Holy Demon Army vs. Jun Akiyama/KENTA, NOAH Great Voyage 2009 in Osaka ~Mitsuharu Misawa, Always In Our Hearts~ (10/3/2009)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from one of my favorite old MV Zone guys, ddevil. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

After writing about one of my favorite old MV Zone videos, the “Wild World” finale with these two, when talking about the final Misawa vs. Kawada match, it was a genuine pleasure to hear from one of my all-time favorite wrestling music video creators in ddevil, offering up this match. Genuinely, outside of the fact that I can actually make money talking about professional wrestling, hearing from people whose work I have admired for years and that seemingly being a two way street is one of the coolest things about this entire endeavor.

Fittingly, this is also one of my favorite matches of all time.

Very little of that has to do with the physical content of this as a wrestling match.

That isn’t to say this is bad, because I think just about anyone can watch this and see the greatness in it.

All four are tremendous.

KENTA and Kawada are probably the story here, as the only pairing with true antagonistic feelings between them. KENTA, being the only one in this match with no real sentimental tie to anything happening outside of professional respect for the portrait hanging over the entrance, cannot help but take shots at the only one he hasn’t fought a million times and who he most resembles, stylistically. Kawada, in the other best performance of the match next to KENTA’s ultra spirited showing, looks as offended as possible, and they spend the match running at each other whenever possible, elevating the match above mere emotion and feel-good sentient into being super super interesting on another level. Akiyama and Taue are asked to do less — Taue as the sympathetic old man of the bunch and Akiyama kind of just as this control group, the one of the bunch in his prime and semi-dignified in a match that feels always on the border of losing that — but they are also both fantastic, and give the match all that it asks of them and then some.

The match is also as well put together as you might imagine from four all-time talents. The early sparks, dueling control work, hot tags, the escalation of both the offense and the anger between KENTA and Kawada, all of that. Even on a micro level, things the younger KENTA avoids before later falling victim to when Our Heroes really commit themselves to it.

It is not a match that succeeds entirely because of these things, but it is clearly a match put together with some level of intelligence.

What works about this match is, fucking OF COURSE, everything else.

In the first week of October 2009, I moved from Chicagoland to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Not at all by choice, however much I love it now. I had moved out of my mom’s a few months earlier to live with a cousin in Chicago proper, then a windowless basement apartment of my own after that, but when that wasn’t working out anymore, I found out my mother had moved back, and my uncle had a small apartment ready for me. I took an Amtrak over, got there later in the night and found what I believed to be the door to my apartment locked with no key waiting as I had been told of, and spent the night sleeping in the second floor landing of a staircase before I moved in the next day, using a duffel bag full of clothes as a pillow.

This was not the first wrestling I watched in that new home — it was a bullshit Smackdown eight main event that night, the go home to Hell in a Cell 2009 that I think was Cena/Undertaker/DX vs. Orton/Punk/Cody/Ted Jr. — but it was the first really great and/or affecting match I watched in my new home, and I guess, at least with a match like this, that is the sort of thing one remembers.

At least it is when a match so clearly revolves around the mental state of one of your all-time favorites.

For whatever reason, when I first laid eyes on Toshiaki Kawada in the summer of 2006, hunting down the All Japan classics and finding 6/9/95 first, there was something about Dangerous K that drew me in. The meanness and brutality are exciting, but what got me was the way he looked at people and carried himself, and how even in moments where he was objectively being cruel and unfair, you could always see his side of it all. Many wrestlers have gone crazier with them, but few have gotten as much out of facial expressions and eye movements and body language like Kawada has. I personally believe that Kawada is the greatest facial seller in pro wrestling history. This is maybe not the absolute best example of that, in the way that his 1993-6 work, when he was at the peak of his powers as the greatest wrestler alive, was, but it works in the same way.

Truly, I have never seen a wrestler wrestle with the feeling of a weight on them like I do here with Toshiaki Kawada.

Spending the last twenty years, minimum, measuring himself against his childhood friend, to both great emotional turmoil and complex suffering and even occasionally real victory, Kawada suddenly finds himself without any of that. There’s a weight to every single thing he does in this match, from the spirited cut-offs to his explosive moments against KENTA. He always feels like the most put-upon wrestler of all time, especially in the moments where they cut to the Misawa portrait, with Kawada now literally wrestling in the shadow that he did escape, but also never quite let out of his sight. With few exceptions, such as Mark Briscoe following the passing of his brother or Eddie Kingston’s famous “the best man at my wedding” promo, grief has never poured through the screen in quite the same way, in large part because it is treated entirely as a purely professional thing. I immediately recognize it. Not so much in the same way I did at the time, seeing Kawada holding his face tighter than usual, but in a way I understand more nearly fifteen years later, and having suffered some loss and having to work through it.

