The 🤼 プロレス thread! Learning Japanese through pro wrestling

only a little bit more negative industry stuff

Yeah, on some level whatever meetings happened if any clearly didn’t register as having any import to Ibushi and didn’t work to make everyone happy, so I suppose it’s the same difference.

I think your read makes a lot of sense!
One thing that still confuses me is if the New Japan management’s goal with the press conference was to kayfabe the public into thinking the situation was cleaned up, it seems like a weird strategy when the problem at hand for them is a guy breaking kayfabe and telling the public a situation needs cleaning up - if they think that guy might still do that.
That makes me want to still lean a little bit “they thought they were cooperating with Ibushi and had reestablished trust, and were gravely mistaken” (which isn’t necessarily much better!) but who knows – I could easily be naively reading too much good will into a corporation’s actions, or underestimating the legal restraints they have (or thought they had) on what Ibushi can say and the power of a friendly seeming press conference to influence marks like me, or just misreading the situation entirely.

Thanks again for the clear and cordial discussion about it, anyhow!
I’m unplugged from the wrestling social media grapevine more and more lately to avoid spoilers for shows I haven’t seen yet (and never had friends who were also into wrestling) so I appreciate the bits of background of the type of things that for better or for worse don’t make it into shupro! :sweat_smile: (though I hope it doesn’t feel like an obligation!)

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continuing the discussion

Yeah, it does seem odd, but then again, there are plenty of fans who don’t follow Kota on twitter, and plenty of English speaking fans who have absolutely no idea whatsoever that any of this is going on, so it makes sense from that perspective that NJPW would try to bend the narrative to the best of their ability.

Unfortunately, judging by a lot of fan responses, plenty of people are eager to discount accounts like Kota’s, as well as Karl Fredericks’, because their NJPW fandom comes before their support of the performers, and they seemingly don’t want to consider that the wrestlers might have serious reasons for speaking out against the company.

The main thing for me is that it was more than just a press conference; they also tweeted out birthday announcements for him, merch and other promos, and promoted matches and such involving him, especially in conjunction with Forbidden Door, despite knowing that there was no way he was going to be involved. Plus with Tana doing the Kamigoye…

There’s just such a stark difference between what the company is presenting and what the actual person is saying, on multiple counts. I think they’re trying to ensure that when he does leave, it makes it look like it was one person acting irrationally, and that they were trying to do everything “right”, but he was the one being impolite and erratic.

No problem! I’m… very plugged into the wrestling social media grapevine, for better or for worse, so I hear quite a lot. I’m very strict about sourcing stuff, though, so with most of the stuff coming through to the English-speaking world about the Japanese wrestling scene, I automatically don’t trust it unless there is an actual verifiable source (Meltzer and Sean Ross Sapp and co. don’t count). Kota tweeting openly about all of this is one of the very rare occasions where we do have an actual primary source instead of secondhand info being transmitted by people who don’t speak any Japanese, so I give it a lot more weight.

(Small complaint about the wrestling rumor mill)

I am… very sick of western fans who know absolutely nothing about TJPW and DDT talking about those companies and the wrestlers as if they have some deep knowledge of what’s going on there. The latest rumor that bothered me was some people saying that Shida was scouting the wrestlers in TJPW while she was there in order to bring some of them to AEW.

Miyu in particular was named here, which is frankly ridiculous, because if you’ve followed TJPW/DDT over the past couple years, you’d know exactly who scouted her for AEW, because it was a literal plot point in her match at DDT Ultimate Party in 2019. Kenny (who works very closely with AEW’s women’s division, though he does not have booking power) specifically said that he wanted to fight her to see if she would be a good candidate to bring to AEW. He met her years ago, actually, and he and Kota helped her with her kicks when they were still in DDT. If it wasn’t for the pandemic, I’m sure we would have seen her show up in AEW in 2020.

Not to mention the fact that Sanshiro Takagi has talked about wanting to bring TJPW talent to AEW loads of times, before they had an official partnership, even. It’s just really frustrating to me that people ascribe all of these ulterior motives to Shida’s actions and her bookings in Japan when we have no actual evidence that she is working as a scout for AEW at all. It just feels like a lot of fans trying to make themselves feel smart by discerning the inner workings of the industry when they don’t even have a basic understanding of the surface level details about TJPW and DDT that are available in English, even!

So yeah, basically I think it is very fair to avoid the wrestling social media grapevine, because half of the time, the information that circulates on there has no actual source besides like: “well, there was a reddit comment that said this.” I won’t even get into the many false Kota Ibushi rumors that circulated for years, like the rumor that he has a rich family… :sweat:

I’ll try to keep posting more stuff here that I think is worth mentioning! Obviously, most of my concerns are over labor issues and abuse in the industry, but there are some positive things as well that are worth sharing, too :blush:.

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週刊プロレス No.2191 (from a couple weeks ago, the week following and including Forbidden Door)

In Naito’s column he says he didn’t watch Forbidden Door partly out of grumpiness since he wasn’t on the card. He says when he heard about Hiromu not being able to make it he was surprised and texted him “huh, where are you right now?” with the response “in Japan.” at which point he did not follow up any further. He says normally he ignores Takagi’s travel stories, but this time he might actually pay attention since Takagi got to tag with Sting.

There’s a pretty funny interview with Suwama - he insists that this new/old Voodoo Murders heel version of himself is a completely different person than Evolution Suwama, so while on paper Suwama is a record 7 time triple crown champion, this upcoming championship match with Jake Lee will be an attempt to win the belt for the first time, since he never held it when he was in Voodoo Murders. This bit extends to the point that when the interviewer asks about that joshi wrestling endeavor Suwama recently gave a press conference about, Suwama says that was someone else and you’ll just have to ask him.

The cover of the magazine this week is about a wrestler named Fujita “Junior” Hayato who returned in Michinoku Pro to win the Tohoku jr. heavyweight championship after a 5 year absence including a long battle with cancer. He says he’s happy to be alive and in the spirit of no regrets, even challenged Hiromu Takahashi and Kenoh.

Giulia talks about moving, which it sounds like she’ll be trying to do in the near future. Her old apartment sounds pretty bleak. One wrestling-related aspect is she talks about how the road from the train to the apartment involves 凸凹 roads and stairs and pedestrian bridges and it really sucks coming back from tour with bags while tired and in pain, so she’ll be looking for a place with a quicker and easier walk from the train station.

Some good pictures from Tam vs. Natsupoi!

This is the self-confidence I feel whenever I eat bread

The history column is interesting - it talks about Haku’s start in wrestling. Apparently he was a sumo wrestler who had to quit sumo along with some other Tongan wrestlers due to a dispute, and he was scouted by All Japan where Genichiro Tenryu had also at the time recently transitioned from sumo to professional wrestling. Early ring names there were Tonga and Prince Tonga and anyway he had a long and varied career and now his sons Tama Tonga, Tanga Loa, and Hikuleo are all involved with NJPW.

In Kenoh’s column he says Mutoh’s retirement is “いいニュース” and it’s 「引退ロード第1弾じゃない。”脱・武藤”の始まりだ。」He says there’s no active wrestler with the kind of name recognition to the general public that Mutoh has, but he will be happy to fill the gap that he leaves behind.
He also recalls a Michinoku Pro show in Tokushima (a bit far from Michinoku huh) that he went to when he was a fan, and he was happy to see Mutoh, but some goober ダサいマスクマン kept getting in the way – given it was Michinoku, was it The Great Sasuke? Nope! He was a bit like Sasuke, but he wore orange and yelled “いっちゃうぞバカヤロー!” - that’s right, it was “ザ・グレート・コスケ,” Satoshi Kojima under a Sasuke mask. Kenoh says after he wins the championship he will grant The Great Kojisuke a spot on the opening card of NOAH shows.

There’s the short article about Rika Tatsumi training undergoing 滝行 to hope for victory in her title match in TJPW. She says it was surprisingly painful and she narrowly bested the waterfall, lasting about four minutes. She’ll definitely win the match now.

There’s also a short article (it’s mostly pictures of her at the beach) about Maki Itoh returning to her hometown of 福岡県小郡市. It’s a pretty small, out of the way town, and she left to pursue an idol career and hasn’t really been back since school days. Apparently she doesn’t have much sense of it as a hometown since when she was there she had no friends - she suspects because she was too cute and everyone was jealous and mean so she retreated internally. She says coming back affirms that she made the right choice (since she is the cutest in the world after all, so of course she has to leave and travel bigger places) but she’s glad to not just be from Tokyo since it prompts her to work harder and she can be a superstar when she comes home. And if anyone offers she’ll be a 観光大使.

朱崇花 catching the eye of the camera mid chair shot makes for a fun photo.

Speaking of 朱崇花, there’s an interview with Chihiro Hashimoto, double tag + singles champion in Sendai Girls, ahead of her title defense against 朱崇花. She’s been focusing on defending the tag championship for want of challengers, but the match with Asuka should be an exciting and interesting match. She says they have similar roots since they both apparently did レスリング and watched Ayako Hamada and decided to become pro wrestlers from that.
She recently turned 30 and she’s feeling positive about it. She says the red dress she’s wearing in the photoshoot was a gift from Meiko Satomura a long time ago that she picked out now to represent Sendai Girls red as the champion.
A lot of cool wrestlers in the shot from the press conference for the event! I feel like at this point I’m surprised when Suzu and Risa aren’t involved in a joshi event rather than the reverse.

The costume column is about Master Wato – I was kinda hoping to learn why his costume is quite so blue, but it just says it’s his favorite color, which I gathered. Apparently on one of the レガース there’s a hidden cat mark, so watch out for that and if you spot it you may be blessed with good luck.

In Hideki Suzuki’s column, he says he popped for Minoru Suzuki and Chris Jericho interacting, but otherwise Forbidden Door was “within expectations.” He’s a lot more excited and interested in talking about the NJPW and Stardom joint show announced for November 20th. He says he’s a “古い人間” but in principle he’s fully supportive of intergender matches, saying he wants to see stuff to shake up his “古いタイプの人間” expectations. Even if there’s just mixed tags rather than direct competition, there’s lots of exciting possibilities for wrestler and faction combinations, like Himeka and Okada, Giulia and Naito, Starlight Kid and a top junior, etc. It ends with an extended joke about how he’ll contribute his valuable WWE Thunderdome experience of seconding as a complete bystander to Giulia and DDM generously for free with an implied joke that he probably asks Giulia to cover for drinks and stuff a lot.

The short industry column is about Tatsuya Endo’s return after the KO that was such a big topic in a previous issue. He sounded shaken and humble and regretted showing weakness as champion but will treat it as a reset and hopes DDT fans internalize that it wasn’t a mistake on Nakajima’s part, but a lack of 耐久性 on his part and couldn’t be helped.

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Incredible, haha. I haven’t really watched much AJPW, so I think I’ve only seen one of his matches, but I can respect a good bit.

I love wrestling because everything is frequently infused with hidden meanings, but then half of the time, the reason for something is actually just this simple, haha.

I’m impressed his expectations were that high, because I think most of us going in were quite pessimistic :sweat_smile:.

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Some mostly belated impressions of various wrestling shows and such:

General feelings

It might have been obvious from all those magazines, but I confess my interest in pro wrestling is at a high water mark lately. I think making more of an effort this year to look forward to shows rather than catching them when I hear that they’ve gone by has been really successful, and that + this thread and learning more about TJPW + having read enough of those magazines that I feel like I have a decent grasp on the state of the industry very broadly + realizing afresh what little language barrier still remains with those older shows, all adds up to some built up enthusiasm and admission that maybe I am a pro wrestling fan after all, and an interest that feels like it’s less tied to particular promotions or directly about specific things going on.
It was especially strong when I realized tournaments were coming up and that I was in a very tournament-receptive mood at the time actually, so I marked a bunch of shows on my calendar and made some 星取表 (including a 5 Star GP I won’t get to use for a little while) and then read all those magazines.
The tide can certainly ebb again! And I wonder if I’ll really have endurance for all those tournaments. but I work from home, and round robin tournaments do make excellent background noise to try to stay focused, since they’re always interesting enough to sustain a glance or two while thinking about something else but rarely like, can’t-miss entertainment. So that’s my plan for most/all of it (except the 5 Star GP) but I usually always get sick of whatever I use in that timeslot pretty quickly too…
But on the other hand, I wonder if the accumulated knowledge and language barrier dissolving will smooth out the peaks and troughs a bit and make for a more regular approach of at least catching big shows when they happen. I guess we’ll see.

