Hiroshi Tanahashi Recalls Getting Slapped By Antonio Inoki in 2002, Issues With Inoki At The Time

In the latest Aces High, Hiroshi Tanahashi looked back on the famous moment when he and others had a tense confrontation with Antonio Inoki during a 2002 NJPW show. At the time, Inoki was in charge of NJPW and his vision for the company was very unpopular. Masahiro Chono called out Inoki in front of the crowd alongside Yuji Nagata, Manabu Nakanishi, Kenzo Suzuki and Tanahashi. Inoki asked each of them if they were mad and delivered slaps to them.

You can see highlights from the column below:

On saying in the segment that ‘I’m going to wrestle in an NJPW ring!’: “At least in the end, I bore those words out, but I wasn’t really thinking much at the time. Yeah, I was pissed off. Really pissed off [at Inoki]. Yeah. If I were to say how I felt I would have told him ‘this whole thing is f***ed up’. He would have said ‘who are you mad at?’ and I would have said ‘you’. But I just couldn’t be as straightforward as that. ”

On Inoki being criticized at the time for his vision for NJPW: “I don’t want to speak all that ill about my own company, but… I think in the Inoki-ist mindset that was a way of bringing new support into NJPW, but in the end it only became a negative …It was like our own boss was saying ‘don’t buy what we’re putting out, it’s s**t.'”

On Inoki questioning everyone: “So as he went down the line, he was basically saying ‘why are you telling me this?’. By the time he got to me, asking who I was mad at, I figured actually answering the question would be a losing gambit, so I figured I’d just say what I wanted to do … It was a turning point, yeah. We each took that Inoki slap and I gave him my best stare at the end.

On Inoki pushing ‘Strong Style’ at the time: “I don’t think I ever really understood what it [Strong Style] was. I think then, and now, I really just see it as just some words, branding. Marketing strategy really. A long way back, I did an interview with Inoki for Weekly Playboy magazine. I asked him just that same question, what Strong Style meant. He said ‘that? That’s just something everybody just started saying and it got carried away’ (laughs) But he was putting it out there, you know? I think if he really coined it, it would have been nice if he could take it with him when he left, really freed us from that spell of his.”