Thank you for all of your help as always!
And yes, the Yu Ishino news is fantastic! It’s really encouraging to see the positive reception from the wrestling community, and just seeing how happy he is now. Someone I follow on twitter is apparently working on subtitling his video, and I’ll definitely link that here if it gets finished.
Yu Ishino appeared in the Hana Kimura Memorial Show yesterday (though don’t get your hopes up if you expect to see him wrestling a match), and he was really fun! I really recommend both of the Hana Kimura Memorial Shows, though they can be emotionally difficult at times. Kyoko Kimura is seriously one of the best bookers in the industry. These shows have the most well-designed battle royales I have ever seen, in terms of pure entertainment value and a coherent but ridiculous plot, haha.
This year’s show also had loads of other highlights, including a main event between two of my absolute favorite wrestlers: Syuri and Asuka.
Unfortunately, during the last stretch of the show, some unfortunate news broke on twitter re: Kota Ibushi and his situation with NJPW. I think the topic of Hana Kimura’s death was probably pretty triggering for him.
Putting this under a cut (tw: suicide)
Kuma (golden_kuma) and Joe (thefeelite) have both posted translations of Kota’s most recent tweets on twitter. Here is the compilation of them on Joe’s blog. Basically, Kota is saying that the stress that NJPW executives Ohbari and Kikuchi have caused him contributed to his mom attempting suicide right after mother’s day (which seems to be the event that pushed him to start tweeting about all of this in the first place).
He suggested that he’s going to be taking the situation to court, which is probably a good idea at this point. Hopefully he’ll have a better chance there of actually getting justice for everything the company put him and his family through. I hope it leads to better, less-exploitative labor practices in the industry, and I hope that he and his mom are eventually able to be happy and healthy again.