wrestling / Columns
Into the Indies 12.28.10: The Top News Stories of 2010! (Part 1)
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Into the Indies, the column that isn’t above cliches.
As you’re all very much aware, the year 2010 is getting ready to come to a close. In fact, less than seven days from today’s date, the new year will be in full effect. When the year comes to a close, pop culture websites like this one fall all over themselves in order to do year in review columns. For a period of my time covering professional wrestling, I struggled NOT to do a year in review column, because I felt that they were horribly overdone. However, as time wore on, I saw why writers decided to do these year in review columns. There are two reasons: 1) if you tend to do them correctly, they’re easier to put together than what you normally write and 2) more often than not, with Christmas and New Year’s Eve landing at the end of the year, you’re going to need to write something easier than your standard fare. As a result, I now bring to you my year in review column. I now bring to you . . .
I2I’S TOP TEN JAPANESE INDY STORIES OF 2010~!
Because, if I’m going to work a cliche and do a year end column, I’m going to go all the way with the cliches and make it a countdown as well.
In any event, even though business as a whole is down for professional wrestling in 2010, it seems like the majority of Japanese independents have found a way to hold on to life and create products which continue to entertain the relatively small number of fans that are still turning out to see them (present company included). In short, though there aren’t a lot of people following it, the people who are enjoy it a good deal and are treated to a large number of newsworthy events. We are here to recap the most entertaining and/or newsworthy of those events, with the first five today and the next five coming next week. Also, in a rarity for this column, we’ve got lovely, streaming VIDEO~! to accompany each entry in the countdown. Without further adieu, here are the Top Ten Stories of 2010.
Over the past couple of years, there has been an interesting phenomenon in Japanese professional wrestling. Companies who are not involved in the wrestling business have, on more than one occasion now, decided to put on their own professional wrestling shows with whatever talent is available and with a theme to the show that is used to promote their products. As a result, we’ve seen things like wrestlers acting out scenes from video games in the ring or pretending to be live-action M.U.S.C.L.E. characters. Slightly less outlandish was a show produced on February 28, 2010 by a company named Glico to promote their “Power Production” line of bodybuilding supplements. Featuring talent from both All Japan Pro Wrestling and New Japan Pro Wrestling as well as several independent grapplers, the card was certainly an interesting one and even got its own hour long television time slot. The part of the show that captivated wrestling fans’ imaginations more than any other, though, was a certain trio that appeared in the main event slot. Former sumo wrestlers and rather, um, large men Akebono, Ryota Hama, and Yutaka Yoshie teamed up and donned special gear and facepaint to become the LARD WARRIORS~!, a parody of the Road Warriors which replaced massive muscles with morbid obesity. Bono Warrior, Pork Warrior, and Pink Warrior went toe-to-toe with Keiji Mutoh, Hiroshi Tanahashi, and the masked Power Pro Kamen (current IWPG Champion Satoshi Kojima). Though they came up short in the match, the Lard Warriors captured the imagination of independent wrestling fans and have the kind of cult gimmick that will result in them being discussed for years to come.
If you want proof, look no further than the below Lard Warriors music video generated by YouTube user ddevil or take a look at I2I’s full review of the show.
