Section 1- Results
All Japan: Suzuki retained over Kono. Akebono & Kea beat Suwama & Hama to win the main tag titles. They only half-filled Osaka Prefectural Gym, though it was a rather weak card.
Dragon Gate: The annual Kobe World Hall event is in the books. Yoshino beat Yamato to win the title, Shingo beat Hulk, Warriors and KnesSuka retained both tag titles. CIMA retained the Osaka Pro title. Tigers Mask beat Horiguchi to retain the lightweight title.
New Japan: Devitt retained over Aoki.
NOAH: At Saturday’s big event, Sugiura retained over Takayama, Kanemaru retained over Marufuji, Shiozaki beat Tanahashi, and Morishima beat Yoshie. They only half-filled Ariake Coliseum, which is already much smaller than Nippon Budokan, and with a reasonably loaded card that’s a very bad sign for the company. Ishimori & Marvin retained the tag titles yesterday.
Section 2- News
All Japan: They have a junior heavyweight tournament on the July/August tour. Block A includes Hayashi, Minoru and Super Crazy. Block B has Kondo, Taka and a returning Jimmy Yang. Nishimura’s political bid flopped so he’s likely to return.
Dragon Gate: CIMA and Tigers Mask will have a double title match on the 29th, a DG show. They are doing a tag league that ends at Korakuen on 8/24, with two 5-team blocks. Block A includes Kness & Yokosuka, Doi & Yoshino, and CIMA & Gamma. Block B includes Yamato & Shingo, and Mochizuki & Fujii. I’d think Yamato/Shingo is a lock for the finals, but since there are semi’s we could also get two block A teams in the final.
New Japan: Two blocks of 8 wrestlers apiece makes this year’s G-1 quite loaded. Block A features Makabe, Tanahashi, Nakanishi and Marufuji. Block B includes Nakamura, Shiozaki, Nagata, Kojima, Goto and Bernard. Finals will be on the same day as the last round-robin matches, which include Makabe vs Tanahashi, Nakamura vs Shiozaki, and Kojima vs Goto. Added to Monday’s show is Kanemoto & Samurai defending the junior tag titles against Devitt & Taguchi, with the challengers being significant favorites considering how little Samurai has done in New Japan since winning the titles. Tanahashi’s jaw got jacked by a Shiozaki moonsault but he isn’t missing any time.
NOAH: Nakamura & Gedo vs Marufuji & Aoki is added for the 24th. They’re using Ariake Coliseum again on 8/22 (yet another big show in Tokyo that month), and Sugiura will defend against Akiyama at the show.
Zero-One: Fire Festival blocks have been announced, with 5 wrestlers apiece. Block A has Ohtani, Sekimoto and Yoshie. Block B has Tanaka, Sato and Sai. They announced an ambitious 10th anniversary show on March 6th at Sumo Hall.
Section 2a- Meltzer News
All Japan: They had been avoiding Osaka Prefectural Gym. Seems likely they’ll be avoiding it again. Osaka was a weak area for All Japan since the beginning; Baba never used Osaka Castle Hall (~16,000 seats) even when the company was at its best.
Section 3- Knight Stand ~ Wasshill!?
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A very kingly article from Biscuiti.
Section 4- I Love The New Japan ‘80s Part 3: I Love Fujiwara and Masa Saito
Final Falls of Gauntlet match, New Japan May 1st 1986.
This is part of a 5-on-5 NJ vs UWF gauntlet, specifically the last two members from each team: Maeda and Fujiwara vs Fujinami and Kengo Kimura. I initially wasn’t going to post this, since it’s only part of the match, but it finished so high in the vote and this is the part that’s high-end. Fujiwara really should be in the Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame and performances like this are why. The middle of the three bouts is off-the-charts and sets up an extra-intense finalie.
Maeda & Takada vs Fujiwara & Yamazaki, tag titles, New Japan May 25th 1987.
Shoot-style doesn’t always lend itself to tags, since it discourages the usual tag match structure. This one works nicely because it’s got hard-hitting exchanges, good pacing, and… blood? Yes, blood, and used for all it’s worth.
Choshu vs Fujiwara, New Japan June 9th 1987.
Remember the time I talked about Fujiwara as a Hall of Famer? Oh right it was two matches ago. Well, here’s another awesome Fujiwara outing. Nuclear heat, big-time intensity, and a straightforward FIGHT to the end.
Bit of an oddity here, but a good one. Here we have a theme of old wrestlers (plus a young Mutoh staying loyal to Inoki) against the younger core of company headliners. Plenty of quality action, some wonderful elimination spots, and baby Mutoh gets to show what he’s made of.
Fujinami vs Choshu IWGP title, New Japan May 27th 1988.
Their rivalry resumes after a nearly five year break. Fujinami’s selling and the heat these two are able to generate makes up for a bad ‘80s finish. What’s remarkable about the six matches I’m linking here is that only one of them doesn’t have a real finish.
My #1 match for this whole deal and #3 in the voting (after the 1984 elimination match). Everyone contributes something, and it’s high-end most of the way. What makes this exceptional is Fujinami against Masa Saito. In an elimination match the year before, Saito toyed with Fujinami at the end rather than just beat him. This time a more accomplished Fujinami has the chance for revenge, but will he get it, and what will the moral of the story end up being? Saito might be an unknown Hall of Famer to many of you. Well, after this match you shouldn’t have any doubts about his worthiness.
