I finished my traipse through oldish NJPW and the second part of that Shinsuke Nakamura biography to close out the year!
Wrestle Kingdoms VI through 10 and 中邑真輔自伝 KING OF STRONG STYLE 2005-2015
My general thoughts about this stretch of years in NJPW and Wrestle Kingdoms in particular, is that it’s like watching more and more elements slide into place to make the “New Japan” and the “Wrestle Kingdom” that I remember and know and certainly have affection for still today. From big obvious things like the arrival of The Rainmaker, to subtle but surprisingly impactful things like the format of the “X vs Y” in the corner overlays and commentator name info boxes getting fully set in stone. It seems like every one of these shows had 2-3 different things like that. “oh, Suzuki Gun’s here now”, “Hey, Yano’s got his DVDs!”, “ah, Bullet Club’s turned up (albeit with Jeff Jarrett and a weird early logo)”, etc. at different stages and points throughout. All the way up to the last match I watched (Nakamura’s last in New Japan) being the first I saw on this run with Milano Collection AT on color commentary (though it seems like he probably did other shows in this span I think, or maybe I overlooked him - the most consistent color commentator throughout these seemed to be Soichi Shibata, a Tokyo Sports reporter).
Watching particularly the last few of these Wrestle Kingdoms almost back to back on subsequent days was… a lot! but surprisingly not all that draining, as it certainly gave a decadent holiday off sort of feeling, and these shows are pretty much just… really really good. I definitely tended to get bored in the earlier matches, but the format of a Wrestle Kingdom show with not all that great but at least kinda interesting things like the New Japan Rumble, or three or four ways for the Jr. Tag championship and things like that, building to a stunning wildcard or two in the midcard, and finally a capper with a Nakamura Intercontinental match and a Tanahashi heavyweight match – it’s gotta be the perfect iteration of a “Wrestle Kingdom” show and what they’re going for. So no matter how drained I was, it the final matches would always pull me into some form of excitement, and then it was easy to be curious what new or unusual things would turn up in the lower card of next year’s show.
One general thought across the board: by george that Tanahashi just walked directly out of a concept page for an ideal archetypal pro wrestler didn’t he?? He headlines every single one of these 5 Wrestle Kingdoms (and closes all but one) and boy, something about him climbing to the top rope while the crowd is going absolutely bananas just makes it feel like the world at least got everything right for just a moment. He can play air guitar in the ring afterward for as long as he wants and the crowd and me will be happy.
I was going back through these with an eye towards Nakamura, but inevitably that meant essentially following Tanahashi through the same span as well, and I think I watched every singles match between them on NJPW World in this time period, and would happily watch any more if they were to exist (maybe… someday…). I think what makes their dynamic work so well is that, reductively, it’s an exceptional talent vs. a unique talent. Tanahashi’s clearly absurdly well suited to be the face of a pro wrestling promotion, and had just about as orthodox path to that exact spot as you could have. While Nakamura was thrust into a spotlight in the worst time for the company and had to earn his confidence slowly over time, only at last now, having proved everything he needed to prove, leaning fully into his own style and his own interests, taking the intercontinental belt just as a canvas to make into his own thing. They’re both great in completely different ways.
I’m kind of bouncing all over the place in organizing these thoughts - but I’ll touch on the book briefly (it was to be honest, overshadowed by the shows I originally started watching because of the book - it’s more of a collection of website columns than a capital-B Biography, and reads like it, but is pleasant enough and has some good tidbits), since one thing that especially amused me from this last chunk is he compared wanting to be the Ace derisively to Captain New Japan - declaring yourself a superhero - and said he had no interest in it. (other bits from this last chunk of the book I remember is there’s various bits about how he’s comfortable talking to foreigners and feels especially at ease in foreign rings showing something they haven’t seen before - which helps explain the WWE decision which was still in the future at the time of the book I think, and he describes strong style as like, processing your anger, at your place in the world or society or anything, by using it in the wrestling match - or something like that, I should have made better note of the page to quote it better. Also, he said YeaOh is like, a meaningless sentiment that’s a sneaky way of just deferring to the audience to do the work of deciding what he means 
)
Again, bouncing around, but on the Nakamura/Tanahashi subject, one non-Wrestle Kingdom show that I got pretty emotional watching is their last singles match together, at the finals for G1 Climax 25.
