WHY I ONLY WATCH PRO WRESTLING FROM JAPAN

*Pic is 16 year old me receiving a kick to the noggin from my last match in 2016

To the upmost surprise to everyone I didn’t pop out of the womb to be greeted by IWA Kokusai tapes. Like most people I learned about pro wrestling from WWE and school yard banter. Through that schoolyard banter it was made very apparent that you’re a loser if you watch wrestling so obviously not wanting to be perceived as a ten year old loser I stopped watching for a while but WWE sucked me back in once went into high school. In my early years of teenage hood I would be stoked watching the six hours of WWE a week until I discovered high spots and RF video which led to a multiple year fandom of US indie wrestling (I’ve still got a good 50+ PWG DVDS in my bedroom). After I discovered the indies I wanted to support and follow these guys somehow so when I was 15 I started a Twitter and everything changed from there. In my real life at the time I had no friends and couldn’t leave the house so I was itching to be apart of some community where folks can all get together and bond over a shared hobby. I followed the usual suspects (VOW, Alan4L, Strigga, Bix, Bahu, Lariato and of course Jahmale The Realhero) as well as writing for a couple of wrestling sites. Most notably the old “Wrestling With Words” website which was the main wrestling site I contributed to. Through interacting with all these new people from all across the world I learnt more and more about wrestling outside of North America, not long later in 2015 I found myself gravitated towards Japanese wrestling.

I didn’t start my Japanese wrestling fandom watching Misawa All Japan matches but you know I came across NJPW in 2014/2015 and loved it! When I started to wrestle my nickname around the boys would be “Tanahashi” because I couldn’t shut up about Japanese wrestling. The presentation was slick, the wrestling was leaps and bounds better then the stuff I was used to and at no point did I feel embarrassment about watching it as it just felt like a real sport. New Japan was fun for about two years but it burnt me out with the sameness so I handed in my Nooj fan card close to five years ago at this point. I may have given up on New Japan but by all means I was barley scraping the top of the iceberg when it came to Japanese pro wrestling as a whole. Just for example, Kazuchika Okada vs Hiroshi Tanahashi was the pinnacle of wrestling for me seven years ago but here I am as a twenty two year old buying CROWN and GAROGA tapes from close to twenty years ago. Quite the natural progression if you ask me. If I didn’t discover Japanese indie wrestling then I would be the most casual of casual fans to ever exist, I’d watch Wrestle Kingdom, Royal Rumble and WM once a year and forget the thing ever existed outside those three big events. In actuality I did this once I was eighteen, working full-time with a partner and friends in real life I didn’t think about wrestling because I was so burnt out by all the promotions I was into. I stopped using twitter thus basically leaving the online wrestling community for a couple of years. Life absolutely happened and I’m not here to give you a sob story on my shoot life but yeah everything I had going on in my life halted fairly suddenly as I fell into a deep depression. being unable to leave the house and all that fun stuff. During this time in 2019 I logged back into twitter and started interacting with the guys I used to be tight with like Lawrence and Jahmale with Lawrence mentioning we should restart the old ‘Puro In The Rough podcast” of which was our original podcast on wrestling with words from 2015 where we covered wrestling that wasn’t New Japan but not necessarily indie either, more in the middle covering promotions like All Japan, BJW, FREEDOMS and DDT. In 2019 we re-started the poddy so I quickly reimbursed myself within the indie scene more than ever before, I couldn’t tell you how many hours I spent on cagematch and wrestling data just being sucked into to a never ending portal of insane facts, stats and matches you would have never imagined existed. It was very hard to find the right people to follow and interact with as the Japanese indies are super niche and even more niche for international fans but with thanks to guys like Bret with his history of FMW series and puroresu online archivers it made everything so much easier then it should have been. People don’t realise how easy it is nowadays to watch anything, I swear to god it’s easier now in 2022 to watch promotions like FU*CK and NIGHT MARE as opposed to trying to watch New Japan before New Japan world took off.

