Essential Japanese Wrestling Discussion/News

[The Rainmaker]

What the hell happened, Fale?

 

[The Rainmaker]

(Ultimo) Dragon Lee

 

[krackdagawd]

(Ultimo) Dragon Lee

We comin for that get back

 

[PlayerNinety_Nine]

Red Shoes really letting his son face Suzuki Gun with only Nagata and Kojima for back up

It was funny as hell seeing what looked like families in the crowd with Suzuki Gun merch like "This is a Lonely Warrior household ".

Probably have a Frank Gotch shrine in the crib too :misuz:

I still dig the fact that all of Ishii's feuds seem to start after matches like

"...........Aight - we're beefing now"

Dude is backstage talking to his next opponent like "Real talk - I know what Gedo said. But I'm telling you - fukk the storylines, b. I'll get in your grill after the bell - boom - see you at the PPV, ani"

 

[desp]

Taka's starting a new promotion, Just Tap Out



Hope it's shoot style Bring in everyone from Bloodsport

 

[desp]

Sekimoto vs. Okabayashi @Jmare007

 

[The Prince of All Saiyans]

Taka's starting a new promotion, Just Tap Out



Hope it's shoot style Bring in everyone from Bloodsport

impressive

 

[PlayerNinety_Nine]

Taka's starting a new promotion, Just Tap Out



Hope it's shoot style Bring in everyone from Bloodsport

Get ready for that ZSJ inaugural title run

 

[stro]

I really don't get Japan sometimes. Taka drops out/is kicked out of Kaientai Dojo due to a cheating scandal, as it disgraced both his and the company's name. K-Dojo rebrands, Taka immediately starts up a new promotion...so, seems like nothing was accomplished with the name change and getting rid of Taka.

 

[Jmare007]

Sekimoto vs. Okabayashi @Jmare007

Yokohama doesn't deserve the yearly piff Big Japan books for Endless Survivor ever year. One of the worst crowds in Japan

 

[krackdagawd]

Rewatching Ibushi vs ishii from last year g1 low key gave me ishii Shibata vibes .....they should have let Ibushi win it last yesr and have him kill Omega at the dome man

 

[stro]

KENTA has finally been announced for his first post WWE appearance.....and it's at Game Changer Wrestling's death match tournament in June in New Jersey

 

[The Rainmaker]

KENTA has finally been announced for his first post WWE appearance.....and it's at Game Changer Wrestling's death match tournament in June in New Jersey

You got me scared there Thought he was going to get hit by a thousand lighttubes, but it's just an "special appearance"

 

[Jmare007]

Will Janela book Kasai again?

Will the US let Kasai enter the country again?

Will Kasai be able to leave the U.S without getting arrested for the crazy shyt he would pull off in that ring again?

 

[Honga Ciganesta]

Inoki-ism running wild in the classic Observers. Ogawa was such an a$$hole Made mincemeat out of Hash and then just embarrasses Choshu the Elderly.

They had a one match show. And the match didn't deliver.

That was the story about the New Japan return to the Fukuoka Dome on 5/5, which on a national holiday week, drew about 25,000 fans (announced as a face-saving 35,000) in the 70,000-seat stadium. The line-up was ordinary, with the exception of the main event, promising the long-awaited first meeting of Riki Choshu and Naoya Ogawa, in a tag team situation, where the goal should have been to tease a few quick spots, let their partners do the bulk of the work, and bring it back on 7/20 at the Sapporo Dome in a singles match.

Result. Something so bad that the next day the national sports newspapers ran front page stories talking about how bad the match was and that Choshu should retire. We even received reports that this match was so bad it could be a strong candidate for Worst Match of the Year.

The card, which aired as a two-hour prime-time television special based on the match, had great TV and magazine build up for the match. Everything was built around Choshu and Ogawa, as if they were doing a singles match, with partners Manabu Nakanishi and Kazunari Murakami ignored.