Big Japan Wresting (formerly Big Japan Pro Wrestling) was founded in March 1995 by wrestlers Shinya Kojika and Kendo Nagasaki. At the time BJW was formed, deathmatch wrestling was insanely popular in the country. It was first established as a force in puroresu by Frontier Martial Arts Wrestling (FMW), and, as the years marched on, there were many competing promotions formed specializing in the genre, including Shin-FMW, IWA Japan, and W*ING. However, virtually all of these FMW spinoffs burnt out and faded away on a major level after only a few months, and even the originator, FMW itself, fell by the wayside in 2002. However, for some reason, Big Japan was able to not only survive but flourish, and as a result it is currently THE Japanese promotion to go to if you want deathmatch wrestling, and it has been for the last decade and a half. The company celebrated their fifteenth year on May 4 of this year, hosting an anniversary show which was praised by critics as a very strong top-to-bottom show entitled “DEATH & CRAZY THAT’S THE WAY OF THE BJ WORLD.” (You have to love it when Japanese companies title anything with English phrases.) The promotion pulled out all of the stops, bringing in numerous guest stars from the company’s past, including Tajiri, Minoru Fujita, Necro Butcher, and CZW wrestlers Nick Gage and DJ Hyde. Though the special guests were a nice addition, it was the company’s current roster that was featured most prominently, including a fun tag match involving the stars of the company’s hard-hitting, non-deathmatch “Strong BJ” division as well as a traditional BJW deathmatch in the main event pitting Ryuji Ito and Yuko Miyamoto against one another with over 200 light tubes surrounding the ring. It was a hell of a night, BJW has had a hell of a run, and hopefully things stay that way for at least fifteen more years.
Not familiar with the out of control action that Big Japan regularly showcases? Look no further than the video below, which is the retrospective package that opened the anniversary show when it ran on television.
On numerous occasions in this column, I have talked about Muenori Sawa as being a wrestler who has the potential to become one of the greatest junior heavyweights in the sport, at any level. In addition to doing some of the standard high flying associated with smaller grapplers, he also has a strong background in shoot-style wrestling picked up during his time in BattlArts. In 2010, Sawa continued to demonstrate that he is a master of serious, bell-to-bell professional wrestling in companies like ZERO1 and heading overseas for EVOLVE. However, one of the things that really stood about him in 2010 was not his ability to be a professional wrestler but rather his ability to be a sports entertainer. Though that phrase is often scoffed at by American fans who follow Japanese wrestling, the fact is that under the right circumstances some good, old fashioned SE can be just as entertaining as a forty minute workrate-fest of a match, just in a different way. Sawa wasn’t a stranger to the lighter side of pro wrestling coming into this year. In fact, his transvestite character Lingerie Mutoh had already become a cult favorite several years ago. However, it was this year in which Sawa proved that he could be a sports entertainer under his own name and his regular gimmick, as was displayed in his excellent run as one-half of the KO-D Tag Team Champions with Sanshiro Takagi in DDT, the promotion that Tagaki has run for over a decade. The two had a series of wild title defenses, including a series of three bouts in virtually unknown independent groups (one of them, which is featured in the video below, practically being a backyard promotion) that were featured on DDT’s television show and review here in I2I. On top of that, they had numerous title bouts in settings other than traditional wrestling rings, including matches in ancient ruins, ski resorts, shopping malls, and factories. Though their title reign has come to an end and the KO-D Tag straps have passed on to other tandems who have had more traditional runs with them, Takagi and Sawa’s time with the belts was one of the most entertaining title reigns of the year and definitely one to go back and watch if you missed it.
In addition to the aforementioned fact that I’m a Sawa supporter, I’ve also made no bones about the fact that I’m quite entertained by SMASH, a wrestling promotion which ran its first show on March 26, 2010 and has come back every month or two since. SMASH hasn’t exactly been the best drawing indy in the country or one that has gained high levels of critical acclaim, but it is a show which consistently sells out the smaller venues that it runs and put together shows that are, more often than not, consistently entertaining from top to bottom. One of my favorite aspects of SMASH is that it gives opportunities to wrestlers who aren’t necessarily going to get them in other places. Wrestlers from outside of Japan who don’t have much international experience are given the opportunity to showcase their skills against Japanese competitors and potentially earn permanent roster spots in “World Tryout Matches.” Canadian indy wrestler Mentallo has been the biggest beneficiary of that system, wrestling against the likes of El Samurai and Jushin Liger in showcase bouts this year. Old wrestlers who haven’t received attention in years are allowed to step back into the spotlight through “World Legend Revival” matches, one of which recently gave the seventy-seven year old Gypsy Joe the chance to show that he still has something to contribute to the wrestling industry. In addition to introducing those concepts, SMASH has also done a great deal to help preserve women’s professional wrestling, which has slowly been dying in Japan and is now relying more than ever on showcase matches on what are otherwise “men’s shows” in order to survive. Finally, perhaps the individuals given the biggest opportunity by SMASH are the young wrestlers who have called it their home promotion for the majority of their careers. KUSHIDA, Hajime Ohara, Lin Bairon, and Shuri, all of whom in some ways have become proteges of SMASH booker Tajiri, are the real focal points of the company, and all of them have developed since the promotion started to the point that they can be taken seriously as high level wrestlers, both in SMASH and elsewhere. (KUSHIDA, for example, regularly pops up as a guest on New Japan shows and Shuri has appeared on cards for traditional joshi promotions.) Of course, in order to give all of these people opportunities, SMASH needs a core group of veterans for them to play off of, and that role is filled by the likes of Tajiri, AKIRA, TAKA Michinoku, and Akira Shoji. Though there are some occasional misfires caused by the fact that there are wrestlers without high level experience on the cards, more often than not SMASH puts out an intriguing product.