I think probably the top storylines I’m most interested in at the moment are:

  1. Who’s going to win the 5 Star GP?
  2. Shoko’s title defenses
  3. what’s the deal with the skeleton
    (with an honorable mention to the continuing suspense about when/if/how crowd noise will return - not really a storyline but still)

Prominence 旗揚げ戦〜はじまりの紅炎〜

I finally got around to watching The Prominence 旗揚げ show! I did end up watching it as background to getting work done, as commentaryless shows definitely have it tougher for me these days and it just didn’t seem like it was going to happen a different way.

I do think my enthusiasm for deathmatch wrestling is more limited to as a fun variety aspect of a larger show, than for a show where it’s mainly all about that, but I’m glad they’re doing what they want to do, and Risa Sera and Suzu Suzuki are at their coolest doing deathmatches so I hope they get to keep doing that and be succesful at it!

One thing I feel vaguely guilty about is I still haven’t actually internalized the names of any of the other Prominence members apart from those two. Sera and Suzuki show up constantly in shupro (Suzu might as well be the main character of the magazine apart from the regular columnists), and they’re clearly treated as the main guest attraction when they turn up all the time in other promotions, so I mean, I do feel like it’s kind of not my fault that I’ve internalized the other three as comparatively an afterthought… I wonder if there’s a storyline or something they could be involved in that would help with that.


NJPW BEST OF THE SUPER Jr.29 (first four shows)

The El Desperado interview in one of the magazines reminded me that – although I know what the finals of this tournament are and who won already – there are actually a lot of matches I would like to see from it, namely, uh, the El Desperado ones.

So it kind of ended up a steam valve for my tournament enthusiasm and a proof of concept for my “day of tournament matches as background noise for the main nose to the grindstone part of the work afternoon” and it’s worked so far! I’ve enjoyed the tournament shows and felt like I got more work done during them than I would have without, while the extent of my actual watching them is mostly just fleeting impressions and then rewinding to note the finish in my chart of a match that I completely ignored.

My most positive impression so far is maybe Francesco Akira - I’d seen him a little bit I think in AJPW (so he must have spent at least some of the pandemic in Japan?) and so was curious to see more, and I like his double knee to the back finishing move (and when Despy dodged it and he went flying) and that he’s got some plucky likability amidst United Empire who generally… do not have that.
I’m reserving judgment on Ace Austin (I like purple but am not drawn to stage magicians so it’s a bit of a wash but he seems talented) and Alex Zayne (not a look for me really but he seems nice) but the impressions are more positive than I was maybe expecting for some reason.
Despite Wheeler Yuta being the one I probably most wanted to see I feel like I’ve ended up being 100% busy during all of his matches so far.
(And TJP just makes me feel sad about the Cruiserweight Classic but that’s not really his fault)
And so anyway – catching more wrestlers to have impressions of like pokemon has been a fun element of the tournament.

There’s some matches ahead that I feel like I would want to like, actually pay attention to and watch… but also these are probably just going to be upstaged by current shows anyway, so I don’t know when or if I’ll actually continue.


Stardom NEW BLOOD 3

This is a free show!
Since it doesn’t have commentary, it got the background noise treatment, but it seems like a cool thing! Almost like… the Stardom equivalent of AEW Dark? I say, not having actually seen any AEW Dark. But like that impression I guess of a free youtube show with some established stars but mostly new people, assorted guests and undercard people. I think Stardom’s slate of rookies is actually super cool right now, and the guests are cool too, so it’s a good show!

MIRAI vs. Suzu Suzuki is the match that most threatened to steal away my attention entirely out of all these shows I’m talking about that I used as background noise.
Waka’s attempt at psyching Ram Kaicho out via inverting her face paint was… interesting…
And although I unfortunately was too busy to actually catch much of Giulia vs. Miyu Amasaki, it seems like between this and a nice set of documentary videos (interesting to get a look at the “プロテスト”) they’re positioning Amasaki as a potential near future star. (complete tangent but I was thinking a bit before this about how probably there’s relatively few like, “it’s just a normal name, but sounds cooler” type ringnames in Japanese wrestling compared to American wrestling, and then it turned out Amasaki is exactly that)


TJPW SUMMER SUN PRINCESS '22

Crowd noise!! I got very emotional whenever any wrestler reacted to the crowd noising, which I think was a very good state to be in for a TJPW show. Miu Watanabe especially seemed touched, and a small bit that really got me was when Sayuri Nanba was starting to practice cheering with the crowd instead of clapping, and when she said something someone in the crowd yelled はい as a response and she was taken aback and had to regain composure for a second.

It was also really interesting to see the intended full effect of certain flourishes, like Yuka’s swinging arm pose scooping up all the streamers, or Maki Itoh’s shout to the audience.

A minor thing I caught in the commentary that made me laugh because of this thread was when 2 of the commentators got 東洋盟友’s name wrong in different ways, and the third commentator then spelled it out fully for them including explaining which kanji to use. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I had never heard of Alex Windsor before, but she seemed super cool! I’m glad that her winning means we’ll presumably see more of her.

The tag match was awfully good - I already mentioned the moment that stuck out to me most (Yuka chucking Arai back into her corner). I’m surprised such a newly formed team was able to get the better of the rabbits and their bond! :open_mouth: But it’s a clear story and an interesting one so we’ll see where it leads.

Having mainly only seen Ryo Mizunami from an AEW show (I think one of their early PPVs?), it was super cool to see her in front of a receptive audience with commentary who knows what her deal is. I remember the commentary at the AEW show at the time being kind of confused at her goofy showboating during what they expected to I think be a serious title match, but here just hearing “みんなのアニキ” immediately made it 100% click into place for me and had me yelling “アニキ!!!” in support like a 龍が如く side character! She’s cool and dependable and fun, just like an アニキ would be! Because she is your アニキ!! Duh!
(for that matter, come to think of it… being glad to see women who’ve wrestled for AEW wrestle for a fully receptive audience and commentary team could probably apply to a lot of wrestlers on the show, including maybe even Thunder Rosa…)

Yay, Shoko!


Stardom MidSummer Champions 2022〜真夏の王者たち〜

I thought this was a great show!

I thought the Natsupoi defection to Cosmic Angels was really well done! I was wondering to myself beforehand why in the world such an emotional feud would go from a cage match to a regular one-on-one to a group tag match, so I really should have figured it out in retrospect, but it caught me by surprise! And the move makes a ton of sense – Giulia did think of her as a pet (and I bet I could go look up the shupro citation to prove it), and we could clearly see Tam does care about her when she rushed back into the cage to check on her, and Natsupoi’s clearly very talented but felt static in Donna Del Monda so it freshens up her character while giving Giulia more reasons to be bitterly angry at other people over situations caused largely by her own mistakes, and plus on top of it all the ポイ捨て suplex on the apron to cause a ring out is like, an A++ spot for that kind of turn!
The one major bummer is definitely Maihimepoi (and Himepoi) ending – I’ll really miss her riding on Himeka’s shoulders to the ring. But hopefully it’ll make for a nice emotional reunion someday.
One other minor comment - I think I’m noticing the former Actwres girls are noticeably better at acting during the dramatic scenes like this one. :sweat_smile: Goes to show, I suppose.

And the other stuff was all really good too!


AJPW 2022 Summer Action Series (the one with Suwama vs. Jake Lee)

I got tempted into watching an AJPW show because of the coverage in the magazine.
The dynamic at the top of the card in AJPW of Lee, Miyahara, Suwama, and Aoyagi, seems honestly very good right now, because they’ve all got charisma in a completely different way than all the others do.
But AJPW is tough… the name and the 50 year history I think make the lower budget presentation hit a lot harder. Like if the split had gone differently and modern-day Noah was called AJPW and vice versa, it would make perfect sense and be fine. But in this timeline the gap is unfairly amplified I think. This particular show I watched is a Korakuen show, so it’s not a huge presentation by any means, but the less slick video player, complete lack of editing (like pointing a camera at a projection for pre-match videos), and rougher edges like when the camera completely fails to catch Yuji Nagata’s facial expression when he’s presumably doing his signature 白目 to the commentary’s frustration, still all felt a bit rough… I feel like when TJPW or Stardom go with less polished VODs for smaller shows they still manage to make what is there feel polished in its own way. But I suppose it’s unfair to criticize the company not backed by a sprawling entertainment firm on that kind of thing.

And in any case I enjoyed it!

A couple wrestlers I hadn’t seen before who made an impression: a very old guy who wrestled as comedically as a frail old guy we all hope doesn’t die (this was apparently Masanobu Fuchi and wikipedia claims he’s a co-booker), and Yusuke Kodama who was like… an odd middleground between a slimy goth side movie character and a buff babyface professional wrestler? In not really a bad way?

And I mean I’d seen him before but Kento Miyahara is so good - he’s just never not hamming it up or showboating, it’s great.

Oh and it turns out Yuma Aoyagi has a little brother who’s like a slightly smaller Aoyagi. Neat!

Yuji Nagata and Tiger Mask were there (the former with the full Pirates of the Caribbean intro to his theme! Do they still do that in New Japan? I guess I’m not really sure… another entrance here had Danger Zone so I’m imagining infringement wasn’t a concern of there’s) confusing me a bit further about the influx of New Japan wrestlers into other promotions recently.

And I thought the main event was fun. When I watched a Champion Carnival in 2020 I extremely did not “get” Suwama, but now being decently more aware of why he’s a big deal, and having seen him at Wrestle Kingdom 1 (which I’ll talk about whenever I get around to finishing the last few matches) and with this fresh silly coat of Voodoo Murders paint (and with “Voodoo Murders” being such an incredibly silly albeit slightly culturally insensitive probably name for a heel wrestling faction), I was a lot more receptive here, although he is still on the older and slow side than young and chipper…
And I’m curious about Jake Lee – he honestly reminds me a bit right now of 2007 Shinsuke Nakamura, who was doing some kind of like, “dark messiah” thing. In the sense that Lee’s definitely got charisma and he’s made a big recent change to start to bring it out more, but maybe he could still use an additional element or bits of growth or two to 100% fully click into that all-time gimmick that’ll stick with him forever. Or of course, it’s entirely possible I just haven’t noticed that he already has those elements yet since I’ve only seen this one match, really.
One moment I especially liked in the match was when Lee went to spear Suwama into a table, and Suwama countered by just tossing the end of the table up into Lee’s face. I don’t think I’ve seen that before!

And Suwama won which surprised me! I don’t… know if the Voodoo Murders thing has THAT much legs to warrant taking the title off of Lee so soon, especially with it already bouncing around quite a bit this year due to injury and stuff… but I guess we’ll see!

I was sufficiently entertained to not immediately cancel my renewed ajpw tv subscription in regret, at least.


NOAH DESTINATION 2022

A bummer with this one is I happened to see the results of the main event in a couple places (a tweet and the thumbnail to Kenoh’s youtube video lol) before I watched the show, and… it was really the only match I actively cared about on the card. :sweat_smile:

A pity, as I think the problem with me and NOAH shows right now is definitely that they absolutely have the length and production of a big, major, show, and have a lot of talented people on the roster, but they just don’t have a high density of wrestlers I’m like, actively personally 憧れている’ing, you know? Even Kenoh, who is probably the one I’m most interested in, is more of a “he’s funny and good at his job” rather than a “oh man, he’s so cool and I feel deeply that he should win” type of deal.
So I definitely lost a lot of steam by the last few matches, unfortunately. I guess I’ll try to avoid spoilers better, or watch the show quicker next time!

Thoughts I did have:

That set is so slick! I don’t remember if the last big Noah show I watched (which I think maybe was also at Budokan?) had the giant sign (probably?) but it looks great! And they made such good use of lighting and fire.

Elgin not being around was a pleasant surprise of course, and I’m glad that whatever the exact details are it’s not an injury or something like that so I don’t have to feel at all bad about it.

I haven’t seen Timothy Thatcher before, but he seems like a good partner for Suzuki! A couple of old-school wrestling weirdos.

Kitamiya with the Shibata-esque post-headbutt blood ooze was rough! I hope that’s all fine!

I had read in the book about Showa wrestling themes I mentioned that Mutoh used to come out to Final Countdown so when they actually played it that was a nice surprise and I got a little bit of the emotion vicariously!


NJPW G1 Climax 32 (first day)

Let’s uh, hope this one goes better than last years!! :grimacing:

I’m not tremendously excited about this one, and the four blocks seem like they increase the predictability of the individual sections (like if anybody but Okada is advancing out of A it would be a ridiculous surprise). Something I’ve been thinking positively about the 5 Star GP, that there’s truly no one in it I’d be like, disappointed if they won the whole thing, is also… not really the case with the G1.

