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

No, Kagetsu was with Stardom, which only does women’s wrestling, though, in a fun twist of fate, the company that owns New Japan Pro Wrestling, Bushiroad, now owns Stardom (they acquired them at the end of 2019, right around when Kagetsu retired), so technically now NJPW and Stardom are under the same umbrella, though the actual products are still kept pretty separate. They have their own streaming services, and the wrestlers don’t usually appear on the other company’s show (though, for the past few years, Stardom has gotten a few matches at Wrestle Kingdom, NJPW’s biggest show).

In Japan, most companies do only men’s wrestling or women’s wrestling (unlike in America or Mexico, where companies often have male wrestlers and female wrestlers on the same roster), though there are some very notable exceptions. ChocoPro, Ganbare, and DDT (where the Golden Lovers got their start!) all have both men and women on the roster and do a fair amount of intergender wrestling (where men and women wrestle each other).

Though, Kenny Omega is a huge fan of joshi wrestling (it’s one of his biggest inspirations), and he does really like Stardom. He definitely watches them and has friends who have worked there, including Riho, who is one of his favorite tag partners :blush:.

Oh, also, one current Stardom wrestler, Saya Kamitani, really idolizes Kota Ibushi! She uses one of his finishers, the phoenix splash, and also refers to herself as the “golden phoenix”, which I believe also references Ibushi.

Usually with wrestling, if you look deep enough, haha, you can find connections somewhere!

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oh wow, this is so cool. I’ve found something to fill the time in between NPB seasons :slight_smile:

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I can recommend Stardom! It’s where Kagetsu wrestled, and it’s the biggest women’s wrestling promotion in Japan right now, currently doing very well in both quality and popularity!

Nowadays, promotions all tend to have streaming services, so it’s really easy to get access to all their shows. Stardom-world is ¥920 a month and has… I think prettty much everything from the 10 years Stardom’s been running. Including all new shows! (Albeit with a delay of a few days usually before they’re posted).

So I think getting into it is just about building up enough interest to make that monetary jump. If there’s one match on a show that can make you think “heck, I’d be willing to try this out to see that match!” then hopefully that show’s other matches (or the service’s backcatalog) will give you other interesting threads to check out!
And if not, oh well, at least you’ll have satisfied your curiosity!

Looking around Stardom’s youtube page and twitter account could be a free way to see a bit of what’s going on and get interested. And before I got into wrestling there was a long period where I just occasionally googled looking for matches of a wrestler I knew I liked and kept slightly aware of what they were doing - so I think that’s a totally fine way of going about things!

Stardom’s next major show is a two-day show on March 26 and March 27 called Stardom World Climax 2022. I’m really excited for it!
The New Blood event mentioned above is I think more of a rookie-oriented exhibition type thing, with matches mainly featuring new wrestlers. World Climax is going to be much more of an extravaganza with full commentary (not guaranteed as far as I know, but I wouldn’t be shocked if english commentary was included, as they’ve done that for a big show or two in the past), championship matches, all the stars, returns, feuds, betrayals probably, etc.!
Here’s the card for Day 1, here’s the card for Day 2.
A match on that show I’d maybe highlight especially is KAIRI vs. Starlight Kid - it’s Kairi’s return match after a long absence (she wrestled in WWE for a while). Since it’s her first match back in the promotion, there’s no prior context you need to know other than that. And her opponent, Starlight Kid, just had a major rise in popularity when she joined Kagetsu’s old faction, Oedotai.
They’re also both incredible wrestlers, so it should be a really cool blend of Stardom’s past and present!
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So I think a good way to go could be to pay attention just enough to see clips of World Climax and the kinds of stuff that happened on it, and see if that sounds like something you would have liked to watch. And then if so (or if you’re already curious enough) give stardom world a shot (in April, perhaps – I think they probably bill on the first of the month regardless of when you join) and catch it when it’s uploaded, or the next major show (I’d say the output is very roughly ~1 big show a month, ~5-10 smaller shows).

At some point tournament season will roll around and if you’re already bought in but don’t know many of the wrestlers, that can be a great introduction for the ones you don’t know. But that’s for another time…

Hope that helps!

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Hi! I always recommend Wrestle Universe (WRESTLE UNIVERSE | Watch DDT, Pro-Wrestling NOAH, Tokyo Joshi Pro-Wrestling, Ganbare Pro-Wrestling, Rojo Pro-Wresstling (Pro-Wrestling in Public)) to someone who wants to get into Japanese pro wrestling. I believe the first month is free and then it’s only 900 yen per month to watch four different promotions. You’ll get access to all of the promotions under the CyberFight umbrella: Pro Wrestling NOAH, Dramatic Dream Team (DDT) Pro Wrestling, Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling (TJPW) and Ganbare. They’re four promotions that are pretty different in style so I’m sure you’ll find something you like!

If you do end up trying out a subscription, I would start with CyberFight Festival 2021. Each promotion on Wrestle Universe is featured and you can get a feel for what each company has to offer. It’s a really good show from top to bottom.

Here’s what I’d say about each promotion’s style plus what show I’d recommend starting with.

DDT: If you’ve ever seen YouTube videos of people wrestling in the street/in a train/in a theme park, or a guy wrestling a doll or some other inanimate object, that’s more than likely DDT. I really love them because they have a great mix of sports-centric wrestling and variety/comedy style stuff. There are some extremely talented people in DDT! There’s also the Pheromones, they are a bit scary at first but I’ve grown to tolerate and appreciate them. There is a big show this weekend on March 20 called Judgment that includes a lot of big matches that will tie up a lot of story lines. I think that would be a good jumping-off point. You can also watch their last big show, which was Never Mind in Yoyogi, that aired on 12/26. Lastly, the Super Encount series has 3 short episodes that feature street wrestling, so if you’re looking for non traditional, fun wrestling I suggest checking out those shows too.

Ganbare: This is the smallest of the promotions you can find on Wrestle Universe, but it is also my favorite! The whole roster is really charming, talented and engaging. All of the matches hit hard and are full of energy. This might also be the most difficult promotion to get into, though, because there’s not a whole lot of English content. However, their recent show, Bad Communication 2022, was the first one to have English commentary! And it was a great show, so that’s what I’d recommend if you want to see what Ganbare has to offer.

TJPW: A Joshi pro wrestling promotion that has picked up a lot of popularity in the past year. Maki Itoh is popular internationally, and there’s also a member of idol group SKE48 on their roster. I’m not as well versed in this promotion as the first two, but I’ll stick with my formula of recommending a big show. There is one this weekend on March 19, and their last one was Positive Chain 2022, which I believe included the finale of their tag team tournament. There’s also a recent show they filmed at a swimming pool that was really fun.

NOAH: My biggest blind spot of the CyberFight promotions. They offer mostly sports-centric, traditional Japanese puroresu. I would love to see more of them if I had the time. If i were to start watching today I’d probably go with their most recent show with English commentary, which was on 3/13.

DDT and NOAH have their own English language Twitter accounts:
DDT: DDTProEng (offers translations for live shows)
NOAH: NOAHglobal
And, as a bonus, if you want DDT/TJPW show translations for shows prior to this year, check out Twitter account DDTPro_Eng (this was an unofficial account run by someone who used to be employed by CyberFight)

Anyway this is probably way more info than you need! I promise I’m not paid by CyberFight. But I do think the site and each individual promotion are worth checking out. If you have questions about anything let me know :slight_smile:

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Oh nice, another CyberFight fan!! I also recommended Wrestle Universe at the start of this thread because it’s my favorite service as well :blush:. I linked some of my favorite DDT, TJPW, and NOAH matches at the start, and I feel pretty good about the variety in the DDT section, though the TJPW section needs some more recommendations, and the NOAH stuff is heavily centered around my favorite wrestlers in the company haha so it could probably use more, too. Feel free to add GanPro matches to the match recommendations section! I’ve only seen a few of their shows, so they’re my biggest blind spot as far as CyberFight goes.

I actually tried translating stuff from DDT shows on my own at the beginning of the year before they hired another translator, so I talked about some of their recent shows and storylines earlier in this thread (along with translation questions) :sweat_smile:. After they got regular translation again, I redirected my efforts to TJPW, which is actually my favorite company, though it’s sadly a lot harder to follow now. When I’m done reading their latest press conference, I’ll make a post with some highlights from it and information on big storylines. It’s actually a great time to get into TJPW and DDT, because both of them have really big shows coming up this week.

Though part of the problem with getting into wrestling is that there’s just so much content out there. And everyone has their favorite companies, haha, which can make it difficult to find a place to start! That’s why I recommend if you already have a performer or a story you’re interested in, it’s a good idea to just follow your heart. You can always branch out later :blush:

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I finished translating the main press conference going into TJPW’s March 19 show at Ryogoku Kokugikan! This was over 5,800 characters, which was pretty exhausting, but I did manage to get through it! They did another (shorter) press conference specifically for the TJPW vs GanPro match, which I’m still trying to finish before the show.

