Powergate: Overcoming 2009 -Intro

Bad things happen at the harbor. I am from a harbor town. Down at the docks guys with one arm called "Lefty" splice rope with a marlin spike, a cigarette dangling out of their teeth and wrap-around sunglasses. Old dogs run around with one eye missing because they fought a pack of cats over fish scraps. Fisherman hide both pornography and shotguns under their reeking mattresses. Reeking of cigarette smoke, no showers and fish goo. Osaka's harbor is too dirty to enjoy and too clean to be interesting. It is a lifeless streetscape of concrete and cargo containers. It is where you switch trains and wait for a bus. I have always thought they should infuse every neighborhood with outdoor basketball courts and make all of he schools in the district magnets for basketball. Try to turn Minato-ku into Coney Island Asia. But that would make it interesting and the harbor has no momentum in that direction. It looks like they could hold fights on one of the rusted, brown, useless barges lining the river. However, at the end of a charmless street, under an elevated highway lies a small theater that looks like a large jazz club. The Sekaikan is attractive in all the ways the usual non-Tokyo Shooto matches, held in rec-rooms and community centers are spiritless.



Out back the Purebred crew were getting very Rocky. Eda, fresh off driving to Tokyo and back to corner Sato Takuya, was warming up Kanayama.




Shiba Hiroshi showed up to run some sprints.


The room and ring were small, but pretty much the right size for this type of affair. Anything more would have seemed unfriendly. Anything less would have been a punk show.