HARASHIMA vs. Shuji Ishikawa, DDT D-Oh Grand Prix 2018 Final (1/28/2018)

This was the final of the 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix tournaments.

In something of a theme with Shuji Ishikawa in this tournament previously, it’s a match that lives in an impossibly large shadow, and does not ever really come close to stepping out of it. It’s a historically great match up, and it is not here what it was then.

Fourteen months ago or so, right at what we’d call the end of Shuji Ishikawa’s physical prime, he and HARASHIMA not only had one of the best matches of the year, but one of the best KO-D Openweight Title matches ever, and a match that I think represents the absolute booking peak of DDT, and stands as more than just a match, but as like this summation of all the best qualities of the company preserved in amber. If you cannot interpret context clues, it’s a match I’ve got some real fond feelings for.

This is not that match. They don’t have anything close to the booking support they had in 2016, they cannot create quite the same feeling of importance that elevated that match so much without it, Ishikawa is not physically what he was then, the result here is fairly obvious (one who Takeshita has already beaten vs. someone he hasn’t yet and who he had his biggest career failure against on another big show) and they simply do not aim quite as high as they did then.

Having said all of that, it’s still really great!

In some large part, the match benefits from the ropes breaking at a point, rendering the top useless, and forcing them into something of a different match. They’re fixed, this isn’t like Low Ki vs. Chris Hero at the 2008 Battle of Los Angeles or the Cena/Del Rio broken ring match in 2011, the thing gets fixed. However, save for a middle rope Superplex spot late in the match (one that is clearly teased once to see if it will even work), they lose confidence in the ropes and never again run off them or use them for some of the things HARASHIMA would like to do late in a match off the top rope. On top of narrative utility of a thing like this, it also really helps a match feel different a lot more interesting than it could have been. I hate to play the ’this match would have been worse without [x]’ game, because there is no actual way to separate these things and know and it feels like a wrestling version of a sports fan making excuses, but the problems with the ring really really really benefit this match, and provide these two with the thing they needed to make a post-prime retread work as well as this does.

Also though, firstly and most obviously, it is just a great wrestling match.

Both wrestlers naturally fit super well into each other’s match, Ishikawa getting to brutalize a smaller wrestler, HARASHIMA getting to work more overtly as a pure babyface. They’re also always real precise against each other, and urge each other to throw harder at points than both frequently do — neither being the most consistent elbow thrower in the world at this point — and all of that. They have a match that makes a ton of sense, is beautifully constructed to get as much out of everything as possible, breaks out some newer stuff

Secondly, while they don’t have that level of booking support, it is a stellar example of Tournament Wrestling.

All throughout this inaugural D-Oh, we’ve seen Ishikawa beat guys with one or, at most, two of his big moves. Rarely ever countered or blocked, always successful. HARASHIMA pushes him here in a way that, as a result of the contrast to the body of work over the last month, makes this feel like a much bigger struggle than any of the others. Doubly so when HARASHIMA both counters and then survives almost every single big Shuji Ishikawa bomb in the final stretch. If it can’t capture the feeling of their last match, little touches like this create at least SOME feeling of importance that does them a lot of good, showing the difference between a great tournament like this, and so many of the others. Thought and time and effort put into making these things feel important by the finals, allowing for all of these little moments that feel like individual victories and losses. They’re even able to overcome the obvious nature of the match itself, just slightly, as a result of all that care, making it feel like if this can’t be a match that’s often truly in doubt, it at least feels like Ishikawa’s really accomplished something by pushing through the first wall that he’s really come across so far.

Narratively, on a level beyond just tournament booking and the build up of these big pieces of offense, it is also a delightful story of things just going wrong.