But again – background noise, and it was good for that today.

I haven’t seen Tom Lawlor before - it was an interesting first impression?
I like Okada and his fancy new trunks, and I like Jeff Cobb but the combination of the two is very very stale to me at this point. I wonder if there’s something they could have done to make it come across more like a heated feud or rivalry if they knew they might have this many matches? Like – I genuinely don’t even know what Okada as a character cares about except winning in a general sense, so I feel like he really needs a super intense foil and Cobb just seems like a pretty nice guy who also wants to win.
I liked Jay White loudly complaining about how hot it was in Sapporo at the start of his match. Wrestling in Japan right now doesn’t sound like a ton of fun with the heatwave.
The promise of ZSJ and KENTA promos does counterbalance somewhat just how much ELP and Ospreay are going to be talking about their penises in these backstage interviews…


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It’s a little late, but I finished the translation for the first day of the Tokyo Princess Cup on July 16! Instead of finishing one show translation in two days I ended up with two half-finished show translations in two days :sweat_smile:. I’m hoping to get the next two finished before the next round of the tournament, but we’ll see…

Here’s the recap for day one.

A little bit of context that might help with this tournament is that Miyu Yamashita has actually never won the Tokyo Princess Cup in the nine years of TJPW’s existence. It’s a running joke that she does terribly in tournaments. I think it’s actually really clever booking because Miyu doesn’t really need a tournament win to establish her, so it gives other wrestlers more time to shine. We’ll see if this is the year that her tournament curse finally ends…

The main event on the first day was Hyper Misao vs Miyu. Miyu has actually already lost to Misao in this tournament, in 2016 (though Miyu beat her a few years later in 2020). Because of that earlier loss, Miyu was dreading facing her again, and called it a “くじ運が悪い” (unlucky drawing) when she found out who her first round opponent was going to be.

In the match itself, Misao started out by saying that she was going to do this “正々堂々” (fair and square) and shaking Miyu’s hand, but… as the recap describes it, “これは三味線だった.” I was a little confused what it meant by calling this a shamisen, but one of Yomichan’s definitions for 三味線 offered some clarity on this: “「―を弾く(=相手に調子を合わせたり、適当なことを言ってごまかす)」”. I translated the line from the match recap as “this was all a deception.”

EDIT: It just occurred to me that I could translate this as “played her like a shamisen” as a bit of a riff on the English idiom “played her like a fiddle.”

Misao tried a bunch of tricks, including taping Miyu’s legs together to neutralize her kicks. But in the end, she wasn’t able to beat the ace, and Miyu took her out with a Crash Rabbit Heat, which is a move we haven’t seen from her in a while.

On the mic, Miyu said that she thinks Misao is the most difficult opponent in the tournament, so she’s happy to win. Next she’ll be facing Raku, who is also a formidable opponent (:thinking:). Every year, with each tournament, the young wrestlers get stronger, and the bar gets higher, but this is the year she’s going to win.

Backstage, Miyu talked about how when she found out that she had Misao in the first round, she thought she was in trouble. She says that she always felt weak when it comes to tournaments, but this time she felt confident. This line in the twitter caption confused me a bit: “今回は強気・強気でパミにどんなことされても勝つつもりで闘って.” I was a bit thrown off by the 強気・強気. Here was my attempt: “This time, I was confident, and I used that confidence to fight with the intention of winning no matter what kinds of things PaMi did.” (PaMi is Misao’s nickname. It comes from the “パーミ” in “ハイパーミサヲ”).

Miyu said that her legs were tied, and Misao was just getting stronger. There were some really close calls. For this reason, beating PaMi in the first round was huge. Next is Raku, who will also be a difficult opponent in terms of type, so if she can get past this point, she’ll feel better about her chances. Then she said: “一人ひとりしっかり相手して倒して今年こそ優勝したい.” This part confused me. Here’s my best shot at it: “But I will fight each and every one of my opponents and bring them down. This year, I want to win the whole thing.”

I thought it was funny that Miyu considered Raku to be a formidable opponent, considering, well… Raku does not have the greatest win-loss record, let’s just put it that way. But it’s true that Miyu isn’t really used to wrestling Raku’s style of match, just as Misao’s style isn’t really Miyu’s typical wheelhouse either. And if there was any time for Raku to get an upset victory against the ace, it would be now…

Miyu also talked about using Crash Rabbit Heat again. I couldn’t figure out this sentence in this part of her comment: “久しぶりにクラッシュ・ラビットヒートを出したけど、これじゃないと倒せないと咄嗟に出た技かなと.” I believe I’m missing some context, and also the negatives are a little tricky for me :sweat_smile:.

Miyu also explained why Misao is difficult to deal with. She said that the thinks Misao will be even more prepared next time. She thinks Misao is analyzing her, so from her perspective, she’s still a formidable opponent.

Misao pretty much confirmed that, haha. She said that she thought her Yamashita counterplan was flawless, but Miyu was still a monster. This line was a little tricky for me, mostly because of the ブーン sound effect: “あと少しで倒せるってところにきたと思ったら、急にブーンって。” This was my translation: “Just when you think you’re about to beat her, suddenly whoosh.” (I’m guessing she’s talking about the rush of air from the Skull Kick?)

Misao said (from the twitter caption): “山下さんモンスターでしたね。全部の引き出しを開けてもダメでした。でも私の夏はまだ終わりません。山下実優のデータベース、バッチリ入りましたので他の選手と闘う時に応用させてもらって、東京女子のランキング上位目指して頑張ります.” I translated this as: “Yamashita-san was a monster. I emptied out my entire toolkit, and it still wasn’t enough. But my summer isn’t over yet. I’ve hacked into the Miyu Yamashita database, and I will put it to use against the other wrestlers when we fight and aim for a higher spot in the TJPW rankings.”

The other match covered in the recap is the newly crowned tag team champ Yuki Arai vs Mahiro Kiryu. Arai was able to beat her senpai here (although beating Mahiro is not the most difficult thing to do :sweat_smile:). Alas, no tag team title shot for 東洋盟友…

After the match, Arai said that last year, she lost in the first round and was unable to advance, but she won the tag belts last week in Ota Ward, and this year she wants to do her best to achieve results in the singles division as well.

Regarding her next round match with Hikari, she said that they’ve fought on a team together loads of times, but she’s never had a match with Hikari, so she’s an unknown and scary opponent. But she thinks it would be awesome if she could beat Hikari, so she’s going to do everything she can to win.

Mahiro said that Arai has gotten really strong since her debut, becoming champion at Ota Ward the other day. She said: “私はキャリアは上ですけど挑む気持ちで闘いました.” I couldn’t quite parse the second half of this. This was my attempt: “My career is longer, but I fought in the spirit of challenge.”

Mahiro thinks that Arai’s tenaciousness has grown, and she regrets that she couldn’t bring her down. She says that she knows she has to win not only for her own sake, but also for everyone who supports her, so starting tomorrow, she’s going to focus her energy and do her best.

Shoko Nakajima vs Haruna Neko was not covered in the recap, but was also a tournament match. Neko got… a little bit obliterated :sweat_smile:. She said that as expected, Shoko was strong, and she couldn’t do anything about it, but she hopes she can feed on this frustration to help her grow.

Shoko said that next she’ll face Mizuki, and Mizuki has been among the top four regulars for about two years, and she’s a formidable opponent, so Shoko wants to be even more consistent than she was today.

Concerning Neko, she said: “私は出し惜しみなくやったので、そこをどう受け取ってくれているかだと思います.” This line confused me. Here was my attempt: “She fought without holding back, and I think that’s how I received it.”

The other tournament match was Pom Harajuku vs Moka Miyamoto. I was excited to see Pom get the win! She… does not win often in TJPW, so it was fun to see her move on to round two. I realized for the first time when reading the recap that her finisher, the Pom de Justice, is written ぽむ・ど・じゃすてぃす. I’m surprised it’s not in katakana! This was my first time encountering a ぃ.

Moka said that this year, she really wanted to get through the first round and advance to the next, but she lost, which is really frustrating. She’s going to get stronger and do her best to beat her senpais.

Pom said that Moka is getting stronger, so she was anxious, but this summer of 2022, Pom also can’t lose, so she did her best and she won! Next is Suzume, who she’s never had a singles match with, so she’s not going to be careless, but she’s going full speed ahead!

And that’s it for that show!

Ideally I’ll have the next one done by tomorrow, and then hopefully I can finish the last one in time… There was actually a Tokyo Sports article published after the last show that went slightly viral in the international joshi fan community because of a DeepL mistranslation, which I’m very proud to say I was able to figure out on my own before anyone else shot down the unsubstantiated rumor, but I’ll get to that when I post about that show, haha.

It’s kind of strange realizing that in the post-DDT English Update twitter account world, I (and the readers of this thread) now understand more about what’s going on in TJPW than probably like 98% of their international fans who cannot understand any Japanese :sweat_smile:.

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I think it’s maybe just emphasis. She just says that word twice in the video to intensify it and I suppose that signals that clearer than just squishing them together or using a comma would.

XてYてZしたい would be like, “I want to do X, Y, and Z (in that order)”
So she’s talking about how she wants to face her opponents one-on-one, woman-to-woman, defeat them, and this year especially/at last win the whole thing.
(which is substantively just the same as “I want to participate in this elimination tournament and win it” but hey)

I believe she’s just saying she thought suddenly in the moment that if she didn’t use the move she wouldn’t beat Misao (and so used it), even though it had been a long time since she used it.

Nope! She’s talking about Miyu’s life gauge regenerating like a second phase of a final boss :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
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ブーン
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I would say that rather than Misao entering a Miyu Yamashita database, she absorbed a Miyu Yamashita database into her own. (and indeed, in the video she says “山下実優のデータベース、バッチリ私の中に入りました”) .
In the match it self during her usual time with the microphone she was talking about consulting a ハイパーデータベース, so knowing that, and 入 being used for data entry a lot (and accumulated unconscious reading experience) made it easier for me to naturally parse here that if X is the subject of 入りました, it’s going into something, not the reverse.
If she’d just said データ rather than データベース it probably would have been significantly clearer.

I would say the idea is like (to use too noticeable and intense an inserted metaphor for it to count as a translation), “By career length I should be the one looking down on her, but I fought feeling more like David than Goliath”
She fought feeling like the was the one having to 挑む a more established opponent (along the lines of the reverse of the feeling a while back when Kamiyu expressed being happy to be the one standing in the ring for challengers to approach for once)

The reporters not being mic’d in these make them too hard for me to make out, and she’s answering a direct question here so I’m confused also. I think he asks something about what she said at the 会見 so I went back and watched the comments from her and the others in her part of the bracket at the seed-drawing but still can’t tell exactly what he asked.
But I think what’s maybe happening here is the “(猫には)” in the transcript is more like connective tissue than a change in subject.
“(猫には)私は出し惜しみなくやったので” → because I fought (Neko) without holding anything back (lit. without being stingy)
“そこをどう受け取ってくれているかだと思います” → I wonder how (Mizuki) is taking what I give out. (or the other opponents in general, or what she wants the audience to feel, or something else entirely)

A grammar thing I’d point out is that (despite my not knowing exactly what it’s saying), with “そこをどう受け取ってくれているか”, isn’t past-tense, and also the person doing the 受け取って’ing is different from the person wondering this, because of the くれている
“how is (that thing I’m doing and just mentioned) being received (for me by someone else)?”
I think she does in the seed-drawing talk about wanting Neko/others to learn and grow and try hard so maybe that’s where the くれている comes in - like she hopes people/someone will watch and learn from her not holding anything back and she wonders if they are.
Something in that ballpark at least!

Also, this doesn’t have anything to do with language notes but I noticed Shoko has a tendency to end her thoughts with “と思っています” and then make this slightly embarrassed face waiting to see if there’s follow-up questions:
image
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and anyway I just thought that was a fun characteristic trait to watch out for in her promos.

The next step is then the strange realization that you forget sometimes the language barrier was ever there at all… Like, “why are these posters asking this? It said plain as day in [untranslated thing X]! … oh… right.”

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Finished translating day two of the Tokyo Princess Cup! This show was on July 17. The recap is here.

Only one of the matches made it into the recap: the main event, Rika Tatsumi vs Kamiyu.

