2019 Four Pillars Bio

Chapters 1-9 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Chapters 10-17 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Chapters 18-21 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Chapters 22-24 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Chapters 25-31 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 1-9, PART ONE (MISAWA AND KAWADA, 1962/3-1985) NOTE: As this is the first post of one of my most-read series, I have grown very frustrated with its low quality, and have begun what is essentially a complete rewrite. Revisions of subsequent posts are a possibility. Chapter 1 starts with Kawada, before turning into a narrative of his and Misawa’s lives through 1985. The narrative is set up with a trip to Mengerous K, Kawada’s restaurant, in the present day. He opened it in June 2010. The author’s description makes clear that, even if he might have been the most “functional” of the Pillars in the ring at the twilight of his care…

(2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 25-31, PART TWO (THE FALL OF TARZAN YAMAMOTO) A 1995 episode of TV Tokyo docuseries Navigator profiles Tarzan Yamamoto. However mixed the response had been to Takashi “Tarzan” Yamamoto’s promo segment with Shinya Hashimoto at the end of the Bridge of Dreams show, his public profile had not diminished. His appearances ranged from a weekly column of horse-racing predictions to his weekly radio show, and even a variety show appearance. While the character itself was not based on Yamamoto, the fact that the protagonist of Fuji TV drama Itsuka Mata Aeru (played by Masaharu Fukuyama) was a magazine editor reflected Tarz…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 10-17, PART FIVE Finally, KinchStalker has come back...to his history thread. I was fairly satisfied with how the last batch of posts came out, for which I held off until I transcribed roughly a hundred pages. The wait on your end was longer, but the posts were more cohesive for it. I’ve decided to stick to that approach: recapping this book in eighths, essentially. The only drawback, besides time, is that this method leaves me with a ton of material to process. More posts covering this range of the book will come very soon, but I need a little more time. Part Three of this book spans roughly 250 pages across seven chapters. …

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 10-17, PART SIX CHANGED PLANS Above: A Tsuruta elbow shot during a six-man tag on October 14,1991 fractured Misawa’s nasal bone. While forced to work the following night’s match, he was written off the rest of the tour in kayfabe when Taue reaggrevated the injury. Toshiaki Kawada was substituted for Misawa in the scheduled October 12 Triple Crown title match, which Tsuruta won decisively. After the submission loss of September 4, 1991, Tsuruta seemed to be on a downswing heading into his scheduled October 24 Triple Crown defense against Misawa. (Ichise recalls writing in his 9/4 match report that it seemed to be a poin…

This will either be the final or penultimate post. The final chapter is an examination of the Shitenno's legacy, and I may or may not share some of that stuff. Apologies for the formatting inconsistencies, I have no idea how to resolve them. 2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 25-31, PART SIX There isn’t much that Ichinose brings to the story behind AJPW’s first Dome show. There’s nothing he says that you couldn’t read in Eggshells or contemporaneous Observers. I guess I could bring up that Kobashi had “mixed feelings” about Baba saying that Misawa vs. Kawada was AJPW’s best match in a press conference. Ichinose seems to frame the Halloween 1998 Misawa/Kobashi match…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 25-31, PART FIVE The youngest of the Shitenno finally wins the Triple Crown. [Source: Weekly Pro Wrestling issue #747, dated August 13, 1996 (taken from Twitter post)] On May 24, 1996, Taue ended Misawa’s second Triple Crown reign in Sapporo. Underneath, Kobashi and Kawada wrestled for the #1 contendership, and Kawada won. This was the first proper #1 contendership match Kobashi had wrestled since that famous Steve Williams match in 1993, although he had taken part in the contendership league tournament in the summer of 1995.. With the Williams match, there had been a sense of accomplishment that transcended his defeat, as K…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 25-31, PART FOUR On July 24, Kawada wrestled Albright in the Budokan again. This was not the original plan; as Baba announced the card, Kawada was going to team up with Albright against Misawa & Akiyama. However, Kawada publicly rejected this configuration, stating in a Hawaii interview with Ichinose that he did not want Albright to become fully assimilated into AJPW. On June 29, Baba announced that the match was changed to a second Kawada/Albright singles match, with Steve Williams and Johnny Ace getting the tag title shot instead. On July 5 in Osaka, though, Kawada declared that he wanted their match to be held under UWFi rules. …