Firstly, though, I just want to commend TJPW for doing an amazing job with the posters advertising all of the matches on this show. I don’t have a convenient compilation of the Japanese versions to link, but here’s a thread of all of the English versions. Each match has a completely different feeling, and that really comes across in the design here.

The main press conference is recapped here (it originally aired here in video form, though I haven’t watched it). I feel like most of this was actually pretty straightforward? I had less trouble reading it, at least.

Some highlights:

I didn’t know that Shoko Nakajima and Miyu Yamashita debuted in a dark match at a DDT show at Ryogoku Kokugikan before TJPW even existed! It’s pretty amazing for them to go from that to main eventing a show at the same venue.

I really liked how Shoko described Miyu here. I think it really conveyed the inevitability and totality of Miyu from the perspective of everyone else on the roster. Shoko said that Miyu has always been the heart of everything, at the very top. Shoko then went on to say: “私流に言うと、怪獣の目の前にずっと立ちふさがってる、さらに大きな怪獣みたいな存在です。” I had a little trouble parsing this, especially trying to keep the meaning and also make it read smoothly in English, haha. My best attempt was: “In my manner of speaking, she’s like an even bigger kaiju that is standing right in front of the kaiju all the time.” (Shoko is a pretty big tokusatsu nerd who loves kaiju movies and models her own character after a kaiju). She said that no matter how much she won, no matter how much she thought she could rival her, whenever she thought she had finally surpassed Miyu, Miyu would easily overturn that with her strength.

Shoko also said that she’s entering the 10th year of her career, and in the time that she’s been part of TJPW, the roster has gotten very deep, and her 後輩(こうはい) are gaining tremendous ground, so it’s getting harder and harder to get the chance to main event a big show. So that she doesn’t lose her nerve, she’s telling herself that this is her final chance. (This part scared me at first because I thought she was going to announce that she planned on retiring soon :sweat_smile:).

両国国技館(りょうごくこくぎかん) is a venue that means a lot to most of the roster, and that’s a recurring theme here. Miyu refers to it as “デビューした日からずっと思い続けてきた夢の場所”, the place of her dreams that she has been thinking about since the day of her debut.

It comes up again during Rika Tatsumi and Miu Watanabe’s comments concerning their tag title match with the Magical Sugar Rabbits (Yuka Sakazaki and Mizuki). Rika talks about how she and Miu won the tag belts for the first time at DDT’s November 3, 2019 show at the same venue: "そのときに花道で見た景色がずっと忘れられなくて、そんな感動をまた未詩と一緒に味わいたい。” She’ll always remember the view she saw from the walkway, and she wants to feel that deep emotion again with Miu. (I’ll always remember that match, too, because it made me cry a lot, haha. Not because of Rika and Miu winning—well, actually it was because of Rika and Miu winning, but it was due to the fact that I was worried for what that meant for Misao :sweat_smile:).

The other major thing Rika says is that Mizuki is her favorite opponent, and she still has feelings for her (she’s had an unrequited crush on Mizuki for years), but she’s sure that if she wins the belt, it might cause Mizuki to hate her. This hasn’t changed her intent, though, and she’s prepared to be hated if she does win the belt.

Mizuki, meanwhile, responded to this part by saying “リカさん、私に嫌われるって。安心してください。私負けないので.” She told Rika to rest assured, because she isn’t going to lose.

Yuka also talked about how much the venue means to her, and to TJPW (she actually got so emotional, it moved her to tears). She said that she will defend her belt so that her best partner Mizuki can shine even more.

Mizuki said that MagiRabbi’s strength is the sheer amount of time that they spend together. Even when they don’t say a lot of words to each other, they’re always in perfect sync during their matches, and even their feelings have come to be in sync. Yuka said that she doesn’t think Miu and Rika have a very strong connection (I’d agree with this, though their matches are good technically), so there’s no way they can win against MagiRabbi’s bond.

The next part of the press conference is for Yuki Arai vs Maki Itoh for the International Princess title. Arai is pretty new to wrestling (she debuted just last year), but she’s had an incredible run already. She’s a huge celebrity outside of wrestling due to her work as an idol, but she’s also fantastic in the ring despite being inexperienced.

In this, she said that the reason why she challenged Itoh here is because when she made her debut, Itoh told her “何年かかっても潰しに来い”, basically to come crush her no matter how many years it takes. So Arai thinks that this time has come. It’s… a little bold of her, not going to lie! We’ll just have to see how this goes for her.

Itoh, characteristically, speaks with a lot of bravado, saying she wants to crush stars all over the world, together with this belt. She expects Arai to become another stepping stone for her. Actually, I did have a bit of a translation question here, though not about anything specific. Itoh talks about herself in the third person a lot, which is fairly normal for Japanese, but less so for English. I’ve struggled a bit with how to translate that, since I feel like it adds extra connotations in English if you translate it directly. However, since Itoh is pretty self-centered (and sometimes almost seems to consider her wrestling personality as a separate character in her own life), I’ve mostly just been keeping the third person references to her own self. But maybe there is something better I could be doing to convey how she’s speaking without altering the original meaning? Translation is hard :sweat_smile:.

I did get a little thrown off by this response of Itoh’s: “伊藤麻希は女はもちろん、男とも戦ってきたので・・・。荒井優希は伊藤麻希より体格が大きいんですけど、それでも全然その経験でものおじさせない。想定外の動きをされるかもしれないけど、そこでも対処できる自信があります。自分がやってきた経験は宝だから”. The part that confused me was specifically the sentence where she talks about how Arai is bigger than her, then I think she says that it doesn’t intimidate her (Itoh) at all? But it was a little hard to figure out the subject of that sentence, since my first thought was she was saying that Arai won’t let the experience intimidate her, but that doesn’t really make sense?

The last match covered in this press conference is the opening match, which is the debut match for TJPW’s newest rookie, Juria Nagano. Juria seems pretty cool! She became a karate world champion at a fairly young age, and has been practicing karate pretty much her whole life. She’s teaming up with Moka Miyamoto, one of TJPW’s rookies, who also has a karate background.

I appreciated Suzume (another one of the rookies, who will be one of their opponents) saying that she’s glad they can spend this precious time (of Juria’s debut) together, and she wants to crush Juria with love. She’s teaming up with Arisu Endo, another rookie. They’ve been wrestling as a team recently, and they’ve really started to click.

The part that tripped me up here was my lack of karate knowledge, haha! Juria described herself as a “空手の型の元世界チャンピオン”, a former world champion in karate kata. I don’t know enough about karate to know if this is an acceptable way to phrase this in English? Does anyone know a better way to word this? Juria also said that she has been “型を生かした早い手技を意識して練習しております” (“practicing fast hand techniques that make use of kata”?). I feel like I understand enough that the basic meaning comes across, but the karate particulars are lost on me and probably anyone else who might be reading my translation :sweat_smile:. Oh well, I tried my best!

That’s all for now! I’ll hopefully have another post tonight or tomorrow about the other press conference for the TJPW/GanPro match.

I was considering trying to write a proper card preview for the entire show (especially since a lot of the nuance is getting completely lost on most of the international fanbase who can’t understand the pressers or comments), but I’m not sure I’ll have the time, so this might just have to do. The guy who runs the Dramatic DDT blog was planning on writing up a preview for the show, so I guess stay tuned for that if he can get his post finished in time!

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I finished translating the other press conference for the GanPro vs TJPW match at TJPW’s Ryogoku show! Whew, that’s over 8,500 characters translated over a period of like five days! :sweat_smile:

Here’s the recap for this press conference, and here’s the video (which I also didn’t watch, though I did check one part at the end to make sure I was translating something correctly).

This press conference was a lot shorter, and honestly I wasn’t sure what to expect, going in, since I don’t know terribly a lot about Ganbare Pro. But it ended up really surprising me! Lots of great stuff in here.

Some highlights:

Something I just found out while translating this is that Yuna Manase and Nao Kakuta were both in Actwres girl’Z together! Yuna was Nao’s senpai there. I had also forgotten the fact that Yuna left TJPW and joined GanPro right around when Nao was coming to TJPW, which was a little over a year ago. So, there are some neat connections between the two of them.

This match was basically born because Yuna, representing GanPro, made a surprise appearance at TJPW’s last Korakuen show and requested a match at the Ryogoku show. Nao was the first TJPW wrestler to answer her challenge. She said in the presser that this was her first time putting TJPW’s name before her own name, referring to herself as “東京女子の角田奈穂”, since she was volunteering herself to represent TJPW in this match.

The other three TJPW wrestlers in the match seemed, well, chosen because they didn’t really have anything better to do at the show :sweat_smile:. But they did a pretty good job selling the match here, I thought.