Almost impossibly, on the fourth or fifth time I watch this, the first in at least a decade, I somehow leave this match thinking more of Toshiaki Kawada than ever before. It is not one of the greatest performances of all time, as this match is not quite so ambitious, but it is one of the more affecting matches of all time.

It doesn’t make the match better mechanically.

Taue pins KENTA with the Ore Ga Taue to win, and the match is a kind of classic NOAH young vs. old sort of thing, one of the enduring formulas for a reason.

In some small part, I like it more like this. Kawada gains nothing from a win, and more simply from the moment itself, going through it with Taue, in sight of Akiyama in the match to be stopped yet again and Kenta Kobashi on commentary. Kawada, even as tampered down and buttoned up as this match seems to be at times, cannot entirely hide from what is obviously there, and in as much as what was real enhanced the work of one of the greatest stories in the history of professional wrestling, what is here now makes the aftermath into one of the more unforgettable matches ever.

Like the feud that this is an epilogue for, some of the most powerful and affecting pro wrestling possible.

***3/4

Kenta Kobashi/Go Shiozaki vs. Genichiro Tenryu/Jun Akiyama, NOAH Encountering Navigation 2005 Day Fifteen (4/24/2005)

Commissions continue, this one from Ko-fi contributor Maggie as the snake turns back around. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

Hell yeah, dude.

It’s another match that clearly displays just how easy this all can be.

Two of the great antagonists of all time against two of the great protagonists of all time, at the point when the former could also apply a classic bullying the kid tag team formula to the latter, all wrapped up in under twenty minutes. They do not deviate for a second for what every single person not only knows the match should be, but also what every single person to ever lay eyes on it did so hoping to see. It is not complex, they never once feel like they are trying to have a Great Match (not always a given with three-quarters of these guys, even as great as they are), and it is one of the most fun and satisfying matches of the century to date.

Outside of the overall shape of the thing, wonderfully crafted and assembled, no rough edges or miscalculations, the match is also home to four great performances.

Shiozaki and Uncle Jun are the least complex and demanding, largely in charge of the mechanical aspects of the match. Go Shiozaki is, again, one of the great rookies of the generation, managing to be both believable fighting all-time greats with under a year of ring time, but still also very very sympathetic. The stuff that eventually underlines everything he does when he becomes one of the best in the world is there already, all in raw material form, but so obviously there and easy for both he and the two opponents to access. Although given how bad he is at elbows, and how many he tries to throw, there is clearly still something major to be learned. Akiyama is the one that this match asks the least of, but in his prime, everything he does is so good. Nasty offense, casually mean, a composure constantly slipping just a little bit when confronted by this bullshit mirror in another super rookie cast as Kobashi’s pal.

Kenta Kobashi, unsurprisingly, is also really great, and the second best part of this.

He also isn’t asked to do a whole lot, really just existing as this ass beating force of justice, but it’s the role he’s best suited for.

Early 90s crying knee clutching babyface Kobashi is some of my least favorite stuff there is, but it’s the stuff like this that really does it for me. No fucking about, responding to every single Tenryu slight not only immediately, but with something a million times meaner all while making these energetic and vibrant facial expressions that, unlike aforementioned earlier work, never feel phony either. He’s the strongest one and he whips the most ass so, on paper, you run the risk of of it not working, but 2000s Kobashi has the rare gift where he can put out these overwhelming displays of brutal force and still have them feel not only cool, but like these ultra righteous triumphs. This is hardly the greatest display of that, but given some aggressors on his level and a slam dunk big brother role to play, it is the best version of Kenta Kobashi that there is, and it may be my favorite Kobashi match.

Really though, and this is no insult to the others, this is the Genichiro Tenryu show.

From the very start of the match, Tenryu puts on an unbelievable shithead performance. It is maybe my favorite ever example of someone simply having the Devil in them on a given night. At least a little of that is because this was the first Tenryu match I ever saw and he made a more immediate impression than almost anyone I saw for the first time after like twelve years old, but he really is a complete maniac here. Immediately chopping Kobashi to set the tone. Constantly encouraging Akiyama to be a worse person and gleefully supporting him as if he has found a new son, or at least a cool nephew, with Akiyama even throwing some rarer Tenryu-style right hand jabs. Hurling a table at him outside, then backing off while shouting and signaling to go away, as if Kobashi is the one acting insane for trying to fight him. Letting things calm for a minute before this really beautiful moment — really one of my favorites in history — where he gets a water bottle on the apron, then has the thought, before hopping down to the floor and walking around ringside so that he can whip the half-full water bottle at Kobashi on the apron as hard as possible, before then again backing off like it is so insane that Kobashi wants to beat his ass.

