A WRESTLER 6 feet 8 inches high, and big in proportion, with muscles and flesh as hard as iron, and with agility enough to put him in the front rank of his profession, is the man who claims the championship of Japan, and probably of the world, with considerable chance of making his claim good for some time to come.
    There is a young man in Tokio, now 19, w ho was unknown two years ago and who is a better man than our own Muldoon. He is the hero of the Japanese sporting world.
 

    Taiho, the most sensational wrestler who has come to the front in modern years in the Mikado's empire to compete in the national meetings for the championship - and the champion wrestler of Japan is to the country what the first matador is to Spain - made his first big hit at the temple grounds of Ekoin one year ago. Prior to that time he was looked upon as a big lumbering fellow who had mistaken his calling and ought to be jerking rice bags around instead of trying his prowess in a ring where agility is a paramount consideration. He was then between 15 and 17 years old, and had been apprenticed to the Wrestlers' Guild since his earliest boyhood.
    Six months after the writer saw him go down before a man hardly two-thirds of his size, he made his appearance at Ekoin under the high-sounding name Taiho, literally "Big Gun," and fairly electrified the vast pavilion of spectators with his performance. In his class he met all comers, and wafted them aside, as the big wind plays with little leaves. Then, he jumped up one class, and no one was found in it who could cope with him.
    It looked as though he had a walkover right to the very front, but he struck a man in the second class who gained a chance fall from him. This fall delayed his meeting the champions for six months. At the next meeting, last spring, he entered the arena as a first class man, and the sporting public was prepared to see him do victorious battle with Konishiki, the fat-bellied fellow, who has worn the silken rope for several years.

    Unfortunately the young fellow, tired out by his many bouts in rapid succession, the victor being put on from day to day to meet newcomers, lost another chance fall to a, man recognized as very much his inferior. So it stood that, while not entitled by an uninterrupted series ot successful bouts to the championship, he was regarded as the champion by the people, and could draw a larger crowd than any other person in the country, not excepting actors and statesmen, with whom Japan abounds. What the result of the most recent meeting at Ekoin has been is not positively known in this country, but there can be little doubt that Taiho, already so nearly at the front, and for that reason having to wrestle only three or four men, is today champion in name as well as in fact.
    The great difficulty in winning the national championship may be gathered from the fact that in the classification matches, if a wrestler goes down, his competitor remains in possession of the field and has to meet the next candidate. One fall will set a competitor back. It is just as in the Sullivan-Corbett fight the first round that Corbett had the advantage - say when he drew blood - he, was judged victorious, and had, on the morrow, to meet Peter Jackson, and if he vanquished the Australian gentleman of color, next day had to whip Charley Mitchell, and so on as long as the A1 fighters held out, in each battle Corbett having to draw blood, or, if the scarlet came first from Corbett, then his adversary to take up the cudgels in like manner. This is the sort of fighters would make our fighters and wrestlers tired, and leave them little time for play-acting. It would be a sort of treadmill Charley Mitchell would not relish.
    Yet thin is just the sort of thing which has been going on in Japan since the beginning of the seventeenth century, and of the long list of champions, commencing, it is related, with Sukune, who wrestled for the Emperor in the year 23 B.C. and ended with Konishiki, Taiho the boy wrestler, has by his meteoric rise put them all in the shade.
    In the picture given, taken from a photograph by Prof. Burton of the Imperial University, the young wrestler's height may not assert itself until one knows that Prof. Burton, standing at his side, is a man of about five feet nine and of nearly average weight and size. Taiho stands 6 feet 8 inches, and is as heavy and solid as an ox. His head looks as large as a half-bushel measure, and his skull must border on an inch in thickness. His flesh and muscles are as hard as the best picked prize-fighter's fists that ever punched a bag, and he has not a pound of superfluous flesh. He is, so far as has come before the public, without doubt the finest specimen of the animal man in the world, and is, if not as agile as Muldoon, more so than Cannon.
    A championship match between Muldoon and Taiho would be the grandest athletic exhibition ever presented. WILLIAM R. GARDNER