ChocoPro may just be one of the most unique wrestling products out there. It takes place mostly from a one-mat studio, the Ichigaya Chocolate Square, and boasts some of the best no-ring wrestling around. One of the top stars of this company is Baliyan Akki. He personifies the wrestling dream of moving to Japan and making it work for him. Now, as ChocoPro’s ace, we got the chance to speak to him. In part one, we discuss moving to Japan, the pre-ChocoPro days, how great Masahiro Takanashi is, and the bond ChocoPro has with its wrestlers and fans. Enjoy.

Since this is your first time being interviewed for SteelChair, tell us a bit about yourself, your start in wrestling, and things like that.

“This is Baliyan Akki. I am an independent wrestler if I can say so, from India. I started my career in India, and because I fell in love with Japanese wrestling, I decided to move here somewhere around 2017 as it was quite hard to do. December 2017, I moved to Japan and have been here on/off for most of about three years now.”

What was it like moving from India to Japan? It’s a whole new culture over there. I remember going on holiday there and it’s a 24-hour culture…

“It is a 24-hour culture. It’s a 24-hour day. It’s safe like noon, no matter what time it is. It’s bright like noon, no matter the time it is. Everything is open like noon, whatever time it is. It took time. It took some time mostly because I didn’t speak Japanese at that point. That was the biggest reason. It could be because I always loved anime, manga, but the Japanese Language, not just the culture but the language of Japanese, was always interesting to me even before I moved to Japan. I wanted to come here, and I wanted to be embraced being here. I always really wanted to be here. I’d thought about it for so long. I’d wanted to move here for so long that there was like a Tokyo already in my mind. I had dreamed and thought about this place for so long that there was almost an image already in my head, which was very different by the way, it was not an actual place, of course, when you imagine something, it’s more of a dreamlike state instead of like an actual place.

“From the movies and the anime and the wrestling I’d seen from Japan, it had made a very dreamlike place. When I got here, the thing that calmed me down yet also excited me at the same time, it’s hard to say those two things together, but it really did both those things. To this day, this still happens, I will be walking because if you live somewhere, take this room. It really doesn’t matter where you are a room is a room. No matter which place, country, or city. Wherever you are, inside these four walls, it’s just a place. But when you walk out, I love walking, and Tokyo is a very beautiful walking city. If it’s 3-4KM to the venue, I’ll always walk there, and every now and then, I will see something. It will just hit me like a surge of feeling, that I am in Tokyo. That image of the dream city, I’d see that for a few seconds. Those moments are really what has kept the dream thing alive. That was my transition here basically.”

You started with the original Gatoh Move shows, what was it like in the pre-ChocoPro days?

“When I got to Japan, I had a built-up image of Japanese wrestling in my head. When I came to Gatoh Move, there were two things. First of all, it was the most intimate wrestling that I had ever done because, audience-wise and venue wise it was so different. It was also the hardest to do, of all the wrestling I had done, I could get by with what I knew and the way I had wrestled. I could get by with that. I couldn’t in Gatoh Move. The quality of every second of every match, every section of the match. Every little detail. They were so precise. Most of what you watch on Gatoh Move is chaos. It’s just this mat. If six people laid in here, they wouldn’t all be able to fit, that’s the size of the mat. Six people would fight here with no place to put one foot out of the mat because people are sat with their feet touching the mat. Six people would fight in here with perfect synchronicity as pure chaos when you looked at it. But it’s organised chaos, every second and every place. It is incredibly sophisticated, the way it’s done. It’s hard to do, very hard to do. Not just in this venue but the whole principles of Gatoh Move and how they think about wrestling and what’s important to them.

“Wrestling is such a broad artistry with so much in it from Osaka Pro to old-school All Japan. There’s all that encompassed within. There are wrestlers like Kikutaro who do full-on stand-up comedy skits in the ring to wrestlers who just punt-kick the other in the head and giving the other CTE, where if one of them dies in the ring, it wouldn’t be surprising. It encompasses all of that and more with wrestlers like Katsuyori Shibata, who are basically like I’m going to kick your ass, or you’re going to kick mine, or a more charismatic performer like Shinsuke Nakamura or someone more emotional like Hiroshi Tanahashi or someone like John Cena who you love but also hate because of how good they can be as they stay at the top.