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 25-31, PART THREE Chapter 27 starts concurrently with the events of the previous chapter, as Ichinose recalls his frustration that he could do nothing as an All Japan reporter to stave off the magazine’s decline. Back in 1991, when Weekly Pro had lost access to SWS, their coverage of the Super Generation Army, particularly Kawada (who got one Weekly Pro cover a month from March to August), had helped keep them afloat. Unfortunately, there was no equivalent to 1991 Kawada in 1996 AJPW. This chapter concerns itself with Taue and Akiyama. —- The 1996 Champion Carnival saw Taue defeat the returning Steve Williams in the Apri…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 25-31, PART ONE This is the start of a series of posts on the last part of the Ichinose bio. I'll be putting each one out as they're ready, as I think I've kept you all waiting too much. Overall, this stretch of the book is not as insightful on All Japan as what came before, leaning on contemporaneous interviews to flesh out the wrestlers as characters and possibly reflecting Ichinose's diminished role as a creative consultant. That could just be my burnout on this particular book talking. Whatever the case, I'll summarize the last stretch using whatever piques my interest. — 1994 had seen a decline for the company. Ichinose …

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 22-24, PART THREE I think I’m going to keep this post dedicated to the thrust of Chapter 24, which concerns Weekly Pro and the Bridge of Dreams show. Just covering the second and third AJPW tours of 1995 and trying to interweave them feels weird to me, so I’m going to go ahead with scanning and transcribing Part Four and probably include the stuff about those tours in a general post about 1995. ----- In Dave Meltzer’s coverage of Takashi “Tarzan” Yamamoto’s 1996 step down as EIC on the July 8, 1996 issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, he wrote that Yamamoto was credited with bringing Weekly Pro’s coverage “from the Apt…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 22-24, PART TWO Chapter 23 doesn’t offer much insight into AJPW’s product in the second half of 1994, but there’s a bit. It’s arguably more about Ichinose’s experience working for Weekly Pro and under Tarzan Yamamoto, which I am going to save for the next post since that will largely be about Weekly Pro and the Bridge of Dreams show. --- “I know that every time I fight, my body gets more and more tattered, but I can't stop chasing him, and I'm going to keep chasing him. I've been chasing Misawa for 15 years…” Ichinose doesn’t write that much about 6/3/94 itself, besides the story beat of Misawa bringing back the “Tiger D…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 22-24, PART ONE I have completed the second half of part three of The Rainbow over the Night, which covers the sixteen months from the start of 1994 through the 1995 Champion Carnival and concurrent Bridge of Dreams Tokyo Dome show held by Weekly Pro Wrestling, albeit through the discursive approach that has become characteristic of this book. This stretch hasn’t been as revealing as what came before, and much of the next two chapters are more about Weekly Pro than AJPW, but I can squeeze some stuff out of it. First, though, I have been getting the author’s name wrong this whole time: he’s Hidetoshi Ichinose, not Ichise. I will go…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 18-21, PART FOUR After the Holy Demon Army successfully defended their tag titles on June 1, Kawada grabbed the microphone from Ryu Nakata to reveal his secret ambition: "I really wanted to take the win from Misawa-san, but I'm going to take it in a singles match! I'm going to take it in a singles match!" The Summer Action Series tour spanned 22 dates, beginning at Korakuen on July 2 and ending in the Budokan on July 29. This would be the retirement tour of the Destroyer, but more relevant to this story, Cagematch claims that this is when the Tsurutagun branding ended and the Seikigun/Holy Demon Army branding begun (in their reco…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 18-21, PART THREE (THE NIGHT THE PILLARS WERE BUILT) With nearly two million residents as of a 2020 census, Sapporo is Japan’s largest city north of Tokyo, and is the political, cultural, and economic center of Hokkaido, the northernmost of the Japanese archipelago’s five main islands. It became the first Asian host of the Winter Olympics in 1972 (and would have been so 32 years earlier, had the second Sino-Japanese War not forced them to relinquish the hosting rights to an event that never happened anyway). It was the first city that my hometown of Portland, Oregon established a sister city relationship with. It holds an annual snow f…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 18-21, PART TWO For the second post of this batch, we will look at Kenta Kobashi’s arc in the early 90s. ------------ On September 7, 1990, Kenta Kobashi & Johnny Ace defeated the Fantastics to win the tournament for the All Asia Tag Team titles, which had been vacated in the wake of co-champion Shinichi Nakano’s departure from the company. Ace had worked three tours for AJPW in the late 1980s, but that summer he had signed an unusual deal to work fulltime for the promotion [Wrestling Observer Newsletter, 7/9/90]. Ace & Kobashi would enter the 1990 RWTL as a unit, and made their first successful All Asia title defense…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 18-21, PART ONE I finished the transcription of chapters 18-21, whose 125 pages cover 1993 but make a lot of digressions. This continues to be a book that I cannot recap simply, but I think that what I’ve taken from it will be illuminating. This first post will set the table