HARASHIMA is wrestling a classic HARASHIMA match against an opponent that history shows is susceptible to the usual attack, only for the collapse of the top rope to change everything. It doesn’t happen immediately, and it’s not the only reason the match goes the way it does, but Ishikawa doesn’t need to run off for momentum or springboard off the top. HARASHIMA does and cannot. It doesn’t help that Ishikawa is also more willing to break the rules than he was before, hurling chairs at HARASHIMA’s face outside, sending him into the barriers at Korakuen, all of that. He puts up a hell of a fight, of course. HARASHIMA adapts to the environment with some fun new pieces of offense, and in a real rarity, even throws some gnarly skull-on-skull headbutts of his own. He avoids every move once, becomes the first to block Shuji’s Kamigoe in DDT, and survives both the Fire Thunder Driver and Splash Mountain, but he can’t ever get his own stuff going right.

Shuji Ishikawa batters him with his own headbutts, lands the Kamigoe this time, and finally the Giant Slam to get past HARASHIMA. 

Nothing Ishikawa does is obviously the reason for his success, in the way that HARASHIMA matches often have going for them. There might not even be a real reason. You can chalk it up to him having an urgency he didn’t have before. You can point to Ishikawa using the chairs at ringside and cheating more than he did before. You can also just put it all under one umbrella and say this is about Shuji Ishikawa making up for what he’s lost physically by throwing it all into simple aggression and brutality, which just so happened to come in a match in which HARASHIMA was hurt by the environment in a way Ishikawa wasn’t. That’s all probably true. Alternatively, you can also none of those things. Maybe HARASHIMA just lost. Sometimes, you just lose, and that’s so much crueler and more frustrating, but in the long run, it is so much better.

On what has to be a complete accident, also a fascinating accompaniment to the previous day’s Tanahashi vs. Minoru Suzuki match, with the two great Japanese Aces of the decade once again mirroring each other thematically. Both these crushing defeats against long-term rivals who they’ve had promotion defining matches with, chalked up to circumstances that you can really only put down to just having real bad days at the worst possible times. You could never convince me any of this was planned, but it is one of those lovely little flukes in wrestling, the universe simple deciding to tell roughly the same story in two strikingly different ways, in matches totally representative of their promotions. One based on prolonged set up and that packs a greater emotional punch but that is clearly like ten minutes too long, and the other this less sentimental and far more efficient version of the thing. It’s easy to go with the former, but at the end of the day, I admire the latter so much more.

Not the classic it was, but an outstanding smaller-scale slice of HARASHIMA doing what nobody else really can, and that old DDT magic.

***1/4

Shuji Ishikawa vs. Kazusada Higuchi, DDT D-Oh in Shin-Kiba (1/14/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix tournament.

Unlike the more stacked A Block, which is still very much in the air going into the two matches left after this, this is a clear de-facto semi-final and was such going into the show. Ishikawa had eight and Higuchi six and with a three way tie at six points between Mike Bailey, Daisuke Sasaki, and Soma Takao, there is no scenario in which the winner of this doesn’t win the block, as Higuchi would match the Big Dog at eight and hold the tiebreaker with a win. Which is great, as DDT’s two most powerful tanks can simply run full speed at each other and have themselves a little super fight.

Relatively speaking, anyways.

They’re not exactly giving you a sequel the size of their 2016 KO-D Openweight Title epic, one of the best matches in a really good year. They were never going to. Firstly, because it is a match third from the top in Shin-Kiba 1st RING. Like, sorry, but that’s just a reality you have to accept, this is not going to be a K-Hall title epic in front of a rabid crowd. There’s also the fact that, while his January 2018 has shown he still Has It, Shuji Ishikawa is not the wrestler he was even fifteen months ago, slowing down significantly during his move to All Japan as his main promotion. So, this match was never going to be like their more famous, bigger setting, and outright better inaugural voyage.

Having said all of that, we ought not to let comparison be the thief of joy here, because this absolutely rocks too.

It does so for all the reasons that their last match rocked, just a little more simplified for the setting and for who they, specifically Shuji, are now as wrestlers.

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, a popular form of amusement in America used to be buying tickets to sit in a field by train tracks and watch two old steam trains run full speed at each other and be destroyed. It happened all across the country at weird little state fairs and what have you, preceding the demolition derby. Thousands of people, apparently, would do this. Debris from these trains would be sent hundreds of yards, and yes of course, as this was an American pastime and no American pastime would be complete without a turn like this, people often got hit by it, and in some cases, would die as a result.