Mahiro Kiryu confused me by bringing up mahjong in her comments! I don’t really know anything about the game, so I had a really hard time parsing what she said. She said: “私は麻雀が好きなんですけど、私たちは絶対に下りない。高打点上がり切って勝ちたい.” Lots going on in here, and lots of confusing things that don’t seem to have anything to do with wrestling! My best attempt at a translation was: “I like mahjong, but we definitely won’t fold. I want to win by getting a high score.” 打点 further confused me because my dictionary defined it as “runs batted in”. I was like, “wait, she’s talking about baseball now??” But when I searched for the word along with 麻雀 I did find a mahjong book with both words in the title, so I’m assuming she’s still talking about mahjong? In any case, I tried my best, haha.

Kaya Toribami, one of the newest TJPW rookies, had a really fun comment. She wrestles under the mask of a cassowary (I was actually one of the very first people on twitter who figured out what bird she was :blush:), which she refers to here as “一番世界一凶暴な鳥”, the most brutal bird in the world. Then she said, “強さを秘めてるので、そのマスクに恥じない人間になるために、ガンバレ☆プロレスの皆さん、東京女子と違う戦いを学ばせてもらいたい.” I struggled a little bit with the first part of this sentence, because I couldn’t quite pin down her meaning, but my best attempt was: “I have the strength inside, so in order to become a person who does not shy away from that mask, I want to learn how to fight differently from everyone in Ganbare Pro Wrestling and TJPW.”

On the GanPro side of things, there was a lot of spirit and passion, which the promotion is known for. Harukaze said that GanPro picked her up when she was a dropout and said that she was one of them, so she views them as family to her, and wants everyone to know and love their name.

I really loved Moeka Haruki’s entire comment. She said that Yuna Manase is the sun of GanPro. The sun produces many things, like heat, prisms, rainbows, etc. But Moeka wants people to look at her, too, besides just looking at the sun. “太陽ばっかり見てるんじゃないぞ! 太陽の後ろにある虹を見逃しちゃダメだぞ!” She also says that she looks forward to facing Nao, Neko, and “鳥ちゃんかな”, and she looks forward to cooking them in a delicious meal.

Then she made me do some more research, haha, and piggybacked on Mahiro’s mahjong metaphor :sweat_smile:. She said: “真弥、麻雀好きなのか。私も好きだ。ガンバレ☆プロレスは国士無双、十三年待ちだぞ.” Thankfully, this one ended up being pretty straightforward, though I was still a little unsure of what language to use in English. I think she said: “Ganbare Pro Wrestling has drawn a Thirteen Orphans, and the wait is on all thirteen titles.” 国士無双 is Thirteen Orphans, which is a mahjong hand (?). The things you have to learn about when translating wrestling!

Of course, the real star of all of these interactions was Yuna herself. Yuna has quite the fiery spirit, and this whole time, she was saying that she wanted a “熱い熱い試合”. She criticized the TJPW team for not being passionate enough during the press conference.

In response, Nao said that just because the TJPW aren’t showing it on the surface doesn’t mean they aren’t passionate. A blue flame burns hotter than a red flame, and “私たちは青く冷静に燃える炎です”, TJPW is the blue flame that burns with a cool composure.

Yuna said that she doesn’t understand scientific things, haha, but she knows that they’re both fire. She is fire, and everyone at TJPW is, too. She went on to say that while she was at TJPW, every time DDT had a Ryogoku show, she’d hear everyone at TJPW saying that they hope TJPW gets to go to Ryogoku someday (talking about this made her tear up). So when she heard about the Ryogoku show, she knew that she needed to participate.

This is something that has really stood out to me while reading these, just how much the Ryogoku Kokugikan venue means to all of these women. It’s to TJPW what the Budokan is to NOAH. I got into TJPW in late 2019, just a few months before DDT Ultimate Party on November 3, which took place at that venue. Ultimate Party was an absolutely gigantic show, and they somehow managed to include pretty much the entire TJPW roster.

DDT has run venues like that before, but for the TJPW wrestlers, it was absolutely incredible to them, especially since practically all of them got to be on that show (normally TJPW would only get a couple matches on a big DDT show, but here they were on matches all throughout, including the third to last match and the semi-main event). They continued to talk about it for over a year after that show happened.

I dunno, stuff like that probably seems really abstract if you aren’t already neck deep in this world, haha, but I’m so proud of them for finally reaching this point where they can perform on a stage this big. Here’s hoping that their March 19 show is only the beginning!

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The main thing you do in mahjong is draw a tile and discard a tile - doing that over many rounds to construct a large winning hand where all 14 tiles contribute to a pattern in your hand worth some number of points.
You can see what everyone else is discarding, and everyone is working with the same pool of tiles, and there are a couple ways you can take tiles discarded by other players - the main one being to call “ロン” if someone discards a tile that would complete your hand - if that happens, you win the round and take all your won points directly from the player who discarded that winning tile.
Since someone else calling ロン on you is bad, if you know someone is waiting for a last tile to complete your hand (which you may well do, since a player in that situation will often call リーチ to risk a little more points to increase the value of their hand if/when they do go out), a cautious player may choose what to discard based 100% on avoiding discarding the tile they think that person wants. Like even if discarding a six of characters would make my hand better, uh oh, that could be the tile they’re waiting on - better discard this wind tile instead, I can see from the discards that it’s definitely safe. That kind of thing.
Apparently doing that is called オリる. So rather than playing cautiously, she’s going to risk it and go for maximum points - which in general means going for riskier, less likely combinations of tiles.
There’s no folding in riichi mahjong but good guess! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I think you got it, I’d just add that this is a ludicrous hand. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: You would have to be incredibly lucky and very bold to go for it (for the reward if it happens, of tons of points and, I’m sure, a victory you’ll remember basically forever) (speaking as an extremely casual player of course).
The reason being that in normal mahjong play, you’ll be sorting your tiles roughly into pairs and groups of three to maximize the chance that the next tile you draw will be able to contribute to your hand. This hand is very very unusual in that there are no pairs and no trios and all the tiles involved are the ones worst for making pairs and trios - so essentially have to be dealt a hand so terrible it becomes incredibly lucky, and completely forsake normal play, instead just waiting and hoping you draw the remaining tiles you need on your own (since any method other than that for getting cards requires on trios).
When in tenpai (one tile away from a winning hand), a normal wait is like… 1 to 3 possible tiles. So a 13-tile wait is completely wild, and should mean a very very good chance of going out successfully, especially since they’re all tiles people playing normally might be likely to discard. (you still have to wait though… so much of mahjong is just tense waiting. Ugh imagine if someone ron’d you while you were on a 13-tile wait… it hurts just thinking about it…)
I don’t really know the most correct English terminology myself, but hopefully that adds some color for you at least!

I’m looking forward to the show at that venue too! I think I’m gonna try to avoid spoilers and watch TJPW’s show this weekend, then do the same for Stardom’s shows there next weekend (or whenver they upload them anyway) too. Should be fun!

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Thank you so much for all of your help as usual! I’m impressed that you can understand mahjong!

There are just a couple more things I want to link before the show, in case anyone is interested. The first is Dramatic DDT’s preview for the show, which explains the basic story behind all of the matches. It’s a lot of repeated information if you’ve been reading my posts, haha, but it’s a nice summary!

The second thing I wanted to link is a little bit heavier, but it offers some important context. Recently, Hyper Misao made a really personal tweet about her own past before she discovered wrestling (which saved her life). Here’s her original tweet in Japanese, and here’s her own translation of it in English (tw: mentions of attempted suicide). This is what the summary linked above was referring to. Mr. Haku also linked to his translation of a blog post Misao wrote a few years ago which has some additional context, if you don’t already know her story.

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No problem! It’s purely because of the Yakuza series games :sweat_smile: They’ve all got mahjong built in as a side activity so early on I gave a shot at figuring it out and now every time I play one some chunk of hours gets burned drawing tiles and hoping for tsumo… Once you wrap your head around it, and that it’s largely a game about waiting and resisting the urge to do anything other than waiting… it’s fun! And kind of addicting!
(Incidentally, sort of off-topic, but that series is very very “pro wrestling” in general. The mix of earnest, dramatic emotional storytelling plus enthusiastic ridiculousness and stylish kayfabe violence is extremely similar, and NJPW wrestlers even cameo in multiple games!)

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Say – speaking of those posters (which I agree are great - those tipping me off about the show on twitter / the back of shupro + your posts definitely have helped me be prepared and excited for the show, so thanks by the way!), one TJPW question I did have…

Why is Sakaguchi Black Jack?
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Not that I’m complaining of course! I’m definitely all for a pro-wrestling Black Jack… And he pulls it off better than Joe Shishido
Is the joke that his already black and white hair + upper class = Black Jack so he became that way when joining up with Sakisama et. al? I honestly barely recognize him, I’m just going off the listed name and hardly trusting it!

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I actually didn’t recognize that his character was a reference to anything specific, haha, but I think you’re absolutely correct that this is what he’s going for; his look is just too similar.