for the formation of the Holy Demon Army and cover the debut of Jun Akiyama. Ichinose held off on covering a lot of this stuff to streamline the narrative in Part Two, so this goes over a lot of the same ground, albeit from different angles. ------ On March 4, 1992, Akira Taue celebrates the first top title of his career, while Jumbo Tsuruta ce…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 10-17, PART EIGHT This will be the final post covering the second half of part two of the Pillars book. --------- Tarzan Yamamoto’s suggestions to make Korakuen Hall a priority of the company had paid off. By early 1992, these events were selling out so quickly that AJPW began to cater to those who weren’t fast enough, through a postcard lottery system for a certain number of seats. “I CAN’T REST ANYMORE” Above: after Mitsuharu Misawa was legitimately injured in a Korakuen six-man tag on July 21, Toshiaki Kawada was substituted in his place. Three nights later, a local promoter threatened to lower his payment…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 10-17, PART SEVEN “WHEN HE FIGHTS LIKE THAT, HE’S BETTER THAN MISAWA” Ichinose cites a handful of 1991 matches in the context of Toshiaki Kawada’s efforts to develop his own style. The earliest of these is his Champion Carnival match on April 6 against Jumbo Tsuruta, a match whose finishing stretch hinged on Kawada’s persistent kicks to Tsuruta’s face. After winning in decisive fashion, Tsuruta was nevertheless encouraging of Kawada. “When he fights like that, he’s better than Misawa.” On July 6, during a Misawa/Kawada vs Tsuruta/Ogawa tag match in Yokosuka, Kawada was injured by Ogawa’s step kicks (Ichinose reports it as a b…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 10-17, PART FOUR (EARLY SHIFTS IN HEISEI PURORESU AND ITS FANDOM, THE 1991 CHAMPION CARNIVAL, AND AJPW FAN APPRECIATION DAY) Issue #429 of Weekly Pro Wrestling. (April 16, 1991). With sixteen extra full-color pages in the middle of this issue, originally intended for coverage of the SuperWrestle In Tokyo Dome event but made moot by the SWS ban, the magazine decided to print two eight-page profiles for Kenta Kobashi and Megumi Kudo, the latter of whom won out for the cover photo. This profile was a prominent example of Kobashi’s marketing as an “idol wrestler”, which catered to a notable peripheral demographic that All Japan was a…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 10-17, PART THREE (SHIN HAGESHĪKU PURORESU) Anybody familiar with the All Japan product of the early 90s knows that foreign talent still had a very important and prominent role during this period; for one, it wouldn’t be until 1996 when the Triple Crown switched hands between native competitors for a third time, after the two Jumbo/Tenryu switches of 1989. Baba was upfront in this period about his “absolute confidence” in the exports he hired, and in an interview around the time of the AJPW/NJPW/WWF Wrestling Summit had stated his ambitions to gather a crop of foreign talent for the 1990 Real World Tag League that would be comparable t…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 10-17, PART TWO (BATTLE LINES AND SHIFTING TIDES) Above: Tsuyoshi Kikuchi, Mitsuharu Misawa, Toshiaki Kawada, Kenta Kobashi, and Akira Taue at Ichinomiya beach, August 1990. [Weekly Pro Wrestling, Issue #392 (8/21/1990)] As covered at the end of the post at the top of this page in the thread, the Great Kabuki was the last in a string of AJPW departures connected to the formation of SWS. The day after the Summer Action Series tour had ended, the then co-world tag team champion turned in his notice. On August 1-4, the younger wrestlers held a training camp under Baba’s supervision at Ichinomiya beach. Misawa, Kawada, Koba…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 10-17, PART ONE My summaries of Part Two (Chapters 10-17) of the Pillars bio begin here. I settled into a two-chapters-per-post groove early on in these recaps, but I decided to transcribe some more this time before posting again. Part of this was psychological; the time when this process drains me most, outside of especially long chapters, is when, having finished a recap, I have to start from square one of a whole new chapter. But the thing about this book (particularly compared to Osano’s Jumbo bio) is that it likes to subsequently bring up details that I often wish I’d had at my disposal when writing a previous recap. I must have c…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 1-9, PART FIVE I crushed my finger closing a cot during a camping trip (no bone or nerve damage, but still painful), but that didn’t actually hurt my workflow much. Most of this transcription work is pressing CTL+C->CTL+V, after all. Anyway, here’s what I’ve gleamed from Chapters 8-9. ---------- “There was a time when I used to think that [that was] the way it should be. But now I've changed, and I'm thinking, "This is better.” In a sense, I used to be a professional wrestler. I used to cheat my fans and do whatever I could. But now, I think that I won't cheat my fans anymore.” - a roughly translated remark by Ba…

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 1-9, PART FOUR (KEKKIGUN AND THE ASUNARO CUP) Sorry for the slowness. I transcribed over 60 pages this time, deciding to bundle Chapters 6-7 together after the first wasn’t as meaty as I wanted it to be. Personal engagements, existential dread in the wake of my 25th birthday, and the malfunction of my laptop keyboard also contributed to delays. Broadly, these chapters are about the struggle of the younger generation to break through in All Japan in the late 80s. They both essentially cover the same stretch of time from different angles, so I’m not going to bother with splitting them up in my recap. (There's a little bit of stuff it cov…