In a career full of insanely antagonistic performances, perhaps because of how little was really on the line and how out of nowhere it seemed, it is really maybe the pettiest Tenryu performance ever.

Mechanically, he’s also really really great. Every strike is nasty of course, the chop wars are fantastic, and there are few ever to deliver a bully beatdown like Tenryu can, even while not quite at the peak of those powers anymore. The blood that comes from being chopped by Kobashi also adds so much to the match in that sort of incalculable atmospheric way that great bleeding often does. My favorite thing he does in this match though, when actually in the ring, is the way he sells those Kobashi chops. Wincing obviously, but there isn’t a horror to it or a shock or anything you often get out of a pure antagonist against Kobashi. Tenryu always looks like he knew this was going to happen, but decided a while ago that this was worth it to get to do all that other stuff, some fascinating combination in his eyes, a cross between yelling “shit” over and over again and also daring Kobashi to keep going, coward.

Even when he does get his ass kicked, he never stops being a real mother fucker about it. Minutes later, when he’s throwing chops at the kid in front of Kobashi to taunt him, he wipes the blood off of his chest and flicks some of it at Kobashi in another of the most memorable spots possible. Tenryu’s career is full of these sorts of performances, so it’s hard to call anyone the greatest example of it, but it is one more wonderful display that it is so much less about what you do than about how you do it. Nothing he does is fancy, but because of how much he puts into it, it is genuinely a performance that I’ve never really forgotten about, even like seventeen or eighteen years since I first saw it.

Nobody has better put the concept of pure hating — without goal or desire, but simply the thrill of slinging mud — into a professional wrestling context better than Tenryu in matches like this.

As for what actually happens, the direction of the match, you know, I think.

Kobashi’s hot tag leads to the kid getting back in, hell of a flurry, but he gets stuffed in incredibly brutal fashion. Tenryu makes a show of a Kobashi style fist pump before a Lariat, and then beats Shiozaki with a real mother fucker of a Powerbomb.

More than most though, like Tenryu himself, the success of this match and many like it during NOAH’s peak has very little to do with what happens and so much more to do with how it happens. The violence, the atmsophere, the energy, all the little expressions and movements and the little pieces of craftsmanship layered throughout the match. That’s the stuff that makes matches like these so enduring, as joyful to me here again as they were the first time I laid eyes on them.

Not one of the best matches of all time, but absolutely one of my favorites.

***3/4

Takashi Sugiura/Daisuke Harada vs. Jun Akiyama/Atsushi Aoki, NOAH FLIGHT: Naomichi Marufuji 20th Anniversary Show (9/1/2018)

NOAH’s past and present face off, as the father/son team from All Japan returns home.

On a show put on by a deccidedly not great wrestling promotion and devoted to one of my least favorite active wrestlers and someone whose work I have not enjoyed in around eight years or so, it is probably not a surprise that most of the show was extremely Not For Me. Nearly zero percent my shit.

The exception is this match, including four of my favorite wrestlers ever being hurled at each other for half an hour, which is Incredibly My Shit.

It is not perfect. I recognize this.

Of the four wrestlers in the match, three of them (Akiyama, Sugiura, and Aoki) are past their primes, and it shows from time to time. There is always enough there with all three to still be in good matches, and as of the year I am writing this (2023), Akiyama in particular still regularly finds himself in great matches and is often the reason for said greatness. But it‘s not all there here in this one. It’s a match with guys who like their elbows, and for whatever reason, not a one of them is having a particularly great elbow night. The match has enough slaps and chops and knees to make up for it, it’s not a soft match, but it does not feel like the best version of this that could have happened. I badly wish that this happened in 2015 or something, before Aoki began to fade and while Sugiura was still in his absolute prime (2006-2015). Thirty minutes, considering these things, is also just a little bit too long. 

So, you know, there are some flaws here, and I‘ve never gotten too bent out of shape about the fact that I am the high man on this as a result.

They make up for it in pure aggression.

Every hit is not always the hardest, but there is a spirit of dislike and disrespect and general ill will permeating every inch of the thing. There is no pairing that avoids this, even while Aoki and Harada are a little more sporting, there is always some tension to this. The match hits its peaks in these areas when the heavyweights are abusing the opposing team‘s junior heavyweights, as often tends to be the case, and it’s especially good then. The highlight of the match is every single Akiyama vs. Harada exchange, for every reason you might imagine. Akiyama is one of the best bullies of the century, Harada is the crispest wrestler and most sympathetic of the four, and not only makes Uncle Jun work a little harder, but provides him the easiest target as well. 