“All of these are encompassed by wrestling so what’s important to you? What do you want to convey? The part of wrestling that Gatoh Move cherishes and thinks is so important is hard to capture. One of the hardest to capture. This was the first promotion I got introduced to in Japan because, on random luck, I met Masahiro Takanashi in Singapore. I was doing a tour of Singapore right before I moved to Japan because I was wrestling independently in India. I did well enough as a performer, even though there was no wrestling in India. I did at least whatever I did well enough that I got noticed by the promotions from Asia, and they were willing to bring me over to go to Thailand and Singapore and those places. I did a show in Singapore right before I moved and by some luck Masa Takanashi, who was a regular with DDT and Gatoh Move, was wrestling there and he saw me and I was like, “I’m moving to Japan.” He asked who I was moving to, and I said nobody. He said which company is bringing you, and I said nobody. I don’t know anybody there, I’m just moving and hoping I could do something, maybe knock on a dojo or something. He goes, “Okay, if you’re there, contact me, maybe we can do something.” I moved here and contacted him and he says, “Okay, are you free Tuesday?” Of course, I was, and I showed up, and it was a Gatoh Move training day in a dojo. I went there and trained for a few weeks, and they asked me to work a show. I showed up, worked the matches, and I just got hooked. I got hooked on their style of wrestling. I was doing a lot of independent wrestling in Japan while I was doing Gatoh Move, and it felt to me like if I want to be good if I want to be the kind of wrestler that I like, I think that Gatoh Move is the best place for me to be. And even though it was a Joshi promotion completely, I was still battling to get a lot of things passed by me to stay here, even though it was so small.”

What is it like being the only male main roster member in a Joshi company?

“Yeah, that’s not how it feels, though. In ChocoPro, a lot of things change. In Gatoh Move, the only male wrestler was Masa Takanashi, not me. Masa-san is incredible. In my eyes, he’s one of the best proficient wrestlers in the world. You can tell that from how much Chris Brookes cherishes him because they partnered one time in DDT, and they’re best friends now. He’s been hurt for a year now, and Chris still hasn’t chosen another tag partner in Japan, he’s still waiting for him. That’s how good he is. He is incredible. His wrestling is the type to make a professional wrestler just sit back and watch.”

Masahiro Takanashi was in the main event of the first DDT show I watched against Daisuke Sasaki and I was hooked after that…

“Do you know how he got that main event? He’d been the forever middle-card dude. He’s popular and sells a lot of tickets, but for some reason, according to how wrestling is, would have never been at the top. DDT decided to do a popularity poll on who should main event, who do you want to main event. He’s like the Daniel Bryan of Japanese wrestling. DDT asks who people want to challenge for the title, and he won by a mile. It wasn’t even close. He won and went on to main event. He’s like the Daniel Bryan who couldn’t rise. There wasn’t a company, and the internet didn’t exist when he was younger. But yeah, Masa introduced me and was one of the guys I looked up to. He’s incredible. I don’t know if people see it or not, but he’s one of the best in the world. I know that at least, and I wanted to be around him and watch him as close as possible, and Emi Sakura, who is a genius in every sense. Almost a mad genius actually. Somebody who you can’t figure out, who can’t be reasoned with. Her ideas sound mental to you when she brings them up and seems genius once she’s done doing it. She, too, is incredible. Those two really hooked me in, but when ChocoPro rolled around Masa Takanashi was hurt, he got hurt two weeks before the pandemic. Which he says himself was the best time to get hurt as the wrestling world stopped. Emi Sakura wanted to do something, and she turned to YouTube because it’s YouTube, it’s everywhere.