Airing on a few hour tape delay in prime time that evening from 7-9 p.m. on TV-Asahi, the show drew a 12.3 rating, a number that is a success but in some ways is misleading. Most of the show actually didn't do that well except for the main event, which pulled in a remarkable 21.1 rating and 29.5 million viewers, which will likely be the largest audience for a pro wrestling match anywhere in the world this year. The main event beat out the Yomiuri Giants baseball game which aired live head-to-head, which was also considered amazing because the Giants are basically Japan's national baseball team and it's considered impossible for a competing sporting event to outdraw them on television. It would be the equivalent of a Raw match outdrawing Monday Night Football for a quarter hour, actually even bigger because baseball in Japan is bigger than football in the U.S. and the Giants, who are basically the country's national team, like the equivalent of a Dallas Cowboys in Dallas but national, are much bigger than Monday Night Football. And Raw has never come close to beating MNF, even for a quarter hour.

Ogawa is clearly the biggest mainstream star in the genre, as the three biggest TV ratings of the past 13 months for big matches on television have been the 24.0 that his match in April of 2000 against Shinya Hashimoto did, this match, and an 18.7 that a tape of his match with Masaaki Satake from Pride with the judo vs. karate world champion hype drew. The strong numbers improved the odds that TV-Asahi will put New Japan's 7/20 Sapporo Dome and 10/8 Tokyo Domes on in prime time after some disappointment from the network standpoint (there shouldn't have been if they'd be paying attention to wrestling) with the 10.7 rating of the Osaka Dome show on 4/9. There's also an important point these ratings show about the Japanese market. Whether something is a work or a shoot may be important to hardcore fans and it is super important to insiders who want to know the real story. But to the casual mass audience, it is personalities and the ability to suspend disbelief that is the big draw. Deep down, everyone knew Ogawa vs. Hashimoto was going to be a work because the poll that was taken on the air, which showed the majority thought Hashimoto would win (since it was "his turn to win" if you think like a wrestling fan who knows it's a work as opposed to someone who thought it was real) even though Ogawa cleaned his clock at every prior opportunity because that's what happens in storytelling pro wrestling. But that was a bigger match than the Satake match, which, while it was also a work, to this day, virtually nobody in the general public is aware of it and even many insiders are in denial of it. The Choshu match, even though Choshu is nearly 50, because Choshu is a pro wrestling legend a generation of fans have seen, going against the current hot star, even though it was a tag and New Japan itself is in a cold period, still drew a huge TV audience.

The match contained almost no wrestling. Mostly standing and stalling. Ogawa and Choshu would eye each other, threw some half-hearted jobs, slaps and kicks, lock up, end up in the corner, and tag out. Nakanishi and Murakami did no better. Standing, circling, teasing a big explosion, and then doing nothing.

In a great example of Booking 101 after this travesty, Ogawa, tried to "save" it by saying Choshu isn't any good and it's unnecessary to do the planned singles match. Ogawa said his next match would be on the Zero-One show on 6/14 in Osaka and he had no opponents in New Japan, while New Japan President Tatsumi Fujinami claimed that they weren't going to use Ogawa anymore in New Japan, that the proposed Ogawa vs. Choshu singles match wouldn't take place and that the company was going to go in a different direction. After all the bad newspaper press, Choshu publicly admitted the match wasn't any good. However, the marketing department of New Japan is said to be adamant that they won't be able to run successful Dome shows as far as selling tickets or drawing a competitive prime time number on 7/20 or 10/8 without Ogawa. It is said New Japan management after a meeting on 5/7 was deadlocked on the issue of allowing Ogawa back. Keep in mind that with Antonio Inoki involved with the booking, probably most of this is all his idea of a believable storyline as opposed to actual news. The story they were trying to get across, and failed, is that Choshu wanted to test Ogawa in a wrestling match, while Ogawa wanted a street fight.

Before the match started, Ogawa & Murakami came out with Tatsuhito Takaiwa and Naohiro Hoshikawa of the Zero-One promotion, along with a man in a white mask (Shinya Hashimoto).

Ogawa took Choshu down immediately and went for a choke after punches from the mount. Choshu looked trapped and a lot of fans thought the match wasn't going to last 30 seconds,but Nakanishi made the save. Choshu got a comeback later but it ended with a rope break. When Ogawa and Choshu were going at it again, Nakanishi used a chicken wing submission on Murakami in 9:07 to end the match.

