Why I chose this moment in history: Much like ECW, WCW and TNA I've been told how super special awesome Japanese wrestling is, how far superior it is than American wrestling so I felt I needed to give that a go. I chose this match for one simple reason, it's really fucking hard for me to find Japanese wrestling matches, especially older matches. It had to be a tag match because boy do the Japanese wrestling fans love tag matches. Each show I've looked up it's tag match after tag match maybe a singles match followed by . . . more tag matches.
Hipster side fact: Puroresu is the main style used by the AJPW roster. For those people who don't speak Japanese Puroresu is another word for strong style.
Match of the day: Akira Taue & Toshiaki Kawada Vs. Jun Akiyama & Mitsuharu Misawa
Winner (18 year spoiler alert) : Akira & Toshiaki
Quote of the match: Seeing as I don't know more than a handful of irrelevant Japanese words there are no quotes per se but it was very interesting to hear what moves they would say in English such as frog splash and occasionally high kick. It's equivalent to our use of enzuigiri, Enzui means lower brain and one meaning of giri is chop / cut. It's a high kick to the back of the head but sounds so much cooler in Japanese right?
Opinion / Observations:
- Previously I've stated that I'm not the hugest fan of the smaller arenas lack of pyros and flashy videos, this was half between what I'm acustomed to and what I'm being introduced to. Bigger arena, big fan base no pyros buuuut . . . . streamers! You'd think it would be stupid but it was kind of awesome. It made me crack up just stremers flying up and falling on these super serious wrestlers. So I'm glad it's a practice that is holding on through the years.
- One thing I am ok going the way of the dodo is the wrestling tights of that era, couldn't get past the fact that every last one of the wrestlers looked like power rangers.
- High kicks and arm bars for DAYS just over and over and over.
- Misawa's finisher was really cool looking, in a long very technical match it was the most unique move I saw. What looked like a petigre changed into a power bomb it was really impressive.
- What did the fans love more than high kicks and arms bars and finishers? Suplexs they loved them some suplexs. The fans went banans for pretty much anything and everything but suplexs the roof almost poped off.
- If someone missed an awesome suplex don't worry there was about forty photographers against the ring at all times snapping photos
- Wrestling is staged I get that and moves dont hurt as much as they appear also get that but being thrown chest first into the top rope no matter how you flip it has to hurt like a bitch.
- It was almost a forty minute match and it seemed as though Akiyama was in the ring for like thirty of them
- I was surprised about the outcome of the match, the heroes didn't win, after so many near falls I thought they would overcome but they didn't. Fans still cheered like crazy, as I found out later Japanese pro wrestling is less about storyline good vs. evil it's more athleticism driven, a match by match basis so that made sense that cheering was always abundant.
- All and all I did really enjoy this match, too long for my attention span but I was really entertained.
- Could only find this one match from the event so I can't review the rest of the show so I suppose . . . I'm done
