TOKYO: “The Queen of Villains” is a typical coming-of-age tale about a young woman’s road to empowerment and self-discovery — except it all takes place in the body-slamming, arm-twisting world of Japanese professional wrestling.
The Netflix series, which began airing last month, tells the story of Dump Matsumoto, a real-life wrestling legend from the 1980s who grew up poor with a father who was often absent or abusive.
Matsumoto grew up angry, she said, and went on to create in her wrestling persona a ferocious, almost camp villain character, known in the sport as a “heel,” complete with outlandish Kabuki-like facial makeup, chains, sticks and a grotesque scowl. She loomed large as a symbol of fearless and defiant womanhood.
“I gave it my all to be evil,” Matsumoto said.
A hefty woman with a friendly smile, Matsumoto makes a point even now to adamantly deny that she was ever a nice person or acknowledge that many people in Japan, especially women, love her.
“I still beat people up in matches. I stuck forks in them and made them bleed,” she said, adding, “All the people who pretend to be good are the truly evil ones.”
“The Queen of Villains” follows the friendship between Matsumoto and Chigusa Nagayo of the popular wrestling tag team known as the Crush Gals. Nagayo served as an adviser, trainer and choreographer for the series’ dramatized wrestling scenes.
Japanese professional wrestling fans still talk about the matches between Matsumoto and the Crush Gals, including the ones they fought in the US
The actresses in the series spent two years training for their roles. They gained weight and muscle, and learned techniques like the “giant swing,” in which a wrestler grabs her opponent’s legs and moves in a dizzying circle, or the “flying knee kick,” which involves a jump and kick to the body while airborne.
The trick in professional wrestling is to execute the punches and body slams convincingly but in a controlled way to avoid serious injuries. A wrestler also must know how to fall properly.
One key fight scene took a month to film as the actors went over each move, again and again.
“Dump played a role to be hated by the entire nation,” said Yuriyan Retriever, a professional comedian who stars as Matsumoto in the series.
“Previously, there was a limit, maybe even unintentionally, beyond which I couldn’t go. But when I played Dump, all those emotions had to come out and be expressed,” she said.
She felt like she was no longer playing a role, she said, but that she had become Dump Matsumoto.
“It’s frightening to be hated, and I don’t think anyone wants to be hated,” Retriever said.
“When I finished a cut, I was crying. And my body was shaking. I can’t express it in words, but I understood all the pressures Dump must have felt.”
The series not only presents a women-beating-the-odds story against a backdrop of sexism and abusive management but it also captures the postwar period of the Showa-era in a way that feels authentic. The scenes used thousands of extras, many of them serious wrestling fans.
Some viewers say the real-life wrestling was more intense than the dramatized version in the new series.
Rionne McAvoy, an Australian filmmaker who as a professional wrestler was hit with a stick by Matsumoto, said: “The actors often fail to capture the intensity, grit and charisma required for these roles.”
But for most viewers, it’s real enough and heartbreaking.
“This is an eternal but emotional story portraying ordinary girls who passionately pursued a dream, found friendship and also themselves,” director Kazuya Shiraishi said.
“It gave me a chance to reflect on my own 15-year filmmaking career, what I truly want to be, what kind of films I want to make. I just wanted to tell their story, which is also everyone’s story.”

NEW YORK: Humanity is hitting the upper limit of life expectancy, according to a new study.
Advances in medical technology and genetic research — not to mention larger numbers of people making it to age 100 — are not translating into marked jumps in lifespan overall, according to researchers who found shrinking longevity increases in countries with the longest-living populations.
“We have to recognize there’s a limit” and perhaps reassess assumptions about when people should retire and how much money they’ll need to live out their lives, said S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois-Chicago researcher who was lead author of the study published Monday by the journal Nature Aging.
Mark Hayward, a University of Texas researcher not involved in the study, called it “a valuable addition to the mortality literature.”
“We are reaching a plateau” in life expectancy, he agreed. It’s always possible some breakthrough could push survival to greater heights, “but we don’t have that now,” Hayward said.
What is life expectancy?
Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live, assuming death rates at that time hold constant. It is one of the world’s most important health measures, but it is also imperfect: It is a snapshot estimate that cannot account for deadly pandemics, miracle cures or other unforeseen developments that might kill or save millions of people.
In the new research, Olshansky and his research partners tracked life expectancy estimates for the years 1990 to 2019, drawn from a database administered by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. The researchers focused on eight of the places in the world where people live the longest — Australia, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Switzerland.
The US doesn’t even rank in the top 40. But is also was included “because we live here” and because of past, bold estimates that life expectancy in the US might surge dramatically in this century, Olshansky said.
Who lives the longest?
Women continue to live longer than men and life expectancy improvements are still occurring — but at a slowing pace, the researchers found. In 1990, the average amount of improvement was about 2 1/2 years per decade. In the 2010s, it was 1 1/2 years — and almost zero in the US
The US is more problematic because it is harder hit by a range of issues that kill people even before they hit old age, including drug overdoses, shootings, obesity and inequities that make it hard for some people to get sufficient medical care.
But in one calculation, the researchers estimated what would happen in all nine places if all deaths before age 50 were eliminated. The increase at best was still only 1 1/2 years, Olshansky said.
Eileen Crimmins, a University of Southern California gerontology expert, said in an email that she agrees with the study’s findings. She added: “For me personally, the most important issue is the dismal and declining relative position of the United States.”
Why life expectancy may not be able to rise forever
The study suggests that there’s a limit to how long most people live, and we’ve about hit it, Olshansky said.
“We’re squeezing less and less life out of these life-extending technologies. And the reason is, aging gets in the way,” he said.
It may seem common to hear of a person living to 100 — former US President Jimmy Carter hit that milestone last week. In 2019, a little over 2 percent of Americans made it to 100, compared with about 5 percent in Japan and 9 percent in Hong Kong, Olshansky said.
It’s likely that the ranks of centenarians will grow in the decades ahead, experts say, but that’s because of population growth. The percentage of people hitting 100 will remain limited, likely with fewer than 15 percent of women and 5 percent of men making it that long in most countries, Olshansky said.