a young age, and suffered from childhood asthma. His condition worsened especially in sixth grade, and he had to stop doing sports. He was able to finally come back [to baseball] for what would be his last tournament, but he couldn’t keep up at all during practice and would get asthma attacks whenever his breathing fastened. Because of this he was in no shape to join a sports club in middle school. MAO thought that it might help to train his lung capacity in order to mitigate the asthma, so he joined a concert band, where he played bass clarinet at first, and later contrabass.

MAO was instantly captivated by wrestling, but something would happen not much later that he would never forget- Misawa Mitsuharu’s accident. He was confronted with the reality that sometimes wrestlers lost their lives in the ring, and realizing that “eroding your body means putting your life on the line in a match”, his respect towards wrestlers grew more than ever.

MAO, knowing that Takagi had posted about it, made a fervent request to him. He sent [Takagi] the videos of his middle school wrestling, and when asked if his parents made them and he said that he was making them himself, he seems to have greatly surprised [Takagi] with the fact that a middle school student was creating videos. “I mean, editing footage in the first place is amazing. It seems like Takagi himself was surprised. He told me, ‘I know that you can do the moves, so just do me a favor and finish high school and then you can come to Tôkyô and take the entrance test.’ I already had an unofficial job offer in third grade of middle school. When I told my parents for the first time—they’re from the countryside so they were like, ‘If a promotion in Tôkyô is telling you this they’re trying to rip you off’ (laughs).”

MAO put his heart and soul into jûdô, and meanwhile, during the summer vacation in second grade, he went to Tôkyô for the first time and helped out with the Beer Garden show in Shinkiba. This was also when he met Katsumata, with whom he still tags to this day as the team of “Shunmao”. In his free time [during the trip], Yasu Urano watched [MAO] practice and taught him how to do lockups and headlocks.