Section 1- Results
Dragon Gate: Magnitude handled Anthony Mori on Saturday. After that came an impromptu main event 6-man ending with Ryo Saito pinning CIMA. That led to the news below.
Kensuke Office: Their debut show is getting notice for its main event of Kobashi & Sasaki vs Tenryu & Nakajima. It could also lead to Minoru Suzuki in All Japan.
New Japan: Tanahashi defended the U-30 title against Yamamoto. Yamamoto has been in a large number of main event tags, and his push is probably the story of the tour so far.
Section 2- News
All Japan: Though it’s now clear that the Dudleys are gone for good (signed with HUSTLE for their Japan dates), All Japan has replaced them with Matt Morgan. Morgan will join RO&D, and I suspect Taiyo Kea will turn to join Voodoo Murders. The factions will square off on the 3/10 show. Headlining that show will be Kojima vs Great Muta for the Triple Crown. Last but not least Yoshie will be wrestling most All Japan shows for the foreseeable future. I wouldn’t be shocked if they have to build to a Yoshie title shot with how thin things are.
Dragon Gate: Magnitude vs Ryo Saito for the title is already lined up for the 24th in Korakuen. Magnitude isn’t nigh invulnerable outside Osaka so maybe there will be a title change now. The Brave Gate title will be up for grabs in a 6 man round-robin ending on 3/19. Dragon Kid, Yoshino, Doi and Tanisaki all have a real chance of winning. ROH has announced that Blood Generation of CIMA/Yoshino/Doi and Do Fixer of Ryo Saito/Dragon Kid/Genki Horiguchi will be on the 3/30, 3/31 and 4/1 weekend shows.
New Japan: The 3/19 Sumo Hall show is likely to be the spot for the next IWGP title match. Akebono, Choshu and Tanahashi are all in line for the shot. Simon Inoki’s meeting with WWE turned out to involve WWE wanting to make an agreement for using New Japan footage on its DVDs. Antonio Inoki was back in the news as well. He’d negotiated for New Japan to run big shows in Bangladesh, but he booked said shows with the promise of a Muhammed Ali appearance. Ali didn’t agree to do so and Bangladesh nixed the shows. It’s interesting that New Japan was going along with Antonio on it.
Section 3- Shill
I wrote a column for Fight Opinion that covers a lot of different topics, most of which don’t get much notice on wrestling websites. Take a gander if you please.
Section 4- Is yours truly biased?
Yes, I’m biased. We all are. What’s at issue is whether I’m biased against any and all aspects of New Japan as compared to other promotions.
I got my start in the world of puro by writing for Zach Arnold’s puroresupower.com (and to a lesser extent doing reviews at Rolling Germans). Like Zach, I was a staunch critic of the overall direction of New Japan. You know the score: bad dome shows, bad booking decisions, Inoki being a jerk, etc. I criticize and poke fun at New Japan more often than other promotions. Why is that?
To begin with, New Japan was number one in Japan for some time and only very recently slipped to number two. News in big feds makes for better headlines, which is why coverage of All Japan is so much less than it used to be and coverage of Dragon Gate is hard to find. This is the case here and in the Japanese press. When you add in the amount of turmoil in recent years, the vast majority of which has been negative, it’s hard to avoid an overall negative tone towards New Japan. All Japan and Zero-One are in much worse shape but their problems aren’t as flashy.
And NOAH, why are they different? It helps that they were so down in the dumps in the entire middle of 2002, eliminating the expectation that they’d capture the former glory of pre-split All Japan. Kobashi’s return, the use of freelancers at big shows and the popularity of KENTA and Marufuji deserves almost all the credit for their improvement instead of Misawa’s booking, so there’s a certain artificiality to the growth. Still you wind up with a company that has more stability, is growing, and simply doesn’t drop the ball as often. They excel on the big stages where New Japan’s highlights are often found beneath the surface. It’s hard not to give NOAH better treatment that New Japan when analyzing things.
So why the heck am I bringing this up? I received an email from the venerable Stuart of puroresufan.com. As I said in one of my first columns his site is a treasure trove of information from news to results, and has been for going on five years. Stuart is primarily a New Japan fan and has never made any secret of that. His knowledge has made the attempts I’ve had at debating him an exhausting task which I typically abandon due to the inertia of my laziness, and he remains civil in debates where others often don’t.
Stuart pointed out that I said New Japan was only half-filling Korakuen Hall when they were doing better than that. Korakuen’s permanent/standard seating is around 1600, and promotions can pack in several hundred more if they want thanks to the balconies and alternate floor seat arrangements. New Japan has been selling 80% of the 1600 standard seats in recent months, and very few promotions who use the venue do better than the 1600 number. What’s more, they aren’t doing significantly worse than they have in recent years as a glance at his archives demonstrates. I had thought NOAH’s standard 2100 number was the designed capacity, so I was wrong. And what’s to say NOAH doesn’t fudge that number from time to time?
He went on to criticize me for focusing too much on ticket sales in Tokyo, as New Japan holds its own in places like Osaka and Kyoto. Indeed the G-1 Climax tournament in recent years has hinged on the ability to do well in mid-range buildings across Japan, something no promotion has even come close to trying let alone pulling off well. The G-1 is often considered the truest representation of what the company is capable of, where Tokyo Dome shows suffer from being largely disconnected and ‘too many chefs spoil the pot’ booking, thus the G-1 in some ways is the best thing to judge the company by.
Okay then. New Japan can sell 4000 tickets in more places than any promotion in Japan. New Japan does respectably in Korakuen Hall. And at the same time New Japan has lost a lot of talent, bombed massively in a number of major shows, struggled heavily when it attempts to run venues larger than 6000, and its product has declined badly over the last year and a half in the eyes of most viewers. In only a few years it has gone from packing the Tokyo Dome to barely packing Sumo Hall. The ‘third generation’ led by Nagata and Tenzan has faltered, while the fourth led by Nakamura and Tanahashi isn’t quite catching on as hoped. Choshu-ism is a better bet than Inoki-ism but it’s still problematic.
I’m not fabricating New Japan’s problems. Neither am I ignoring the problems faced by others. When All Japan is reduced to having TARU as a Triple Crown challenger, I point out that they’re in a bad way. I’ve repeatedly analyzed the major problems facing NOAH in the long run as they attempt to replace Kobashi, Misawa and Taue, and I never hesitated to say that Rikio was a flop. Dragon Gate is essentially an afterthought and Zero-One isn’t a thought at all anymore. The business as a whole is in decline, and New Japan has been emblematic of it.
What I want is to see Japanese wrestling improve. I believe that booking and wrestling quality both effect ticket sales, and to a lesser extent ticket sales can improve wrestling quality. I loved when New Japan pushed Tenzan, I praised the booking of the 2004 G-1 tournament, I’ve gushed over top matches from all promotions. That’s why I hated New Japan tossing Tenzan by the wayside, and why I’m concerned that Akiyama might blow his latest opportunity. When companies make bad booking decisions it tends to harm the product, alienate the fans and punish the hardest-working wrestlers. When main eventers fall short it makes it hard for those beneath him to succeed.
No wrestling promotion will ever be above criticism for one facet or another. Perhaps I’m too harsh on old New Japan. But never forget that like Stuart I am first, last and always a puroresu fan, and no amount of my ‘tough love’ columns mean otherwise.