Beyond that, they just kind of bounce off of each other until the prerequisite half hour elapses, and that‘s the match. 

Not the hateful old interpromotional wrestling that I would have preferred from two of the better interpromotional wrestlers of the century, but enough spirit and more than enough fun to make for one of my favorite more forgotten matches of the year.

***1/7

Zeus vs. Jun Akiyama, AJPW Champion Carnival 2018 Day Eleven (4/21/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 Champion Carnival tournament.

I lied about that B Block thing last time, I guess, because this also whipped a ton of ass.

Zeus and Uncle Jun don’t exactly have the big time scrap that Akiyama and Suwama did six days prior, it’s a different kind of great match. This is a classic sort of great All Japan match, a simple war between two outstanding heavyweights.

The only real issue here is that this is a single cam shot, and so the camera only catches about half of what goes on on the floor when they choose the far side of the outside are as their destination for like two-thirds of the fighting outside. A piledriver outside, lots of action, knees, Calf Branding off the apron into the railing, most of it happens to be obscured by where the camera is.

On some level, I respect the realness of it, the fight goes where it goes, and if it were really an actual contest, why would they take the trouble of walking the fight over so the camera could catch it perfectly?

On another, you know, damn, I want to see everything.

Luckily, we still see most of it and it almost entirely rocks.

Theoretically, it’s a very simple thing.

Great looking and sounding offense, big strikes, cool moves, all of that. Relative to highly successful formulas in Japanese wrestling, it seems the easiest, but relative to every failed would-be successor to classic matches in this style before, it is not quite so easy, I suppose.

Uncle Jun and the Big Guy deliver a stellar example of how it’s done.

For one thing, it matters a whole lot who’s actually in there.

Akiyama and Zeus are two super magnetic wrestlers, with a whole lot of energy. This is a fairly routine match for the most part, but because wrestlers who I naturally find myself drawn to are the ones having it, and because they put such an energy and spirit into it, it’s very easy to enjoy.

While there isn’t chair and barricade throwing and closed fist face punching here, it always feels like there’s a real tension here. Their faces light up, they yell out when hit or when throwing shots out, and there’s an urgency to it. A feeling present at all times. The match may not be structurally perfect, you could lob off two or three minutes, there’s some repetition of Zeus’ Lariats in the last third of this that you could cut out with no real loss, but fucking WHATEVER. It’s a match that feels like one that both wrestlers involved genuinely care about, and it’s so rare in wrestling, let alone on a house-lights-still-on mid-tour Carnival match, that I am willing to make some real allowances.

It’s also a match that’s constructed really well. Nothing all that flashy to it, but the way it escalates and builds is very well done. Early scrapping leading to bigger and bigger sequences in the ring, moves teased and later paid off, strikes with increasingly larger impact upon repetition, all of that. There’s a connective tissue between the big moments and a foundation laid early on that really benefits this, and allows them to get as much as possible out of a match like this on a stage like this, and it’s where so many others with similar qualities simply come up short.

Following a real great closing stretch with a bunch of great little nearfalls and a real feeling of desperation on both ends, Zeus finally gets moving. He dodges the big cut off high knee and lands another Lariat off the ropes in a bit that feels like the moment that seals a victory before it actually comes, before then hitting an especially nasty borderline release Jackhammer, getting the win.

Another great little pocket God Damner out of Uncle Jun in the Akiyama Block.

***

Suwama vs. Jun Akiyama, AJPW Champion Carnival 2018 Day Seven (4/15/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 Champion Carnival tournament.

2018’s B Block is not an especially interesting one to me, and I don’t think it’s one I’m going to be writing too much about. As Akiyama begins to scale back and Suwama is as mercurial as ever, the B Block is mostly about getting invader Naomichi Marufuji to the finals, and we do not need to belabour for the ten thousandth time that his entire thing is so so deeply Not For Me at this point. The A Block is stacked though, and there’s more than enough meat there, figuratively and literally, to get more kicks out of this than I’ve gotten out of a Carnival in a few years.

However, this fucking rocked.

Akiyama and Suwama, for whatever reason, find a patch of wild hairs up their asses and decide to finally have the mean ass petty and spiteful and borderline hateful fight that none of their Triple Crown title matches ever quite were. It’s not a surprise so much, as they had one of the decade’s best build-up tags in 2011, and Triple Crown matches are different than scraps like this, but it is such a joy to finally see them do this after years of knowing that they could.

My favorite thing about this is that, unlike what a lot of other matches might do and what both men have done in similar settings before themselves, there is no inciting incident.

Nothing happens here that causes this animosity to erupt.

It’s just always there.