That maybe sounds ridiculous, but watch this match, and you kind of get it.

Nobody in Shin-Kiba 1st RING got hit with an errant elbow or chop, limbs did not fly off of these two and send some poor office worker to their death, but the guiding principle is the same.

Which is to say that it is incredibly fun to watch a horribly destructive collision.

The attraction is the same as it always was, we’ve just stopped using trains, and began using human bodies instead.

It is an absolute delight to watch all of the many different and deeply violent collisions and the ways in which two masters of a show like this can differentiate between all of them over fifteen or sixteen minutes. Between Ishikawa’s elbows, knees, and lariats and Higuchi’s chops, John Woo style shoulderblocks, and lariats, there is so much that can be done here, but there’s also so much craft that goes into it. The modulations between different chop vs. elbow battles, the slow escalation of those battles, the way they use these collisions to create something l

There is a little more to it than just the purely physical, of course. There‘s a lot of meat on the bone here, narratively speaking. As with their last match, there‘s a clear story being told of ascendant Higuchi taking it to the scene‘s pre-eminent big guy and coming a lot closer than he did over a year earlier, and also of an aging Ishikawa having to get a lot meaner and more aggressive against a Higuchi who has shortened the gap between them dramatically. 

Kazusada Higuchi does better than ever, not just at the start as he rushes in with a lot more confidence than he had before, takes over easier for a period, but primarily in the back half of the match. He stops Higuchi’s classical finishing suite a few times, lands these big dramatic cut-offs, and while he maybe doesn’t ever get closer to beating the Big Dog in terms of the nearfalls he gets or what he survives, he feels so so so much closer to it, and because it’s pro wrestling, the feeling matters so much more than what you can track on paper.

The problem is that, for all this growth he shows, Higuchi still cannot close. For lack of any better way to describe it, Kazusada Higuchi simply fucks around too much.

When he first really cuts Ishikawa off in the final third and begins to pour it on some, he allows too much distance and loses his lead. When he makes another comeback and nearly wins off of the Doctor Bomb, he doesn’t stay steady. When they begin really trading shots, he makes this huge error of going for an audience appeal before a chop and gets cut off, and never really has the advantage again. He’s not beaten immediately, he still stays alive through a real real awesome slap fight, but there’s three big moments here where he had a real chance, and simply could not do it, all through these small little mistakes that the real top guys simply do not make. For all the progress he’s made up the mountain, as this match shows, there is still just enough daylight for the real titans of the company to stay on top.

Following a genuine motherfucker of a headbutt, Shooj gets him with the Giant Slam, with a little bit of an extra hurl to it than you usually get on that move, and that’s that. The king of tournaments over the last few years makes the finals of yet another one.

It’s not quite the all-decade level certified face melter of their original meeting in September 2016, but still, a certified God Damner, especially given the many reasons it could simply have not been. No matter what level that’s at, I find it just way too hard not to appreciate this sort of a thing.

***1/4

Kazusada Higuchi vs. Mike Bailey, DDT D-Oh Grand Prix 2018 in Shimizu (1/13/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix tournament.

Once again, this whips just a whole ton of ass.

You maybe ought to just go read that, because it mostly all holds just as true here. Two of the world’s more purely reliable wrestlers meet in a nearly perfect match up (Higuchi is not quite enough of a bully to be a perfect Speedball opponent as a bigger guy, but he’s so good at so much else that it doesn’t matter all that much) yet again, and toss some great stuff out at each other. It is not all that complex, save for a shadow puppet on the wall of some big vs. small stuff. Mostly, as with that 2017 DNA match, this is simply an offensive showcase between two guys with some of the absolute best offense in all of wrestling.

They get it a little more correct here than they did in their DNA match, likely due to the fact that this is a DDT match, but also due to the fact that it is a few minutes shorter as well. Not only do they aim a little higher, but with less time, they cut whatever fat was there eight months ago too, and have, if not the absolute best version of this (K-Hall title match, the best version of most singles matches), certainly the best one we ever got to see, a real mother fucker of an artillery show between two outstanding marksmen.