I think I’m confident enough to say it’s probably the first full pro wrestling match I ever saw. The deceptive small/intimate feeling of 両国国技館 matches my memory, the gear of both men matches my memory (I remember thinking no combination of Nakamura with solid red or black pants and red or black armband felt quite right to my memory, so red pants with black stripes down them and a black band makes sense!) (and my first impression of Tanahashi was, I recall “look at this goober and his silly hair” – I was very Nakamura biased at the time), and the result (Nakamura not actually winning) also matches my memory. And the timing makes total sense! I recall that Seth Rollins cashing in Money in the Bank at the 2015 Wrestlemania got enough people I knew of tweeting about wrestling that I thought for the first time I might eventually get into pro wrestling, and I know that I was definitely searching out Nakamura matches in my last, most stressful semester of college in fall of 2015, so if I was searching “Shinsuke Nakamura match” on dailymotion or whatever in Fall 2015, it would certainly make sense if the first result were the G1 Finals from August.
So I think it was my first match! And it was honestly really wild and kinda profound to watch it again with an astronomical boatload more context, from everything I’d seen between the two men in watching the years up to this point, to knowing with future knowledge it’s their last match, to stuff like oh, Chono and Mutoh are on commentary and I know who those people are and know what they’re saying to each other. It wasn’t remotely on my radar at the time that that match would arguably lead to all of ~ this ~ (gesturing). In retrospect too though, they got me good! Although Nakamura doesn’t win, it’s structured pretty much perfectly to rope in a nascent Nakamura fan, because at first the crowd is behind Tanahashi, but he behaves dominantly and a little heelishly for a long time, making the crowd solidly behind Nakamura by the time he gets to do cool stuff. If my perspective at the time was “I want to see Nakamura do cool stuff” then it’s no wonder it tricked me into watching the whole match, getting into the drama of it, and then clicking on another match to see Nakamura win.
It’s also just a great match between the two wrestlers who have meant the most to me at different times in that like, most raw “look up to” kind of way, in the sense that I used both of them as motivation to get through low times in my life, and it makes sense at which times: I looked up to Nakamura around the end of college when I very strongly felt the need to define myself and figure out what my own whole deal even was, and I wore a Tanahashi shirt under my interview clothes some years later when looking for a permanent position to replace my contractor job - partly since it was the closest thing to an undershirt I had, but also because: genuinely who more says “hireable” than Tanahashi? That guy’s passing the interview no matter what the position even is.
Again - both great in completely different ways. And it was nice to go back and see that with that later developed dynamic of my own fully in play instead of just “this guy seems kind of cool but I don’t know anything about wrestling, maybe this one’ll be interesting?” like it was at the time.
Anyway! I guess that ended up being mostly what I wanted to say, which was mostly just about that one match not on any of these actual shows, so I’ll try to close with tidbits and then anything else that stood out about the Wrestle Kingdoms themselves.
The non-Wrestle Kingdom Nakamura matches I watched that stood out were an intercontinental title defense against Naomichi Marufuji (his Shiranui is so cool! Add him in with Shiozaki and Mutoh in the pile of “current NOAH wrestlers I learned to appreciate more by watching them fight Nakamura”) and another one against Shibata, with whom he had plenty of his own history with as well.
Oh yeah! One last thing I have to mention is the phrase セルリアンブルー burned its way into my vocabulary organically via these shows, since the first one or two times I heard it I was like “what was that? From the tone that sounds like it was someone’s catchphrase” to then on the next show “hey! they said it again! and there’s different people in the ring this time!” to finally “They must be talking about the mat” - and sure enough.
It’s as in synecdoche for New Japan like “I can’t believe AJ Styles is stepping onto the cerulean blue mat!!”. If you’d asked me before what color the mat in New Japan was, I’m embarrassed to admit my answer would have been “what? I have no idea” even with all of it I’ve watched. Now I know it’s CERULEAN BLUE.
