Quick question for some of you wrestling historians:
Were there any Vietnamese-styled heels during the war? Google hasn't been too helpful (or maybe I gave up too quickly?), and I can't imagine there being a wealth of footage or information about such a topic.
I'm doing a presentation Friday about media coverage of the war and just wanted the information as PowerPoint fluff.
Certainly not in the AWA or WCA, which were the Feds I had contact with during the 'Nam.
Japanese Heels (and sometimes faces) back in those days were more common, such as Tojo Yamamoto, Tokyo Joe, Mitsu Arakawa, Mr Moto, and Mr Fuji. We were still hating on the Japanese and Germans during the Vietnam War, you know, which is why a guy from Wyoming became Baron Von Raschke, and a guy named Robert "Kenji" Shibuya who was born in Utah, married to a mormon gal named Janet, was Billed from Tokyo, Japan.
We'll be back right after order has been restored here in the Omni Center.
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy - Swift
it wasn't during the Vietnam War, but Hiroshi Hase was part of the Viet Cong Express in Calgary in the mid to late 1980s.
Fumihiro Niikura was the other member of the tag team.
edit: not totally german to your original question, but you also in the 1980s had workers putting the war on their resume in feuds, both work and shoot. And Steve Keirn got babyface mileage in Florida (or maybe Memphis) when heels would threaten his vietnam vet father.
Sgt Slaughter was a huge heel coming off the Vietnam Era, calling the whole crowd maggots, etc. Since it was an unpopular war and the military was generally looked on unfavorably, this was how Vince McMahon Sr. saw the money in it.
As AWArulz called it, it was easier to keep hating on the Germans and Japs, as well as keeping different types of ethnics beat each other (or beat jobbers). Bruno, Pedro, Polish Power Ivan Putski, Irish Terry Hogan, American Indians, Canadian French, British, Australians, Mexicans, etc.