He joined NEO Biishiki-gun before I started watching TJPW, so I don’t know the original circumstances of his character joining (the, well, expanded Bi-gun rarely shows up as an entire group in TJPW), but all of the members of Bi-gun are considered different people in kayfabe than the wrestlers who “play” them. His character is Yukio Saint-Laurent, and he probably has some sort of fun kayfabe backstory, haha, like how Sakisama found Mei Saint-Michel in the woods while playing a flute. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the English commentary team will mention it during the match!

Some fun trivia: Sakaguchi is in Saki Akai’s faction Eruption in DDT, which is fun because the wrestlers are also both in Bi-gun (predating Eruption’s existence). I figure they’re probably friends in real life who like working together, haha. The other member of the “expanded” Bi-gun is Martha, who is portrayed by Masa Takanashi (my friends and I couldn’t figure out who played Martha at first, so we looked it up, and you can imagine our groans when we realized her name is just a pun on “Masa”). Masa is actually one of the people who trained Saki originally!

If I remember correctly, Yukio Saint-Laurent wields syringes full of some type of weird medicine that he injects his opponents with. He makes for a fun occasional opponent in TJPW, just because Sakaguchi contrasts so much with the typical house style of the promotion, though his Bi-gun character is pretty different from his normal self!

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I watched TJPW Grand Princess '22ツーツー

I really enjoyed it a lot!

Thoughts on Grand Princess

One thing I did miss from when I was watching WWE was the feeling of a PPV as a special occasion, an excuse to eat a lot and relax a lot watching a wrestling show on the weekend and making a time of it.
So I’m glad that this year I’m making more of an effort to pay attention to when shows are coming up and be excited about them beforehand to capture that feeling, instead of just watching them whenever I get to them (also glad for AEW PPVs filling that gap in a different way)! Picking up a bunch of fast food and watching Grand Princess really delivered on that feeling very well!

And I was very impressed with how throughout the show was good wrestling with an impressive amount of emotional investment tied to each show. It felt like TJPW really firing on all cylinders, although that might have been just my being more invested in it through the build and how I was watching it. There wasn’t really any match where I wasn’t entertained.

Obviously Hyper Misao’s match was a major standout. Doesn’t get much more emotional than the backstory to that one, and I love that it works both as an intense emotional match and an extremely silly comedy match.
My favorite match though was the main event! I love kaiju, so I was immediately rooting hard for Shoko right out of the gate, and obviously Yamashita is a perfect dominant foil for an underdog like that. Shoko’s post-match promo was also I think maybe the most moved I’ve been by a wrestling promo entirely in Japanese – which is to say, very moved indeed!
(Not that you need more motivation in this area but) it really went to show for me how studying the language really does make a difference and add something to the show - I knew astronomically more about what was going on than I would have otherwise (through shupro, this thread, etc.), could actually listen to the commentary like commentary and help stay engaged and keep track of who was who or what moves are 得意技 or which Toy Story is which, etc. (and I appreciate a lot how the Japanese commentary works as deadpan for the silliness - something about them not remarking on how silly NEO美威獅鬼軍 are, or treating characters who are clearly the same person as being different people, makes the whole thing that much funnier). And being able to hear and (mostly) understand what wrestlers actually say in the ring in the moment goes a really long way. Noticing that those like, “foreign” barriers had almost entirely dropped away was awfully cool.

Overall I do personally still prefer Stardom’s more competition/fight-oriented presentation. I don’t know that I need to have まけたくない stuck in my head at the start of every show, and the part at the end where everyone stepped up to the microphone and expressed happiness/thanks was fun but personally the “everyone’s happy to be here / idol performance” vibe of TJPW doesn’t click with me as much as Stardom’s really solid grounding in feeling like a prestigious fight league (come to think of it - it’s funny that it works out like that, since from their names you’d think it would be the reverse :sweat_smile:). It’s obvious though that TJPW is doing a ton of things right, and it’s great that they have their own flavor and are running bigger and bigger shows! I’ll be sure to catch more in the future - I wanna see Shoko’s championship reign.
It’ll be interesting to see next week how Stardom’s shows in the same arena will be! Even though I’ve got more prior investment in Stardom - I could see this one big emotional show stealing the spotlight - I don’t know if I’ve seen a 2-day pro-wrestling show yet where I’ve been fully enthusiastic through both days… Looking forward to hopefully enjoying that too!

I’ve been neglecting posting about shupro for a while, so here’s three at once! I’m rather behind, so these are from January I think still. Notes will probably be lighter since it’s been a while since I read the first one (and they aren’t incredibly dense issues)

週刊プロレス No. 2161

In Tanahashi’s column talking about the KENTA match, they talk about how “ノーDQ” is a confusing phrase in Japanese, since “disqualification” isn’t exactly an easy and clear English word. Tanahashi says it just sounds like a “No Dragon Quest” match!

The NOAH vs. NJPW Wrestle Kingdom show had just happened. Kenoh 100% dodges talking about it in his column. Talking about an upcoming match instead, he says when in Saitama to be sure to visit きいろいタコ, a food truck run by 新崎人生, a retired wrestler (Hakushi in WWE).

There’s a double page obituary for Strong Kobayashi, an older wrestler who passed away. It talks about how he was the ace for 国際プロレス and pulled very respectable ratings when that promotion was on television amid New Japan and All Japan. He also ran shows in Europe against Andre the Giant. His most famous match was when (with that history of being a star from another promotion) he went to New Japan and fought Inoki - here it is on njpwworld. And here’s a picture of him with Andre (warning - blood):

Here’s a picture of Hazuki and Koguma with the Stardom tag belts - not for any particular reason, I just think they’re neat.

The main feature in all three of these issues is picks of (mainly younger) wrestlers to watch in 2022. I didn’t read these super carefully or find them all that interesting, I confess. Master Wato is the pick for NJPW (I did not recognize the others in this issue).

I remember Tenryu’s column being really interesting in a way that’ll be hard to summarize from memory… He talked about the unfortunate situation in AJPW where right at the start of the year Jake Lee had an eye injury and had to vacate the championship – apparently this was in a match with a relative rookie, Ryuki Honda. Tenryu says the injury may have come from Lee underestimating Honda, and he hopes that in the fight for the vacant championship, Honda gets a larger spotlight from the situation.
He also talks about Prominence and groups of wrestlers going independent - he quotes Rossy Ogawa (the head/booker for Stardom - that old guy who comes out before every championship match) rather ominously: 「(’22年は)女子プロ界統一。。。じゃなくて(笑)、女子プロレス界をもっと上に上げたいと思います」. I remember he said something about how the temptation as a smaller group is to look at what the most successful company is doing and try to do that, but what you need to do to survive is find your own niche (like e.g. FMW).
He also talks a bit about Chono getting surgery.

合体! (oh no, Tenma’s the base? What will they do once she’s retired!)

週刊プロレス No. 2163 (2162 is a wrestle kingdom special issue I think)

Kenoh in his column explains more about his thinking behind not commenting on the Wrestle Kingdom match.

There’s a pretty cool interview with Naito talking about the anniversary show match with Okada, and how ten years earlier the 40th anniversary match was also Naito vs. Okada.
A sidebar has a rundown of their ten matches together - they are (were) 5-5, with apparently every match ending in a 片逆エビ固め (?!)

Giulia’s column is about cheering not being aloud in wrestling crowds. She talks about how since she only started getting fully popular in Stardom quite recently, there’s really only two moments that stand out where she got big cheers - her singles match with Hana Kimura, and the Cinderella Tournament final. She talks about the seconds in Stardom who pound the mat etc. to get people to clap, and says she does wish they would be sure to let the match breathe sometimes and build excitement on its own (personally, the Stardom seconds are my pandemic MVPs for masking the silence well – hard to believe I’ve not really ever seen a Stardom show with cheers, except maybe once before I got into it fully)

The wrestlers to watch in 2022 column this time has women wrestlers - Stardom’s is Koguma, and it talks about her history more and how she earned the “highspeed genius” name by especially standing out before she retired for 6 years. She talks about how now her power is 「引退してもいい」全力 - she’s giving it her all all the time, so that if she retires then and there, that’s fine. Sort of like, living every match like it’s her last, I think… Her standout moment in 2021 was jumping from the top of the ladder, and she says she wasn’t scared in the least when doing it - she was climbing and jumping off the roof a lot as a kid, so it was nostalgic!
Yuki Arai is the pick for TJPW, and it talks some about her path from idol to wrestling.

Here’s Takumi Iroha looking cool with three belts:

There’s a small recap about the OZ Academy show that had to be stopped due to a fire alarm in the building. It doesn’t sound like it had anything to do with the show or that anyone was hurt. The show took place at Shinjuku FACE, and the pictures reinforce my belief that the place where that venue is is 100% the inspiration for theater square in the yakuza series.