I’ll have to listen out for it at 2023’s Wrestle Kingdom… I feel like they’ve since stopped saying it so much or I would have noticed it before, but who knows! Maybe my listening comprehension and volume of New Japan consumed just hasn’t been up to the task to this point!
Anything that stood out about the individual shows:
Wrestle Kingdom VI
This one has the debut of “The Rainmaker”!! … in a lower card match against YOSHI-HASHI, to little crowd interest, capped with an AWFUL zoomless rainmaker pose that has an awkward “I’m gonna get ya” feel moreso than an “I own the world” vibe like it should, leading into a Rainmaker-style NON-LARIAT with zero impact that looks awful. Oof! I took a clip of this and watched it like dozens of times because it’s so so bad knowing with hindsight what a Rainmaker “should” look like.
… And yet, he truly Rainmaker Shocked me because at the end of the VERY SAME show he challenges Tanahashi for the belt, a challenge HE WILL WIN, and by Wrestle Kingdom 7 he’s a former IWGP heavyweight champion, a G1 Climax winner, a Best Bout winner, and now a Tokyo Dome main eventer. I genuinely don’t think it is possible to be all those things in a shorter time..
An early match features the young lion Kyosuke Mikami. Hey, I wonder what ever happened to him, and why El Desperado is listed as a related page…
The last two matches are a non-title “Genius vs. Genius” match between Keiji Mutoh and (Stardust Genius era) Tetsuya Naito, and Tanahashi vs. Minoru Suzuki for the Heavyweight title, and I feel like this is the last “prehistory”-feeling Wrestle Kingdom in retrospect, I suppose mostly just because I’ve known Minoru Suzuki for too long as a “doesn’t need a title to be extremely threatening” type of wrestler, so maybe it was different at the time, but it was hard to see him as a major threat for Tanahashi in the main event of the Tokyo Dome. Tanahashi’s gonna close out the show, you know?
That and there’s quite a bit of other promotions on the card as well (like Mutoh from AJPW at the time and Shiozaki and Marufuji from NOAH in the Nakamura match). I think an aspect of “Wrestle Kingdom” in my head vs. “イッテンヨン in the weird MMA times or the Yukes era” is that in my head Wrestle Kingdom is very NJPW centric, and seeing the cavalcade of other promotions almost as much in the spotlight was a surprise. – Which is to say I think this is the last one that feels like that.
Wrestle Kingdom 7
This one has Nagata/Suzuki and Makabe/Shibata as strong midcard matches, as well as a kinda weird but fun triple threat for the jr. heavyweight championship between Prince Devitt (still non bullet club), Ibushi, and Low Ki of all people, in full Agent 47 cosplay for some reason (his pants 100% split as it appears to be a real suit he wrestles in).
The Intercontinental match, Nakamura vs. Sakuraba, is I think an interesting one, and very good. Of course it’s more MMA-feeling, but I think it captures some of the sudden turns that do seem fun about MMA, and Sakuraba always seems cool to me even though I don’t really care about MMA.
And the main event is the first Tanahashi / Okada dome main event and I thought it was just outstanding. I didn’t check very carefully beforehand who was winning these, so I got it in my head that Okada was going to win this one, which gave me very powerful GO ACE!!! feelings when Tanahashi won. Obviously I’ve talked plenty enough praise about Tanahashi at this point, anyway.
OH I NEARLY FORGOT!!! The REAL highlight of Wrestle Kingdom 7 is Ayumi Nakamura is there in person to perform 風になれ for Minoru Suzuki’s entrance!! This is obviously the most exciting musical guest a pro wrestling show could ever have. It’s great.
Wrestle Kingdom 8
This one has the arrival of Bullet Club, as well as the Young Bucks, who were strange to see from a present day context (even of course knowing they would be here eventually).
Sakuraba and Nagata have a weird MMA-tinged match ending in DQ with a couple of Gracies. Boooo.
Kojima wins the NWA Heavyweight Championship here (from some guy I don’t recognize). Go figure! The man’s accomplished.