For an example of what the promotion is doing, take a look at this highlight reel that they produced for SMASH.7, featuring Mentallo going up against Kenny Omega, Shuri & Lin Bairon teaming up to take on Toshie Uematsu & Tomoka Nakagawa, and TAKA Michinoku breaking in SMASH rookie Yusuke Kodama.
As I mentioned in the above write-up on SMASH, things are rough for women’s professional wrestling in Japan. It used to be that promotions featuring exclusively women’s matches would be just as popular as, if not more popular than, the traditional men’s promotions. However, in the early part of this decade, the bottom fell out of the women’s professional wrestling market in a big way. The biggest companies of the joshi puroresu golden age went out of business, and the ones who did moderately well after succeeding them started to play to smaller and smaller crowds until only a few hundred fans were showing up. There are still talented women’s wrestlers out there, and the shows that current joshi groups like JWP, NEO, and WAVE are promoting are, more often than not, entertaining. However, because of the low attendance, the wrestlers on the shows aren’t exactly raking in the big bucks, so some of the more enterprising wrestlers have been looking for other opportunities. This search for other opportunities lead to a group of four young female wrestlers from Japan making their North American debuts in April 2010. They were Ayumi Kurihara, the high flyer with the inspirational comeback story, Misaki Ohata, the undersized underdog with a bevy of submission holds at her disposal, Tomoka Nakagawa, the super heel with the blinding water mist, and Hiroyo Matsumoto, the powerhouse with heel tactics who is so darn personable that you’ll cheer her on even when she’s gouging another babyface’s eyes. The first trip by the joshi fab four was a joint venture between SHIMMER and Jersey All Pro Wrestling, with the crew first competing on the tapings for Volumes 29 through 32 of SHIMMER’s DVD series and then shipping off to Jersey for a series of matches on JAPW show. Three of the four wrestlers (Matsumoto was unavailable) then returned to SHIMMER in in September, wrestling matches taped for Volumes 33 through 36. Meanwhile, both Kurihara and Nakagawa travelled south of the border to Mexico where both of them obtained numerous bookings and Ayumi in particular was well-received by the locals. The marriage between these four young Japanese wrestlers and SHIMMER has been a great one, as it has resulted in several of the best women’s matches to take place in the United States in 2010 which also happen to be some of the best matches involving female Japanese wrestlers to take place in 2010.
If you’re interested in seeing any of the four women in action, I’ve included highlights of each one in the videos below. If you like what you see, you can then head on over to ROHwrestling.com to purchase any of the volumes of the SHIMMER DVD series where the Japanese ladies are featured and then to the official SHIMMER forums where you can find all of the details on how to see SHIMMER live at their next tapings, which are taking place on March 26 and 27 in Chicagoland.
And that concludes the first half of our look at the top indy wrestling news stories to come out of Japan in 2010. Be sure to come back next week for stories five through one!
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