In news that has been kept secretive in Japan until the past week, Yoshihiro Takayama, 50, one of the biggest names in Japanese pro wrestling and MMA circles of the past two decades, has been paralyzed from the neck down for the past three months.
Takayama’s injury, described a cervical spinal cord injury due to degenerative cervical spondytosis, took place at a 5/4 match in Osaka for the DDT promotion where, after going for a simple sunset flip in his match with Yasu Urano, he landed on his head and was motionless. The match, which he was supposed to win to set up a challenge for the KO-D singles belt, the top title in the promotion, was stopped immediately and he was rushed to the hospital.
It was only said at the time that he would be out of action for some time and that he and Danshoku Dino would have to vacate their tag team titles.
When Kazushi Sakuraba was in Las Vegas and accepted his UFC Hall of Fame induction, Sakuraba asked that a prayer for Takayama be included in his speech three weeks ago. Sakuraba, who broke into pro wrestling a couple of years after Takayama with the old UWFI promotion, didn’t elaborate on the extent of the injuries, but it was clear the situation was serious.
While it was a basic move that caused it, the belief is that all the years of punishment from a very hard style of pro wrestling, and from fighting, had led to the degenerative spine issues.
Takayama has remained in an Osaka hospital since the match. His wife got an apartment in Osaka to take care of him. His son, Yoshihiro Takayama Jr., has been in Osaka all summer also helping out during school vacation, and is thinking of moving there permanently as well.
Takayama has remained bedridden, and has not even been able to be transferred to a wheelchair.
Those in Japan have noted that one of the reasons the news was kept quiet in the country is because of the amount of respect people have for him.
“He is a real good man and a very special human being,” noted one person who was among those familiar with his condition.
Sakuraba and others who started with him are starting to work on fund raisers.
Takayama had a 25-year career in pro wrestling, best known for his Pride fight with Don Frye, which is considered by many as the single greatest brawl in MMA history. He was already a pro wrestling headliner before the fight, and even though he lost, the fight took him to a new level. He is one of only two men in history to have held the three major singles titles in modern Japanese wrestling history, the IWGP heavyweight, the Triple Crown and the GHC heavyweight (the other being Kensuke Sasaki).
As a free agent, he had great pro wrestling matches with the top stars of several different promotions and in 2003 was named MVP of pro wrestling by Tokyo Sports. The prior year, he had placed second in the same voting to Bob Sapp, which, three weeks after the results were announced, led to a New Year’s Eve MMA fight between the top two place winners of Japan’s biggest pro wrestler of the year award, on New Year’s Eve at the Saitama Super Arena, which Sapp won via armbar in 2:10.
Takayama was very well remembered for his unique size and look. He was 6-foot-5 1/4, tall for a Japanese athlete, and his weight varied from 260 to probably around 300 pounds with a large belly. He always had bleached blonde hair and a face that showed bruises easily, which helped get over the brutality of both his fights and wrestling matches.
He was not a good fighter at all, in fact he never won a legit fight, and not really a smooth pro wrestler either, but he had the ability with his face, size, taking punishment and the way he carried himself, to get fans into his matches and have a true superstar aura.
He also improved rapidly as a performer. Takayama started his career in 1992 with the UWFI. He was notable because he was so much bigger than the other Japanese wrestlers in the promotion, but was not at all smooth in the ring nor a good wrestler. In 1995 and 1996, as the UWFI started having financial issues, he joined with Yoji Anjo and Kenichi Yamamoto to form a heel stable called The Golden Cups in New Japan and later WAR. Later they became a masked trio called the 200% Machines, a spoof on a generation earlier when Andre the Giant & Bill Eadie formed the masked tag team of Giant Machine & Super Machine, and they were popular enough that they even performed as a pop band and released an album.
When UWFI, and then its lower-profile successor group, Kingdom, collapsed, Giant Baba signed Takayama, largely because of his size. All Japan had the best main events and pro wrestlers in the world during that era, like Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, Vader, Toshiaki Kawada and others, and put him in a group with Gary Albright and Takao Omori as the Triangle of Power. Takayama at first stood out in a negative way, as probably the worst wrestler on the roster. But he found himself and had one of the greatest career improvements in history, from a genuine bottom level worker to someone who had great matches often. By 1999, his tag team with Omori, called No Fear, was one of the most popular teams in Japan, both with All Japan and later he left All Japan for Pro Wrestling NOAH.
Because of his pro wrestling stardom, size and background in UWFI, where everyone was trained in shooting, he was recruited by Pride for a high profile battle of pro wrestlers on May 27, 2001, at the Yokohama Arena against Kazuyuki Fujita, a national amateur wrestling champion who had been recruited by New Japan Pro Wrestling and at the time was a prelim wrestler. While Takayama, a main eventer, lost to the prelim wrestler in the shoot, his MMA losses unlike with others, because of the excitement of the matches, only served to make him a bigger star with his unique look. He did television commercials and was one of the most recognizable pro wrestlers and fighters of the time.
The fight with Frye was on June 23, 2002, at the Saitama Super Arena, where the two went out and just pummeled each other with punches for six minutes straight until Takayama finally went down. To this day, the pro wrestling spot popularized in Japan and later used on indie shots and for a while in WWE (Kevin Owens has done it frequently in his matches) where the stand and throw windmill punches with your opponent at the same time has been known as the “Frye-Takayama spot.” Not only did it win almost every Fight of the Year award, every super brawl in a UFC fight for more than a decade was always compared to Frye vs. Takayama.