I did watch that (very fun) TJPW pool wrestling show by the way - and speaking of pools and wrestling, apparently All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling in 1988 had their own pool built at their venue, リングスターフィールド - I don’t know if any wrestling happened in it, but here’s a Crush Gals concert:
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The history column is very interesting in this issue - apparently in Sumo there was some recent controversy as a wrestler broke with tradition and took a position in the front office as well. So the columnist talks about that tradition’s history in wrestling and how it was broken.
Apparently in the early days - it was seen as like, “well, it’s fine for Rikidozan, but no one else” - like Rikidozan was part of management while still wrestling, but Rikidozan was so exceptional that the taboo still held even if he didn’t follow it. In his day, management types and “ときには裏社会の大物” but not wrestlers except for Rikidozan. After Rikidozan’s murder, 豊登道春 succeeded him, but the columnist paints a very negative picture of his management - making it sound like pro-wrestling seemed doomed to slip further and further into the corrupt and illegitimate sides of society. But 豊登 quit due to illness, and Giant Baba took over and took things in a much more positive direction.
I’m not full up on the details, but it sounds like from there 豊登 talked to Inoki and helped plant the seed in Inoki’s mind of starting his own promotion - because if he didn’t he would never surpass Baba because now Baba was management too, not just a wrestler. (later on, of course, Inoki would found New Japan and Baba All Japan, which NOAH would eventually split from, and the rest is history)

There’s pictures of Yuki Aino and Nodoka Tenma’s trip together as sisters to their home prefecture of Okayama ahead of Tenma’s retirement. Looks like it was fun!
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There’s another Michael Nakazawa report on AEW - always nice to see.

週刊プロレス No. 2164

The big thing this issue is the reveal of the winners of the 2021 プロレスグランプリ!
This is a vote by shupro readers and mobile users, with 4376 votes in total. So it’s a reader popularity contest, not editorial decisions.
Let’s run them down why not:

  • プロレスグランプリ - Shingo Takagi wins with almost double the votes of second place, Keiji Muto, who in turn got almost triple the votes of third place, Kota Ibushi.
  • ベストマッチ - Shingo Takagi vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi at the dome in summer takes first place! This was the one that came together so suddenly because Ibushi had to drop out - and it would probably have been my pick too so I can’t complain. Second is the hair vs. hair match between Giulia and Tam Nakano. Which is cool! Because the way the magazine talked about it at the time, I thought maybe audiences were negative on this, but I guess it was just a case of the negative voices being disproportionately loud! Third is Shiozaki/Mutoh, fourth Hayashishita Syuri (I’m arbitrarily cutting off when I stop mentioning these - so there’s more runners up than these, just to be clear)
  • 女子プロレスグランプリ - Utami Hayashishita wins, then Tam Nakano, then Syuri, then Miyu Yamashita. Starlight Kid, Tsukasa Fujimoto, Maki Itoh, Yuki Arai, and Rina Yamashita are also on the list.
  • ベストユニット - Cosmic Angels wins, followed by United Empire, Los Ingobernables de Japon, and Donna Del Mondo. This list got me so grumpy :sweat_smile: – United Empire so high?! and above Donna Del Mondo…. A Very funny detail to me about lower in the list is Magical Sugar Rabbits coming in just above Bullet Club - not that I disagree!
  • 最優秀外国人選手賞 - Jeff Cob, then ZSJ, then a big drop in votes and Will Ospreay. I wonder what this list would have looked like if travel were more normal?
  • 新人賞 - Yuki Arai takes first place. Second place is Tiger Queen, from Strong Style, which I think is a promotion run by the first Tiger Mask? Don’t know anything about her but she looks cool! third/fourth are a couple of young lions.
  • 好きなプロレスラー - for this award, people voting could write in a list of 3 names. The top 5 are Hiroshi Tanahashi, Tetsuya Naito, Yuki Arai, Tam Nakano, and Kazuchika Okada. And boy, before I caught a glimpse of this and the build to Grand Princess - I had no idea Yuki Arai was that popular an idol! That’s wild, seems like a major asset!
    If I’d voted I probably would have written… Tanahashi, Giulia, and… Starlight Kid, I think.

This issue includes a poster of Syuri on one side and Saya Kamitani on the other - and can I just say I wish they would pick cooler pictures for these. Every few issues there’s a poster and I’ve never actually clipped out and put up any of them because they’re like, them posing normally against a white background.

Giulia talks about people complaining that MIRAI challenging for the belt immediately lowers its prestige - I think her point generally was that it’s a way to show another side of the competitors and bring out excitement that way.

More wrestlers to watch in 2022 - Suzu Suzuki picked for Prominence, and she chose to write a characteristically violent aphorism for the year:

The ‘here’s old back issues you could read on the mobile app’ page mentions Andre the Giant starring in ‘プリンセス・ブライド・ストーリー’ which made me really badly want to find a Princess Bride dub in Japanese, or at least subtitles for some of the famous lines - but alas, I couldn’t find one.

the Champ Talk (that’s usually just like, a promo) has Hanan talking about how much she looks up to Mayu Iwatani, and how she wants to follow Mayu’s path and slowly take all the belts in Stardom, rather than jump straight to the red belt. I feel like there’s always the (100% reasonable) chance that wrestlers who start so young decide they want to do something else and retire early, but at least according to her here she’s planning to be in Stardom for a long time it sounds like.

Takumi Iroha talks about those belts she won in that picture above – they’re the AAAW single and tag championships, tag belts with an old (for joshi wrestling) history, coming from GAEA Japan in the 90s, reactivated for GAEAISM recently, shows which Iroha regrettably had to miss due to injury. She wanted badly to win them here because it earns her the right of succession to GAEA, basically, and GAEA was apparently founded by Chigusa Nagayo and Takumi Iroha is like, really intensely Nagayo’s successor (again… they have matching tattoos), so this brings the belts to their promotion, Marvelous. Iroha says Nagayo always said if she wanted Marvelous to have championship belts, to go and take them from someone else - so she did!

the costume column is about Yuki Arai - it sounds like at least the first version of her costume was done by SKE48’s regular costumers, and she’s tweaked it some. She likes the buttons a lot, but they especially hurt when she gets kicked. Apparently she likes black leather but it looks too heelish so she’s going to maybe try to discreetly include more of it over time and see if she can get away with it that way…

There’s a column talking about Hideki Suzuki getting quickly fired from WWE. He’s a longtime indie wrestler in Japan who had a column in the magazine when I started reading - he went to NXT, where they changed his name to “Hachiman,” and then very quickly was let go along with a lot of others at the start of the year. Some of the shupro staff I think are definitely close friends with him, and Giulia definitely is, and they all tease him quite a bit here, while also hoping for the best in the future and wondering what he’ll do next.

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I’m glad you liked the show! And I’m so glad that my posts have helped make it more enjoyable to you! :blush:

Your experience with your Japanese knowledge really adding to the show is very aspirational to me! Slowly but surely, it’s improving my experience watching, too, though not enough to make a substantial difference quite yet. I feel like when Mr. Haku was still translating, it let me approximate the experience of watching with actual fluency, but without him, I still have such a long way to go :sweat_smile:

Cut for a long digression about TJPW's overall style and some possible spoilers for the show.

Yeah, one of the things that I love about TJPW is that their big shows pretty much always deliver. Their undercard rarely feels like an undercard, if that makes sense. Each match has a purpose. I really liked this show especially because I thought it really let them show the diversity of the kind of stuff they were capable of, from very straightforward wrestling, to the character-driven comedy of the NEO美威獅鬼軍 match, to the intense and emotional but simultaneously absurdly ridiculous Misao vs Takagi match.

TJPW’s product is definitely not for everyone, because I feel like to fully appreciate it, you have to reframe your thinking a little bit. Their booking is pretty slow-moving, for instance. I’ve seen it compared to AJPW’s king’s road style booking, haha, where the climb to the top is very long, and it’s hard for newcomers to sort of break in. They really have to earn it. Because of that, it makes it so satisfying when someone does finally make it to the top, but it does mean that often your faves won’t get the title reigns you might wish for them.

However, I think fans who watch TJPW and focus primarily on their title scene are missing at least half of the picture. In TJPW, titles are important, but they’re not really the true bread and butter of the promotion. TJPW’s strength lies in its character interactions, and the strong relationships between all of the wrestlers. They don’t really have a lot of straightforward feuds, but instead have dozens of relationships that are gradually evolving and unfolding with each show.

Because of this, TJPW really, really rewards following them long-term, and paying attention to the details. This show was a great example, because there were so many nods and references to stuff from throughout their history. I think Mr. Haku commented on twitter that they brought back pretty much every single former member that they possibly could to appear in some capacity, and of course the main event was built around the two wrestlers who have been there since before the company even existed.

I got struck really hard by seeing Misao cameo as her Bi-gun self, haha, since that story meant a lot to me when it happened in 2019. Three of the other former Bi-gun members were entirely before my time, but I’m sure that for those fans who have been following TJPW for longer than I have, that appearance meant a lot, too.

I’ve made multiple solid efforts to get into Stardom, first at the end of 2019 through early 2020, and then the end of 2020 through most of 2021, and the thing that I always personally struggled with was how much the company was always changing. I watched three of their tag leagues, and I think almost all of the tag teams were completely different combinations of people from the previous year.

