A History of the International Wrestling Enterprise

NEW INFO ON EARLY IWE I've finished transcribing the next four chapters of the Pillars bio, and am currently sifting through the material to figure out the best way to distill and arrange it. In the meantime though, Igapro just posted a historical post with a couple new pieces of info on the earliest days of the IWE. I put my IWE history project on indefinite hold when I managed to get a copy of the Pillars book—and after Herr Sitemeister tweeted this, I fear that it may become my brand—but this shit is too good to keep to myself. I plan to eventually incorporate it into a rewrite of the first IWE history post It looks like Hiro Matsuda had ulterior motives duri…

A HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WRESTLING ENTERPRISE PART 5.1 (1976) [Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3.1 here, Part 3.2 here, Part 4.1 two posts above, and Part 4.2 directly above.] ANOTHER YEAR BEGINS Above: Len Shelley holds Mighty Inoue in place for a Sailor White diving foot stomp, in their 1976.01.23 shot at Inoue & the Great Kusatsu’s IWA World Tag Team titles. Spoiler The 1976 iteration of the New Year Pioneer Series was a fifteen-date tour from 1975.01.04-01.25. An unremarkable gaijin crop was led by a returning Sailor White. Winter Hawk was Pepe Lopez working a Native American gimmick. Len Shelley was a Canadia…

I needed a break because I needed a break, but I also took one to try to give myself more time to search for sources. By no means was 1975 an unimportant year for the IWE, but it is the year that I have found the least extratextual information about thus far. If I ever transcribe the book that Koji Miyamoto wrote a couple years back on this era of the IWE, maybe I’ll find more. On an unrelated note, I finally got together the cash to order another book from Japan for transcription: the 2019 Four Pillars bio 夜の虹を架ける 四天王プロレス (roughly: The Rainbow over the Night: Shitenno Puroresu). It should arrive sometime in August, at which point I’ll survey it and figure out what I…

A HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WRESTLING ENTERPRISE PART 4.1 (1974) [Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3.1 here, and Part 3.2 here.] ODE TO TOKYO JOE Above: Tetsunosuke Daigo, working abroad as Tokyo Joe. Spoiler Parallel to IWE’s domestic woes, one of its wrestlers on excursion saw his life irrevocably changed in an instant. Tetsunosuke Daigo had finally gotten his excursion after the 1973 Challenge Series. (Cagematch claims that he had worked overseas dates in 1967 and 1969 as Tokyo Joe, but Japanese accounts are firm on this being his first time out.) Through the connection of Mad Dog Vachon, who had been quite…

This is the first part that is going to end during a year. The IWE’s TBS coverage ends in early 1974, and that on top of the departure which caused it makes me think it’s best to delineate the two eras of the promotion that way. Part 4 will be about the early years of the Tokyo 12 Channel era. A HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WRESTLING ENTERPRISE PART 3.2 (1973-1974) [Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3.1 here.] ------------------ 1973, PART ONE Above: Isamu Teranishi and Mighty Inoue wrestle in a rare native vs. native semi-main event on the last show of the Challenge Series. Spoiler The New Year Pioneer Series w…

Brothers, I think it’s best to break from my three-years-per-section format from here on out. 1972 alone has gone over 3,000 words, and I feel like putting so much together in batches might be affecting the digestibility of the content. This is a forum thread, after all. A HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WRESTLING ENTERPRISE PART 3.1(1972) ------------------ 1972 BEGINS Spoiler At the start of 1972, TWWA Pro-Wrestling Relay was reduced to a 30-minute timeslot, because the financial fallout of the Nixon shock [1] made it difficult to gain sponsorships. The ratings, in turn, declined further to around 10%. This would last from the 1972.01…

A HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WRESTLING ENTERPRISE PART TWO (1969-1971) [Read Part One here.] ------------------ CANADIAN CONNECTION AND JAPAN’S FIRST “DEATHMATCH” Spoiler At first, I could not find much information about the IWE in 1969 that one could not derive from looking at their cards for the year. But partway through writing about 1969, I had the idea to make a YouTube comment asking the person behind the js_Tokyo 12 channel_Pro-Wrestling_hr. channel to clear up my confusion, and they got back to me quickly. They filled in my gaps about who booked North American talent for the IWE before they had made their alliance with the …

I think the IWE is worthy of its own extended series, with the excellent Japanese Wikipedia page as a primary source. This will repeat information seen in my previous posts, but I think it’s worth tying it all together into as complete a narrative as I can make without having access to the pair of books on the promotion published by G Spirits in recent years. A HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WRESTLING ENTERPRISE PART ONE (1966-1968) ------------------ PALACE Spoiler The circumstances that led to the formation of the International Wrestling Enterprise were those surrounding the Riki Sports Palace in Shibuya. Modeled after the Hono…