Jun shoves Suwama back with his foot off the first collar-and-elbow against the ropes, Suwama shoves him back harder in the middle of the ring, and the match never once slows down. Not every shot lands with this audible megaton force, but enough do that it works, and kind of feels more genuine as a result. They get into outside, hurl chairs and guardrail segments at each other, all of that. They also trade elbows for long enough and in such a specific enough way that it feels like an actual dick measuring contest with measuring tape and everything, rather than just some nonsense done because everyone does it, complete with it breaking down into face punching.

There’s also this great run in the last third where, in frustration and anger and probably both doubled back and folded back over each other and they begin simply trying to choke each other out. First with these incredibly mean front guillotines, where they wildly swing each other around in them, getting lifted off their feet in mid-swing, before falling down, and later when Suwama puns on a real motherfucker of a sleeper hold. Again, it feels so much meaner than usual for a routine spot like that, and gives this match a real different feeling. Not so much that this is some all-time superfight, but it’s so much livelier and more spirited than not only is so often the case with these two at this point in AJPW, but also so much more than they easily could have gotten away with.

Akiyama just gets actually choked out at the end with the sleeper turned rear choke, adding in a finish that is not only a genuine surprise, as some shit that just does not happen like this anymore, but that also feels like the most complete and perfect possible ending for a match like this. A perfect end to a shocking display of spiritually correct professional wrestling.

Secretly the best match of the tournament (probably), and the most interesting thing All Japan’s done in a while.

***1/4

Burning Wild vs. Suwama/Shuji Ishikawa, AJPW New Year Wars 2018 Day Two (1/3/2018)

This was for Akiyama and Omori’s AJPW World Tag Team Titles.

Is this perfect?

No.

2018 is not the best time for this to happen. Akiyama and Omori, as much of a miracle as it is that they’re still great and good respectfully, are not getting any younger. Shuji Ishikawa is just starting to break down, despite still being capable of contributing to any match he finds himself in, and on top of being no spring chicken himself, Suwama is never a wrestler you could rely on to consistently deliver the goods, even in his physical prime maybe five to ten years before this. So, the match is not the best version of itself could ever exist, and has moments where this shines through on occasion. Not every shot is perfect, there’s some restraint in moments where there might not have been half a decade earlier, and it is not the cleanest match in the world.

At the same time, it is a twenty minute heavyweight tag that is about hitting each other really hard and little else.

What needs to work out in this match works out, it’s very uncomplex.

Jun Akiyama gets to get real mean and nasty in control for the first time in a while, Suwama gets fired up enough, Shuji Ishikawa brings it for the second consecutive day in a row, and Omori feels wild enough to leave his feet and break out the hits. There’s even something close to a big long Jun Akiyama vs. Shuji Ishikawa run at the end, which wasn’t something that had happened before in any match of note, or a match up that All Japan ever tried that hard to deliver (somehow, they escape the three years or so that they’re both on the same roster here without ever having a singles match). It’s as great as you’d think. Lots of nasty shots, a whole lot of bombast and energy to it, just a phenomenally enjoyable pairing that leaves an impression.

The finishing run is especially good and occasionally great.

Whole lot of sick moves and hard shots, and a tidy little narrative about the new superteam overwhelming an older one. Omori is easily taken out when either Suwama or the Big Dog gets him one on one, and while Akiyama can keep either Giant at bay on his own and maybe even win, nobody in All Japan can stop both of them. Akiyama does a real admirable job of fighting it, but he is simply not at an age to perform miracles anymore, turning the last few minutes of the match into yet another example of the old All Japan standby, admirably fighting off the inevitable and fighting a battle that simply cannot be won. It’s one of the best tropes in wrestling and while it’s not exactly Kawada in the ’93 Real World final, it adds a whole lot here as always.

Uncle Jun gets cut off, double powerbombed, and after Shuji’s Kamigoe and an especially nasty Splash Mountain Bomb (made just a little better by the trouble they have getting Jun in position for it, in one case of a lack of cleanliness benefitting this match) gets the boys the titles.

Definitely imperfect, but real fun in all the ways that count.

three boy

 

Jun Akiyama vs KENTA, NOAH/KENTA Produce Cross Road (5/17/2009)

This was a commissioned review from frequent contributor Kai, as the snake turns back around. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything you would like also, be it a match, a series of matches, a show, or whatever. The going price is $5/match (or if you want a TV show or movie, $5 per half hour), obviously make sure I haven’t covered it before (and ideally come with a link). If that sounds like a thing you’d like to do, head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon and do that. If you have an idea more complex than just listing matches and multiplying a number by five, feel free to hit the DMs and we can work something out. 