To take a page from this match and other great matches like it, that’s all you get, because that’s all you need.

***1/4

HARASHIMA vs. Masahiro Takanashi, DDT D-Oh Grand Prix 2018 in Shimizu (1/13/2018)

This was an A Block match in the 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix tournament.

It’s another one for the perverts.

Being as it is just you and I reading this, the ten to fifteen other people who are reading these 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix reviews, I think we can just talk amongst each other (well, I can talk, you can listen, and that’s the way we should keep it) as real DDT heads. I don’t need to tell you that Masahiro Takanashi can actually be really good. You know this. I don’t need to spend a few hundred words, again, going over all the ways that HARASHIMA can be great. You know this. I do it a lot when discussing the bigger matches as there is theoretically always a new reader dropping in, but for the smaller stuff like this that I have actual data proving is not a significant draw, I don’t think we have to do that whole song and dance. If you wound up on this page, it’s because you know this probably rocks.

So, this is a great match, we both know this.

What really stood out to me here was that, while HARASHIMA is no longer officially the Ace of DDT at this point (although, if we’re being honest, he kind of still is up until like 2020), this is a picture perfect DDT Ace match.

The boys over at Q&T, one of the only good wrestling podcasts, have discussed this idea a lot at different points when covering DDT shows, with a few different guests, and it was what I kept thinking about here. The idea of a DDT Ace specifically is different than being the Ace of another company. For example, Konosuke Takeshita would have been an okay Ace of another company. Not great, but in the same way that a Kento Miyahara was okay or whoever for NOAH was okay. Not exciting, but passable. It is not just about these usual qualities of feeling like a top guy, being able to reach down and pull someone up to your level (in any number of ways), wrestling like a top guy, looking great, or whatever. The Ace of DDT also has to be able to get a little goofy, feel genuine doing that, but always still preserve that feeling of superiority. It’s not a very easy thing to do. For all their physical gifts, I don’t think either Takeshita or Endo ever really had it in them, as neither has ever felt like an actual functioning human person. Kenny Omega and El Generico were both wrestlers with the switch, but their goofiness at times always felt like more of an act, almost too eager to play along, and losing something in the process. Kota Ibushi way back when and Kazusada Higuchi, in 2022-23, have come close, being able to play along without (a) losing themselves in a bit & (b) still seeming above the bit. But nobody’s ever hit that balance as well or as frequently as HARASHIMA has.

In this match, HARASHIMA delivers one of the best ever illustrations of the concept possible in a twelve minute match.

Part of it is, yes, that he is always better than Takanashi, but makes that very powerful well maybe pop in your head for a moment or two at the end. Classically speaking, as in not just specific to DDT, it’s an ordinary Ace performance in a singles league match that he is clearly never going to lose. Slightly elevates an underneath guy, creates enough doubt to make it interesting, but leaves zero question about their respective positions by the end, all while delivering a great match.

More importantly, he is able to participate in Takanashi’s bits and play along with a smile without it ever feeling unnatural or losing himself in it and not seeming serious. He is the best straight man (do your own joke, i am passing you the ball) that DDT has ever had, playing along not just by laughing and going with it, but by giving Takanashi the space to do it without involving himself as anything more then the object of it. HARASHIMA will laugh it off, but also tinge that with a kind of annoyed alright you little asshole, come on facial expression after. He also stops just as many of the traps as he falls for, which is not an unimportant detail. He keeps himself apart from the nonsense, but also never really falls victim to it in a larger sense.

Above, but never removed from.

It doesn’t seem like an especially hard thing to do, and didn’t seem that way in the moment, but given everyone who’s tried to follow since or failed to do this sort of a thing in other situations, it becomes more and more impressive every time I look back at some random thing like this and see just how well he pulled it off.

Anyways, HARASHIMA wins in the end with an especially nasty Somato to make Takanashi pay for the antics, completing yet another stellar performance from the best wrestler in the country.

***

Mike Bailey vs. Yukio Sakaguchi, DDT D-Oh Grand Prix 2018 in Yokohama (1/11/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix tournament.

It is beautiful professional wrestling.

