10 Wrestlers Who Inflicted The Most Damage To Their Bodies
2. Jun Kasai
Jun Kasai took what was already an extreme form and intensified it to a degree that transgressed upon itself.
Like the most abrasive experimental noise recordings, the idea was to push the death match genre well beyond an unspeakable limit to achieve the maximum blunt force experience; to elicit an unsettling physical sensation within a desensitised audience. A dare, almost, to gauge just how much he and his audience alike could withstand.
Kasai's work feels less like a wrestling match and more like grotesque body torture as avant garde performance art.
He still worked the suspense element of a death match - the form is still tethered to the original - but he doesn't stagger towards barbed wire but rather razors and gussets. Kasai is actually a very capable wrestler in a traditional vein, but he actively enjoys rendering his body a complete mess of bulging scar tissue. This is a man who willingly scrapes open his chest with a broken light tube as a fire-up spot.
This is a man whose skin isn't so much scarred as contoured.