I’ll admit, I was on Rika’s side for this, but mainly because I have an ulterior motive: I really want her to face Mizuki :sweat_smile:. I don’t think I’ve seen them have a singles match since I started watching TJPW, and with Rika’s crush on her and all… It would just be interesting, I think, haha. (I’m also rooting for Mizuki to take the entire thing. I don’t care that she’s already won twice, and fairly recently. It’s her time!! :triumph:)

In any case, Rika vs Kamiyu surprisingly felt very close. Kamiyu has really raised her stock this year, I think. But unfortunately for her, it was still not enough.

Rika’s comments on the mic were a little confusing to me. She said: “かみーゆ(上福)、執念深くて何度も立ち上がってくるから、負けてられないと思って…。負けたかみーゆの分まで勝ち進もうとは思いません。私は勝手に背負ったりしない。私は私の道を突き進みます.” I think her first sentence basically means: "Kamiyu (Kamifuku) is so tenacious; she gets back up over and over again, so I thought she couldn’t be defeated… "

The second one was where I ran into real trouble. Here’s how I translated the rest of the paragraph: “I don’t intend to advance and win on behalf of Kamiyu, who lost. I’m not going to carry her on my back. I’m going to forge my own path.”

Mostly the かみーゆの分まで part was confusing to me :sweat_smile:. At first I thought she meant that she didn’t just intend to advance until Kamiyu, but then that didn’t really make sense with the rest of what she was saying. I wasn’t super confident on the next sentence, either, which didn’t help.

Backstage, Rika said (here’s the twitter video) that in a tournament, you never know what’s going to happen. She couldn’t lose her first match, so she attacked Kamiyu mercilessly. Somehow, she managed to get this important win, so she will keep building on it. If she keeps winning and advancing, she’ll be able to face even stronger opponents, and she’s really looking forward to it, but her feelings are already acting up. She says she’s the kind of person who gets more fired up the more frightening her opponent is, so she’s awfully looking forward to it. This is the year that she’s going to hoist up the trophy!

Kamiyu said that Rika’s level is still high. She had a title match recently, and Kamiyu thought she was very strong. Kamiyu said: “トーナメントは1回戦で負けちゃうことが多いけど、昔のゆきを考えてみたの.” I struggled with this, but ended up going with: “I’ve lost in the first round of tournaments loads of times, but I started thinking about the old Yuki.”

The next quote from her is really funny, so I’m going to include the full thing (from the tweet): “昔はリカさんが高いところからケツを落っことしてくる技がめっちゃ怖くて。尻から逃げがちの自分がいたんだけど、今日はあの尻を受けた上で頑張りたいなって思って。尻から逃げてた自分が尻に立ち向かう人になってて、そこはよかったなって思う.”

Here was my translation attempt:

I used to be so scared of Rika-san’s technique of attacking with her ass from a high place. I was inclined to run away from her butt, but today I thought I’d tough it out and receive that butt. I’ve gone from being someone who runs away from the butt to being someone who faces it head-on, and I’m glad about that.

I got a bit lost with her last line in the recap. She said: “負けちゃったんで、海行って気合入れて、来年の夏に備えようと思います.” I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the middle part of the sentence. Was she saying: “I lost, so I’m going to channel my fighting spirit and go to the beach and prepare for next summer”? It would be a very Kamiyu thing to say :sweat_smile:.

For the other tournament matches, Arisu Endo lost to Miu Watanabe. Arisu said that she couldn’t surpass her performance last year, but she did the best that she could do, showing her best self now, so she has no regrets. If she has another chance next year, she’s going to do her best to win and advance to the next round.

Miu said that no matter who advances (Shoko or Mizuki), they’re both so strong. Then she said: “でも自分がすごい思ってるのは、私たちの世代が先輩たちを超えていける夏にしないとなって.” I think this says: “But what I really want is for this to be the summer where my generation surpasses our senpais.”? Then she says that she won her first match this time, so she hopes to surpass her senpais and get results.

Kaya Toribami lost to Yuka Sakazaki. Kaya’s whole comment was another one I wasn’t quite sure on. She said: “今回正直勝てるかっていったら厳しいカードではあったので、勝ち負けよりも、ちょっとでもユカさんに本気を出してもらえるような技を出してもらえるようにって、負けない気持ちで頑張った.”

Here was my attempt:

To be honest, it would be tough to win that match, so win or lose, I tried my best to show a serious effort against Yuka-san and fight as if I wasn’t going to lose.

Yuka said that losing the wonderful tag belts shocked her to the core, and she was trying to forget about it. A tournament is the perfect thing to help you forget, so she’s ging to try to release her frustration here.

The other match that actually felt like it could go either way was Yuki Aino vs Nao Kakuta. I was pleased to see Nao get the win, though I was sad for Yuki because she sure has had a rough year…

Yuki said that she wanted to challenge Shoko for the belt again, so it’s really pathetic that she lost the first match. She can’t reverse what she already lost, so she will create another opportunity to challenge on her own.

Nao said that today she kept her mind calm and was determined to advance past the first round, so she’s happy to have won. The interviewer asks what if Miyu wins, and it’s the same matchup as last year (Miyu eliminated Nao in the first round). Nao says that climbing is not the only way to get over a tall wall, you can also smash it down, or slip through to reach the other side.

And that’s it for that show!

Miyu’s actually about to have a very interesting week ahead of her, because it was just announced on AEW today that she’s going to be facing Thunder Rosa for the AEW belt next Wednesday. I think she’s also hosting a wrestling seminar with Konosuke Takeshita at an indie event this weekend? (Ace and ace…)

Obviously, what’s going to happen is Miyu is going to beat Thunder Rosa and come back to TJPW to finish up her TPC as AEW champ :triumph:. Here’s how Nao Kakuta not only gets her win back, but gets an AEW title shot and then goes on to become AEW champ—

smart_hazuki

If all goes as planned, I’ll be back tomorrow after translating the third show from last weekend!

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The part I would say your translation is missing here (largely because it’s the part that’s most snipped down in the transcript) is the sense of like – she’s not going to selfishly act like she’s going to strive for victory for Kamiyu’s sake / in her stead, like she doesn’t have the right and pretending like she did would sorta denigrate the pain Kamiyu and her fans would be feeling for the tournament loss. It’s the “勝手に” that gives it that sense in the summary version and without it it sounds sorta cold, like she was pondering whether to win in Kamiyu’s stead and was like “nah screw her” :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Just for fun, here’s the full version (of this part of the speech, there’s a little more after about there being one more day of the 3-day run of shows), parts in the summary bolded:

なんとか、なんとか勝ってました。かみーゆ、物凄く執念深くて, 何度も立ち上がってくるから、やあ、私も負けてられないと思って…凄かった。ありがとう!ね、私、なんとか、初戦突破したわけなんですけど、負けたかみーゆの分まで勝ち進もうとは思いません。(she says 思いません a bit like a punchline and the crowd chuckles, since it’s a little unexpected of a conclusion to that thought)。一番悔しいの、負けた本人だし、その子を応援するファンの人だと思うから、私は勝手に背負ったりしない私は私の道を突き進みます.

Yeah, if the confusion is from trying to figure out how this part is a complete thought, it isn’t really separate from the next part! It’s clearer from her tone of voice in the video (the period in the transcript may camouflage it) but the “昔のゆきを考えてみたの” is her starting to tell the story about how she used to be scared of Rika’s butt and now she isn’t.

Like it’s a “y’know I’ve lost in the first round of tournaments a lot, but come to think of it compared to the old me, [tells story that shows progress]” type of thing.

yep!

I would say it’s like, “what’s really on my mind, is that I need to make this into a summer where our generation show we can surpass our senpais”
There’s a bit in between this and the next part in the video where she elaborates further and talks about how Moka and Arisu so far for example have both been elimated along seniority lines, so she especially wants to beat one or more senpais in the tournament because of that / to show it’s possible.

I would say it is less “I tried my best to show a serious effort against Yuka-san” and more like Toribami tried her best to get Yuka to show a serious effort, at least a little bit. The もらえる is the key there.
Also I suppose it’s sort of the same thing, but I would say 負けない気持ち is less like “as if I wasn’t going to lose” and more like, “without giving up” / “with an indomitable spirit”

P.S. this is a 100% total tangent but the extreme difficulty of the tournament slot for Toribami reminds me of how during the random draw to see where everyone ends up in the tournament bracket, I remember genuinely thinking for a moment “this system of having Sayuri Nanba shuffle the envelopes seems foolproof! How are they going to work the bracket??” only for everyone to immediately run off camera after picking an envelope before opening them. :sweat_smile:
Bummer Toribami’s luck was so bad huh!

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I managed to finish the third TPC show translation!

But first, a few things:

I wanted to share this twitter thread of Miyu Yamashita match recommendations! All of them are available on youtube, and if I remember to do it, I’m going to go through and add at least a few of them to the sorely neglected TJPW section in the match recommendations at the beginning of the thread (one of them is actually already there).

The other thing I wanted to share is unfortunately bad news. Mizuki has a fever and is off the July 23 show. As a consequence of that, she had to forfeit her scheduled TPC match with Shoko :pensive:.

despair_kagetsu

However, as a replacement match, TJPW is doing Yuka and Shoko vs Rika and Miu, which should be exciting! A rare MiraClians match, after we were just talking about them!

I’m bummed because I was pulling for Mizuki to win the tournament this year, and was really looking forward to the possibility of getting Mizuki vs Yuka and/or Rika vs Mizuki. I’m going to be rooting for Miu now instead, I think! Though I did wonder about the possibility of Shoko winning the entire tournament and nominating Mizuki to be her opponent…

It… bodes a little poorly that Japan is undergoing a covid spike right as multiple companies have round robin tournaments kicking off…

worried_AZM

But, well, maybe they’ll be luckier than the companies which currently have covid absences right now…

On that cheery note, here’s TJPW’s July 18 show :sweat_smile:! The recap for this one is here.

The main event of this one was Hikari Noa vs Yuki Arai. I was actually nervous about this one, despite being pretty sure that Hikari was going to win? She’s comfortably above Arai in the rankings (TJPW doesn’t have official rankings, but one of my friends keeps a spreadsheet going that ranks TJPW and Stardom wrestlers based on their win/loss records. It started as a parody of AEW’s rankings, but then we realized it was actually really fun to have haha).

For the record, the stats said that Hikari had a 91% chance of beating Arai, which felt about right, but with Arai’s push… well, you never know! Poor Raku has only a 2% chance of beating Miyu :pensive:.

In any case, Hikari beat Arai! Possibly securing another tag title shot for Free WiFi? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

After the match, Arai said that she won the tag belts, so she wanted to show her strength and move up, even if only a little bit, and she’s frustrated. But even though she’s really disappointed, she wants Hikari to win the tournament. If there is a next time, she’s going to do her best to show an even stronger Yuki Arai than she did today.

The version of her comments on twitter had a line that I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around: “他の選手と比べて試合数も経験も足りてないのでそれもあったのかもしれないし、もっと頑張れってことだと思う.” Here was what I went with: “Compared to the other wrestlers, I haven’t had as many matches and don’t have as much experience, and since that’s the case, I think I need to work harder.”

The interviewer asked about next year, and she said, “こんな状態で言うのもなんですが、優勝したい.” This was a mixture of me not fully understanding the Japanese and also not quite being able to figure out how to translate it. Here was my attempt: “I don’t know if I can say this in this situation, but I want to win the whole thing!” I think she’s basically saying that it’s weird for her to say this right after she lost and just got eliminated, but I wasn’t quite sure.

She also apparently said something that didn’t make it into the twitter caption or the recap, but which launched a full day of unsubstantiated rumors in the international wrestling community. Here’s a screencap someone tweeted of a reddit post with a DeepL translation of a Tokyo Sports article. The machine translation made a rather bold claim that TJPW had decided to send Arai to AEW!

I thought this seemed a little fishy, so ended up tracking down the original article. I didn’t look at the whole thing too closely, but it seemed to be just speculation to me. I ended up attempting a proper translation of the offending sentence at the end of that first paragraph: “巻き返しのために荒井が「武者修行」を希望したことを受け、団体側は米AEWをはじめとする海外団体に送り込む方針を固めた.”

Here was my rough translation:

Arai’s wish to “travel about to gain skill in combat” in order to make a comeback was received, and the organization has established a policy of sending wrestlers to overseas organizations, including to AEW in America.

Dramatic DDT essentially confirmed my interpretation on twitter later, and I felt very good about being able to debunk the rumor myself! It would be great, though, if people stopped sharing DeepL translations of articles to reddit… :sweat:. Maybe if I get better at Japanese, I can start a twitter account a few years from now dedicated to debunking TJPW rumors stemming from machine mistranslation :sweat_smile:.