Two of the world’s greatest kickers meet up for ten minutes to trade shots. Yukio tries to drag Young Karate down on the ground and back into his element when Bailey proves too fast for him standing up, but Bailey proves just slippery enough to avoid it. Given Sakaguchi’s success dragging larger men to the ground and defeating them through his own slippery nature, it also serves as this stellar chunk of tournament booking as well, being outdone at his own game.

While Sakaguchi devotes his time to trying to get Bailey on the ground after all the live rounds thrown out, all Bailey is concerned with is not getting caught on the mat though, and eventually finds his opening.

Speedball finds his way out of a choke, lands a standing Ultima Weapon, and kicks Yukio as hard as possible in the temple for the win.

Stylistically, maybe the best AMBITION match of 2018.

***

Konosuke Takeshita vs. HARASHIMA, DDT D-Oh Grand Prix 2018 in Nerima (1/10/2018)

This was an A Block match in the 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix tournament.

Nearly ten months after their last match, which to the date I am writing this (February 2nd, 2023), still stands out as the most important match in DDT history, as it quintessentially defined what DDT is and believes in as a promotion (moving forward always), some drama is removed from this. It is not to say that HARASHIMA will obviously never defeat Konosuke Takeshita again, but DDT made such a clear point and statement with that match in 2017, but it is to say that, clearly, Takeshita has to also win their next match for it to really stick, and that if HARASHIMA was ever to beat Takeshita again, it would be made a much bigger deal of (say, resulting in the 2019 Match of the Year or something), and not happening on a mid-tour D-Oh main event.

A great rule of thumb to have with promotions that have big events like DDT does periodically, or even simply monthly Korakuen shows, is that, if you’re watching a show lit by house lights, you are probably not going to get the real important stuff.

More accurately, if time’s arrow is to ever stand still or reverse, it will not be in a basement in Nerima.

So, before the bell, anyone who knows just about anything knows how this is going to go. Takeshita wins, because he simply cannot lose and still be taken seriously as the new face of the company.

Of course, with a wrestler as great as HARASHIMA, none of that matters.

To their credit, this is a totally different match up than all of their previous outings.

Like the tournament’s Takeshita/Endo match, the match absolutely benefits from being a little bit more casual, but it also has the strength that all HARASHIMA matches tend ot have, where nothing feels out of place or like it hasn’t been thought through. It is lighter and breezier and easier feeling than ever, but also only sixteen minutes, and always feeling thoughtful and purposeful. Every motion not only benefits the match, but in retrospect, benefits this longer term story between the two in between their two major KO-D Openweight Title matches in 2017 and 2019.

Konosuke and HARASHIMA are entirely even at the start for the first time, only for Takeshita’s overzealousness to cause him a fluke tweaked knee. On purpose or not, it is the absolute perfect way to get into the match they want to have given where they are as characters and personalities within the company. Takeshita being less experienced and suffering this weird freak damage means he never quite gets outsmarted by HARASHIMA, but it also allows HARASHIMA the dignity of simply taking advantage of something there. Fans of both get something to take some pride in, there’s no villain to it, that sort of a thing.

The actual work and selling are both stellar, of course.

It is obviously a big and impressive thing for HARASHIMA to follow this outstanding selling performance two days prior against Jiro Kuroshio with this attack on the same limb (and obviously a great one at that, HARASHIMA’s usual kind of casual violence to the stomach translates very well to attacking a limb, as it has in the past), but Takeshita is also genuinely very good at selling the leg. A lot of that comes down to the simple construction of the match, HARASHIMA seeming to only give Takeshita exactly the amount of knee violence he can handle without it feeling like he’s ignoring it on his comeback, but Soup is also really good at this specific level of selling. Showing it’s a real hinderance, expressing that he is in pain, but fighting through it. Had HARASHIMA attacked it for ten minutes, it would be preposterous, but attacking it for five and then ineffectively using it as a route into a HARASHIMA finishing suite only emphasizes the better qualities in both wrestlers.

Takeshita just barely dodges a Somato at the end and reels off a German Suplex, but unable to follow up or trust in the immediate bridge, Takeshita rolls through into a Bridging O’Connor Roll to just barely eek out a win.

