I first saw Tiger Mask in 2008, in a tiny pro wrestling shop near Tokyo’s Korakuen Hall: the sort of place that has autographs in the stairwell and posters from obscure 70s grappling matches peeling off the walls. He sat, resplendent, among a couple of dozen lesser masks: most with patterns, a couple with horns, none as mesmerising as my sweet golden prince with his floppy ears and strokable fur lining.
I didn’t buy him, obviously.
Tiger Mask is the alternative persona of a wrestler (well, several wrestlers), inspired by a manga, with a 40-year history too complicated to even start explaining here. The important bit is that he sits right at the intersection of my interests: as a kid who was a nerd before being a nerd was cool, I loved superhero comics and professional wrestling; as an adult making up for lost time, I got into mixed martial arts and overdressing for costume parties.
The mask would have been the perfect souvenir, but I just couldn’t afford it: on the same trip to Japan I had slept in an internet cafe to save cash, and as I slid towards my late 20s without a toehold on the property ladder, dropping the price of dinner for two on a superhero mask felt … frivolous. I did regret it, though, and I must have mentioned it to my girlfriend at some point, because one happy Christmas morning a couple of years later, I broke open a cardboard box to see a familiar flash of fur and gold.
Joy.
With today’s youngsters raised on frictionless online shopping, it’s tricky to explain how difficult that mask was to source back then: it turned out that my girlfriend had found the shop, liaised with a Japanese friend of ours to do the ordering, and navigated the tricky parts of customs forms and getting the thing delivered without me having a clue. When you’re a grownup, that’s practically perfect gift-giving: slap-bang in the centre of “thoughtful”, “tricky, and “memorable” on the old Christmas Venn diagram. It was, and remains, one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me, and I think about it every time I look at that mask, now adorning a foam mannequin head in the background of my Zoom calls.
And my girlfriend? Well, I don’t wear Tiger Mask much any more. But our son absolutely loves him.
