This was a No Canvas & Glass Board for Takeda’s King of FREEDOMS Title.
It’s not one that requires a whole lot of context or understanding.
For the main event of a show commemorating his twentieth anniversary as a wrestler, at the end of twenty years that have seen him become one of the great deathmatch wrestlers of his generation and maybe of all time, Jun Kasai faces off against the undisputed best deathmatch wrestler in the entire world in the middle of a career year, and in his absolute prime. On top of that, the match happens in a type of match that is both unique and brutal and visually interesting in a way many other deathmatches simply are not.
Of all the big Takeda matches in 2018, this one is my favorite.
Hell, of most deathmatches in years in either direction, it’s one of my favorites.
This one holds that status for just about every reason I can love a deathmatch, and for all the usual reasons whenever I really really really fall in love with a deathmatch.
Firstly, it just whips ass.
As I’ve written about previously, the thing with deathmatches and deathmatch fandom maybe even more than that is that when you watch a lot of them and when you watch them for years, you stop being as amazed by things. There’s a disconnect a lot of the times between older and newer deathmatch fans that isn’t the fault of anybody, it’s just sort of how these things naturally shake out. So much of the 2018 Takeda praise got to be frustrating for these reasons, and reasons illustrated din the piece linked above,
The thing is that it doesn’t frustrate me here, because in this match, they have things to do genuinely amaze and impress me.
What works so well here, before even discussing anything they actually do, is the bare board aspect. Unlike when it’s been done elsewhere, the way a BJW ring handles the wooden boards makes this real interesting. The ring is cut in half with two columns of boards, rather than especially long ones. The way it’s done means most of the bare board bumps have to be in the middle or with bodies spread out more, and a few times early on before they totally figure this out, boards fly up just a little, exposing spaces down below the ring in a way that feels genuinely dangerous and unsafe in a way that most wrestling simply doesn’t. They eventually figure it out, and people at ringside clearly keep a hand on the boards in the back half, but it’s enough.
For the rest of the match, that sense of danger never really goes away, and as the boards become more and more stained with the grotesque amount of blood spilled, there’s a tremendous visual flair to everything going on as well.
On that note, on top of all of the violent and cool things they find to do with the bare boards and the glass boards and several sharp objects and boards of sharp objects (razor cross, razor board, carving knife, fork board, etc.), it also happens to feature maybe the best deathmatch spot of the year too, when Takeda counters a big Kasai set up, and simply hoists him up and dives down into the abyss with him.
Beyond simply what they do, how they go about doing it, and the way that the match is constructed is also something special.
The easy thing to point out about why this works is that, as opposed to Takeda’s other matches against wrestlers without his intangible gifts (or in Abby’s case, without quite the same physical abilities left to make as much of them as he used to), Jun Kasai is also an unbelievably energetic maniac who is nigh impossible to look away from. It’s true. A big part of the success of this match is that, at virtually all times, one of the two if not both are putting on this masterclass in terms of these expressive reactions. Constantly middle fingers, a few fighting spirit spots that work way better than they might elsewhere (more on that later)
It’s also just put together unbelievably well.
Kasai and Takeda always keep the match moving forward, tease out every weapon used to give the payoffs maximum value, never peak too early even with the all-time great spot coming nearer to the middle of the match than the end, and always leave enough to where the match never feels like it should have ended by now. The match is twenty-three minutes long, and when I looked that up during the writing of this piece, I was blown away, because it felt like fifteen minutes. It is not perfect, but it does so much right that deathmatches often fail to do right, in every way that a deathmatch can do something right.
That also includes the other part of this, the other reason this worked as well as it did, and it’s the thing behind every truly great deathmatch. It is not just a collection of unbelievably cool and violent things (although if you want to read it just as that, it probably still whips the same astonishing amount of ass), but there is also something tying this all together, and organizing it into being more than simply that collection.
Again, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out.
Kasai, in a rarity, is overmatched.
Masashi Takeda not only has the advantages of youth and speed, but he might also be crazier and better at this. Every big idea Kasai tries to set up backfires on him. Not just the big glass pane spot through the ring frame, but razor crosses and carving knives and razor boards. Takeda is better at all of it, always finds a way to turn it on the old man, and as much as something like a Tanahashi/Okada match or the like, it feels very much like not so much a passing of the torch, but an acknowledgement of where the power lies at this point, with a beautifully emotive and frantic and pissed off and desperate performance from the old man in response.
In the last two or three years of the decade, it is the most reliable story in virtually every genre and area of professional wrestling, and Japanese deathmatches prove no different than anything else.
Kasai puts up a motherfucker of a fight and turns in his best performance in years and years, but he cannot do it. The things he needs to go right for him to win this match are all going towards Takeda, and he has just as many big, deranged, and wonderful ideas as Kasai. The Crazy Monkey makes a show of kicking out of a U-Crash onto a board of forks, throws up the double bird in defiance, before Takeda hits the U-Crash Kai for the biggest win of the year.
It’s a mother fucker of a thing. None of this deathmatches for people who don’t like deathmatches shit. This is a deathmatch epic for people who love deathmatches, made more important by the history of the genre, and maybe just as mind blowing to newer fans as it is to those with a little more experience. It’s everything that it ought to be, and the sort of genre classic that ought to be preserved and studied.
Barring something I had not accounted for happening in the final third of 2018, the best deathmatch of the year, and more importantly maybe, one of the very best of the decade as well.
HANDWERK 
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