HARASHIMA just barely misses the kickout, kind of loses it after the bell, while Takeshita just barely escapes. As it goes, it’s a lovely finish and a stellar example of how to kick the can further down the road. HARASHIMA takes the match super seriously and spends 99% of the match still feeling like the better wrestler, only for the young heir to just barely pull it out. Enough to keep every question about who the real best wrestler in the company is present, and also exactly enough to not undermine the strengths of either man.

Quality professional wrestling.

***

Shuji Ishikawa vs. Yukio Sakaguchi, DDT D-Oh Grand Prix 2018 in Nerima (1/10/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix tournament.

A beautifully simple one.

Yukio once again tries to slip around, run at, and chop down a tree, much as he did to Kazusada Higuchi five days earlier.

The difference is that while our young hero, Kazusada Higuchi, is something still of a puppy with big paws, Shuji Ishikawa — through the power of his own nickname and his actual status in Japanese wrestling in the last three years — is the Big Dog.

What worked for Sakaguchi then does not work now. Shuji Ishikawa shrugs him off at every turn. Sometimes he brutally cuts him off with an especially nasty elbow or knee or Lariat, and other times, he actually just literally shrugs him off of his body, as if he is late 1980s WWF heel force of nature Andre. Eventually, the pure might and power of Ishikawa once again just cannot be overcome by anybody in the block. All the slipperiness in the world does not matter, as Yukio Sakaguchi just runs out of road.

It’s classic tournament wrestling, one strategy’s success early on making it’s failure in a later match carry a little more weight, build ups and payoffs, things of that nature. It’s yet another example of why, even in a year with yet another stellar G1 and another D-Oh later in the year (they hadn’t yet nailed down that they wanted it to be at the end of the year, we’re gonna give them a pass), this first 2018 D-Oh really may be the tournament of the year.

Mechanically, it is also a delight. Everything they do looks great, and everything Sakaguchi does sounds great too. Ishikawa is not at his absolute best here, but given that as he is kind of hitting the end of his physical prime and having worked a very hard schedule for the last week and a half considering that, it is not the end of the world. They even stumble onto something that inadvertently benefits the match as a result of that, where Ishikawa’s elbows in the last third of this hit with less force and audible pop than those in the first two-thirds, creating a very real feeling of Yukio Sakaguchi having worn out and tired out this gigantic tank, only for him to succeed through other means.

Shuji wins with the Splash Mountain in the end, Sakaguchi simply not possessing the firepower to handle Ishikawa in a late match situation.

Another fun match about hitting.

***

HARASHIMA vs. Jiro Kuroshio, DDT D-Oh Grand Prix 2018 in Osaka 2Days (1/8/2018)

This was an A Block match in the 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix tournament.

Jiro is not my favorite wrestler. Embarrassingly, before I made the 2018 watchlist Google Doc, I had apparently been spelling his name wrong for the last half decade or more (thought it was Kushiro for some reason? brains are weird, hard to know why I did that), which is I guess a way to say that he is just not a wrestler I have thought about all that much. It’s not to say he isn’t good and it certainly is not to say he cannot be in good or even great matches. More often than not though, the bit gets in the way of the wrestler, and so he is rarely a wrestler I make a lot of time for, just on the basis of doing as much with my time as I possibly can.

Fortunately, he was wrestling HARASHIMA, genuinely one of my favorite wrestlers of all time, so I did not miss out on this like so many others have, probably you (yes, you) The Reader included.

It’s the HARASHIMA Classic.

Not to say it is one of the best matches of the year or a top ten career match for Our Hero, but the way it goes. Thirteen or fourteen minutes, matwork into HARASHIMA body work, big nearfalls and dramatics without ever approaching excess, all of that.

Despite some of the changes they make to the old formula, it is such a classical kind of HARASHIMA match, and that is an extraordinarily high complement when I say it.

