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 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 
).
両国国技館 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 ).
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 .
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 . 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!