Since 2019 my fandom for the indies hasn’t let up and now more than ever I’m loving the wrestling I’m consuming. Most of is stuff from 15+ years ago from promotions like WMF, WYF, IWA Kokusai, Zipang, EAGLE and SPWF but then also the modern scene is providing some incredible matches, I’ll cover this more in a future article but a few of my favourite indies around at the moment include GLEAT, Tenryu Project, Ganbare Pro, Kyushu Pro and Wallabee but a lot of the times you get these ‘produce shows’ or sponsor shows that just basically end up like mini indie summit events and personally they are my all time favourite. After going back and watching every single New Years Summit show from Korakuen Hall I can whole heartedly say they are my favourite Japanese wrestling shows of all time. I obviously must love the indies because I’ve got this blog where I try to post fairly consistently and interact with fellow fans of which I’m seeing more and more. If you would have told me two years ago that there would be genuine interest outside maybe four or five people for tapes like FU*CK and Wrestle Yume then I wouldn’t have believed you. I’m so immersed within the scene I know so much useless info about characters like Naoshi Sano, Keita Yano, Ryuma Go, Goro Tsurumi and the goddamn Napoleon SAD GENIUS but it’s honestly so fun and the small little indie puro sleaze community online is nowhere near as toxic and cringeworthy as literally every other sub genre of wrestling fans. I feel like us enjoyers of deep indie’s share many parallels to a middle aged hopeless romantic who finally finds love at a later stage in life. We’ve sifted through a lot of shit, falling in and out of love with all these other useless promotions with the only thing stopping us from abandoning wrestling fandom as a whole being the Japanese sleaze. That’s why in 2022 the ONLY wrestling I follow and support is from Japan, I don’t mean to sound like an asshole but wrestling twitter can blow up all day every day about these flippy yahoo’s putting on five star matches but you ain’t Naoshi Sano so I simply do not care.

I should answer so why don’t I watch wrestling that is outside of Japan? Even if everyone including people I respect rave about it?

I honestly think after more than a few year of being an avid lover of indie puroresu the thing that keeps me hooked is the respect shown towards the business and between the competitors. I’m not talking about some code of honor bullshit what I’m saying is the scene as a whole is taken seriously with wrestlers actually acting like professionals, other guys/girls want to see other guys/girls succeed and the business is still so kayfab’d you tend to believe the friendships and stories involved. These multi-million/billion dollar companies in the US could only dream of a reality where their entire roster bought into a system and worked together to make something flourish as a team. These wrestlers in America and other western countries are just so false and fake, you can’t have a blood curdling match then in a media scrum say “oh all that stuff was planned” like what the fuck are you doing bro? We all know this shit isn’t real but a bit of effort and commitment to your craft goes a very long way instead of running home to your twitch audience to say how hard life is when you’re getting paid six figures. I whole heartedly say some of the worst mannered, selfish and downright cruel human beings I’ve came across are wrestling personalities or wrestlers themselves on twitter, the self-awareness levels just are non-existent these days it’s like no one can hear themselves. Mainstream wrestling twitter is a vile place where abuse is 100% encouraged and supported and none of you can tell me otherwise because I see the “dunking” every single day. I won’t name names because I don’t like conflict as I’m really not good at it but you can’t look yourself in the mirror and say the ‘darlings’ don’t get special treatment. God forbid I ever have a child but if I did there is simply no way I’d let my kid get into wrestling because the community and fans that come with it are just way too toxic.

It’s like the only demographic that matters is twitter. I think social media is great in many ways but to base every business decision on popping the same group of lads on the bird app is mind boggling. Wrestling Twitter likes to think it’s a happy, positive place where mean people are exiled but that’s simply not the case, all these people care about is promoting themselves so they’ll walk over anyone in their way even if it’s unwarranted.