Jiro and HARA tussle on the mat for a while, and they find their way to where that always winds up. They go about in a different way, with Jiro confusing and annoying HARASHIMA, making him get to the stomach in a different way than usual, but he still gets there. The work is, once again, magnificent. Few people in wrestling are as great at one thing as HARASHIMA is at attacking the body, and he’s even better at it when he gets a little annoyed, breaking out some meaner kicks and the reverse Curb Stomps, even laying in elbows harder than usual.

What the match adds into the usual formula is what HARASHIMA doesn’t do all that often — or given how great he is at it, nearly enough — by having Kuroshio escape by going to HARASHIMA’s leg.

As always, HARASHIMA’s leg selling, while not an aspect he gets to show off all of the time, is terrific.

The trick is the same with everything he does, it’s the care and respect put in to every minor detail. A great example is early on once Jiro takes over, where he does a double shin breaker onto the apron, and HARASHIMA is lying on the floor. He grabs one knee and then the other, before both. It’s a small touch, but it just somehow feels like a more genuine communication of what would actually happen, and how pain actually works. There are wrestlers who you know have been in fights before and then there are wrestlers who you know have been in actual physical pain outside of wrestling before (I always cite Bret Hart or Eddie Kingston here, although Eddie is both the former and the latter), and as he does whenever he gets a chance at it, HARASHIMA spends a big chunk of time showing everybody what the latter looks like. Another example is how much he accentuates the struggle to drag himself into the ropes while in the Figure Four. HARASHIMA is also better than anyone in wrestling at still doing offense with his legs while balancing the selling, never feeling stupid for doing so, walking this incredibly thin tightrope between doing his shit and staying faithful to the focus of the match. There’s no one major vanity sell, stumble and collapse, or anything showy like that, it never feels like HARASHIMA is begging for my sympathy as a viewer (which is why he will always have it), but it all works, and it all stands out so much.

It’s all these little things that he turns into big things, but that’s HARASHIMA for you.

Yet again in the D-Oh, one of these tight little matches also happens to come to a lovely conclusion.

HARASHIMA is hobbled, but Jiro is never vicious or skilled enough on the ground to make more out of it than delaying the inevitable. HARASHIMA begins laying in some hard ones like he hasn’t in a while, giving us the real joyful moment of Jiro doing a taunt with his jacket, only to be kicked in the face incredibly hard to start HARASHIMA’s late match end run. HARASHIMA cuts him off running in with a leaping Somato, before hitting the regular one to win, complete with the Michael Jordan/Bret Hart/John Cena style fist pump right after three.

(We can unpack that like 50-75% of my heroes do this after a big play or victory some other time perhaps. Sort of just realizing it now.)

A lovely variation on one of the best matches in wrestling.

***1/4

Mike Bailey vs. Soma Takao, DDT D-Oh Grand Prix 2018 in Osaka 2Days (1/8/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix tournament.

Whereas the D-Oh GP Mike Bailey matches so far have been variations or straight-up reruns of his usual hits (Little Mike Bailey vs. Big Guy, Eye-Rolling Knee Work Match), what we have here is something far more novel, far more interesting, and yes, despite the name on the other side of the match from him, somehow also far better than the previous two matches.

Mike Bailey is a genuine bully, and it is a revelation. Despite all of the fun fireworks shows and dream matches he’s had in DDT, the UK, and Canada in the time since his U.S. ban in early 2016, it’s the best performance he’s had in years at this point, probably since that career year of 2015. He does everything that he’s always done that’s made him such a joy to watch, and not only cuts out the sort of stuff that’s held him back on and off for a few years, but does it all in entirely new way.

In the interest of total and complete fairness, this is not just a one man show.

Shockingly, Soma Takao brings it.

Or, at least as much as he is physically capable of. He’s got smaller arms, there’s only so much that he can bring, you know? His arms are full here, if nothing else. He does not light the world on fire exactly, but given his inability to even create a spark for most of his career, even a nice little campfire is impressive. It’s more than he’s been able to conjure up in over three years, ever since the miracle KO-D Title match against HARASHIMA in November 2014. He throws a lot of elbows, and something like sixty to seventy-five percent of them are genuine heaters. He’s got a few real nasty ones that he throws to the body that leave a real impression. There’s some weaker offense too, and he is still not an especially likeable wrestler, but there is a real effort from Soma Takao, and he does not let the match or his opponent down like usual.

