Edmonds-Woodway High School will be the final stop for Japan’s Under-18 national wrestling team on its cultural exchange tour through Washington.
The Japanese squad will compete against a team of Snohomish, Skagit and Whatcom County all-stars at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
The Japanese contingent, headed up by team leader Kenji Hashizume, wrestled at Royal High School on Wednesday before competing at the Gut Check Challenge in Bremerton over the weekend and at Curtis High School on Monday.
Japan won the team title at the Gut Check with four individual champions.
Edmonds-Woodway coach Brian Alfi coordinated this stop on the tour and put together the team of 18 Washington wrestlers to compete against the Japanese, who plan to visit Seattle with Alfi and Shorewood wrestling coach Derek Norton on Wednesday before flying home from Sea-Tac International Airport.
“We put in to host them at the state coaches convention, and it worked out because they want to end in Seattle,” Alfi said. “We’ll take them around to meet the mayor and ride a ferry and then do all the tourist stuff they want to do in Seattle.”
The 12-member Japanese team will be housed with the families of Edmonds-Woodway wrestlers and coaches, while the coaches will stay with Norton and his family.
Tuesday’s exhibition match — which will be of the freestyle variety as opposed to the collegiate style adopted by American high schools — will be contested in the Great Hall at Edmonds-Woodway instead of the gym.
Alfi said that freestyle, which is the type of wrestling that recently was cut as an Olympic sport, is more action-packed than the occasionally plodding and methodical collegiate style.
“Most of these kids compete in freestyle in the offseason, so it’s not that much of a transition,” Alfi said. “It’s a lot more entertaining and rewards athleticism more. Comparing freestyle and collegiate wrestling is like baseball and softball, which each have a four bases, a bat and a ball, but everything else is a little different.”
The styles may be different, but Tuesday’s event isn’t about takedowns and falls, wins and losses.
It’s about how the love of sport can span oceans.
Arlington coach Rick Iversen, who will be the team leader for the local all-stars, has participated in numerous events like this throughout his long career and has taken an American team of prep wrestlers to Budapest, Hungary, to compete.
Iversen’s foster son, Hiromi Nara, came to the United States for the first time on a cultural exchange trip from Japan, decided to stay to get an American education and went on to wrestle for Iversen at Western Washington University.
“The competition is great, but this will be about meeting and visiting kids from another country and seeing different styles of wrestling,” Iversen said.
Alfi, who hosted Japanese wrestlers after competing against them as a high school athlete, said the local all-stars will find their opponents from across the Pacific a lot like themselves.
“A lot of the Japanese kids learn English in school, but even if they don’t, the language of wrestling is universal,” Alfi said. “You walk into a wrestling room and nothing needs to be said. You walk onto a wrestling mat, you shake hands and you know what to do.”
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