Yeah, that is the hard part
! I’ve written about a lot of recent ones in my wrestling journal, but it’s very much my own personal tastes, so you might not be interested in the same stuff. “Just jumping into it and figuring it out as you go” is probably the strategy that most people end up going for, haha.
The easiest way to watch it regularly is to get a subscription to one of their streaming services. The top one I’d recommend is Wrestle Universe, which nets you Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling, DDT Pro Wrestling, and Pro Wrestling NOAH (plus some other stuff, like Ganbare Pro Wrestling).
A little more info:
DDT has the most regular English support (if you follow along with their official English translation twitter account during shows for live translation). They’re also the company where being able to follow what’s happening in Japanese at least a little bit is probably most important, because a lot of the humor comes from verbal interactions between the wrestlers. DDT loves to push the envelope, so some of the humor can be… not everyone’s kind of humor, I’ll put it that way, haha. For example, they have a faction called Pheromones that’s about to end soon which uses a lot of sex-based offense. But the company as a whole has a massive amount of variety, so there’s also a lot of just straightforward wrestling as well as extremely wacky gimmick matches.
TJPW has almost no official English support anymore
. But they have me, haha, so if you want translations of stuff, there’s the pro wrestling thread here for all of my translation rough drafts, and then my blog has all of the finished translations. Some matches have a lot of Japanese said in the ring and can be a bit inaccessible without translation/Japanese fluency, but most of it is pretty accessible!
NOAH has an official English account now, though it doesn’t translate as much as the DDT account. Thankfully, NOAH isn’t really a very talky promotion! They also publish Japanese transcripts of the post-match comments on their website, which is super handy. The Japanese account publishes the post-match comments videos, and often the twitter captions have a good chunk of the dialogue transcribed. NOAH is probably the easiest to enjoy with low Japanese proficiency, since talking during a match is rarely a plot point, haha.
GanPro is probably the least accessible, both in terms of unofficial and official translation. They’re sort of the “indie” brand under the CyberFight umbrella of companies, so their big shows are a lot smaller than the other companies’, and they have a more down-to-earth spirit of grit and determination rather than like these super epic narratives. One of my friends really loves them, though, and she barely has any Japanese ability.
I think Wrestle Universe has some shows available to watch for free (DDT’s big show Judgement on 2022.03.20 and TJPW’s big show Grand Princess on 2022.03.19 were both great), so it might be worth checking those out! If you’re watching for the first time, I’d probably go with English commentary to get a little more context (they’ll also translate post-match promos and such).
Besides Wrestle Universe, there’s New Japan Pro Wrestling, which is the biggest pro wrestling company in Japan, and which has by far the most English support, as well as Japanese commentary available for I think every single modern show. I fell off of them pretty hard last year, though, so I can’t really recommend NJPW in its current form.
There’s also Stardom, which is NJPW’s sister company (albeit with its own streaming service), and which is the biggest joshi wrestling company. They have some amount of official translation (the videos have English subs, though they’re not the greatest quality), but the post-match comments don’t make it into the video uploads, and aren’t translated (my friend used to translate them as well as the press conferences, but she burned out on it and stopped). I don’t watch Stardom anymore, but when I did, their shows and stories felt pretty accessible to me.
An important note if you do sign up for any of these streaming services: they all charge you on the first day of the month regardless of when you signed up initially. So it’s best to sign up at the beginning of the month, otherwise you’ll get charged for the initial sign-up, then get charged again a few days later…
There actually is a fair amount of stuff out on youtube from most companies, though if you’re a long story arc person, usually it’s not enough to really follow those. But there are a few companies that air most/all of their shows on youtube! So if you don’t want to spend money on a subscription, you actually do have some options.
The one I’d recommend the most is ChocoPro, which is also very accessible to English speakers! They have a very unconventional set-up (most of their matches are done on a mat in a tiny room instead of in a traditional ring), but the matches are a lot of fun and they’ve done some great stories. I haven’t been keeping up recently, though, so my knowledge of ChocoPro lore is all a couple years old by now
. If you want to try them out, I linked a trilogy of ChocoPro matches that I loved in the pro wrestling thread, though sadly Lulu Pencil hasn’t been wrestling lately.
ChocoPro has the youtube chat for some bonus extremely low stakes reading practice, too (Wrestle Universe also has a live chat now)! It’s pretty evenly split between English and Japanese, at least from what I remember.
That’s probably way too much info, haha, sorry! If you want a place to start, I’d recommend checking out those ChocoPro shows/matches I recommended and see how that goes.