After viewing a tape of what was the disaster of a main event on the New Japan 5/5 show at the Fukuoka Dome, it was total unprofessional conduct that ruined what had been a good show.

What it appeared from the tape is that in the Naoya Ogawa & Kazunari Murakami vs. Riki Choshu & Manabu Nakanishi match, that either Ogawa & Murakami were advised by someone, or decided themselves, that since they were doing the job, they were going to ruin the match. Both men were uncooperative in selling or making the match, making New Japan's legend and biggest major show draw, and its "enforcer" current star and the company itself, look weak at the least opportune time. It was made worse because more people saw this match then all but one pro wrestling match in Japan over the past several years due to the monster rating (nearly 30 million viewers) for the match itself. In a sense, it was similar to Bruiser Brody at his worst, amplified many times because of the audience and actually made worse because there was a finish that looked so bad to end it.

The match ruined what, at least on television, had been a pretty good show and had to leave virtually every viewer letdown after a great job throughout the show of hyping Choshu vs. Ogawa, which had no payoff. Choshu looked old out there, particularly since in the build-up on TV, they were showing clips of him which went back to the early 70s. They went in with two spots, a spot where Ogawa, who was a silver medalist in judo in the 1992 Olympics, immediately got Choshu's back and went for a choke and a rope break, and later, Choshu, who wrestled in the 1972 Olympics, getting a takedown and doing a quick ride. The heat was great for all this so people would have made an average match seem awesome because of the interest and intensity level going in from the angles and personalities. At this point, Murakami tagged in. Murakami, who has done a lot of shootfighting, refused to sell for Nakanishi and kept throwing jabs and slaps standing. Nakanishi, with a wrestling background (1992 Olympics), but out of competition for nine years, looked foolish because he had no striking background or hand speed to block, and was flat footed in what wasn't exactly a shoot, but wasn't a cooperative work either. Murakami wouldn't allow him to take him down and Nakanishi didn't know what to do. If it was Antonio Inoki's idea to put something like this, which "doesn't look right," together as a way to help a struggling wrestling business by trying to make people think it's real, I think it backfired because all it did was make people not want to see Ogawa & Murakami because their matches are bad, and at the same time think Choshu & Nakanishi really aren't tough at all, which is not how Japanese fans want to think of New Japan main eventers. You almost would have to see the match to see how bad for business it was, because New Japan as a company looked impotent. With the exception of Ric Flair at the end of his career in that Kevin Nash angle, I've never seen a situation where a legitimate national wrestling legend was upstaged to look so bad, particularly when he was the key in drawing the audience. No wonder newspapers, with no apparent understanding of what professionalism in the ring is, said Choshu should retire, because that was, "if it was real," how it would look to an outsider. Even when Choshu would throw stiff but worked blows on Ogawa, he laughed them off and dared Choshu to do something about it. Choshu was blown up on his feet chasing Ogawa, who slapped him around by embarrassing him, but never hurting him physically. Then, Murakami so obviously let Nakanishi get him down and do the planned hammerlock submission in 9:07. There may be worse matches held in pro wrestling this year, but I doubt there will be one match of such high profile that will do as much damage as far as killing angles and future business. -*

The huge rating and poor match which buried the company's top draws led to different feelings among everyone in power, from the New Japan booking team, the business executives, the wrestlers and the TV network. Everyone acknowledges Ogawa as the key to the huge ratings. The wrestlers and booking team are negative on him because he was unprofessional. The business people are more positive, because he's a ticket seller and also because of pressure from TV-Asahi, who has kind of sided with Ogawa, since he draws ratings, rather than acknowledge he put on a terrible show which will hurt long-term business. TV-Asahi has indicated as long as Ogawa works the main events, they will continue to broadcast the Dome shows in prime time.

I watched Misawa/Rikio vs Ogawa/Murakami from the second Zero One show which took place around this time frame. It's such a fukking great 10 minutes (including the post match brawl). The tiny Ogawa/Misawa interactions are so good, so much hate and a molten crowd. I can't hate Ogawa

This is a really fun few minutes too. Lots of slick matwork and it has a top 5 shoot headbutt of all time (Otsuka has around three of those).