The standout midcard singles matches are Goto/Shibata and Ibushi/Devitt, with the latter ending with the arrival of a mysterious masked man!! It very much felt like an “I’m a time traveler” moment to be like “DON’T YOU RECOGNIZE EL DESPERADO??” to the commentators who had no idea who this guy was - it’s his debut! Pretty cool!
Also Prince Devitt has a lot of body paint here and tbh it’s way cooler to me here as just a guy with a bunch of body paint than any of the “The Demon” stuff in WWE ever was.
This is the one where the fan poll decided the order, and so Naito vs. Okada for the heavyweight championship goes on second-to-last, with Tanahashi vs. Nakamura for the intercontinental going on last.
And I mean… well, yeah. Having gone through all this up to this point, the poll (which I’ve heard plenty about in the context of explaining Naito’s deal) now just seems like an obvious pretense. Naito and Okada at this point, sure, they were both very promising wrestlers and were arriving at being stars. … But it’s Tanahashi and Nakamura. of course that’s going on last. Admittedly I might have biased myself though by focusing on the latter far far more than the former in this process.
I don’t really remember a lot about Naito and Okada – I think I remember feeling that it was interesting Okada’s style (long match slowly building) does already seem very fully formed.
I remember really liking Tanahashi and Nakamura, naturally, but the GO ACE!!! energy was muted for me this time since he beat Nakamura… in the same way I was surprised Tanahashi won the previous year, Nakamura being so associated with the Intercontinental belt and having it off and on through this entire stretch made me not realize how it’s really a handful of different reigns with stuff like this losing it to Tanahashi and winning it back again shortly after interupting it.
Wrestle Kingdom 9
Oh boy, it’s the first New Japan Rumble.
reDRagon and Time Splitters take me back…
Minoru Suzuki vs. Kazushi Sakuraba is another interesting one - they treat it like a really big deal, and Suzuki’s even gone with a full white color scheme and died his hair!
The Junior Heavyweight match is a standout for me: it’s “The Cleaner” Kenny Omega vs. Ryusuke Taguchi (doing some kind of Simon and Garfunkel thing?). Kenny Omega’s done plenty of great things and all but there’s really something special about The Cleaner - it’s so cheesy and over the top but fun top to bottom. And it was interesting to listen to the commentary as they talked about like - his transformation and how he can speak good Japanese but has stopped. I feel like coming in when I did and with everybody going (understandably) over the moon for Kenny’s heavyweight matches in a few years, it was easy to just think of Omega popping into existence with The Cleaner and only later on learn about anything before that.
Nakamura vs. Ibushi and Tanahashi vs. Okada are both of course incredible. I think Nakamura/Ibushi is one I definitely saw way back when (and had less profound differences in how I experienced it now than the one I talked about at length - it’s just a really good match). And Okada leaving in tears at a loss was an interesting and surprising sight to behold.
Wrestle Kingdom 10
The ROH connection really shows itself here, with The Young Bucks and Ricochet and company doing the stuff they were famous for at the time, The Briscoes winning the inaugural CHAOS 6-man championship with Yano, and an ROH world championship match between Jay Lethal and Michael Elgin… I guess it is better than the TNA partnership older Dome shows had (that comprise all the matches missing from NJPW World…) but it’s funny how things change…
The Jr. Championship is again awfully good with Kenny Omega vs. KUSHIDA - that’s surely the unexpected match (i.e. that I didn’t know to expect beforehand) I was most excited to see.
Oh my god, Shibata vs. Ishii for the NEVER!
I tell ya, I was gonna remark that my equivalent of the “I’m impressed but yikes! I have mixed feelings!” sentiment described about the phoenix splash would probably be the humble headbutt (which Giulia seems to love) - but her “one person controls the other’s head and drives 100% of the movement” seems positively comfy compared to Ishii and Shibata’s “just both run into each other head first” approach here. It’s an awfully good match but maybe not the best idea in the world… Especially given what happens a year or two later…
Similar to the Ibushi match at the last show, I definitely saw Nakamura vs. AJ Styles in the past, and felt similarly about it now. It felt kinda cool to tie the threads together though… The way I remember it, I watched this match (now graduated and unemployed) and then immediately after or the next morning or something, saw the news that they were both leaving for WWE. Then I got a WWE Network subscription and started using my vast anxious freetime to watch lots of wrestling as background for when Nakamura turned up, and the rest as they say is history.