But, that digression aside, back to talking about the show.

Hikari said (here’s the video) that she was barely able to win. She was really nervous after the singles match with Arai was set. Arai is growing more and more rapidly, and Hikari can’t let her surpass her. She thinks she won with just that feeling today. Yuka is next, and she’s a senpai whom Hikari really admires, and is Hikari’s ideal wrestler. Hikari thinks that if she can get past this point, she’s close to winning the tournament.

The other tournament match was Miyu vs Raku. Raku tried some innovative offense in this, trying to psych Miyu out when she made her entrance by bringing a pillow into the ring and lying down. But her rollup attempt after that was unsuccessful, and Raku didn’t have much luck with the Oyasumi Express or any of her usual tactics. Alas, that 2% chance of a shock victory was not to be, and Miyu got her with a Skull Kick… Maybe next year, Raku :pensive:.

I liked how the recap described Misao as a 曲者(くせもの) when talking about the opponents Miyu defeated. Miyu started out by saying, “もういけるんじゃないかと思ってます.” It was a little tricky for me to figure out. I went with: “Let’s go for it again.”

She said that Nao is next, and Miyu beat her in the first round last year, but she thinks Nao has been getting stronger and stronger since then. Without relaxing her guard, she’s going to bring her down, and is going to keep her momentum going more and more.

The recap had a little bit extra that wasn’t in the twitter caption. Here was the line in the recap: “気持ち的には乗ってきてるんで、気を抜かずにしっかり倒して、もっと勢いづいていければなと思ってます.” I couldn’t figure out what was going on with “気持ち的には乗ってきてるんで”.

They also ask Miyu about Raku (which is only quoted in the tweet caption, not the recap), and Miyu said that Raku was tricky, wasn’t she? Then she said “初めてですよ.” which I translated as “for the first time” at first, but that didn’t make sense, so I think she’s talking about the beginning of the match? Miyu went on to say that Raku was doing things like lying right in front of her before the bell.

Raku said that Miyu was really strong. It had been a long time since her last singles match with her. Her first singles match with Miyu was something that changed her life. She said (embellishing with wording from the tweet caption) that when she has a singles match with Miyu, it’s often a turning point in her life.

She said: “だから今日も自分の中ですごい人生の分かれ道の“あっち”にいけたかなと思ってます.” This was a little tricky. My attempt at translating was: “And so today, too, I think I was able to get to ‘that side’ of the forked road in my life.” Raku said that she lost, so she’s going to keep persevering.

And that’s all from that show!

I managed to get them all done in time after all, though I’m very tired :sweat_smile:! Thanks again for all of your help, rodan!

A small translation aid actually finally arrived in the mail yesterday: NJPW’s English teaching book. Between the time I ordered it and the few months it took to get here, I quit watching the company, which is a little awkward… It does seem decently handy, though! I’ve already gotten a few translation ideas from flipping through it.

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I can’t super well make out what question the reporter asked that she’s responding to here, but I think it’s something like “Hikari said this would would be an opportunity to check whether (she is/you are) acclimated to having matches in consecutive days, what do you think about that” so she’s commenting on the three-days and how the tournament went in saying a lesson she took from it is since she doesn’t have as much experience, she’ll tell herself to work harder.
I think that’s what the ことだ is doing, is it connects with the reporter’s question like a “what did you take from this?” “がんばれ、me! that’s what I took from this.” type of thing.

。。。と思っています。
to_omotteimasu

曲者(ヒーロー) でしょ :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I would say it’s more like “(I’m not letting my guard down but) I’m thinking I might actually be able to pull this off!” (about the tournament) (the part about not letting the guard down being from the video - まあ、油断しないですけど、).
I’d put the もういける as in the ballpark of like, “it’s going well!” / “it’s already in the bag!”

like in my last note, she’s talking about stuff’s going real well so far and she’s feeling good about it, so since feelings-wise she’s riding high she needs to make sure to not lose focus and keep winning.

Yeah, I’d transcribe the video more closely like:
初めてですよ, あんなコールの前から目の前に寝てるなんて
so it’s just another case of the periods in the summary making it look to a translator going line by line like it might be a separate thought at first!
It’s her first time seeing an opponent asleep right there in front of her before the match started.
I remember liking her visible confusion mid-pose about it too!

I could be wrong, but I think perhaps the いけた here is like. “could have gone.” Like she could have gone down the 人生の分かれ道の“あっち” by winning but didn’t. I think if she was describing the part of the road she did go down it would be こっち.

No problem!

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週刊プロレス No.2192 (from a couple weeks ago, around the first Midsummer Champions)

Giulia’s column is about her pre-match routines, which the day before includes a visit to the tanning salon, a sauna, and light training where “試合をイメージしながら作戦会議するのがメインかな(笑)。” (that’s one way of putting it - her laugh not mine).
The routine the day-of includes a sugar-free red bull, various preparations and signing/interview type stuff, and then when her music hits a deep breath and a prayer for winning and not getting majorly injured.

The headline for the return of paper streamers at the TJPW show is sweet, but a bit of an eye-roller!
「たくさんの愛に埋もれる懐かしい光景 ーー 紙テープならぬ”神”テープが飛び交う!」

Lately I feel like whenever there’s pictures from a NJPW show I didn’t watch, there’s somebody in a dog cage. this pun’s even worse

In Tanahashi’s column he talks about Forbidden Door some more, and how fans told him he first used the phrase 禁断の扉 so the show is 「禁断の扉©棚橋弘至」. He and the interviewer/co-columnist joke a bunch more like they did already before the show about exactly what state of locked or unlocked the door was in, who had the key, how much did Tanahashi fumble with it, etc. etc. These two men are for sure incapable of not running with bit material like that.
The topic turns to AEW catering, which Tanahashi compares to the bountiful buffets at Sizzler. As a New Japan catering story, Tanahashi says at dome shows his pre-match meal is always curry - he attributes his loss to Okada at the end of his record-setting IWGP Heavyweight Championship run to the fact that he had omurice before the match, despite having curry before all of the victories leading up to it…

There’s an ad for KENTA’s new book (the shilling of which while KENTA pretends to not be shilling it in the backstage interviews has been a highlight of the G1). KENTA seems like one wrestler who could probably write a good book!

In Kenoh’s column he mainly talks about a petty squabble he’s getting into with Kojima about push-ups and stuff - sounds like he’s criticizing Kojima’s push-ups and insisting he can do an absurd number himself and you can go to his youtube channel for proof or something like that. He also talks a little about how ABEMA is broadcasting both the NOAH show and the NJPW G1 Climax opening show on the same day, and NOAH is definitely going to draw more viewers (it was unusual seeing the co-promotion for both on the NOAH show).
There wasn’t really an organic way to show off my cool new useful custom emoji, alas
pain_kenoh

Kento Miyahara fighting Yuji Nagata makes for a lot of sardonic saluting and 白目’ing
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There’s a pretty cool pull-out guidebook for the G1 Climax. It has a lot of stats and stuff (including G1 records for the past three years and singles records against this year’s blockmates for all competitors), the schedule for the matches and specific highlights to look forward to for each day (it’s a bit silly but I avoided looking closely at the schedule for the last day – obviously it will become clear by the time it gets here but it’s just a little more fun I think to predict/hope for particular winners without factoring in how the last day of matches is probably going to be as suspenseful as possible).
Fun fact! Okada’s combined singles win:loss record for everyone in his block grouped together, is apparently 16:4.
There’s also a page of notes from a NJPW Strong commentator about Jonah and Tom Lawlor, going over their respective backgrounds and charms. Of Lawlor he says “さらにデニムジャケットで入場し、コスチュームもデニムのショートパンツというのも印象的で、独特な感性を匂わせる。” which I feel like is a really good way of putting it. I haven’t watched far enough yet to see Lawlor in an actual block match, but I’m oddly looking forward to it because the “theatrically takes off his denim cut-offs to reveal denim-print trunks” thing and general "filthy"ness is a good example of “not cool but confidently not cool enough it wraps back around to being kinda cool somehow.”

There’s a Great O-Khan interview, since last year he got an award from the magazine for his G1 performance despite not having a good win-loss record. As usual, he refers to himself as 余. He theatrically feigns a loss of memory about prior losses, and mentions the nickname “ゼンパイア” (as in 全敗+United Empire) to denounce it, but the interviewer says it might be more accurate than not…
He says one wrestler he hopes he would like to fight is EVIL, because United Empire would counter the various seconds from House of Torture, and “キャラクターが立ってるヤツがスゴい好きで。” to which the interviewer responds “一番キャラクターが立ってる選手が言うことじゃないですね(笑)。”
(I never have any idea what to make of O-Khan)

In the news section, I just kinda liked this odd photo of Giulia presumably mid-slap to Suzu with an out of place SLK in-frame.
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Genichiro Tenryu in his column talks about Keiji Mutoh’s announced retirement, and first off says ご苦労さん. He says after his generation there was 闘魂三銃士, and the 四天王, and with Hashimoto and Misawa dead, Kobashi and Taue retired, and Chono and Kawada not officially retired but indefinitely not wrestling either, in a sense Mutoh’s carried an entire era to the present day alone. He talks some in comparison about his feelings around his own retirement, and it sounds like he approves of the final tour approach (rather than just retiring and being done with it) because the feeling and motivation of showing up for the fans who’ve been cheering for you across the country one last time is very powerful. When he did the same he didn’t think about injuries stopping it, he just bore through the accumulation of them with bandages and painkillers to stand in the ring those last times at all costs.
He closes with 「あとね、俺は引退の時、ウチの女房から言われたんだけど、最後の試合を終えて、しっかり自分の足で歩いて、家族のもとに帰ってきてほしいって。武藤にも同じ言葉を伝えたいよ。」

I really liked this moment at Wrestle Sekigahara.

I like the double kickout composition they went with for this page in the recap of the match between Chihiro Hashimoto and 朱崇花 in Sendai Girls.

Apparently I forgot to read Mutoh’s column the first time through – glancing through to see if I missed anything interesting, he talks about experiences with championships early in his career in the NWA Florida territory – at the time, his fee was paid as a percentage of the gate, and so when Ric Flair would come to the territory as NWA champion it meant he directly got paid more since Flair’s presence drew so much of a crowd, so he came to call him フレアー様.

The WWE recaps in this column give an outsized spotlight to the Japanese wrestlers the readership might be most familiar with, so it can give sometimes an interesting look at the spectrum of roles Japanese wrestlers have in the company. Like this week, Asuka is being cool and having probably cool no holds barred matches with Becky Lynch, Shinsuke Nakamura looks to be feuding with WALTER Gunther over the IC title, Sareee is forming a very cool-sounding tag team with Meiko Satomura in NXT UK, and Akira Tozawa…


The WWE recaps have “Special thanks to WWE, Mr. Vincent K. McMahon and Mr. Paul Levesque” in the corner – I assume because the magazine doesn’t send its own photographers or anything like that. I wonder if one of those names will be gone a couple weeks from now… :eyes:

There’s an obituary for a former FMW karateka/pro-wrestler named Seishi Aoyagi. (no relation, I think, to the AJPW Aoyagis)

The short industry column is about Rina Yamashita - sounds like she’s been invited to and has been wrestling at GCW events in America and is enjoying the well-deserved international recognition as a deathmatch star.

The long industry column is an interview with important Bushiroad guy Takaaki Kidani about Stardom. He says 売り上げ is about 5培 (!) what it was when Stardom joined Bushiroad in 2019 (with a similar profit icnrease), and he attributes that success in part to effective regional advertising and use of youtube on the business side, while on the creative side Rossy Ogawa is able to apply his full 40+ years of women’s wrestling industry experience to “producing”, where before his attention was split with the financial side. (makes sense to me – the weirdly common habit of people who run wrestling companies insisting on controlling both all of the monetary and all of the creative decisions at the same time is always so strange to me)
He praises New Blood for being a mutually beneficial medium for young Stardom and non-Stardom wrestlers to gain experience from each other. He says Rossy Ogawa’s sensibilities suit the modern fast-paced environment, and they talk about Stardom’s breakneck storytelling for a bit. Honestly – I still personally have trouble conceptualizing Stardom as being especially fast-paced, but it sounds like here they’re talking about particularly how there’s defenses and unrelated important storylines happening all the way up to the 5 Star GP, and it is true I suppose come to think of it that Stardom doesn’t really operate the way NJPW does, where a tour is blocked out with tons of “Road to” shows all supporting to and building up only the main show’s matches and storylines and nothing else. Stardom feels more like it has lots of storylines with potential status quo changing developments percolating at all times and any one or couple of them can be brought forward to fill some handful of time or shows at any given time. Which personally I agree is a good thing as an audience member!
For future things they want to improve he says increasing the amount of female fans (apparently it’s starting to increase a little but women make up about 10% of the fanbase – geez, I wouldn’t have guess it was that lopsided… I suppose come to think of it if/when cheering comes back it will be harder to just think of the audience as a genderless, opinionless, supportive void) and フローバル化, both in the form of brining in 外国人選手 and Stardom wrestlers traveling elsewhere as well.