Section 5- 20/20 Hindsight
Issue 108, May 3, 2007. “I rarely see a major show and afterwards think that it should have gotten more fan interest.†The subject of the column was how uninspired and non-strategic booking tended to be in Japan. In some companies that has changed.
I think New Japan has been remarkably steady over the last several years and hasn’t done what I would call a major unforced error since 2005 (giving Lesnar the title in his first match). Dragon Gate’s booking was at a low point of CIMA-MANIA during 2006 and 2007; it got much better since he dropped the title and the focus turned to Shingo, Doi and Yamato. All Japan’s booking has been okay; their issue is a lack of wrestlers who can do an exciting title match. NOAH’s booking… I’ve talked at length about that. Despite Japan’s struggles over the last three years, I don’t think there is THAT much the main companies could have done to help matters besides closing up in order to get consolidation. The fact that there still hasn’t been consolidation is sad but not unexpected.
Issue 109, May 17, 2007. Oh no, Inoki is back with his own promotion! He’ll start meddling again! As it turns out, IGF has been like the planet Earth: mostly harmless. Heck, the biggest thing to happen there was good: Angle beat Lesnar to win the 3rd IWGP title, then a few months later he dropped the belt to Nakamura, thus solidifying the title lineage a bit. IGF is still doing a couple shows a year and I consider it nothing more than a glorified money-laundering operation. There’s no way they come close to breaking even show-to-show.
Issue 112, August 9, 2007. TNA and ROH are taking over Japan! At the time you had TNA wrestlers in most major companies and ROH in others, ROH doing shows in Japan, Misawa heading for a title shot in ROH, etc. I went so far as to say “I expect that TNA and ROH will be at the core of puro developments indefinitely.” Wow. Way to go, me. At least I didn’t put most of my 2007 investment money into an exchange-traded fund focusing on the financial industry. OH WAIT I DID THAT TOO. *sigh*
What happened seems obvious to me. TNA wrestlers didn’t get over, most notably Kurt Angle and Samoa Joe who seemed like a perfect fit. ROH didn’t get over, either. Japanese promotions weren’t willing to invest a lot of time and money in gaijin wrestlers who fans could care less about, and thus TNA and ROH became a non-factor within a year of that column. In issue 115 I speculated that if Misawa vs Samoa Joe was a big hit, Joe could have become a big star. Instead it was a boring, low-drawing affair featuring Joe doing Japanese trademark moves to uninspired Misawa until Misawa arbitrarily decided to take it home. Joe hasn’t been invited back. As we now know, Misawa was in rough shape physically, but I maintain that by effectively using his elbow smash and focusing on strike exchanges he could have had a perfectly acceptable title reign.
Issue 118, December 6, 2007. Kobashi’s back! NOAH is saved! Or at least that’s the impression we got after watching his return match. As it turns out he was in worse shape than he let on, and most importantly he could only be effective in tags. Even tags turned out to be more than he could handle. He only lasted from spring to summer wrestling most shows of tours in 2008, and April through December (at a much lower level of work) in 2009. In all likelihood, the 2007 return match will be his last big main event.
Issue 121, January 24, 2008. I urge New Japan to do some, as the kids say, austerity budgeting. To one extent they did: they spend a lot less money flying in TNA wrestlers. To another extent they didn’t: Sumo Hall shows are still semi-regular, and they often fail to sell even half the tickets. I’m not sure what the economics are, so maybe they still make a profit with 4000 paid at a venue seating over 10000, but I know it looks bad when the company’s top matchup (Nakamura vs Tanahashi) completely flops. Can’t spin that. They’re financially stable, which I suppose is the bottom line. Two issues later I mention that New Japan’s corporate owner Yukes revealed how much it lost after buying them. While we don’t know for certain, it sure seems like Yukes hasn’t had to give New Japan substantial yen infusions since.
Issue 129, July 31, 2008. Kensuke Office had moved from All Japan to NOAH. This was fairly significant, because KO has been absolutely vital to NOAH in the ensuing two years, while All Japan could certainly use a Sasaki on its roster. The shift to NOAH seems like a long-term one.
Issue 154, August 27, 2009. Government regulation of pro wrestling in Japan, led by Hiroshi Hase! A wonderful idea, except it never happened because once Hase’s party was out of power his little program was put on the shelf. Wrestlers are still coming back early from injuries, and delaying surgeries, so not even Misawa’s in-ring death was enough to generate voluntary change among wrestlers and promotions. And if that didn’t do it then only a law can.
Issue 155, September 24, 2009. A ‘title picture’ overview, most of which panned out. I essentially predicted that Tanahashi and Nagata would be IWGP challengers in the near future. I predicted that Dragon Gate had nothing in sight to break its momentum. I predicted that DDT wouldn’t really be changed despite their Sumo Hall success. I predicted that NOAH would struggle to come up with title matches, and it has, jarringly putting the title on Sugiura and giving him no in-company defenses in the first six months of his reign. Where I fell short was my take on All Japan. Masakatsu Funaki hasn’t panned out as a draw now that he’s a regular, Takayama left, Kojima’s reign was cut short, and now both he and Mutoh are gone indefinitely. At the 2008 Champions Carnival, a star-studded tournament field led to disappointing ticket sales. How well can they possibly do for the 2011 version without some big moves or an extraordinary amount of outside help?
Issue 166, March 11th. The ‘Mongolian Pro’ thing? Turns out it was a huge joke played by some indy workers. One show in March, another in May, and the only wrestler of note so far is Takayama (who will go anywhere).
Next Time: G-1 Preview, and possibly other current events type stuff
