Part 1: "Why am I like this?!" Her despair continued into her idol era. How Maki Itoh discovered her wrestling way of life. (3ページ目)

President Takagi enthusiastically approached her and her guest appearances for DDT began to pile up. At that point it was still very novel for idols to wrestle, and as the media picked up on the story in a big way she began to think, "If I seriously go down this path, maybe I can get famous." However, she had a preconception of joshi wrestlers having to abandon their womanhood, and that gave her pause.

"To put it frankly, I had this idea that they were like, "vulgar". As an idol you can only have this good image, so I felt like if I went from that to becoming a wrestler, that meant I'd lost. So that's why even once I decided to start wrestling, I didn't want to tell the other LinQ members. So without even saying anything I moved to Tokyo, yeah."

Looking back on it now, I wonder if there's still anything she feels like she "lost" when she made the transition from idol to wrestler?

"Now I understand that when you come to a standstill like that you need to change course, but if you ask me to say whether I think of that as a win or a loss, I'm not sure I could say, y'know? Pro wrestling brings with it a very real risk of injury, maybe it actually is the case that I'm genuinely shortening my life compared to what it would be if I was an idol and the most dangerous thing I did was smiling. But for me, that would have been too boring. I got bored of being an idol."

Itoh had gotten bored of being an idol.

"The same song, the same dance routine, the same formation, we never got to improve on anything. And because I wasn't getting popular either, it was like, no one's even looking at me. Like, I didn't even get the chance to make eye contact with fans. I would be singing while wondering what I was even doing here. During a song I'd just be like, thinking about my lunch, you know?"

For that girl, pro wrestling was exciting. Every match made her nervous. Every time she had a match, she felt like the audience's expectations were raised. She felt like if Maki Itoh can't live up to those expectations then she's useless, and she didn't have the spare time to wonder about what's for lunch any more.

"There was definitely pressure, but at that point, there had to be. There are certain things that you can only really express specifically because you have that pressure on you, you know. I work backwards from the idea of, "this is the kind of Maki Itoh the fans want to see." So I think if I hadn't had those expectations put on me in the first place, I wouldn't have been able to figure out how to think like that either."