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I laughed at this, haha, what a perfect emoji! The Shoko you made is also great.

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Done with translating TJPW’s July 23 show (recap here)!

A short one this time! There was only one TPC match in this because Mizuki vs Shoko got canceled. This meant that both Pom and Suzume suddenly got a massive opportunity to have a main event singles match, which is pretty cool!

I enjoyed Pom bringing a butterfly net to her match with a hornet. Sadly, Pom’s trickery was still not enough to net (:wink:) herself the win. But it’s pretty big for Suzume to make it into the quarterfinals!

Suzume got to close out the show by herself for the first time. When she spoke live, I could feel her emotion even without being able to catch what she was saying. She said that she never knows what Pom is going to do, and her shins hurt, but she won! Next, she will fight Rika, whom she admires, and who inspired her to join TJPW. She said that this summer, she will surpass Rika Tatsumi, whom she admires so much, and then after that, she’s aiming to win the tournament.

Backstage, according to the recap (here’s the video), Suzume said: “(1回戦は)シードだったんですけど、まず1勝”. This was a little hazy for me. I think she was saying “She was seeded into the first round, but she started out with a win.”? I’m not exactly sure of the proper way to talk about tournament seeding in English, so that holds me back a little. I also wasn’t quite sure who was the subject, but considering the context, it seems to be Pom?

Suzume went on to say that Pom does unpredictable things, but she was glad that Pom showed persistence against her. She said that she joined TJPW because she admired the way that Rika fights with all of her might, and she wants to live her life like that, too. In the twitter caption, she says that if all she wanted was to live her life to the fullest, there are other ways besides pro wrestling, but she chose this path.

Then she said: “この道を選んだからこそ、この道じゃないと成し遂げられないことをしたい.” I struggled with this. Here was what I went with: “I chose it specifically because I want to do something that can only be accomplished this way.” (Or would “that can’t be done anywhere else” be better? Or are both wrong? :sweat_smile:) She says that that is defeating Rika Tatsumi.

Pom said that this was her first singles match with Suzume. Then she said, “前にタッグで負けたとき、人生終わっちゃうくらい悔しかったんです.” I think this says basically: “Before, when I lost in tag team matches, I was so frustrated, it felt like the end of my life.”?

She said that for the first time in a long time, she remembered that feeling. She says that she thinks this experience was absolutely essential, so “Pom-chan’s 2022 summer” will surely become a great memory.

The twitter caption elaborates a little more. She mentions that she thought it would be cool for her to win her first ever singles main event. (Pom actually has singles match victories over both Yuka and Rika, but let’s just say they weren’t standard matches, haha. They’re probably just about the only shoot matches in pro wrestling.)

The recap also points out that Pom and Rika faced each other in the TJPW Inspiration show on April 10, which I believe I talked about in here. The upcoming cup match would be a tough match for Suzume to win, but maybe she’ll fare better this time…

The other match of consequence on this show was the replacement match for Shoko vs Mizuki, which was Shoko and Yuka vs Miu and Rika. I really loved this one! All four of them were really at their best. I feel like when Yuka and Shoko tag together, they have a particular kind of energy where they’re wrestling together but sort of competing with each other at the same time. Though in a way that makes them stronger as a team, not weaker.

I was convinced it was going to end in a draw, but Shoko managed to pull off the win at the very end, pinning Miu with less than a minute left on the clock. Tough loss for Miu! It’s her second one in a short period of time (after she took the pin in the number one contender 4way at CyberFest).

I think I was able to understand this part of the recap, but was a little confused because I couldn’t double-check it because no one else mentioned this in English. Here’s the last part of the match recap: “20分時間切れギリギリで中島がロコモーション式ノーザンライト・スープレックス・ホールドを約1年ぶりに繰り出して渡辺から勝利.” Here was my translation: “just before the 20 minute time limit, Nakajima executed a locomotion-style Northern Lights Suplex for the first time in about a year, pulling off the victory over Watanabe.”

I was a little confused over what the 年ぶり part was referring to (the move? the win over Miu?), and I’d also never heard of a locomotion-style move before. But I commonly learn new wrestling things, haha. I’m not sure if this is exactly how it would be translated in English, but google seemed to show some precedent.

After the match, Shoko said (embellishing with the twitter caption) that she thinks Mizuki is even more disappointed than she is (over losing by forfeit). She says that if she wants to call herself the best in TJPW, she thinks Mizuki is one of the opponents she has to defeat. Shoko won by forfeit, so she definitely wants to face her one-on-one when they get the chance. Next she has Miu, who might be the opponent she doesn’t want to lose to the most right now. She’s bracing herself for the challenge.

Miu said that she wanted this to be the summer of surpassing their senpais. She thinks the young wrestlers have to work hard to achieve results here, so even though she’s disappointed today, she’s going to do her best in order to surpass Shoko.

Rika’s comment was a little confusing. She said: “私も対戦相手が鈴芽になったんですけど、大きい羽が生えたばっかりだけど、むしり取って、その先の決勝で会おうよ”. I translated this as: “My opponent is Suzume, but even though she just finished growing bigger wings, I’m going to tear them off, and we’ll meet in the finals at some point down the road.”

I’m pretty sure the bigger wings refer to the new wings on Suzume’s gear, which are longer than the old ones. Rika also tore one of her wings off in their last singles match, haha. But enough of the wording in the comment was tricky, I wasn’t entirely confident. According to the recap, Rika also mentioned that she’s going to meet Miu, her tag partner, in the finals.

And that’s all for this show!

Next show will decide the semi-finals. Then the four names will be shuffled. My friends and I have debated whether this is or is not a truly random draw, haha. I guess we’ll have to see how they do the draw this year, and if there’s an easy way to work it like they did the draw for the tournament bracket…

I’m torn between rooting for Miu to win, or rooting for Shoko to go all the way and nominate Mizuki for her opponent, so that match will be extra tense for me… For the other matches, I’m hoping for some upsets, haha. I’ll be rooting for Nao, Hikari, and Suzume :blush:.

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She’s talking about herself - it’s shuffled around a quite a bit in the transcript (the video has “まずトーナメント1勝 (bow), シードだったんですけど、私のトーナメント始まりました!”) so I suspect she didn’t organize her thoughts into fully coherent grammar, but she’s celebrating her first victory while acknowledging her favorable seed in the tournament meant she got a bye in the first round.

“この道を選んだからこそ” would be more like “specifically because I chose this path”.
She’s saying she chose this path of pro wrestling and because she’s chosen it, she wants to accomplish things that wouldn’t be possible on any other path.

Yeah roughly – in the video it’s more clear I think that she’s talking specifically about past losses to Suzume (which are in tag matches since this was their first singles match), and saying that while other losses are a bummer too of course, those were especially vexing losses, like “人生終わっちゃう世界バーンってぐらい” with the “バーン” being my attempt at transcribing an sfx and sort of like, “to heck with it” hand gesture she did.
I would say it’s more in a teenager “ugh my life is over!” sense than anything more grim, to be clear! Like, the gist in the video is it was so frustrating she was saying “[stuff you might say when really frustrated].”

I would say your translation is correct – the “Xを約1年ぶりに繰り出して” construction would mean that the 1年ぶりに would refer to that clause, so yeah, it sounds like Shoko used that ロコモーション式ノーザンライト・スープレックス・ホールド for the first time in about a year (and she won with it).

From googling the move name, looks like ロコモーション式 refers to hitting the suplex and rolling right into another suplex (and so on potentially from there)! (like here you can hear one commentator say, when Natsupoi doesn’t bridge the first suplex so it can’t be a ホールド, “お!ジャーマンじゃない!” and then as she transitions into suplex #2, the other commentator says “ロコモーション式です!”)
Fun name!
I don’t know what the best name would be in English - maybe “Locomotion” in the context of a Japanese wrestler’s move to match their name, and just “rolling” or something outside of that context.

Yep! I agree with your interpretation.
One minor thing I’d point out is that “at some point down the road” is much more definite than that! For that part, she’s talking to Watanabe, and the “その先” is just, like, “after that.”
In the video she turns to Watanabe and says “その先の決勝で会おうよ” and gives her a kind of awkward supportive slap on the shoulder, which leads to laughter and more kind of awkward shoulder grabbing, and they resolve to meet specifically in the finals of the tournament (shuffling of the semifinals notwithstanding)
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With their positions in the tournament, “その先の決勝で会おうよ” is a bit of a mix of support, pressure, and threat, after all!

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Posting something a little bit different this time. Since I’m (very temporarily) caught up on the TJPW translations, I ended up reading the NJPW English book for my daily reading! I very much read extensively and not intensively, and did a lot of skimming over details I didn’t really care about, but I got through the first, uh, 64 pages?

It’s actually pretty cool how much I was able to read! I was a little bit floored, honestly :sweat_smile:. I guess all of that Anki time has really paid off. I definitely don’t have nearly this level of fluency with non-wrestling-related Japanese.

The book starts with advice on where to start reading depending on your level of English skill. The entry level is 道場生 level, which I guess is like dojo student? Then beginner is young lion, intermediate is 中堅 (I looked at this word and was like “is this basically midcarder?” the answer seems to be yes), and advanced is champion.

Obviously, if you’re coming at it from the opposite language direction, the hardest stuff is the easiest, and the easiest stuff is the hardest. One day, I aspire to reach 道場生レベル :triumph:.

I was today years old when I learned that it’s called a figure 4 because it looks like the number 4. In hindsight, I’m not sure where I thought the name came from otherwise :sweat_smile:.

I also learned that apparently 本 is the counter used for belts! There are 10本 in NJPW.

I laughed at the translators having to figure out what to do with names like Zack’s finisher, Orienteering With Napalm Death. They also mentioned that he calls himself “soy boy”, but did not explain what that means. Fair.

I didn’t know that Ryu Lee’s nickname was “Super Powered Muscle Car.” I thought it was funny how his biography section mentions his brothers, then sums up the highlights of his CMLL career, then casually mentions that he changed his name in 2019. I’m sure that happened for no particular reason. It also says that he has a mutually acknowledged rival relationship with Hiromu, which is one way to put it and leave out all of the actual interesting bits.

It was really funny how the book had to clarify that the “daddy” in Chris Dickinson’s nickname “Dirty Daddy” specifically means a sexually attractive man.

I thought it was interesting that it translated “gonzo” as both “異常” and “でたらめ”. I guess that does make sense!

I wasn’t exactly fond of the decision they made with Karl Fredericks’ finisher, Manifest Destiny. They just translated the words literally. Which, yeah, they don’t exactly have a lot of character space here, but I feel like there’s an important connotation to this one, especially since Karl is making an intentional statement by using that move as someone who’s Native…

Hangman didn’t have much in his description, because he basically did nothing while he was in NJPW, but I thought it was a neat touch that they described him as leaving NJPW in January 2019 together with Kenny Omega and others.

I also learned that the Kamigoye was called the 人でなしニー at first, which one of my friends informed me was what Murata called it when Kota used it for the first time.

I laughed at Kenta’s description mentioning that the Go 2 Sleep is his original move, and then the line after that just says that AEW’s CM Punk also uses it.

naitoyikes naito_beer

They talk about Makabe entering to Immigrant Song and translate the song title, but conveniently leave out that they have to dub over it every time because they don’t actually have the rights to use it.

I laughed at the last line of Tenzan’s bio, which says that in recent years, he has also been active in the role of Master Wato’s diva (?). The question mark is present in the actual Japanese description.

Kojima’s description mentions his love of bread, and him expressing his thoughts in English on twitter as the Bread Club, and how he has lots of fans in the English speaking world as well. All true!

I didn’t catch the full context for this because I didn’t bother to look up the unknown kanji in the sentence, but it mentioned “チビ虎” for Tiger Mask. Chibi tiger… that’s so cute.