As someone who really loves long-term storytelling, and who loves tag team relationships especially, they just had the tendency to rip the rug out from me every time I got invested in something :sweat_smile:. Tag teams would break up, or new people would join the roster and get mixed in with established members in different combinations, and as a consequence, I felt like I never really had the time to get invested in anything. It simply moves too fast.

Stardom definitely does have a lot of history that it often touches on in stories, but so many of the feuds seem to be primarily driven by current stuff rather than older stuff. I guess that makes it more accessible for new people just popping in, but for me, it always gave me a bit of whiplash.

I actually have the same problem with NOAH’s jr division, which is constantly rife with betrayal and upheaval :sweat_smile:. People will frequently change factions super suddenly completely out of nowhere. Usually the Stardom betrayals make more sense, at least.

But hey, maybe I just watch wrestling for reasons that are different than most other fans! I get the appeal of lots of dramatic change, too.

What’s funny about this is that I feel like part of what appeals to me about TJPW is that it’s more realistic, haha, at least as far as presenting the wrestlers as being friends with each other instead of being arbitrarily divided into kayfabe factions where they can’t really show that they’re friends outside of those boundaries.

One of my favorite parts of wrestling is that opponents are actually working together to keep each other safe in a collaborative performance. And something that I know many wrestlers have said is that they have their best matches with the people they love and trust the most (since you have to quite literally put your life in someone else’s hands). So to me, TJPW appeals because it doesn’t really hide this fact. It doesn’t break kayfabe when talking about the matches, but it is very much a company where the roster is, for the most part (with the exception of Sakisama and crew), actually friends with each other in kayfabe despite fighting each other all the time. It makes the emotions of the matches feel so much more real to me.

But that’s definitely a different tastes thing. I have friends who dislike that part of TJPW, too, haha, but I guess I just strongly prefer the emotions of a match like Misao vs Takagi, or Yuki Aino vs Nodoka, or the other various matches on the card of this show rather than, say, a NJPW match with a manufactured faction feud. I can appreciate manufactured wrestling drama as much as the next person, but it always hits harder for me if it’s based in something real. And in TJPW, when they do have a manufactured feud (like when Misao joined Sakisama, and everything that followed), it usually gets tied back to actual real stuff (like Misao’s real life backstory with wrestling).

As far as the idol stuff goes, that was actually one of the things that really turned me off when I first started watching TJPW, haha. It’s not my favorite aspect of the company, either, though I feel like I can appreciate it more now because I’ve gotten used to it and also have a more nuanced understanding. The thing about the idol-to-wrestler pipeline in TJPW is that… it mostly seems to go in one direction, haha. TJPW has more ex-idols than they do current idols.

I think Mr. Haku was the one that put it this way, but Miyu started out wrestling because she wanted to become an idol, and Hikari became an idol because she wanted to become a wrestler. Miyu’s path ended up taking a very different direction than she expected, and she evolved into an incredibly talented wrestler, and as far as I know, no longer harbors any ambitions about becoming an idol. Hikari is still balancing both worlds, but its clear where her real passion is.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve watched the Up Up Girls evolve so much over the past few years, but to me, TJPW is largely about women discovering that they have an intense passion and love for wrestling, and how wrestling then changes them and uplifts them.

With Yuki Arai, I’m honestly really curious to see how her career goes, because she genuinely has a real talent with wrestling, and she’s clearly talented as an idol as well (I don’t think any of the other idols in TJPW ever had even a fraction of her popularity). It actually presents quite a lot of interesting tension in her stories with the ex-idol members (as well as current), because naturally there’s a lot of respect but also resentment there. Honestly, some part of me is hoping that TJPW steals another one, and Arai ends up primarily pursuing wrestling instead of her idol career.

I guess I don’t really have grounds to complain about their shows featuring singing and dancing, haha, because I love it when men’s wrestling does that as well (I wish men’s wrestling did it more often, honestly). And Stardom, too, has a lot of former idols on their roster, so it has been an element of their presentation, too, though they do seem to be distancing themselves more from it recently. But Kamitani was the product of an idol collab project they were doing in 2019, if I recall correctly.

But, in any case, yeah, I totally understand disliking that aspect of TJPW’s presentation. I think if that was all TJPW had going for it and it didn’t have strong characters and emotional stories, I probably wouldn’t be watching it still.

In my opinion, I think TJPW has been evolving to have a style a little closer to DDT’s, honestly. Grand Princess really illustrated that to me because I watched it back to back with DDT’s anniversary show, Judgement, and both shows were structured fairly similarly, where there was a lot of comedy mixed into the undercard, along with some regular wrestling, and some absolute ridiculousness with real emotion, and then the last few matches were more straightforward solid title matches.

DDT is very much a variety show, and I think TJPW is becoming even more of one than they already are, especially with wrestlers like Misao continuously pushing the envelope. I will say also that DDT big show endings are very similar to TJPW’s, at least in terms of getting the whole roster together to celebrate. DDT shows also usually have happy endings, haha, and frequently end with wrestlers reconciling or at least respecting each other.

It’s something that I really like about them because it’s just so different from most other wrestling. But, yeah, for folks who watch because they like the drama and destruction, haha, it’s not always as fun to see people try to kill each other in a fight and then end the match by hugging and making up and talking about how they want to make the company better together. For me, those endings are relieving because they feel true to the emotions of the real people portraying the wrestlers. I like to know that everyone is okay.

I’ll be back with another post in a few days with some highlights from the post-match comments for Grand Princess and probably also translation questions, haha.

I'll put my DDT Judgement thoughts in a separate section in case anyone doesn't want to get spoiled.

I thought Judgement was good! It wasn’t quite as strong of a show overall as Grand Princess was, in my opinion, but at this point Grand Princess is my favorite show of the entire year, so that’s a pretty high bar! It might’ve been a different story had travel been more open, and had a certain pair of wrestlers been able to participate in the show…

But, well, speaking of those wrestlers, the thing that I really love about DDT more than anything is how much DDT’s history just infuses the entire spirit of the promotion. The Golden Lovers have been gone for years, and yet DDT’s love for them still shines so loud and clear. The anniversary show was, at least in part, a love letter to the Golden Lovers, and their legacy in the company after leaving.

They were both very prominently featured in the opening video montage of footage from DDT’s past, and of course were referenced over and over again in Michael Nakazawa vs Takagi (which, sidenote, props to Takagi for having that kind of very demanding match two days in a row at his age, haha). They made it so clear that Nak was in this show as a stand-in for both Kenny and Ibushi, who couldn’t be there. And the Golden Lovers were there in the video package before the main event, because they were the ones who had entrusted the company to Takeshita and Endo years ago, and now Takeshita and Endo were both trying to live up to that. And, during the match itself, both wrestlers showed Kenny and Ibushi’s influence on them. It was just really incredible and really emotionally moving to me to see how much their spirit still lives on in the company.

Though, speaking of that, how about that announcement that DDT and AEW officially have a working relationship now? Truthfully this was one of the worst kept open secrets in wrestling, but now it has at least officially been put into words, haha!

I still can’t believe it, honestly, that Kenny actually managed to do it. He managed to get AEW partnerships with both NJPW and DDT at the same time. I loved this tweet of his because of the Golden Lovers reference (we’re back to Kenny not even being able to say his name), and also because he still considers himself to be part of DDT, even now.

I’m looking forward to it, because I think a lot of DDT wrestlers would do great on a bigger stage in America, and there are lots of fun story possibilities there. Sadly, I doubt we’ll be seeing Yoshihiko live on TBS anytime soon (or the Pheromones, though that’s probably for the best), but they have a lot of talent on their roster that can put on great regular matches, too.

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TJPW/Stardom differences discussion

I think it’s mainly just a matter of perspective! I never really thought of Stardom as fast-paced, for example. :sweat_smile: I think of the factions as a vehicle for that long-term continuity, and they’re stable enough that when someone switches or a new faction is born it’s a big deal. And something I like a lot about Stardom compared to NJPW, is the factions seem a lot more meaningful to me in Stardom than there. Seconds from a wrestler’s faction are always by ringside supporting them, and my impression at least from interviews is that they really do train together.

And so storylines like Syuri vs. Giulia coming up have all the history of Donna Del Mondo and アリカバ baked into it, amid complications covering basically Giulia’s whole (not very long) career like Thekla coming in and them clearly being super close friends and that maybe overshadowing the rest of DDM, or Suzu Suzuki showing up meanwhile angry at her. Plus just the interest in how the two wrestler’s fighting styles will mesh in a fight for a major championship, which I think Stardom can lean on a lot more in general. Like whoever wins Night 1, I’d like to see their match the next night with Mayu Iwatani just sort of inherently, since Mayu is in an interesting wrestler with an interesting backstory, and Giulia and Syuri are both different interesting wrestlers with interesting backstory, so the combination and seeing how those stories continue is interesting even if they aren’t directly interlinked.