“So, I became a main part of that promotion as I was trying to translate and get as much English content out, so the English fans could really get into ChocoPro because, in my mind, Gatoh Move is one of the best places wrestling wise. The world couldn’t get into it because it wasn’t accessible. Whereas on YouTube, ChocoPro was accessible, perhaps the most accessible product in the wrestling industry today. Nobody even gets close. No one is even in the ballpark of how accessible ChocoPro is, the wrestlers are. You can hang out with them for two hours like every week. We went from non-accessible to very accessible, and I all of a sudden became an essential part of the team. It looks like I’m the only guy there, but from where I see it, it’s half and half, the people who keep it afloat. In their mind, they’re from Gatoh Move, it’s the Gatoh Move roster. They even say to this day, Mei Suruga or Emi Sakura of Gatoh Move. That’s how they introduce themselves. My ordeals in Japan with ChocoPro have gotten enough interest that wherever I go, everyone calls me Akki from ChocoPro. I’m the only wrestler who gets called that. If you think about it on paper, I’m the only ChocoPro wrestler, the only one on the roster. Everyone else is Gatoh Move or a guest from somewhere else. Even on my ZERO-1 debut and at DDT, I get called Akki from ChocoPro. Outside companies treat me as from ChocoPro now.”

Dreams are still coming true in Pro Wrestling, please watch one come true at #ChocoPro tomorrow at 19:30 (JST) https://t.co/WCueCHqjBL

チョコレートプロレス旗揚げ戦https://t.co/WCueCHqjBL
メインイベントは
鈴木みのるvsバリヤンアッキ@suzuki_D_minoru vs @baliyanxakki #gtmv pic.twitter.com/6rXSOQ7Mr9

— Emi Sakura さくらえみ (@EmiSakura_gtmv) March 27, 2020

That ties in nicely to my next question, you were in the first episode of ChocoPro against Minoru Suzuki, and from there we’ve seen you take on so many other challengers. How has the journey been to become the ace of the show been?

“When I came to Japan, I was sure to change a few things. Once you’re caught up in your own momentum, it’s hard to see where you are. It’s like being at sea. There’s just water all around, and you don’t know. That’s how I felt the first two years in Japan, I was so busy doing shows like three shows a week from the next to the next. It’s easy to get lost in what you want to do. I’d been to England for six to seven months. I moved back to India before I could come back here. I actually came here to do a tour for two months. I wanted to challenge myself. I did a lot more weight training, got a lot more muscle, and tried to do a lot more things. My first match back in Japan was a singles match against Chris Brookes, and that match got a lot of buzz. I got a lot of messages because he’s a big deal. He’s the top gaijin wrestler of DDT, the third could be second biggest company in Japan. He’s in a pretty big position, and I wrestled him in a singles match for Gatoh Move. It got a lot of interest and opened a lot of doors for me. I got an influx of incredible matches that all got cancelled, because two days later, everything shut down. That happened to everyone, everywhere, though.

“That match I did, though, showed something to Emi Sakura that I haven’t been able to show before. When everything hit, Emi Sakura wanted to, as I asked her afterwards because I didn’t know why she gave me that match with Minoru Suzuki. She wanted to show hope to people. She wanted to show that even in this time, where the industry itself may never come back, like general professional wrestling might end because if Coronavirus was really what we thought it was, it really would have ended. We thought the plague was coming, even more, horrible than the plague. That’s what the whole world thought when it really came. It is incredibly brutal and horrible, but what we imagined was way worse. If it really had been that, we might have lost the general ideas of professional wrestling. To Emi Sakura she wanted to show that even in this time, dreams can still come true. There can still be someone that has moved from India when there is no wrestling in the country. Where someone like me can wrestle in a main event of a company that started when every other company stopped and still wrestle Minoru Suzuki, one of the best this business has ever produced. Those types of dreams can still come true. She wanted to show that. Without saying it, just present it in an actual form, as an example. That’s why she made that match between me and Minoru Suzuki. That gave her the hope to give me the next, and I did the next, and that momentum kept rolling.

“Then I got hurt, and that gave me another perspective on myself. Looking from the outside in because I watched a lot of wrestling when I was hurt. We were doing a lot of ChocoPro, and I was watching Mei wrestle and Yuna Mizumori and Emi Sakura and everyone else were wrestling, and it gave me an outsider perspective. It gave me a break that I had never had before. It momentarily stopped me in time whilst everyone was still moving. I could really look back, and I think that changed my wrestling. I think I’ve had ten years’ worth of experience in this one year. It might be arrogant of me to say so, but that’s how it is in my head.”

