Puroresu History

This was a topic that I had not planned to write about for a while: not until I reached 1979 in the NJPW/Otsuka thread, by which time I would have properly contextualized it with all the years of politicking between All Japan and New Japan. But your friend and mine, Loss, will soon reach this point in his Wrestling Playlists Newsletter, and I cannot leave our brother in the lurch (or try to have him cram all the interesting details in there himself). This, as best as I know it, is the story of the 1979 Tokyo Sports show. On March 8, 1979, Giant Baba and Antonio Inoki met for a private Chinese dinner in Roppongi with Tokyo Sports editor-in-chief Noriyoshi Takaha…

My laptop may have just gone FUBAR. For the last ten days or so it's been not detecting the replacement battery I got a couple months back. I know it's still in there because the battery charge was showing up, but the computer doesn't draw power from it. This has resulted in restart loops where some fluctuation in power supply or something messes a thing up and I have to go into boot menu stuff. Now, the keyboard lights flicker when I turn it on, but no boot happens. I reinsert the battery and it goes into a preboot sequence but that crashes when it tries to initialize the battery, and we go back to the keyboard flicker loop. (Which is all that happens when I try to…

READ THIS IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE THREAD. Now that this is a proper thread, I should note that this first post covers the third interview in this series, as it was the first I acquired. The below posts cover the first and second while being substantially fleshed out with a general history of the company. (This is particularly after the first numbered post, which focuses on the business side of NJPW's first year. I eventually wish to expand this first post into multiple entries covering the year properly, with new resources that I may soon take a research break to transcribe.). As of February 2023, I have finished 1974, and have about two more years of material to cover…

The following is translated from a column in the March 1978 issue of Monthly Puroresu. Charity concert featuring Tsuruta and other vocalists Whenever he had free time during his regional tours, he would visit nursing homes and other places of comfort. Despite his appearance, Jumbo Tsuruta has a strong spirit of volunteerism. On March 1, he will hold a charity concert at the "Ruido" restaurant in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Last September, Tsuruta held a "Songs for Young People" charity concert. This will be the second time he has held such an event, but this time it will not be just for his friends. This time, he would like to invite professional singers and hol…

Gogeum sits about a mile south of the tip of the Goheung Peninsula. Its 63 square miles, bolstered by reclaimed land in the northwest, make it just a little bigger than Chicago. Kim Tae-sik was born in Gogeum in 1929, as his country sat beneath the “black umbrella” of Japanese annexation. Little of the island itself is arable, so Kim’s father farmed green laver. Although this practice has declined significantly in recent decades, it is likely that he did so using the traditional ‘racks’ method. Every year, he would have planted bamboo in the seabed. Then, he would have affixed nets to the sticks to catch floating laver seed. These nets would then be arranged in racks on t…

[This article was printed in the March 1979 issue of Monthly Puroresu. It concerns the Kido family, two of whom who became wrestlers: Tokio, whose brief career was shattered in a training accident, and Osamu, who would carry out his elder’s dream. However, it is framed as an interview with their father, Yoichiro.] PRO WRESTLING SIDE STORY - YOICHIRO KIDO’S STORY Father and mother send their two sons to the mat world The injured brother who could not recover and the younger brother who followed his wishes Do you know the name of Tokio Kido, who was an aspiring professional wrestler? He was born in Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture. He was…

I have revived my plan to write a piece on From Milo to Misawa about Kosuke Takeuchi and the legacy of Gong magazine, which will be published on May 3, the tenth anniversary of his death. In the meantime, I have decided to publish the first part of the article, which essentially covers the Monthly era of the magazine while also revealing Takeuchi's legacy as an archivist. (I've picked a few alternate photos to make this version a little unique.) ---- EARLY YEARS Left: A caricature of the first match Kosuke Takeuchi saw, published in the second-ever issue of Monthly Puroresu. It was on a summer night in 1955, on a street television in the Taito ward, t…

Ringu Yori Ai O Komete (“With Love From The Ring”) is a 1981 autobiography by Jumbo Tsuruta. At just over 200 pages, the book is an interesting snapshot of the kayfabe around the wrestler as he turned thirty. My series of posts on the 2020 biography by Kagehiro Osano already covers much of this, and for the most part I’m not going to repeat that stuff here. Think of this thread more as fun flavor text. There are six chapters, and I have transcribed all but the last, which appears to be largely poetry. (Note to Loss: This stuff is light enough that I don’t think it warrants a new thread for each post like the aforementioned bio.) Chapter One Tsuruta gives the …

The following article, rewritten for clarity and flow, was published in the March 1982 issue of Monthly Puroresu. It begins with a February 3 interview with AJPW president Mitsuo Matsune, who had recently taken Giant Baba’s chair in the network takeover of 1981, before commenting on the state of affairs in its second half. This article provides frank insight into Nippon Television’s perspective on the stagnant company. --- - It has been almost two months since you took over as president on December 14. After one tour, what is the actual situation of All Japan Pro-Wrestling from an insider’s viewpoint? Matsune: On February 1, I attended a local show for the …

This interview is from the now inactive official Japanese site for the film Rikidōzan, a 2004 Korean-Japanese co-production. I am guessing that it was conducted in early 2006. Ever since completing my Broken Crown series in December, I had been preparing a longform article about Takeuchi and the history and impact of Gong magazine. I have decided to shelve that piece, which I had planned to publish on the tenth anniversary of Takeuchi's death in May, because I am not confident that I could do the subject justice without direct interviews with ex-Gong journalists. I simply do not have the clout, the money, or the fluency to make that happen. I may cannibalize what I had wr…