I definitely want everyone to be okay, and hugging at the end of a wrestling match is like, the #1 way to end a wrestling match in my book :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: - but I guess I like seeing more the component structure within the promotion, what individuals want as individuals, what their values are, who they’re friends with, etc. and I like that Stardom’s factions make that more visible. Team loyalty feels a lot more real and powerful to me personally than company loyalty, I suppose too. So sometimes I struggle with idol-adjacent things since it seems like brand positivity is a big part of idol presentation.

Not trying to argue, to be clear! The different perspective is just interesting (and a good thing! :slight_smile: ).
Like Tenryu was alluding to - a landscape of multiple groups each successful with different focuses and flavors is much better than all doing the same thing! I’m really glad joshi wrestling seems like it’s on such an upswing lately!

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Continuing the discussion

Yeah, it’s definitely a matter of perspective, but from my experience, relationships and such just shift so fast there. Even Syuri and Giulia’s relationship has radically changed since both of them joined the company. It just feels like to me like a tag team in Stardom has at max a shelf life of two years before they break up :sweat_smile:.

I think for Stardom’s case, the fast-paced storytelling happened a bit out of necessity, because for a long time they would always lose their top stars to WWE (maybe this part is changing, haha, since they actually managed to get one of them back), and they’ve always been plagued with a lot of retirements and such, which make longer term stories harder to pull off. They build on older stuff when they can, but there’s just so much change all the time, whenever I start to like a tag team, they almost always break up months later or maybe a year later if I’m lucky.

I guess to contrast that with TJPW, because TJPW doesn’t really have factions (with one exception), they can build lots of relationships at once and have them all in place whenever they want to revisit one. So you get Misao’s extremely complex relationship with Rika (Rika not only brought her back from her Bi-gun phase but also stopped her from retiring), and then also Shoko and Misao’s evolution as a tag team, plus also smaller stories like Shoko, Nodoka, and Yuki Aino trying to 合体 during their matches. Shoko and Misao actually had an earlier feud with Bakuretsu where if Shoko and Misao beat them for the tag titles, Bakuretsu would join them as heroes haha (this happened when Shoko had to change her name for a month, so she was “Shin Ultra Shoko” and was a hero instead of a kaiju, and it was great because she obviously loved it, but kept pretending that she hated having to be a hero).

I definitely agree that Stardom’s factions make this kind of stuff more visible (in TJPW, this kind of storytelling is more subtle and kind of opaque unless you’ve been following it for a while), but I think factions can also be kind of limiting. TJPW essentially does have a bunch of regular groupings and pairings, each with their own flavor and particular dynamics (some of them get along very well and work great together, and some of them… do not), but the wrestlers aren’t tethered to those groups in the same way, so they can explore different sides and aspects of themselves with different people at the same time.

Basically, it’s just two different booking philosophies, each with its own positives and negatives! In TJPW, change is slow and gradual (except when it’s not, haha), and tag team relationships are relatively stable (they’re way more likely to break up because a wrestler gets poached or retires as opposed to having a dramatic breakup, with a few notable exceptions), so it lets you get a really strong core sense of each of the characters.

In Stardom, change is constant and everything is always in motion, and stable relationships can at basically any time fall apart due to differing ambitions or other conflict. This can be a really effective way of adding stakes and tension to a match (it’s an essential building block of wrestling storytelling for a reason, haha), but for me at least, seeing too much of it tends to discourage me from getting too deeply invested. Or I guess it encourages you to get invested in individual wrestlers whose style and personality you like, but not in relationships. Definitely agree about Stardom’s factions being more meaningful than NJPW’s, though!

Regarding company loyalty, I guess to me, this is a theme in every single wrestling company, haha. It’s honestly not my favorite thing either, at least when it’s used to put down freelancers or criticize wrestlers for leaving a particular work environment. But every single company I watch incorporates pride for the brand into their stories, and often wrestlers are really respected for carrying the company through hard times, and all of that. I do like it as a theme in the sense of the wrestlers all working together toward one goal, and wrestlers taking pride in their past work instead of ignoring it (especially in terms of like DDT, which many modern fans have no respect for). But for what it’s worth, my biggest wish for my two favorite wrestlers is actually for both of them to go freelance, haha!

But yeah, I’m definitely seconding your point that it’s awesome that joshi wrestling seems to be on such an upswing, and it’s great that the landscape is so diverse. I’m especially excited for the future of groups like Prominence and Nomads. As I’ve seen people pointing out, Prominence started in a situation not unlike TJPW’s beginning (wrestling on a mat in a bar), and TJPW managed to go from there to running Ryogoku Kokugikan!

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Still a bit of discussion

Hmmm… yeah, I’ve been having a hard time honestly seeing what you meant about Stardom being fast-paced - and maybe what it is is yeah, I’m more inclined from the start to be invested in individual wrestlers and groups, and so to me the change that does happen over time feels (mostly! They do definitely indulge sometimes in jarring ‘heel turn’ type changes) fairly naturally paced. Like, groups like Oedotai or Queen’s Quest stretch back long before I started watching, and individual reigns like Utami’s are given plenty of room to develop.

Looking at specifically relationships of two I guess I can see what you’re saying though – it’s definitely true that they just plain don’t have stable tag teams - even though Syuri and Giulia for example surely have more room to explore as tag partners but it looks like this next match will mark an ending for that. (and I’d certainly be happy if duos like Hazuki and Koguma or Himepoi got a longer time in the sun in the future)
In some ways I think that those changing relationships can add richness rather than detract - like anytime Mayu Iwatani interacts with Starlight Kid going forward I think I’ll be a lot more invested than if MK Sisters was still going - and at least some tag teams like that make a big enough splash to echo down through matches later on. But it’s certainly true there’s nothing like, for example, the Golden Lovers where two wrestlers are so strongly associated with each other that they remain in each other’s orbit in some ways even as single wrestlers doing completely different things in different companies.

That’s different perspectives for ya!
Every so often I think what a really funny coincidence it is that there’s exactly two people on this forum (so far!) who post a whole bunch about wrestling and one of us is clearly a bit more inclined towards Cyberfight and the other clearly a bit more inclined towards Bushi Road. :grin:

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What’s funny about this is that I actually got into NJPW first, haha. Or, well, I started out watching old Golden Lovers DDT matches (then went from there into streaming NJPW and AEW shows live, basically), but I didn’t regularly start watching current DDT until the beginning of 2020. My first year as a wrestling fan, I primarily just watched AEW and NJPW.

I got into TJPW in late 2019, watched very casually for a couple months, then Misao’s storyline kicked into another gear and that’s when I got seriously hooked on the company, haha. By November 3, I was crying my eyes out when she lost the tag belt. I also started watching Stardom around that same time, but nothing quite managed to grab me that same way.

I’m not sure exactly when TJPW sort of supplanted NJPW for me, but I think it was probably late 2020. For the first part of the year, I’d still prioritize NJPW and AEW over everything else. Then by the end of the year, NJPW was mostly just making me sad, and I was deeply invested in a few AEW storylines (Kenny and Hangman…), but my heart was really more in TJPW and DDT and the Go Shiozaki/Katsuhiko Nakajima storyline in NOAH. I guess it was NJPW’s pandemic-era booking that really caused me to fall off of it.

I actually got excited about NJPW again in early 2021 when Ibushi won the belt (his match against Jay that year at Wrestle Kingdom is still one of my favorites), but… well, the whole title unification debacle tainted that pretty early, and although I loved his match with Despy, Ibushi losing the belt to Ospreay after that left an incredibly sour taste in my mouth, and then his struggles with illness and injury after that took away the main thing I was interested in NJPW’s product for.

Even though from the start, I was watching NJPW for Ibushi, they have actually done plenty of other stories that I’ve gotten invested in. Though at this point, if he leaves the company, I don’t think I’ll keep watching them regularly. It’s funny, despite being owned by the same company, NJPW is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Stardom in terms of pace, haha. Though I think that has changed recently. The pandemic really screwed with long-term booking plans for everyone.

I guess yeah, at the end of the day, I’m really still just a Golden Lovers fan above all else :sweat_smile:. I’m more invested in particular relationships than I am in individual wrestlers or companies. There’s a part of me that really loves DDT’s style, and a part of me that really loves NJPW’s style (at least, their pre-2020 style), and a part of me that really enjoys AEW’s stories (televised American wrestling is, hands down, my least favorite style, though). I also just love the Golden Lovers story because it truly transcends companies.

Of course, there isn’t really a strong connection to the Golden Lovers in TJPW, haha, but I think my absolute favorite aspect of TJPW is how meaningful they make tag team relationships feel. I think they do a better job with tag team storytelling than pretty much every other company, at least from the perspective of someone who prioritizes tag team relationships over singles title success.