In years past, at the UFC Fan Expo’s, it was the only fight that when put on the screens at the expo, would, after about 30 seconds, result in most people stopping what they were doing and becoming enthralled with it. In the movie “Here Comes the Boom,” where Kevin James played a school teacher trying to earn money for the school by fighting in UFC, when his fight turned into a crazy brawl, Joe Rogan, playing himself, compared it to the legendary Frye/Takayama fight. While there were bigger fights, such as Fedor Emelianenko vs. Mirko Cro Cop as far as significance to the sport, in Japan, Frye vs. Takayama is probably the second most famous Pride fight in history, behind only Royce Gracie vs. Sakuraba. In 2005, a movie called “Nagurimono: Love and Kill,” was released in Japan by Dream Stage Pictures (essentially the attempt by Pride to do what WWE Films has attempted to do), set in the 1860s, using a lot of Pride fighters, including a movie fight scene with Frye and Takayama that attempted to duplicate their fight. He had minor parts in six other movies.
In 2002, he had both the MMA Fight of the Year with Frye, as well as winning the media voted Tokyo Sports pro wrestling match of the year in an IWGP title match with Yuji Nagata, and placed second to Sapp, whose mainstream popularity was unprecedented for almost any foreigner, in the MVP balloting.
After his loss to Sapp on the highly rated 2002 New Year’s Eve special, due to medical issues from his beatings in the Frye, Semmy Schilt and Fujita fights in particular, Takayama was no longer allowed to fight in MMA. While it is listed that Takayama had a 1-4 MMA record, that wouldn’t include legitimate shoots such as a loss to Kimo Leopoldo when he was in UWFI, and for some reason includes a 2013 win in a pro wrestling match with Hikaru Sato on a U-Spirit show, a UWFI remake show, which was obviously a pro wrestling match.
He continued to be a major pro wrestling star, often teaming with Minoru Suzuki as an independent tag team that would go from promotion to promotion. The two were IWGP tag team champions, having won the titles from Hiroyoshi Tenzan & Osamu Nishimura on February 1, 2004, when he suffered a stroke after a controversial match in the G-1 Climax tournament with Sasaki.
The level of brutality in that match is far beyond even what was done during the hardest style of 1990s All Japan, or anything done today.
While out of action, Takayama delivered the memorable line while announcing a July 18, 2005, match at the Tokyo Dome between Sasaki and Kobashi, as the two were exchanging chops for two minutes while the sellout crowd was going crazy, saying “I hope this never ends.”
Takayama returned after being out of action for nearly two years later, on a July 16, 2006, show at Budokan Hall, teaming with Sasaki against Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama before a sellout of 16,500 fans. Sasaki was a late replacement for Kobashi, who was diagnosed shortly before the match with kidney cancer. The idea was that Takayama would return by teaming with Kobashi, who he had many famous encounters with including a classic Budokan Hall tile match. But when that wasn’t possible, Sasaki, the wrestler he faced in the brutal match that likely caused the stroke, was made his tag team partner. Akiyama pinned Takayama with the mentality that a wrestler, in his first match back after a stroke, should do the job when put in with the top active stars at the time.
The stroke somewhat changed his facial features, and mostly worked comedy matches, although he did get some big matches because of his name value . He was no longer a great worker, although he was part of the December 2, 2007 Tokyo Sports match of the year, teaming with Kobashi against Mitsuharu Misawa & Jun Akiyama. But that was more because it was Kobashi’s return after kidney cancer that generated incredible interest and emotion in Japan for that reason as opposed to the type of match that people today would view as a match of the year. Kobashi was pinned, with the idea that in reality Kobashi shouldn’t have been able to return from cancer and hang with this level of company, at 27:07 before an overstuffed Budokan Hall with standing room everywhere and 19,000 fans, the largest crowd for any entertainment event in the history of the arena.
The match did get over and people viewed it as Takayama, Kobashi and Misawa, all past their primes due to the accumulation of injuries and all three probably should have already ended all of their careers previously. But instead, they were in a high-profile Budokan Hall record breaking main event and generating incredible emotion.
But all three are cautionary tales. Japanese pro wrestling did tone down, cutting way back and frowning on the head dropping in the wake of all the injuries and the later death of Misawa. Kobashi’s early retirement was due more to knee problems from doing so much, and then elbow problems from delivering so many hard chops to compensate for limitations later in his career, although the cancer may not have been punishment and injury related.
In pro wrestling, Takayama was willing to take ridiculous head punishment, because his face bruised easily and thus it made for a more dramatic and realistic presentation. In fighting, he also took similar punishment because he was not a good fighter, and had limited defense, but was incredibly tough and could take it. This came during an era where people didn’t know just how damaging repeated hard head blows were, and thankfully, while there are more high risk spots done, the type of punishment to the head that Takayama took regularly in his big matches is not repeated today.
Some may want to dismiss all this, noting that he landed on his head messing up a simple sunset flip spot. But it’s hard to believe that all the previous punishment didn’t play a major effect in what happened.
@Honga Ciganesta how you been breh?
Glad this thread is still going strong, I remember years back it was me, you and a couple of others in here. Talking about NOAH's terrible attendances. 
Think it was around a G1 I started it too and now that has it's own dedicated thread. Any AJPW or BJW from the summer you'd recommend? Or any of your write ups in here you can link?
at Eddie fukking Edwards being the next challenger. He might win the belt too 
I fully expect Akiyama to create his own promotion 5 years from now and takes a lot of All Japan's roster once he either sells the company or gets mad at someone 