Imagine that wrestling is your only safe space where you feel comfortable and you tweet your favourite wrestler an easy question and instead of responding like a respectful, well raised human-being the wrestler just puts you on blast in front of his millions of fans who will then continue to dunk on you? That’s fucking straight up bullying bro and that’s why people kill themselves, you may be patting yourself on the back because you got 10,000 likes but this guy could be sitting at home by himself wanting to die because hundreds of people online are attacking him. To be truthful that’s exactly how I would feel if that happened to me, I’m nowhere near mentally equipped to take on that much negativity so I have no idea how I would react. That was just an example but CM Punk basically did that to a fan last week, schoolyard bullying at it’s finest but it’s CM Punk so who cares right? Thank goodness some people are equipped to handle this kind of online bullying because I know I’m not and many other people aren’t so when they get all this attention and 100% of it is negative how do you honestly think they’ll react? I’ve only got my voice and this blog is for fans of Japanese independent wrestling but I just pray that people could get along again and this online culture of dunking and shitting on anyone for likes and your five minutes of fame needs to end. I’ve been on twitter for eight years and I mean twitter was never rainbows and lollipops but it was a much more accepting place when I logged in eight years ago. I had wonderful people that accepted me into the community with open arms and did everything possible to make me feel comfortable of which I’m very thankful for. It’s just really not that hard to be a nice person and say ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘have a nice day’… Twitter isn’t real life even though it can feel like it sometimes. People that are introverted or don’t have many people in their lives may only ever interact with people through apps like twitter which I completely understand because I’ve been there but if you ever find yourself fuming at a tweet from an unknown with a shit wrestling take then don’t throw your phone at the wall or start attacking the persons character over their opinion as it’s just simply not worth the energy. I get that persistent trolls exist, I’ve encountered my fair share but you got to remember these guys aren’t handsome chad’s with seven figures in the bank. They are sad pathetic human’s that live to bring others down to their level of scum.

The whole idea of feeding scoops to dirt sheet writers is also kind of insane and the fact sites like freakin’ voices of wrestling claim to have people dishing them the gossip from NJPW and NOAH is really not a positive thing for these promotions. If I was their employer and found out who the moles were I would be furious and I’d soon be looking for new international talent/commentators that are professional and buy in instead of feeding the gremlins the news. Like whoever (wink) leaked the Kazuyuki Fujita and Mutoh stuff from NOAH doesn’t realise how negatively that effects how the company is seen by a vast majority of international fans. NOAH have copped a lot of shit online the past few weeks which can be tied back to the leaks coming out of the company so whoever did that may not be as smart as they seem as the only thing that can happen in that scenario is people losing interest in the company YOU work for, what if a bunch of the international fans cancel their Wrestle Universe or NJPW World subscription and English commentary isn’t necessary anymore? Just think that one through.

I appreciate all forms of wrestling as even on the smallest of scales most people take their bumps and learn their trade and it isn’t easy at all. Injuries are common and pay is subpar so the courage that it takes ANYONE to step into the ring is admirable. I’ve seen some gifted athletes and marvellous wrestlers first hand that weren’t Japanese so if you get the vibe from this article that I don’t think wrestlers outside of Japan are talented then you’ve got it all wrong. Great wrestlers exist in every country that wrestling flourishes in, Australian wrestling isn’t massive but in the past five years we’ve produced some pretty extraordinary talents, everyone’s an individual and it’s up to you to reach your potential. I wish every wrestler the best of luck and upmost success because it’s a tough gig. The vibe I’m trying to put out there is I’m so sour on a lot of wrestling from Northern America and most English speaking nations because of the community/toxicity that comes with it. People love it and more power to them but for me It just doesn’t feel right, I feel bad unfollowing certain people I’ve interacted with for years but I just can’t take the negativity and If I see it I just unfollow or block in the harsher situations. I’m going to go finish a FU*CK show I was watching but thank you to anyone who actually reads this, I appreciate the support 🙂


*Online negativity never*

*Naoshi Sano forever*