I do really like the diversity of a bunch of different companies and styles, though, and I absolutely love it when companies collaborate with each other, so I think in this sense, it’s a great time for wrestling, because we seem to be moving more and more toward a world where this is possible :blush:

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I can commiserate! I started watching wrestling with NXT… :sweat_smile:
For a bit there I was new enough that I actually thought that stuff would be the future of WWE for the better… I think it’s safe to say now that it’s been fully dismantled and changed into something else that that was never going to happen and AEW’s diverted a shockingly large amount of that energy into a far more positive direction than WWE ever could have done!

And I suppose I drifted away from NJPW at the same time you did too! :grin: just to Stardom instead, and not really letting myself acknowledge I’d left…

It’ll be interesting to see what the future holds!

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I had a busy weekend, so this was delayed a little bit, but I did finally finish translating the recap/comments from TJPW’s Grand Princess show on March 19! All of it combined ended up being almost as long as both press conferences, at 7600+ characters :sweat_smile:.

The main recap is here, though unfortunately (maybe fortunately for my time?) it left out a lot of matches, including the one that made me cry the most. I worked with what I could, though!

Shoko Nakajima beat Miyu Yamashita for the Princess of Princess title in a really great main event. I liked what Shoko said backstage about how despite the fact that they debuted at the same time, Miyu always stands above everyone else, at the very center, and wins again and again no matter what. When Shoko realized just how far away she was, she wanted to catch up.

Shoko also said that she wants to represent TJPW at CyberFight Fest this year. I really hope she gets to be in the title match there! It occurred to me that her career is actually almost as long as Tetsuya Endo’s (this is his 10th year, I believe), so it’s cool to see both of them at the top of their respective companies at the same time. Last year, at CyberFest, they picked the order of the three main events based on combined length of the wrestlers’ careers (hence why it went TJPW, DDT, then NOAH, considering the fact that Jun Akiyama and Keiji Mutoh were champs at the time, and they’ve been wrestling for longer than many people in TJPW have been alive :sweat_smile:), so depending on who Endo and Shoko’s opponents end up being (assuming they still have the titles), TJPW could maybe get the semi-main event spot instead…

During the tag title match, one of my friends asked me about the name of Yuka’s finisher, since the English commentary team translated it several different ways, which were different than how Mr. Haku had translated it. When I read the recap, I was able to answer her question! Yuka’s strongest finisher is the 魔法少女にわとり野郎. Mr. Haku translated it as the “Magical Girl Chicken Dude,” but I’ve also heard it translated as “Magical Girl Chicken Bastard” and now “Magical Girl Chicken Son of a Bitch”. I had a suspicion that the tricky word was 野郎, haha, and sure enough, yep, that’s the word she uses.

I did have one question from Yuka’s post-match comments. She said, “全然余裕の勝利じゃなかったけど、あんなに一進一退の、本当に紙一重で勝てた。今はもう最高です” I think I understood the first part well enough: “It wasn’t an easy win at all, it really could have gone either way, and we won by a thin margin.” But her next sentence was a little tricky for me. Is she saying essentially “We’re the best now.”?

I really liked the way the recap described the beginning of the International Princess title match between Maki Itoh and Yuki Arai: “伊藤の場外での洗礼を受けた荒井だ”. I love how it described Arai as receiving Itoh’s “baptism” outside of the ring. She’d never had a match go outside the ring like that before, so Itoh initiated her into the real pain and suffering of this world.

The match itself was interesting because it was sort of Itoh’s first time in this spot, where she is the dominant champion and not the underdog trying to claw her way to a victory. It really fits with the way she and Yuki Arai are sort of each other’s shadows in a sense.

I also loved how Itoh described Arai afterward: “パワー、スタミナ、根性もある。一つだけ足りないものがある。素材としてはいいけど、料理人としてはまだまだ。” My translation was: “She has power, stamina, and guts. There’s just one thing she lacks. The ingredients are good, but as a cook, she still has a long way to go.” I think it’s a really great way to describe someone who’s a bit of a prodigy but also a rookie.

Juria Nagano’s debut match was fun! I didn’t realize that she was a nurse on top of a former karate world champion and an actress and all of the many other things she’s done! In her post-match comments, she mentioned that she lost her last karate match before she retired (at 18), so she was frustrated to lose her debut, and wants to keep wrestling because she doesn’t want to end on a loss there as well.

Hikari Noa vs AEW’s Hikaru Shida was fun! I’m glad to see Shida wrestling in Japan again. After the match, they both said they wanted to have a hardcore match next time (Shida originally won the AEW title in a hardcore match with Nyla Rose). Hikari said that the gap between them was even further than she’d imagined.

Those were the only matches covered in the recap.

Working from the comments videos shared on twitter, I really liked this one from Nao Kakuta. I liked the way that she described that her team was four people who weren’t good at asserting themselves. She confessed that she didn’t actually want to get involved with GanPro, but then she was disappointed when the match ended, and found herself wishing for a next time.

Yuna Manase was not impressed, haha. She said that she’s not convinced, and she knows that TJPW can be hotter. She said they’re holding out on her, and told them: “出せよコラ!!今出さないでいつ出すんだ!” If TJPW doesn’t bring it out now, when will they bring it out?

Kamiyu and Asuka thankfully appear to still be on good terms after their match, and Asuka said she wants to keep teaming with her. Kamiyu said that even if she loses in wrestling, she will never lose in drinking.

After Nodoka Tenma’s first and last match with her sister Yuki Aino, she said, “妹は子供の頃から病弱って言われて控えめな子だったけど、負けん気はあるんだなって。” If I’m understanding correctly, she basically said: “Ever since she was a child, it was said that my sister had a weak constitution and was a reserved child, but she has proven to have such a competitive spirit.” From having watched Yuki’s matches, I never would have guessed that about her as a child! She fights with so much heart, and incorporates a lot of power wrestling into her style. I’m going to miss her team with Nodoka so much, though I’m looking forward to seeing what she does as a singles wrestler.

From the post-match comments of everyone involved in the NEO美威獅鬼軍 match, it seems to me like they’re hinting pretty heavily that Marika might join the faction if she ever ends up deciding to come back to wrestling (unlike Nodoka, Marika seemed to leave the possibility open). Sakisama hinted that there might even be a NEO美威獅鬼軍 member lurking among you. And Marika said that maybe Sakisama giving her the rose at the end was her way of showing respect. She said that normally, she’d tear it up, but today, she took it home with her… She also said, “実は愛がある人なんじゃないかなって”, which is a sentence I think I understand in Japanese, but really struggled to translate, haha.

This match also resulted in some fun interactions on twitter between Ram Kaichow and Raku. Raku entered with a new headpiece that looks like a wedding veil, and she and Ram made their entrance together like they were getting married. Afterward, they started talking about being married on twitter, haha, and also hinting that they wanted to challenge for the tag belts together (Ram is not a regular member of TJPW, but has been showing up recently for their big shows). If you looked closely, you might have noticed what’s at the top of Raku’s headdress. It’s Doctor Yellow, the train she named her finisher after, which is a tester train that is rarely seen in Japan, but is said to bring good luck to whoever sees it.

Out of everything on the show, I think the match that left the strongest impression on me was Hyper Misao vs Sanshiro Takagi, the buildup to which I have already talked about. Sadly the best part of the match, which was what was said in-ring afterward, was not transcribed anywhere that I can find :sweat_smile:. I had to go off of the translations from the English commentary during the show.

They certainly lived up to their promises for bringing the most nonsense into the match, haha. Takagi showed up with his full body painted to match Misao’s gear, and he brought his trademark plastic crates to the match, as well as his Dramatic Dream Mobile (Misao faced off against him on her Hyper Misao Mobile). He also brought the chair tower stacking knowledge to TJPW’s rookies (the DDT rookies built one exactly like it for his match the next day against Michael Nakazawa in DDT).

The match was a falls count anywhere match, of course. All of the most significant matches in Misao’s career end up being falls count anywhere matches because watching Jun Kasai vs Sanshiro Takagi in a falls count anywhere match was the match that quite literally saved her life.

One of the things I love the most about wrestling is how it can be utterly over the top ridiculous and also so incredibly serious and real at the same time, and boy did this match accomplish that. In the end, Misao managed to beat Takagi! She cut a very teary promo afterward. She told him that he should stay immature, stay “Peter Pan”, and as long as he is still Peter Pan, she will come for him. She asked him to please stay as ridiculous as he is, because he gives people like her hope.

Takagi tells her that just as Jun Kasai and Takagi inspired her, she is the hero now, and she has to be the one to show the dream from now on. She has to be the one who puts smiles on people’s faces.

All in all, the show was so good, and I’m so glad that I know at least some Japanese now so that I could follow the lead-up to it, as well as where they’re going from here.

I still have another recap from last week’s show (Nodoka’s retirement show) to translate :sweat_smile:. I was very grateful that Mr. Haku took pity on us and did another live translation thread just for that match. He actually has a few potential wrestling translation projects in the works, and I will share more information about those as it comes!

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