He could probably have been anyone though, and with a Mike Bailey performance as great as this, the match would have been just as good, if not better.

In this match, Mike Bailey is not an underdog. He is not even wrestling an equal in some stylistic battle, like you might get on any non-U.S. indie in the world at this point.

Instead, Mike Bailey is a rotten little prick.

Young Karate is out of this world great in this match, delivering the sort of absolute shitheel performance that I genuinely had no idea he had in him before this match. He’s aggressive and incredibly mean, but also such a preening little showoff. Everything he does is either incredibly petty and spiteful, or athletically incredible, which is always followed up by him smiling at himself or taking a bow. He holds things for longer than usual to show off, he kicks a little sharper and harder than usual, and goes out of his way to taunt little Soma Takao. It doesn’t just stand because it’s so unique from Bailey, but on top of that, because it is simply so good. As great as he’s been in the past as an underdog, he’s just as great here as in any of his better and/or more acclaimed matches. It’s not only a performance that whips a ton of ass, but a genuine eye-opener.

The reason I’m often so hard on Mike Bailey is because of this match, not just because he showed the ability to do something different and more sensible, but because he was better here against an otherwise complete dud than he’s been in at least a hundred matches against far better wrestlers. It’s the sort of thing he ought to be capable of all the time, but often doesn’t reach, for any number of reasons. It’s the sort of performance that raises someone’s ceiling in my mind, and that makes every lesser effort stand out that much more.

Soma wins with a cradle, but the result of this is the least important thing about it.

If not the absolute best match or performance of Mike Bailey’s career, given the situation, card placement, and opposition, it may be the single most impressive performance of Mike Bailey’s career.

The sleeper of the tournament.

***1/5

Konosuke Takeshita vs. Tetsuya Endo, DDT D-Oh Grand Prix 2018 in Osaka 2Days (1/7/2018)

This was an A Block match in the 2018 D-Oh Grand Prix tournament.

Endo and Takeshita improve on their previous time limit draw, some eight months later.

The easy bit here — and a very very tempting one — is to say that, simply, it is because this time their time limit draw is half as long, meaning there is simply half as much of it this time around.

It’s not entirely true.

While these two will probably not ever top their 2019 Peter Pan match or that first ever KO-D Title match, one of the great instances of Endo eating as much shit as humanly possible, this is definitely an improvement on the last few. They seem to wrestle this match so much easier than either of their title matches in 2017. Whereas they were burdened in their April 2017 match with both far too much time to handle at that stage of their careers (or based on their 2022 match, any stage), they were also handcuffed in a lot of ways by setting up for a bigger match later that summer, one that they were also not yet really suited for, struggling to have a kind of Big Venue Epic befitting of the main event of Peter Pan.

The match they have here simply gets to breathe and exist without any real pressures on the match. It’s the second match in a round robin tournament, they’re in a smaller venue lit by house lights, and there isn’t really anything to accomplish here. They simply get to wrestle, and it is so much more fun to watch as a result, as they experiment with some newer moves, throw in some new wrinkles into familiar sequences, and get to stretch their legs a lot more than usual.

Still, it is not great.

Ultimately, the easy bit is mostly correct.

Have they both improved in the last eight months? Sure. A little in Endo’s case, and a fair bit more in Takeshita’s case. Mostly though, this is their best match in like a year and a half moreso because they simply had to do less. They had less time to fill, and maybe more importantly, more narrative freedom to simply mess around out there, delivering a much looser and easier feeling match than before. Still, it is half an hour that they are not entirely capable of filling up, and Endo once again finds himself lacking in a lot of the areas that matter, insisting on doing things he is not good at mechanically rather than focusing on the things he’s actually good at. The riffing is fun, but half an hour is a little long for a match between two decidedly Not Great wrestlers to have, especially without any kind of throughline to help guide them. Bouncing off of each other without a care in the world certainly has its moments, more than existed in their last few, but it only gets them so far.

Across all the matches these two have had and will have, you certainly have to count this one among them.