The following is sourced from "大木とキムの殴りこみで"プロレス日韓戦争"開始", an article written by Seibu Kikuya and published in the November 1976 issue of Monthly Pro Wrestling, pg. 78-81. It has been rewritten and rearranged for clarity and flow. OKI AND KIM'S ASSAULT STARTS "JAPANESE-KOREAN PRO WRESTLING WAR" Kim Il (Kintaro Oki) and Kim Duk (Masanori Toguchi), the Korean master-disciple duo, are set to face Giant Baba and Jumbo Tsuruta in the final match of the AJPW Giant Series at the Kuramae Kokugikan on October 28. The catalyst for this was a written challenge from Oki, sent from Korea, for the International Tag Team titles held by Baba and Tsuruta. In summary, the lett…

[Credit to this Igapro article for most of this information.] Flagship NJPW program World Pro Wrestling entered a turbulent period in 1983. As Tiger Mask departed and unmasked in August, after he and manager Shunji Koncha had disagreed with the plans for a coup, the ratings began to fall under 20%. The UWF and Japan Pro Wrestling departures followed in 1984; the latter chunk was so devastating that TV Asahi had to hold a press conference to make it clear that World Pro Wrestling would continue. The popularity of the Machine Army and the acquisitions of Bruiser Brody, Shiro Koshinaka, and Kevin & Kerry von Erich had brought some hope, but AJPW’s return to prime ti…

Monday is the 50th anniversary of Inoki's firing from the JWA, which triggered the greatest year of change in puroresu history. I paused Pillars bio transcription to write a four-part series on the fall of the JWA (in which I call the promotion Japan Pro Wrestling, a quirk which I will explain), paralleled by the establishments of NJPW & AJPW, and I am about 85-90% done. Each part will go live on my blog every two days beginning with the 13th, but I want to give a taste of it now. It just so happens that my post on the coup (the second in this thread!) contains some major errors concerning what exactly happened; I misinterpreted the events to mean that Akimasa Kimura …

There's an Igapro article about Maeda's second stint in New Japan, which addresses that. You know how these Japanese sources are about never totally breaking kayfabe, but nevertheless there's a thread or two that I haven't seen brought up in English-language recounts of the incident. Maeda claims that he tapped Choshu on the shoulder because he expected Choshu to turn towards him to set it up, but Choshu turned the other way instead and bore the brunt of the kick. According to the article, Maeda came up with this spot because he felt that he needed to top Tenryu, who had brutalized Hiroshi Wajima with unprotected kicks in a recent singles match. Inoki and Sakaguchi appare…

Usually I wouldn’t post again so soon, but I’ve been throwing myself into research to get my mind off of some stuff. So, here’s a rundown on the original Tokyo Pro Wrestling. The bulk of this is sourced from a 2017 Igapro article, which cites issue #47 of the G Spirits magazine as reference material, but there’s also material from the Japanese Wikipedia page for the promotion. Tokyo Pro Wrestling ----------------- In March, I made a post in this thread titled JWA: The Transitional Period. I recommend reading that first if you haven’t, but here’s the essential information: In the aftermath of Rikidōzan’s death, the JWA stuck together partially due to it…

CONTEXT ON THE 1975 OPEN LEAGUE AND INOKI VS ROBINSON I found a pair of Igapro posts (1, 2) on the circumstances around the Inoki/Robinson match, and they provide some info that I wish I had incorporated into the Jumbo bio posts. I may edit some of it in later but I think it’s worth its own post. I may have misrepresented the situation around the 1975 Open League being titled such. It was indeed meant as an implicit challenge to Inoki, but when it was announced on September 29 of that year they did invite NJPW to participate. Inoki had been trying to get the singles match against Baba that he’d wanted since the late JWA days, but he sensed that this was a trap, …

I started this as Part Two of the SWS history posts, but there is no way that I could do justice to the fracture of the Newborn UWF, and consequent formation of Fujiwara Gumi, while packing it in with the next main part of the narrative. I promise not to go all Kingdom Hearts on you guys with interquel after interquel to put off proper sequels, but sometimes you need to spin chunks off into separate pieces for your own sanity. This is primarily sourced from a 2018 Igapro article. The Dissolution of Newborn UWF ------------------------ After his victory over Masakatsu Funaki in the main event of UWF Atlantis on October 25, Akira Maeda, the company’s biggest …

Taking a break for a couple days before I start on the longest chapter. I've thrust myself so deeply into transcription that I've barely watched any wrestling since the start of February. However, I will leave you guys with a fun little nugget I just found on a post from Igapro's old blog (this article was reproduced on their current site but with this bit taken out): The 1981 RWTL final, where Hansen made his shocking AJPW entrance, was happening at the same time as Fujinami's wedding reception, so that is where Hisashi Shinma (and presumably the others) found out that All Japan had struck back at them. That's amazing, but I pity Fujinami's wife for having their special …

I’m down to the last forty pages of chapter 9, but as a break and for a stopgap release I thought I could compose an extended post about the post-Rikidōzan transitional period of the JWA. The primary source is a pair of Igapro articles (1, 2) with various sources. TL;DR version is that there were some very shady people at the top of the JWA, and Kokichi Endo was a ruthless man. This is definitely some useful context for my JWA coup post near the beginning of the thread. JWA: The Transitional Period The day after Rikidōzan’s death, it was announced at a makeshift wake that his position would be taken over by the council of Toyonobori, who would become the ace in …