Ah, Goto has challenged for the IWGP belt 8 times, and they all ended in failure…

They specifically mentioned Sanada’s matches with Zack, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was saying about them despite knowing all the kanji: “ザック・セイバーjr.とのグラウンド中心の戦いは、名勝負数え歌の呼び声も高い.” One of my friends explained that 呼び声が高い means famous/widely spoken of/highly acclaimed, and apparently 名勝負数え歌/唄 was a phrase used to describe the chemistry between Fujinami and Chono, who had some matches against each other in the 90s and early 2000s, which were all highly praised at the time.

So this line was saying that ZSJ and Sanada’s mat based-matches are acclaimed as great matches with a chemistry the likes of Fujinami/Chono. (I mostly remember Zack/Sanada matches for being very, very popular with my gay male friends, but I guess that’s one way to describe their appeal :sweat_smile:).

They translated El Desperado’s finisher, El Pinche Loco, but censored it: "クソキチ〇イ’. It took me a bit to figure out what they were censoring, but I’m pretty sure it was “クソキチガイ” (which I understood thanks to WK teaching that unfortunate word…). This book is testing my knowledge of inappropriate words in three languages :sweat_smile: :sweat:.

It was interesting to me that they censored キチガイ and not クソ. if this was english, I feel like it would be the other way around… When I mentioned this, my friend said that apparently they used that word in the Ibushi vs Nakamura VTR, back in the day, which is a rather unfortunate decision… :pensive:.

When talking about Dick Togo’s nickname, they define “spoiler” as “楽しみを台無しにする”, literally spoiling the fun. I always thought of what he does as in spoiling the match, but I guess that’s also spoiling the fun, haha.

It was interesting to me that they defined “heat” in terms of Jado’s “Master Heater” nickname as, well, “heat” in the wrestling sense. Obviously that was my first thought when I heard his name, but it seemed like a mildly insider-y term, so I wasn’t quite sure if that was the intended meaning. They define “master heater” as essentially a genius at irritating the audience.

The next section in the book is a few interviews with wrestlers, in parallel text format, but I think I’m going to skip this section for now and read the glossary next :blush:.

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I’m glad you’re enjoying the book! And congratulations on the surprise of how much you’re able to read - although it’s no surprise to me :sweat_smile: with all those translations I’m sure it’ll catch you off guard how much you improve from it - especially with wrestling stuff!

I was kinda curious – it looks like that bit is talking about Tiger Mask’s 子煩悩ness, as his kid (the “チビ虎”) shows up frequently in his social media posts, like this one, with his own little mask.
Cute!

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Some wrestling show impressions:

TJPW 東京プリンセスカップ

I’ve been enjoying the princess cup! The lack of commentary is too bad, and so I’ve watched them with a mix of all of my different modes - directly, while doing anki, and while working. But TJPW has a lot of wrestlers who are fun to watch even when they aren’t at the top of the card (like Raku’s lullabies or the Hyper Misao shenanigan of the day are consistently fun - I enjoyed Misao forming a sentai-style ranger team, for example) so it was always a good time, and I have to keep up with the translations to help, after all!


NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 1 (from 2007)

Probably the weirdest bit of minor pro wrestling trivia is that the “Wrestle Kingdom” name for the January 4th show NJPW holds every year was taken directly from an Xbox 360 game made by Yuke’s, the company that made a bunch of WWE games and also is making the upcoming AEW: Fight Forever game, because Yuke’s owned NJPW for a bit there. Very weird to imagine from the state of NJPW nowadays.

Similarly – I wouldn’t have guessed from modern shows how common interpromotional shows were at the Tokyo Dome around this time. This one is built entirely around NJPW vs. AJPW, and I found it at least quite a bit more enjoyable for me than the previous year’s NJPW vs. indie, mainly because it felt a lot more unified and the booking made more sense (and Brock Lesnar is nowhere to be seen). It’s also unexpectedly relevant to at least current-day AJPW, as Voodoo Murders style Suwama shows up here (with a lot of WM in general on the card).

Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Toshiaki Kawada I don’t think was as great as it sounds like it could have been from those two participants, but I thought it got across well the danger of Kawada’s kicks and Nakamura’s sudden submissions.

Minoru Suzuki vs. Yuji Nagata for the Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship was really good! It was cool to see Suzuki in top form (which is to say – exactly like he is now but a little plumper and with the full like, crest of hair and spirals style that only he can pull off). They spend a while blading at the start but it doesn’t get nearly as bad as Nagata/Sasaki and while at first I thought it wasn’t as intense of a match as I’m used to from current-day Suzuki… that impression definitely changed by the end!

Hiroshi Tanahashi’s IWGP title defense was against an AJPW guy I don’t think I’d ever heard of, 太陽ケア, who at first I was unfairly biased against because of that. But I thought he played the dominant foil for Tanahashi quite well! Tana really shone as a fantastic babyface with plenty of moments tricking me into thinking he might not persevere and then getting me to cheer as he did just that.

The main event, rather than either of the heavyweight matches, is a “dream tag match” between Tencozy and Mutoh/Chono, which I didn’t necessarily have the background to appreciate as much but provided a good opportunity for Mutoh and Chono to memorialize Hashimoto at the end (and for Tenzan to lose again).

One other highlight was getting to see Milano Collection A.T. wrestle! I think he’s a great color commentator, and from this brief impression it seems like he was a talented wrestler too! He did the Paradise Lock with far more theatrics and aplomb than I’ve ever seen from SANADA…

I haven’t gotten around to reading the 2007 chapter of the Nakamura biography, and Wrestle Kingdom II is barely on NJPW World because it’s a co-promotion with TNA of all things! So although it would be kind of fun to watch lots/all of the “Wrestle Kingdoms”… we’ll see. I suppose there’s no rush, in any case.


STARDOM in SHOWCASE vol.1

What an odd show! This felt like… a year’s worth of King of Pro-Wrestling trophy matches compressed into one card.

One major disappointment is they went with the maximum copyright-avoidance style of VOD for the Stardom World version of the show, with wrestler entrances and celebrations cut out except for the rumble. That sucks! From the air horns and what little could be heard – it sounds like they weren’t using anyone’s regular entrance music? Which might be the reason? I would be curious how much additional novelty vibe would be conveyed if I’d been watching the PPV version. I imagine there’d be at least SOME context for stuff like the airhorns.

My favorite match was definitely the Falls Count Anywhere match! I was curious if they would acknowledge the elephant in the room…
image
… and boy did they! The commentary team had a lot of fun by referring to Koguma as just くま and the inflatable bouncy castle elephant as just ぞう, and well – sometimes pro-wrestling is high stakes emotional fights, and sometimes it’s a wrestler and a bear magically swapping clothes inside of a giant elephant.

Mayu Iwatani was the guest commentator for the later matches, and she was a fantastic choice because she’s a very receptive audience! She laughed A LOT when Koguma tripped trying to jump down the big inflatable slide, and I also liked the commentators explaining the nuances of “I quit” to her during the I Quit match.

Speaking of the I Quit match, this and the other more violent stipulations could probably have been a lot more intense on a less novelty-ish show, but it was still pretty fun! I’m glad for the good excuse to make better note of Kurumi Hiiragi’s name (and “Holly Walnut” is a memorable one, after all!), and an I Quit match is heavily reliant on how gutturally the babyface can scream that they aren’t quitting yet… so Syuri is a great fit!

Similarly the hardcore match was fun - I also like a lot Suzu’s “arrivederci! mata na!” in the backstage comments.

The skeleton turned out to be Yuu! I recognized her from shupro, as her tag team with Chihiro Hashimoto, チーム200kg, seems lauded, although I never mentioned them much in my summaries (partly since not watching the promotions they were in, I was never sure at a glance how crassly or not crassly the weight theme of the team was handled). They also currently hold the tag team belts in Sendai Girls as of the last magazine I recapped, so it was a total surprise to me when the 謎の死神 was her! I don’t know yet if it’s a one-off, the start of her being signed to Stardom, or guest appearances, or what, but my impression is she’d be a very cool addition in whichever slot.
I also somehow appreciate Stardom making “dress up in a horror monster costume and emotionally and physically torture Stardom wrestlers, then when you debut take it off and never do anything like that again because it was completely out of character and implausible for you to have been the one doing it in the first place” like, the orthodox way for a surprise wrestler to join the company. I don’t think it’s good storytelling… but I do think it’s very funny! My personal head canon is it will keep happening because when people want advice on joining Stardom they go for advice on how to make a good first impression from a famously successful ship-jumper… and end up running with Giulia’s unintentionally terrible communication advice.

The “cosmic rules” match was the kind of thing I would have absolutely hated knowing it was coming from the WWE writers room… Stardom retains at least a little bit of the benefit of the doubt from me that the premise and/or details could have come from the wrestlers themselves, but it was still very juvenile. I suppose one positive thing to say about Pheremones in contrast is they don’t pretend like professional wrestling isn’t already a pretty inherently risque activity. Teasing stuff like wet t-shirts and towels just seems sort of childish when we’re already watching mostly naked people be physically and emotionally intimate with each other… but whatever.

One thing I’ll say as a definite positive – I only realized after the fact that this and MidSummer Champions were Stardom running the same venue two days in a row! I think I actually liked this approach much much more than a 2-day show where both days have basically the exact same kind of card. It gave different wrestlers a chance to shine on both days and I think probably gave for example Syuri a bit of a break (although that’s weird to say about an I Quit match) instead of having intense championship matches back to back.
Despite the flaws here, I would like to see them do this again, I think! With some tweaks and polish it could be a great novelty like that cage match show ended up being, or it could just keep being a pretty fun grab bag.


ガンバレ☆プロレス WRESTLE SEKIGAHARA

I don’t know anything about Ganbare (I guess they’re a DDT-affiliated promotion with an emphasis on working with other promotions?) but I watched this because I like the name and the ads made it look pretty cool.

I enjoyed the show! I bet if I were a Ganbare fan I would have loved it. I was especially impressed by both tag teams. Yuuri also seemed cool and “Lingerie Mutoh” was a surprisingly faithful impersonation, albeit with obligatory knee jokes and uh, lingerie. I also enjoyed Manase/Sayaka, and thought the Suzuki match was a really fun classic style Minoru Suzuki match, complete with audience seating disruption and hassling of young wrestlers at ringside.

Yumehito Imanari vs. Ken Ohka in the main event seemed like it would have been super cathartic and good if I’d been following those wrestlers previously - the moment I highlighted in the last recap was touching. I only knew Ohka as “guy in Ganbare posters” and Imanari from the magazines as “pervert movie director from Pheremones and the Great Space War” (the latter of which I was wrong about – turns out I was conflating him with, in true Michinoku Pro fashion, a nude Joaquin Phoenix style Joker who also carried a camera around). So it was interesting to see him in a more serious and wholesome light.


Stardom MidSummer Champions 2022 in NAGOYA

I really enjoyed this show! Going in, Syuri vs. Tam Nakano is a definite headliner for Stardom right now, and with Tam’s recent momentum from the Natsupoi thing, it was going to be Syuri’s riskiest title defense match to-date, and so it made the match very exciting. And Syuri retained! But I believe Tam that this is the beginning of the end for the 朱世界… I wonder if this means Tam will win the 5 Star GP and challenge again more successfully, or if that would be too similar to how Hayashishita/Syuri played out?

The tag title match I also thought was super enjoyable, and the Artist of Stardom match too! It’s fun to hear people say “スパパパパーン” so much and I love the thing that team does where they chain the belts together. Kashima snuck up on me… she was in the background for a while, but she’s really entertaining. And I always forget she does a shoryuken until she hits it again.

Saya Iida was the guest commentator! She’s been speaking in a very confident superhero-ish register recently in promos, which I think is fun, and she wasn’t doing that here but she acquitted herself well for a first time commentating. They had some fun joking about “Super Strong Stardom Machine” from the rumble the previous day.


I saw on twitter Thekla’s out of the 5 Star GP to recover from injury (replaced by Momo Kogo who should be good, but still too bad!) and Suzu and Kurumi are missing a Prominence show due to COVID so we’ll see how all these round robins go huh :grimacing:
The N-1 Victory blocks were announced though, and I thought they looked pretty good. I’m maybe most curious about Hideki Suzuki’s matches - he seems like someone who it would be interesting to see different wrestlers try to deal with in singles matches. I was surprised during the announcement no one had participated in more than 4 of those tournaments… until I realized they were only counting the ones under the “N-1 Victory” name, which only started in 2019…

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週刊プロレス No.2193 (from a couple of weeks ago)

In Naito’s column he talks about getting to do commentary and a ceremonial pitch for some Hiroshima Carp games – apparently it’s his first promotional type event like this since turning Ingobernables, probably because at first after that he was mainly a heel and in the pandemic era there’ve been fewer of those events anyway.
Asked about doing commentary for wrestling shows, he says he’s always turned that down but doesn’t really quite know why, but the reason he settles on is he just wants to leave shows when his matches are done. He cites Shingo Takagi as a wrestler he’s impressed by when doing commentary, and when he commentates he’s less talkative in the locker room which is a plus for Naito.