That’s kind of the Gatoh Move model, though, isn’t it? You do multiple seasons in a year to speed up the learning process…

“It’s crazy. I’m going to give you an example that is terrible and incredible at the same time. ChocoPro is so fast, that no matter how good you do, even if it’s one where people go, “how?” In two weeks, everyone will forget because someone else did the same amount. I remember I wrested Minoru Fujita at ChocoPro #100, and I have never wrestled a match like that. I think there are going to be very few matches like that in my career. Even when I was wrestling it, I felt like, “Oh, this is something special.” There was one point, I watched the match back, and I’m really smiling in the match, even though I should be really angry at that point because we’re beating the hell out of each other. I’m smiling, and I’m genuinely smiling thinking because I remember thinking there are going to be very few of these matches in my career, ever. You don’t get this normally; it just doesn’t happen. The way I feel right now and the way we’re doing this. How much is going on and how, without anything being said, in sync we are. How much I know what he feels right now. Literally, I know how he feels. He doesn’t have to say anything, I just know. The way I felt, I was sure these are rare to come by. Everybody else felt that too, somehow.

“When the match ended, I’d enjoyed it so much that I thought people must have thought it sucked because I was so selfish in that match. I did the match for nobody; I was enjoying it so much within myself that I had no outward emotions in that match. I did it for me. I didn’t know how Sakura-san or the audience felt about that match or how Mei and everybody else felt about that match. It was a weird feeling. Mei was almost like, she didn’t say it, but her general emotions were like, “F**k you. How dare you,” basically. According to her, it was that kind of performance that it kind of upset her to a point. I was really happy, and that was like two weeks ago. It was 20 days ago, and me and Mei just had a match against PSYCHO and CHANGO where people are saying this is the best match in ChocoPro. Which to me is very lovely because I’m part of the show, I’m part of that match, and I’m very proud of that match. I really love the fact that when I do something great with Mei because both of us really make us better. One of the biggest reasons I’m getting better is because I’m tagging with Mei, and I really don’t want to lose to her. I really do feel that way too. When she does something, I’m like, goddamn, that is my emotion. How dare she go ahead of me. I would much rather have my opponent pass me by than Mei. Mei should never be able to pass me up.

“But it just goes that fast. You need to be on the top of the game because everyone is bringing their A-game. That is the reason ChocoPro is so up there. There’s an air here that if you’re here, you better perform like this is the last day of your life, like there’s no tomorrow. You had better bring the best of you that’s ever been. You had better bring that here. For some reason, every guest, every wrestler here brings that for some reason, even if there isn’t a ring here. Those are the things that make it so compelling that you can’t take your eyes off of it despite doing three shows a week. People get angry at WWE for doing that much, and WWE is the biggest company in the world. It’s in so many of the countries in the world, 85% of the countries in the world have WWE. In my country, in India, people don’t know pro-wrestling. They don’t even know the name pro-wrestling, they know WWE. To them, that’s what exists. WWE is a thing on its own. If I go back to India and people ask me what I do, and if I say, “I do professional wrestling,” they think I’m talking about Olympic wrestling. I have to say I do WWE for them to understand what I do. That’s the level WWE is at, the power they hold. The power they hold in India where 1.4 billion people live. Yet people get pissed at them for doing three hours of RAW and two hours of SmackDown.

“We are such a small company, there’s like six of us. We’re doing three shows a week, and the love we get; it just humbles you. I have no words for how good I feel every day when there are 200 people waiting for our show. When I see that, it just brings something that I can’t explain in words. How incredibly good it feels that people would wait for our show. That’s one of the reasons I think people feel so cherished, the way ChocoPro and non-ChocoPro wrestlers feel in ChocoPro like Minoru Fujita or Hagane Shinno or PSYCHO or CHANGO or Chris Brookes. Any guest wrestler like Saki, Makoto, or ASUKA before. Even the wrestlers like Chie Koishikawa, who’s getting incredibly good incredibly fast, or Lulu Pencil, who puts her life on the line literally every match she does. When you do that, you put those types of emotions out. You want to do as much as possible, and I think that conveys to people who watch it. If you can feel that these people are doing everything that they can for me, I think that’s the bond ChocoPro and its fans share.”

Baliyan Akki on Social Media: Twitter, Instagram 

ChocoPro on Social Media: Twitter (Eng) (JP) Instagram 

Watch and Support ChocoPro: YouTube, Shop

All images courtesy of Gatoh Move, Chie Koishikawa, Emi Sakura Twitter, Videos courtesy of Gatoh Move YouTube