Crowd noise

Hey again, readerland.  I hope things are going well, or as least as well as can be expected.  I've heard from my friend in Japan and as of this morning Mountain time, he was ding okay, but I haven't heard from him since.  Stiff upper lip, though.  He'll be fine.

So, I was watching some wrestling earlier and this is something I've noticed before, but I find truly fascinating.  One of the huge differences between American wrestling and puroresu is the crowd.

In American wrestling, the crowd is extremely vocal, cheering and jeering as the match goes on.  There have been relatively rare occasions where fans have jumped the barricade and entered the wrestling ring, only to get a beatdown from the wrestlers and officials.

In Japan, for the most part, the crowd will cheer at the beginning and end of the match, but stay quiet for large portions of the action.  The exceptions to this are:
A)  a wrestler plays to the crowd; or
B)  when, during a tag team match, the first exchange is over and both wrestlers tag their partners, the crowd will cheer for one of the wrestlers being tagged in; or
C)  a strong technical exchange occurs between two wrestlers, at which point the crowd will applaud; or
D)  the action spills out to ringside.

As far as I can tell, that's it.  Sometimes you'll hear a single voice cheer for a particular wrestler, but that's unusual.

Chants are extremely popular in American wrestling, especially the "This is awe-some...clap clap clapclapclap" chant or chanting the letters of the organization, such as "R O H...R O H" for Ring of Honor or "E C DUB...E C DUB" for ECW.  The chants you hear in Japanese wrestling are more for wrestlers names, such as "Let's go, (wrestler's name if two syllables)" or the wrestler's last name if it has three syllables.

Because puroresu is considered more of a sport than American wrestler, where it's nominally considered "sports entertainment" thanks to Vince McMahon, it seems like the fans in Japan are giving the wrestlers more respect by being quieter than American fans.


As a fan of wrestling, it makes a difference because there's so much silence.  It can be quite refreshing, actually.