Kenoh in his column talks about getting called out by the returning-from-cancer Fujita “Junior” Hayato, and praises him but complains that on the cover of the magazine last week they rearranged Hayato’s words! Hayato called out Kenoh and Hiromu in that order… but on the cover they described it as calling out Hiromu and Kenoh. Kenoh suspects “ライオンマークの見えない圧力” may be at play!

Looks like the shupro photographer caught the 白目 the AJPW cameras missed which I complained about!


(of course, even though they didn’t show his face I knew what it looked like since I’ve seen Nagata matches before, so it’s not a particularly big deal, but hey)

Giulia’s column is particularly fun this week, as she brings her new protégé and DDM rookie Mai Sakurai (that’s one of those names that sounds especially weird to me for some reason when I swap it to follow English conventions) to meet her ”師匠”, Hideki Suzuki for special training!
At the start she fires back at Suzuki’s joke about her a while back that I didn’t super understand at the time and still don’t necessarily - but I think she’s saying Suzuki complained Giulia never buys meals or lends him money, and she’s like “yeah duh of course I wouldn’t” but to avoid a 「ジュリアケチ」impression she cajoled Suzuki into this by offering food in return for 師匠 work.
Anyway, Giulia says again that Mai is very “マジメ” which is both good and bad for pro wrestling, and something she’s been telling her is a point to improve is ad-libbing ability and reading the crowd, a “試合のボキャブラリー”. (boy there’s an English word that doesn’t make it through Japanese unscathed)
So one of the exercises Suzuki did was he asked Mai what weapons she would bring to a hardcore match like the one in Nagoya – and her first answer was “a bat” but he pressed her for more interesting answers from “a baton”, “a badminton shuttlecock”, all the way to zany answers like “a fishing boat.”
They also worked on visualizing the 5 Star GP which Mai will be in, and at first when asked her expectations she just said she just wanted to beat Unagi, but Suzuki insisted she aim higher and the settled-on goal record was 10:2 with the 2 losses being AZM and Himeka (and the wins including Syuri, Tam, Utami…). Suzuki asked as an “お師匠の禅問答”: 「10勝2敗、ダメだったらどうする?」
and Mai answered 「土下座します、鈴木さんとジュリアさんと一緒に!」 and Giulia doesn’t understand why she got roped into the potential dogeza but Mai will just have to meet the goal and Gilua will have to win her own block with 11:1! (lol I’ll be rooting for Mai and all but now I will definitely be looking forward to the group dogeza).
It sounds like she also learned moves like the “超実戦的エルボースマッシュ.” Sounds like a productive session! Why would WWE fire this valuable お師匠? other than the language barrier and major style and principles clash


Side note, but one thing I really like about (Stardom’s) units is how they inform wrestlers’ 成長 stories – whether or not it’s really so separate behind the scenes, as a character Mai’s path will always be informed by this influence from Giulia (and by the transitive property Suzuki I suppose) thanks to being in DDM in a way completely different from each of the other wrestlers in Stardom early on in their career who each similarly have their own storyline mentors. (I suppose come to think of it what I’m describing is similar to how NJPW’s excursions work? I wonder if this would be happening the same way if travel were easier – and I wonder if NJPW factions would feel more meaningful if wrestlers didn’t just come back to join them fully formed)

There’s a big feature on Saori Anou, the newly crowned Ice Infinity champion. In the interview it talks about her freelancing and her winning the championship and getting front cover of the magazine. I don’t have enough knowledge of her background or the surrounding context to understand all of the interview fully, but it sounds like she was in the first class of Actwres Girls and is 31 with a 7 year career, and got some flak early on for working with other promotions or something, so it sounds like the freelancer spirit is strong. The interviewer asks her about Stardom, since she’s freelancing and all, and she gives dodging answers of the “not announcing anything and not burning any bridges either” type including this first for me in these interview transcripts:


There’s a rundown of past important matches of hers, and a listing of her signature moves, including this amusingly named エクソシスト and her finisher, the interesting looking タンタンドル
image

There’s comments included as well from her “プロレスの父” Yumiko Hotta and her “プロレスの母” Mayumi Ozaki, who are both very complementary.
Hey, I recognize that photoshoot!

The history column is pretty interesting - it talks about how in the 70s, any of the three major American championships (NWA, AWA, WWWF) having a title change was big news to the Japanese wrestling industry and would ignite speculation about which of the three major Japanese promotions (新日本、全日本、国際) the new champion would be affiliated with if/when they came to Japan. The columnist says this died out in 84 along with McMahon jr. and WWF conquering the American market. It was said 「アメリカのプロレスがクシャミをすれば、日本のプロレスは風邪をひく」but over time the Japanese industry just built up an immunity.
The closing sentence is I think true on multiple different levels: “プロレスを長く愛するためには、「免疫」がないとシンドイものである。”

In the Champ Talk column, Saki Kashima talks about the Artist of Stardom Championship. The most interesting tidbit is she says the “すぱぱぱぱーん” phrase for her 起死回生 that’s popular recently to the point that she’s thinking of using it as the official name for the move, came from a game on the Stardom show on Samurai TV, 煌めく☆まるごとスターダム, where she had to write a 短歌 and came up with it as the onomatopoeia for the 起死回生 to fit the poem she had in mind. I suppose that’s an easy way to remember exactly how many ぱ’s are in it!
I’ll just reiterate what I said earlier today and say this Artist team is cool and I like the chain thing they do with the belts.

Looks like Suzu Suzuki won the Catch the WAVE 2022 tournament! Including the “Regina di wave” championship and 100万円! She says she will spend the latter on 「焼肉、車、デスマッチアイテムいっぱい!」
(I always wonder if wrestlers get to actually keep prize money like this, or those promotional giveaways Stardom sometimes hands out to match winners. I feel like… probably not? But hey who knows!)

The costume column is about Strong Machine J in Dragon Gate and I don’t have any thoughts about the costume but I feel like I could use like, a full guidebook on the Strong Machine lineage because I only really know it as a name evoking “Showa-era masked wrestler” and fully cannot separate legacy iterations from possible duplicates and parodies. I guess I’ve got a lot of reading to do.

Hideki Suzuki in his column talks about “フライング発言” - wrestlers using mic time to call out challengers or storylines without consulting their promotion first, in the context of both Jake Lee floating continuing the feud with Tanahashi, and Hayato challenging Kenoh and Hiromu upon his return. Suzuki makes a distinction between Hayato’s heartfelt, death’s door type of フライング and Jake Lee’s less believable フライング, but seems generally positive on both as a way to get things started and see what happens.
The interviewer brings up a touchstone on the subject I’ll be interested to read about soon! There’s even a footnote explaining it. It sounds like in 2009, as IWGP champion Shinsuke Nakamura called out Antonio Inoki on the microphone, and as it went on there were some attempts for New Japan and Inoki’s Inoki Genome Foundation to get something going, but nothing ever materialized and Nakamura always seemed to be calling out specifically Inoki. Suzuki places it in more the Hayato type of フライング, because Nakamura’s particular career path as a last Inoki disciple and how all that stuff happened must have made it important to him as personal growth to attempt to call out Inoki like that.
Lastly, the interviewer gives Suzuki free reign to make a フライング of his own - is there anyone he would like to challenge? Anyone at all??
Suzuki says the cat he adopted recently is getting up on the couch and playing with toys but still won’t allow petting yet so what he’d really like to do is touch his cat’s butt.

The short industry column is some really interesting context that’s news to me! It’s about Nao Kakuta seeing Saori Anou and Natsupoi both get shupro covers in the last couple weeks, and feeling bittersweet about it because all three of them are first-generation Actwres girls! Kakuta is 35 with an 8 year career and hasn’t ever won a championship, so hearing from some e.g. “now it’s Kakuta’s turn next for a cover!” stings.
Really goes to show how even recent historical context is really easy to miss, because I never would have guessed those three were generation mates somewhere. Maybe it’s just the last month or so talking, but looking back, Actwres girl’Z dissolving seems like one of the most momentous sources of ripple effects from just before I started paying attention. I wonder if I dug back through the pile of back issues I could find interesting news articles I missed…
Anyway definitely a reason for me to root more for Kakuta!

The long industry column is with an AJPW head. Asked roughly (in so many words) to defend the choice of VM Suwama going over Jake Lee on his first defense after Lee already dropped the title once this year due to injury, he mostly just says fans not knowing what to expect is a good thing, and Suwama’s heel champion while involved in the business side too is a new flavor for AJPW. Says the interaction with NJPW is a good opportunity, but about Jake Lee’s フライング just says it would be cool to interact more with NJPW and Tanahashi but they’ll just have to wait for the right time (which sounds to me like “yeah no”). Tiger Mask with the jr. belt and Yuji Nagata in the single-elimination tournament coming up should help draw eyes though. And they’ve apparently got a TV deal with a channel called BS, which is apparently mainly watched by old folks who are the right age to have grown up watching wrestling like Abdullah the Butcher, the Funks, and Mil Mascaras and so on so it’ll be a good opportunity to show them that modern-day AJPW has excitement too. (After hearing American wrestling people drone endlessly about ratings and key demographics since AEW started, it’s really jarring to hear somebody speak positively about how old their ratings audience will be…)

Finally at the very back there’s an ad for the 5 Star GP that shows the blocks, and includes the tournament appearance stats for all the wrestlers.
The stats are pretty interesting! The wrestlers with the most appearances are:

  1. Mayu Iwatani - 9年連続9度目 (I wondered if this was all the 5 Star GPs ever since I still think of Stardom as being 10 years old because of that anniversary feature even though it’s been a year+ since then I think geez but nope! Apparently they started in 2012 so she missed two of them.)
  2. Tam Nakano - 6年連続6度目
  3. Momo Watanabe - 5年連続6度目
  4. Utami Hayashishita - 5年連続5度目
  5. Saki Kashima another name that sounds weird when I switch the order for English - 2年連続5度目 but one of those 5 was the very first one.

Just again - I think it’s interesting how figuring out past contexts like this sometimes feels like archaeology even though it’s just talking about the past ten years, with how quickly things change, especially in Stardom recently. Saki being around early then having a big gap and coming back explains why it’s hard for me to place her sometimes, and in my head Utami is still more or less a young gun but by this metric at least she’s in the veteran percentile. And meanwhile AZM-paisen and SLK are in the background ensuring the career length vs. age graph is just completely all over the place…


… Anyway, I forgot to mention in the last post – how about that scandal finally sticking to Vince McMahon! :eyes: Surely him being (even nominally) farther from the business can be nothing but a demonstrably good thing. Even if it will take a real long time for WWE to not be the thing that it is, if that ever happens…

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feelstana

Aw, poor Nao! I do hope she has better luck one of these days. Maybe she and Hikari have a shot at taking that tag belt from Yuki Arai…

Yes, same, haha. I guess the market over there truly is different… :sweat_smile:

Yes, I forgot to mention this, too! I am very glad to see Vince finally out of the wrestling business. It’s a shame that’s probably the only consequence that he’s going to experience from everything he did… But at least he’s no longer in a position where he can impact so many people’s lives and careers negatively.

It’ll be interesting to see how things go for WWE from here on out. I still probably won’t watch them unless the company changes very substantially including who they’re taking money from and contributing money to, but ideally the situation there will at least get better for the performers.

I was wondering if this would mean the potential for a shift in mindset re: competition and collaboration. I highly doubt they’ll join the so-called Forbidden Door universe that the other companies seem to be creating, but it feels more likely than it did before. I guess Triple H was also involved with the old plans to expand NXT all over the world, so maybe he’ll take that back up again, which would be unfortunate… I do enjoy how Japan has somehow managed to fight off all of WWE’s attempts so far to establish an NXT Japan there.

In any case, it seems like AEW is doing much better in terms of making actual inroads into building a Japanese fanbase than WWE was, considering the unpopularity of the WWE section in shupro, haha, and the many connections that AEW has with Japanese companies now. It feels to me like WWE is just deeply out of touch with what Japanese wrestling fans really want. But all of that can change if people in the right places make the right decisions.

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