In 2009, if not for the entire year than at least for a sizeable chunk of time, I believe KENTA was the best wrestler in the world.

Long term, looking at the year at large, I think I would probably go with Rey Mysterio or Bryan Danielson as your actual Wrestler of the Year, given that KENTA wasn’t able to put together the full twelve months of variety and consistency that either of them did, helped by regular televised work (as one of maybe twenty living people to watch every episode of ROH on HDNet who weren’t paid to do so, it counts) and a wide array of opponents that KENTA maybe didn’t have as much access to. All the same, match to match, KENTA had what I would absolutely consider his career year in 2009, and a match like this is yet another stellar example of an all-time great in his prime, just so happening to come against another all-time great not all that removed from his prime.

On KENTA’s big produce show (I mean it’s Differ Ariake, not the Budokan or anything, but getting a produce show is big, especially for an in-peak junior heavyweight in 2009), NOAH’s two singles champions meet in what is maybe not the biggest deal in the world when you look at venue and occasion, but what a combination of talent and booking make feel like one of NOAH’s biggest matches of the year.

Theoretically, matches like this happen relatively often.

Heavyweight and junior heavyweight champion, or simply, top heavyweights vs. top juniors. NOAH famously ran Kenta Kobashi against KENTA and Naomichi Marufuji as big singles matches on Budokan Hall shows back to back in March and April 2006, but history is littered with other examples. This decade, the 2020s, something like Tetsuya Naito vs. Hiromu Takahashi comes to mind, but in the 2010s, New Japan also loved to occasionally throw this on the anniversary shows, as seen with Okada vs. Ibushi or Tanahashi vs. Devitt.

The difference between so many of those matches and this is that, in a rarity maybe only achieved otherwise in Shinya Hashimoto vs. Jushin Liger in 1994, it doesn’t TOTALLY feel like a foregone conclusion from the opening bell. As opposed to KENTA’s past efforts against heavyweights while being GHC Junior Champion and as opposed to others in this position in the past and future, KENTA really feels like he has a shot. Not a fifty fifty split total toss-up exactly, but given that almost every other match like this feels like only a matter of time, the fact that for so much of this match, it feels like KENTA really might be able to do this, feels like such a huge accomplishment. Part of that goes to NOAH’s booking of KENTA for the last decade, part of it goes to NOAH’s willingness to take chances in the 2000s, part of it goes to simply the way KENTA wrestles and that Akiyama has put over juniors (Marufuji) before in bigger spots than this, but most of it just simply goes to the way in which this match is wrestled.

What really helps there is that, for the first third of this match, KENTA unequivocally and completely whips Uncle Jun’s ass.

It’s not a brutal beating, as KENTA seems on edge for every single second of the time that he’s in control, but it is a relentless one. Early on in the match, KENTA lands the same basement roundhouse to the forehead that his former partner and friend Shibata famously hit on Akiyama in 2005, and after that, KENTA dominates Akiyama for minutes at a time. Everything he does is crisp and intense and loud as hell in the most pleasing way possible, but also has this really appealing edge to it, as if he is stressed out about getting every single thing right. The result is a run of offense that is not only appealing in a lizard brain kind of a way (loud strikes are great! i like seeing cool wrestlers kick ass!), but that adds so much to the match.

Of course, nothing that someone is this tense about preserving can last forever, and the second that KENTA first overreaches, Akiyama punishes him.

Naturally, KENTA cannot help but reach too far. His mistake comes in trying to suplex Akiyama back in from the Differ Ariake Big Ramp, and Akiyama instead drags him out for a Brainbuster on the ramp. From then on, Akiyama zeroes in on the head and neck of our undersized hero and never totally lets up. The cut offs are brutal, the hope spots and comebacks are terrific, and most impressively in this portion of the match, Akiyama is able to constantly cut KENTA off in a way that feels both deeply brutal and both nonchalant enough at times to feel crushing, and spirited enough at other times to again further that idea that KENTA really might have a shot at this, if he can make Akiyama this upset by simply staying in it.

KENTA’s comeback whips a ton of ass in a pure physical and mechanical sense, a million hard shots thrown out with a real feeling of intensity and desperation, but it also succeeds as much as it does because of how well the match set it up. KENTA’s initial onslaught and the Akiyama attack in response gives the comeback this feeling like it might genuinely and actually work, and it creates a nearfall run that a match like this doesn’t often have the benefit of.

