Wrestling
Blake Monroe Opens Up About the Japan Experience That Shaped Her WWE Character
BY SACNILK
Blake Monroe has opened up about the time she spent wrestling in Japan and explained how the experience changed both her career and her life before she made her way to WWE. Before becoming a WWE Superstar, Monroe built her experience on the independent scene and eventually traveled to Japan to continue developing as a wrestler. What was supposed to be a short trip turned into a much longer stay after she quickly became attached to the country and its wrestling culture. “I went to Japan and I was meant to go for like a month and I ended up moving there. So I only had like two or three suitcases. And it was in my first week and I was like, ‘I'll stay.,'" Monroe said during her appearance on The Nikki & Brie Show. Monroe explained she trained at the dojo and spent a lot of time wrestling and improving her skills. Her schedule could become demanding, especially during tournaments and busier stretches of the year. “It wasn't every day, but it went through phases. So, we wrestled at least twice a week. Sometimes in the summer like we had tournaments and like we'd be on the road. Like we'd be on this bus. Like you do your match, you take the ring down, shower if you can, the bus.” Monroe was around 23 at the time and felt she needed to spend some time away from home. Living in another country forced her to become more independent, and she said she found herself during that period. “I just fell in love. It's called the Dojo. We just trained all the time and I loved Japan and I feel like at that time in my life I must have been like 23 or something. I needed that. I needed to be by myself. I needed to be independent and I just found myself and I loved Japan.” Monroe couldn't speak Japanese when she first arrived, which meant she couldn't rely on long promos to connect with the audience. Instead, she had to find other ways to communicate her personality. That eventually became an important part of her development as a character. “I couldn't speak. And as we know, promos, especially in WWE, is the biggest part of like how you're going to make people like you. Wrestling is one thing, but I feel like you have to have something where people hate you, like you, relate to you, whatever it is. I couldn't do that in Japan. So, I had to learn how to exude that in my body, in the way I dressed, in all my mannerisms, and it really made me dial up to like a hundred.” She compared developing a wrestling character to training in the gym. The more she worked on it, the more she learned what connected with an audience. “I feel like it's developed. It's the same way you like train in the gym and you train at wrestling. I feel like you also train your character. But you just kind of learn what works, what doesn't, where you need the crowd, where you might need to like show out to them.” After making her mark in NXT, she's moved on to SmackDown and has made it clear that she wants to become more than someone who simply wins championships. She wants to create stories that fans remember. Monroe recalled eating raw chicken with friends before a major match against Giulia. She initially worried that the unusual meal was responsible for the knots in her stomach, only to realize she was simply nervous about the match. “I ate raw chicken. And I was fine. But it was the night before like a really big match with Giulia actually. And I really wanted to wrestle her... I had started my period so I had cramps. But in my head I'm like it's the chicken. It's raw chicken but it wasn't. I was just really nervous so like my stomach was in knots.”