Section 1- Results
All Japan: Taiyo Kea won the champions’ carnival, beating Suwama in the finals. Kea beat Minori Suzuki in the semifinals by DQ, while Suwama beat Kojima by countout. Relevant results from earlier in the week included Suwama vs Mutoh going to a draw, Bull Buchanan beating Mutoh, Sasaki going nuts on Suwama and getting DQ’ed, and Kea vs Yoshie going to a draw. Kondo defended the junior title against MAZADA.
New Japan: Tanahashi won the biggest match of the first round of the cup tournament, beating Chono clean on Sunday. Also on that show, Jado & Gedo won a junior tag title shot by beating Kanemoto & Wataru Inoue.
NOAH: Masao Inoue won the contenders’ tournament, getting an ill-received countout win over Saito in the final. Hidaka & Fujita defended the junior tag titles in Zero-One.
Section 2- News
New Japan: Post-cup booking is taking shape. On 5/3, Lesnar will defend the title against the tournament winner. The junior tag title match will happen on 5/7, along with a New Japan vs Zero-One tag. In other news, New Japan is currently tinkering with a number of different ideas to increase crowd noise. One of them involves musical devices, such as drums and horns. Another involves using rowdy soccer fans to lead cheers. NJ and PRIDE are hinting at ties between the two groups, especially the NJ offshoot ‘Wrestle Land’ promotion. Part of this is the old, previously unknown friendship between Tanahashi and Razor Ramon HG. So… FUUUUUUUUUUU. Kakihara officially retired. Finally, there’s a lot of talk about an Omori vs Nakanishi AWA title match, and boy I can’t tell you how much I’d give to never have to watch it.
NOAH: You can credit/blame (re: blame) Akiyama for the booking of Masao Inoue in a Tokyo Nippon Budokan main event. Other matches on the card include Kobashi vs Marufuji, KENTA vs Ishimori and Misawa/Ogawa vs SUWA/Minoru Suzuki. No tag title match.
Section 3- Kea wins the CC
Going into the final night of the carnival there were two bad choices for the winner, one okay choice, and one good choice. Thankfully they went with the good choice. Kojima would gain nothing with another carnival tournament win, while Suwama isn’t quite ready yet and still gains from being in the final. Suzuki is still a good Triple Crown challenger for down the road, while Kea really needed to win it all to look like he’s in a position to pose a threat. Kea hasn’t been setting the world on fire so I don’t know if he’s the one to topple Kojima, but at the very least he and Suzuki can stretch out the Triple Crown booking for three or four months.
Section 4- Two shows, one night, one city
Dragon Gate is a truly ‘national’ promotion. They can run big or mid-range shows in Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Hokkaido and others, which spans far more territory than other junior-based feds like MPro or Osaka. They regularly used Yoyogi National Gym #2 for their big shows in Tokyo, but that ended in 2005 when they hit a talent crunch and had a number of people depart (Milano, Kondo, etc). Mind you, that’s the venue All Japan went to once the Nippon Budokan became too big for them, so Yoyogi isn’t bad at all for a fed considered to be second-tier. Dragon Gate will be using the Ota Ward Gym on Sunday, which is slightly smaller but still the largest they’ve used in Tokyo since 2004.
There’s something else that makes it special: they’re running it opposite NOAH’s Nippon Budokan card. For the life of me I can’t recall two companies running ‘big’ shows in the same city in recent years. Zero-One packed Korakuen while competing with a New Japan dome show next door, but that’s just Korakuen. Here we’re talking about Dragon Gate trying to fend off the tops-in-Tokyo promotion at the same time as their biggest Tokyo show in 16 months. And you know what? I think they can pull it off.
That’s because Dragon Gate is running their most loaded show in quite some time. It has everything: heavyweight guests, storyline/feud matches, title matches, a contendership match, and some guy named Mr. Primetime. There’s a mix of the different sub-styles within Dragon Gate and as such there should be a nice variety when it all plays out. Add the fact that most of it has had some build and you’re looking at a satisfying, climactic slab of wrestling.
Do I have to list the reasons why I think NOAH’s show is problematic? Despite that one column where I lauded Masao Inoue for the one good match he’s had in his life, he isn’t in the same hemisphere as a Budokan headliner. A day after becoming number one contender Inoue was in the opener *and he belonged in it*. His non-title match with Rikio at the show I saw in August was third from the top at Korakuen and that was only by default because it was the champ in singles action. Eight months later, in a venue eight times larger and with arguably a weaker card around it? Huh?
Maybe that’s what gets me even more: this is the weakest undercard since perhaps the March ’03 show, which had Misawa vs Kobashi and could afford to have no support. Kobashi vs Marufuji simply doesn’t work. Misawa/Ogawa vs Suzuki/SUWA could be fun but has no build, no particular implications and isn’t like the Tenryu or Ohtani tags from last year where it was a quasi-dream match. The proposed tag title match was scrapped in favor of the aforementioned Kobashi squash (or fluke Marufuji win?) and yet another random 6-man. Oh wait, there’s KENTA in an anticlimactic-to-the-hilt title defense against Toryumon X underachiever Taiji Ishimori. You can blame Akiyama for Inoue in the main event but that’s just one match.
There’s no good reason for Misawa to stop bringing in Sasaki for big shows, and unless Uei pulled Shibata, that should have continued as well. Beyond that, the native talent is being wasted to an absurd degree. It’s beyond belief that things could get so bad in the five and a half months since the ‘Taue Wins’ Budokan show. And barely-mobile Taue getting the belt wasn’t even a factor in things getting bad!
Now, obviously NOAH will out-draw Dragon Gate. NOAH might even claim a sellout, though anyone with an ounce of sense will take that with a Morishima-sized block of salt. But there’s little doubt in my mind that Dragon Gate will come closer to a legit sellout, and even less doubt that Dragon Gate will be the better show. We could wind up with a unique situation of NOAH getting bad press and Dragon Gate getting a boost of good press due to the inevitable comparisons. On one hand, a pointless main event. On the other hand, a main event between wrestlers viewed as on-the-rise and popular with the fans, one with a backstory and short-term momentum. On one hand, stodgy heavyweight wrestling. On the other, dynamic, fast-paced junior-heavyweights. I doubt my views are the least bit unique in Japan and we’ll find out just how widespread they are come Sunday. I know who I’m rooting for.
If only Akiyama had gone with IZU in the tournament. I mean it was right there!