The real joy here is that, in the last five to ten minutes of the match, Differ Ariake comes alive. If you know your shit, you will understand just how impressive that is. If you don’t, then you ought to know that, when it existed, Differ Ariake was a famously low energy crowd no matter what company or what wrestlers were in front of them. Eliciting a single noise out of them was a sign of something special in the twenty first century, and doing it on a continual basis the way that this match was able to is something only a little short of a modern miracle. It’s the ultimate testament not only to how great Jun Akiyama and KENTA are mechanically and how big of stars they feel like in 2009, but also of the match they constructed together, that fucking Differ Ariake of all places feels like a real genuine professional wrestling crowd.

In a big step forward, KENTA survives the Wrist-Clutch Exploder, and forces Akiyama to break out the Sternness Dust Alpha to beat him. It’s not quite a win, but given the way heavyweight champions tend to dispatch junior heavyweight champions, and given how Akiyama dispatched KENTA years before, it’s real hard not to see it as its own small success too.

While we never quite got to see the most ideal possible version of Jun Akiyama vs. KENTA (ideally some K-Hall meeting in 2006-2013 when their primes overlapped, rather than a Differ Ariake one like this, but also in a situation that mattered), this is as close as we ever got. Not only nearly the ideal version of this particular match up, but with only a few exceptions, the ideal version of this thing — heavyweight champ vs. junior heavyweight champ — as an idea.

***1/2

Jun Akiyama vs. Katsuyori Shibata, WRESTLE-1 Grand Prix 2005 Opening Round (8/4/2005)

This was a commissioned review from Four Pillars of Hell. You can be like them and pay me to write about anything you would like also, be it a match, a series of matches, a show, or whatever. The going price is $5/match (or if you want a TV show or movie, $5 per half hour), obviously make sure I haven’t covered it before (and ideally come with a link). If that sounds like a thing you’d like to do, head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon and do that. If you have an idea more complex than just listing matches and multiplying a number by five, feel free to hit the DMs and we can work something out. 

Even if I dont think I have a whole lot to say about this (in so much as there is very little new or interesting to say about a match with this kind of immediate surface level universal appeal), it is always worth discussing just in case there is someone out there who is theoretically interested in this match, and has not yet seen it. People save viewings of all sorts of things, a hefty backlog is an easy thing to build up, but if you fit into that group, you really ought to watch it.

Chances are pretty high though that if you’re reading this, or if you have stumbled upon this blog, you have seen this match before and probably really like it.

I say that because I’ve never encountered someone who saw this match and didn’t fall head over heels in love with it.

Shibata and Akiyama have a generational God damner, a kind of beautiful and deeply hateful sprint for the ages, and a match that, in almost any other year in wrestling history, would at least be a match someone could reasonably claim as the most violent and chaotic feeling match of the year. Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher happened in 2005, so that sort of a thing is out of Akiyama and Shibata’s reach, but they really do give it their absolute best effort.

There’s a certain kind of match that’s happened a lot over the last twenty years or so, and it’s one of my favorite kinds of matches that there is.

In this sort of a match, Jun Akiyama is faced with a younger wrestler who surprises him early on, leading to this explosion of tangible rage from Uncle Jun at being shown up. It’s led to many of the best and/or most purely enjoyable matches of the twenty first century, most frequently employed against Shibata’s tag team partner, KENTA, but applicable to basically every young wrestler to ever exist.

No match may have done this better than Jun Akiyama vs. Katsuyori Shibata.

It helps — significantly — that within a minute or so of this, Shibata lands a famously tight and loud kick to Akiyama’s forehead that cracks his forehead open, and a lovely little bloodletting is added on top of Akiyama’s rage. That’s not to say this only works because of the way blood helps anything. Jun Akiyama is maybe madder than ever and delivers a more violent and forceful beating than maybe ever before, which is quite the high bar, but the blood just makes it all the better. There is something just a little special about the way blood adds to the first half of this, both in the way it drops down onto Shibata’s arms and chest when he tries to choke Akiyama out as soon as he strikes, and to the way it looks while Akiyama is hurling Shibata into rows of chairs, or recklessly swinging a chair down into any parts of Shibata on the ground that happen to be there. It is a truly outstanding beating, among the best in a career full of outstanding beatings, and would stand out no matter what. But good blood is always going to help.

The match otherwise goes as you might expect, provided you’ve seen a single one of these before.

Shibata steps out of line, in bigger and more disrespectful ways, and Jun Akiyama punishes him for it in increasingly violent and mean-spirited ways. The match never quite regains that sense of danger it had in the first half, when they exploded with some of the most genuine feeling contempt in wrestling this century, but it settles into something that’s still enormously likeable in a real mother fucker of a heavyweight sprint. Gross suplexes, tight holds, and remarkably nasty strikes of every kind. If that frantic desperation and urgency never quite comes back, the feeling still remains.