And the main event is Tanahashi vs. Okada again, and again it’s great. Okada gets to finally close out one of these. He’s… not as amazing at it as Tanahashi but he does fine! Gedo being around to help him made me realize that losing Gedo is probably Okada’s major “character development” in the time since, and honestly it seems like a bit of a downgrade, since Gedo’s helpful as the hype man here, but hey.
And that’s that! When I look at my notes, it appears that Wrestle Kingdom 11 was the first Wrestle Kingdom I saw in full (I think pirated, apparently on January 5th 2017), and it appears at the time my thoughts were mainly that everything up to the main event wasn’t that interesting but Kenny Omega and Okada really did a great job at roping me into the drama even though I didn’t care about them going in and had no background. I remark that people had been rightfully praising it a huge amount - I assume I was looking at reddit.
The only other wrestlers I mention are Guerrillas of Destiny (I was impressed by them - particularly Tama). Looking at the card, I know I knew who Cody was at the time, but I guess I just didn’t mention him, and I’m surprised I didn’t mention Hiromu/KUSHIDA since I know I loved a match of theirs, but apparently that was later at Dominion. I also 1000% forgot I apparently saw an Adam Cole match before he was in NXT. 11 being the first one with Ingobernables Naito also makes me realize how fresh the act was at the time I was getting into things, which makes Naito’s whole arc as I’ve experienced it make a lot more sense. It’s really easy to assume whatever was happening when you came in must have been happening for a long time beforehand, so that not being the case I can all the more understand Naito fans’ excitement around his dome championship shots.
Reflecting on it, I’m genuinely shocked that the timespan is so short between this stuff - it feels like I got into NJPW long before Omega was main eventing (and I guess I sort of did in the form of the Nakamura stuff but I mean in general), and that there would be a much longer time between when I fully got into it with the G1 Climax that year and when stuff like AEW seeds started forming, but it really isn’t very much time when you look back on it like this. I suppose it’s the huge changes in my context in how I approach the shows at every stage from then to now that makes it seem like a much larger span of time.
I’m not gonna rewatch 11 or any others beyond this. This was surprisingly a really fun and fulfilling little historical backtrack! I feel like I tied two long-loose ends together at last, and was able to do it in part thanks to my cool language skills!! Commentary and the book to anchor things and provide the excuse to start definitely is what made this be viably fun, I think.
Since it felt rewarding to fill in the blanks in my recent context for a promotion that I follow that means something to me, maybe in the new year I’ll think about watching some old Stardom… or perhaps there are other things I’ve been meaning to go back to… 
Also, I have two other Nakamura-related books, so I’ll probably try to knock them out while all this is fresh in my head before moving on to another wrestling book about something else.
P.S. something I remembered I forgot to slot in, is I was impressed doing this how Nakamura’s transformation over the years feels like a natural seamless growth. I would have assumed originally that like, Nakamura suddenly got cool one day. That kind of thing. But rather I think the Nakamura at the end is the same as Super Rookie Nakamura, he just made the journey and let more and more of himself through until he’d accomplished and outgrown enough that chasing 刺激 and たぎる was the most interesting thing left.
The reason he can lean into that style and fun is the same reason he had to be resolute to defend his sudden place in the spotlight when things were precarious:
「一番スゲエのはプロレスなんだ！！」
That part never changed.
The four promotions I can most claim to be “following” all have big shows coming up (or already happened) around New Year’s and the fourth (as I’m sure many more do…)! And I used one of my “floating holidays” at work for イッテンヨン since if that’s not a holiday, what is.
I’m most looking forward to when Stardom Dream Queendom gets uploaded to Stardom World! I’m doing a pretty good job of avoiding twitter and the like until then.
! 9 of them were for DDT, and the rest were for TJPW. 25 of the TJPW translations were “full text” translations (or as close as I could get). That’s pretty wild to think about!
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: や・く・そ・く で！
: こわい
) I’m able to privately talk on the