Section 1- Results
NOAH: Their Friday show in Osaka drew very poorly despite a decent card. Misawa beat Murakami, as expected. Team Awesome (Taue/SUWA) beat the Brits and Takayama/Sano beat Saito/KENTA in the two tag tournament matches.
Section 2- News
All Japan: The promotion announced that it will be making a new title (singular) to replace the three belts of the Triple Crown. Two superteams will headline the Real World Tag League. First up is the reunited TenKoji, as Tenzan gets brought in to compensate for Kojima in the G-1. Second is Mutoh & Kawada. TAKA is out with knee ligament damage.
New Japan: Stables are being fleshed out. Tenzan’s GBH crew has himself, Koshinaka, Makabe, Yano and Ishii while Chono is aligned with Nakamura, Black Strong Machine, Bernard and Tomko. Akebono has cancelled his bookings for the current tour after his mother died.
NOAH: The card for the 10/29 Budokan show was announced, and while some of the undercard matches could rock, none of them are especially notable. The rest of the tag title matches were announced. 11/17 has Rikio & Sugiura vs Morishima & Yone; 11/20 has Honda & Shiozaki against an unknown team (I’d guess one headed by Misawa or Akiyama); the winners of those two matches face off on 11/25; Team Awesome vs Takayama & Sano happens on 11/26; the finals will occur on the 12/2 tour climax in Yokohama.
Section 3- Old Botter is better than none at all
Section 4- Size matters
AJ, NJ, WAR, SWS, FMW, AJW, JWP, PWFG, UWFi, RINGS. Ten promotions who had at least one show in the ‘90s that drew 10,000 people. I could be missing some. Of those, seven managed at least 20,000 for a show. Great Sasuke didn’t lead MPro to any huge gates, but he represented them atop some important events.
AJ, NJ, NOAH, FMW, Zero-One, Wrestle-One, HUSTLE, Big Japan. Eight who did so this decade, of which two are dead, one is a comedy promotion, and two have practically no chance of doing so again. I doubt I’m missing any. Only three did better than 20,000 at least once, and two of those (AJ and NOAH) did so a mere three times combined. There’s WWE, but that is neither here nor there.
There was a time when the pro wrestling community in Japan had several aces at a time, each of whom could call himself (or herself) the best in the world with a straight face. Sometimes there wasn’t a title belt to go along with it, but the combination of a strong performance and crowd support made up for it. In those promotions the quest among the rest of the wrestlers to become an ace produced great matches, dream bouts between aces filled up domes, lesser wrestlers were elevated by proxy, and tag divisions were important enough to successfully headline major shows.
Over time the number of aces has shrunk. Not every title-holder is an ace, not every ace remains one forever, and not every promotion is capable of producing or maintaining one. At present, none of the titleholders in Japan is worthy of the ‘ace’ designation, unless you start to look to smaller promotions. That’s where the problem sets in. Ryuji Ito (Big Japan deathmatch ace), Susumu Yokosuka (Dragon Gate ace), Shinjiro Ohtani (Zero-One ace) can all put together a solid main event, but none of them are able to create the kind of big-fight atmosphere associated with Japan’s top wrestlers and best matches. Part of it is talent, part of it is style, and part of it is crowd size. Each effects the other.
Pro wrestling in Japan isn’t as lucrative as it once was. Many potential talents have been siphoned off by MMA, and others who might have gone for the money are trying their hands at safer careers. Niche promotions know their role and stick to their styles, realizing they can’t do better at traditional Japanese style than the big names. They rarely try to produce potential classic matches, and when they do it often seems forced or it simply falls short. Smaller crowds turn out for lesser wrestlers and lesser styles, meaning less heat, and less revenue to give incentive for wrestlers to work harder or become wrestlers in the first place, leading to a downward spiral.
That isn’t the case for ROH. They’re a niche promotion, but because the industry leader doesn’t have sound, high-end wrestling at its core they’re able to pull something off that the J-indies could only dream of. For ROH’s two definitive aces (Samoa Joe and Bryan Danielson), claims of being the best in the world aren’t laughable the way it is from the leaders of other small promotions. They wrestle and carry themselves in a style befitting an ace. With a strong world title to build around ROH has managed to grow its revenue, legitimacy and stroke exponentially.
Kurt Angle references wanting to wrestle Danielson, where J-indy champions are beneath even mention for their big-league counterparts. ROH gets referenced regularly by two of the four largest promotions in Japan, where any Japanese promotion is lucky for one or two references a year on WWE and TNA. ROH can appeal to hardcore wrestling fans and wrestling journalists and rightfully say that it deserves best-of-the-year awards and nominations, while Japanese independents aren’t in the same breath as big awards. I could go on, but the point is obvious, Japan and the US are different, there’s no Japanese ROH, what’s the point?
My point comes from fear. I don’t think that Japan is capable of producing an ROH-like promotion, where a ‘match of the year’ or merely ‘high-end wrestling’ feel is regularly produced in front of crowds of a few hundred in low-rent buildings. Because all signs point to a continued sharp decline in the Japanese wrestling business, and because even hardcore Japanese fans equate high-end wrestling with big-show attendance, puro gems are going to be harder and harder to find with each passing year. That is, unless the young talent can manage to get things going in the right direction.
Not that there’s any pressure on the Marufuji vs KENTA match or anything.
