Takemaru Wakaki was a real person who lived in real-life Tokyo where he encountered other real people who generally seemed to agree that he was, in fact, real. It’s important that we establish this one basic fact before talking about his life as Japan’s first bodybuilder. Otherwise, by the time we get to his insane training or the time he worked as a bodyguard for the Dark Ocean Society’s Shadow Shogun, you might start asking: “Are you sure this isn’t a character from some anime?” Let’s investigate.
The Monster Awakens
Born to a wealthy family, Wakaki was a sickly and frail child. After entering middle school, his tiny build and lack of any real strength made him an easy target for bullies. However, after discovering Sandow’s System, a book on bodybuilding and strength training by Eugen Sandow, Wakaki vowed to follow it and one day surpass the famous Prussian strongman.
A bullied kid who managed to gain unimaginable power from a special item he happened to come across may sound like something straight out of a shonen anime, but Wakaki put in some actual work into transforming himself. Stories go that he trained for up to 15 hours a day, sometimes until fainting. He also reportedly slept with a weight on his chest so that he’d have to perform a lift whenever he wanted to go to the bathroom.
While a lot of that is probably an exaggeration, it must have come from Wakaki’s fanatical dedication to building muscle. However, since there was no professional exercise equipment anywhere in Japan at the time, he had to make do with chairs, tire tubes and barbells he fashioned himself from rebar and cement.
He also used human bodies. No, not like that. One of his most famous workout methods was to lift five people standing on him while assuming the bridge position. By the time he published his Showa-period manual on bodybuilding, he was already known as “The Monster of Showa.”
Beauty and Strength
Wakaki loved a good, motivational saying such as, “There’s someone out there in the world training just as hard as you. Are you OK being second best?” He would say this to motivate himself to push harder while training.
Another thing he was known for was his smoking habit. Some sources say he smoked 100 cigarettes a day, but that sounds like another exaggeration. Weird that he didn’t have the strength to quit, given that he had the strength to do some pretty incredible things outside the five-man bridge.
Japan’s first bodybuilder didn’t just develop glamor muscles. He believed that beauty should always be accompanied by function, like being able to do a handstand using just his index fingers.
His personal weightlifting records were 228 kilograms in the bench press and 300 kilograms in the floor press. At his peak, the circumference of his biceps was reportedly 51 centimeters.
To put that into perspective: in his prime, Arnold Schwarzenegger sported 55-centimeter arm muscles. And Wakaki was significantly smaller. He was only 162 centimeters tall and weighed 69 kilograms. But all of that was pure muscle, making him look like an inverted triangle made from circles.
The Dark Side of Takemaru Wakaki
Wakaki was also considered Japan’s first personal trainer, giving lessons to martial artists old and young who wanted to bulk up. They were one of the first to see the side effects of a lifelong obsession with strength, like irritability, abrasiveness and a worryingly short fuse.
Wakaki also didn’t keep the best company, like when he served as the bodyguard of ultranationalist Mitsuru Toyama, who was known as the “Shadow Shogun.”
A powerful kingpin-type figure, Toyama was the founder of the Dark Ocean Society (Gen’yosha), a right-wing paramilitary group active throughout Asia for over half a century until the end of World War II.
The group’s goal was primarily to help destabilize the continent in preparation for a future Japanese invasion. Those are the kinds of people that Wakaki chose to hang out with.
His time with Toyama marked some of the darkest episodes in Wakaki’s life. It was when he killed two people. One allegedly on orders from his employer in some kind of underground power play and another during a street fight after the other guy pulled out a knife.
It’s been claimed that, in both cases, Toyama pulled some strings to get Wakaki off. Then again, Toyama himself allegedly once took a few swings at Wakaki with a katana over some perceived slight.
The Monster’s Legacy
After the war, Wakaki suffered a stroke and became paralyzed on one side, but that only slowed him down a little bit. He still trained nearly every day, even if he could only exercise half his body.
He also continued to train martial artists and wrestlers but mainly lived a simple, ascetic life surrounded by books and his exercise equipment. After he died in 2000, he was allegedly too large to fit into a regular Japanese coffin.
Wakaki left behind a powerful legacy. His book is still widely read by Japanese bodybuilders and health enthusiasts. However, his biggest influence on the world was probably his mentorship of Masutatsu Oyama, also known as Mas Oyama, the creator of Kyokushin-style full-contact karate.
Oyama was known for fighting and killing bulls with his bare hands, earning him the nickname “Godhand.” So, to sum it all up, The Monster of Showa went from protecting the Dark Ocean Society’s Shadow Shogun to training Godhand the bull-killer, because sometimes history just gives us a gift.
