This article is a kayfabe look at the character of Kendo Nagasaki.
Kendo Nagasaki is not a wrestler.
Peter Thornley is a wrestler. Hailing from Crewe, he competed on the British wrestling scene from 1964, with a last match planned for later this year. He was a Judo champion and weightlifting star who trained with the finest wrestlers across the land.
A student of the legendary Billy Riley, Thornley trained on the mat by the Catch-As-Catch-Can legend Billy Robinson. Thornley was a physical specimen, a top-class fighter, a world-renowned wrestler and a man anybody would be afraid to enter the ring with.
This made him the perfect vessel for Kendo Nagasaki to inhabit.
Kendo Nagasaki is something else entirely. The Japanese Samurai embodied the concept of Zen, bringing its Eastern mysticism to the forefront of British society.
He is a spirit, existing in a form unbeknownst to humankind. To understand him is like a dog trying to understand Shakespeare. Try as he might, it is simply not something the loyal pooch will ever get his head around.
This other dimensional known as Kendo Nagasaki is old. Nobody knows exactly how old this spirit is, if the concept of time is indeed one he bothers with at all. The man behind the mask was guided by the spiritual being of Kendo Nagasaki.
“Kendo Nagasaki himself has had lives on the earthly plane as a samurai warrior. He was Shinwon Nagasaki, who perished in the siege of Kamakura in 1333, and he lived in the great city of Nagasaki at the dawn of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 1600s. The man behind the mask has undergone past life regression, during which he has seen himself sharing lives and fighting alongside Kendo Nagasaki during these times.”
Inhabited the body of Thornley, being known as Yogensha, or “seer”.