From the match’s positively nuclear opening moments up until the very end, when Akiyama drops Shibata at a real nasty angle on the back of his head with the Wrist-Clutch Exploder, it is always conducted with a genuinely vicious feeling and a spiritual hatefulness that makes an already mechanically thrilling match all that much moreso, resulting in something close to the platonic ideal of this sort of thing.

An all-time face melter.

***3/4

Jun Akiyama/Tetsuya Endo/Kazusada Higuchi vs. Katsuhiko Nakajima/Atsushi Kotoge/Yoshiki Inamura, CyberFight Festival 2022 (6/12/2022)

A commission here, this time from friend of the program/real bad sports take haver Mason (go blue, count the rings, etc.). You can be like him too, although the only way I would recommend doing that is by paying me to watch and write about wrestling matches of your choosing, provided I haven’t done so before and ideally with a link provided. If you’d like to do that, head on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon and get to it. The going rate is $5 per match, although if you have an aim more advanced than simply counting a number of matches and multiplying that by 5, hit the DMs, and I would be happy to talk about it. 

This is fine?

As most people reading this know, the big thing of this is that at-the-time KO-D Champion Tetsuya Endo got knocked out and concussed by a slap from NOAH’s Katsuhiko Nakajima, to the extent that he had to forfeit the title and drop out of King of DDT. Before that, there are some real tremendous sections with the other four wrestlers in the match. Akiyama against Kotoge is a blast, as Kotoge getting abused and Akiyama doing abuse are two full-proof wrestling concepts. Everything Higuchi touches is gold, he’s probably the best wrestler in the entire country, to the point that even in a match that is not really about him, he is very clearly the best guy in it and steals spotlight for himself in a way that only the real greats do.

There is some debate over the nature of the end of this, and my immediate instinct would be that anything happening in a wrestling ring is probably a work. However, Tetsuya Endo is nowhere near a great enough seller to pull this off and has never shown realistic work like this before, so while it would more satisfying to make fun of you all for believing in something, I tend to agree.

(If Endo does go on to regain the title after the time of this article — 7/29/2022 — and never winds up getting Nakajima back, DDT looks like shit here. I don’t need amateur credentials on everyone exactly and I don’t want Endo to go into RIZIN here or anything, wrestling can be anything, but I don’t know how someone can be your top guy when like the third or fourth most important wrestler in a competing company destroyed him so severely in what at least became a genuine competition.)

Whether or not it was planned, the result is that a promising match gets cut off what feels like midway through, and that not only hurts it but it makes it a hard thing to talk about in any critical sense. I’d love to compare this to a movie that had to be done over and covered for in parts after someone died at some point in the process, but Tetsuya Endo is sure no Donald Pleasance. Before the thing happened, this very much seemed like it was on its way to being a great match, as there are some really great and/or fun wrestlers in this match, and also Nakajima and Endo. Most of what happens is very good. It’s just a little hard to judge it in any real sense given that it is forever an unfinished match.

If wrestling was good, we would have had this exact idea except with Kaz Fujita or Hideki Suzuki against Higuchi instead.

 

Kento Miyahara vs. Jun Akiyama, AJPW Summer Action Series 2016 Day Six (7/23/2016)

This was for Kento’s Triple Crown Title.

All Japan does this match a disservice.

Not just in that it is AJPW and exciting and 100% satisfying things rarely come out of here, but in that this is blown here, instead of saved for something bigger. Just looking at the match is sort of a depressing thing, happening in his incredibly small venue with a crowd to match, performed with the house lights on. This match belongs in a major hall, one of All Japan’s few bigger annual shows. If nothing else, it belongs in Korakuen, where atmosphere covers up so much.

Instead, this is what this match looks like, and it is not a pleasing sight:

Despite that, they succeed.

Or rather, Uncle Jun does it again.

It may come as a shock to you, especially if you’ve watched DDT from 2020 on, but Jun Akiyama does a REMARKABLE job getting a quality title match out of and subsequently putting over a physically gifted but dead-between-the-years young Ace. It may be even more surprising that he accomplishes said feat not through any great scientific genius or any groundbreaking concept in terms of construction or content, but simply through beating the shit out of this weird looking freak and then holding his hand through a classic style main event heavyweight title match level finishing run.

There are true marvels in this world yet to be discovered.

Surprises out there waiting for us.

This, however, is not one of them, and it doesn’t need to be. Uncle Jun gets the little shit through it, gets him just over the line, and Kento keeps the belt with the Shutdown German.

If that or any of this sounds like something you’d be interested in and you can get past how appallingly low rent this all looks for what ought to be a major match — given that All Japan had been building it for YEARS at this point — hey, here’s a match for you.

Go shit in your hat.

three boy