HARASHIMA vs. Kazusada Higuchi, DDT D-Oh 2018 II in Shin Kiba (12/7/2018)

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

Once again, DDT’s greatest pairing delivers one of the company’s best matches of the entire year.

Bell to bell, on a strictly mechanical level, Higuchi and HARASHIMA offer all of the same charms as always. Hard hits and perfect construction and escalation, wonderful reactions to everything that allow routine things like strike exchanges to land with more depth than most other pairings are capable of, the works. All of the usual reasons why these two are two of the best wrestlers alive are, shockingly, reasons why the two of them against each other is one of the surest bets in DDT history, and maybe one of the surest bets in the entire world from 2016 through the present day.

As is often the case with new versions of repeat HARASHIMA matches, this one especially, they’re also incredibly skilled at making small changes to the usual match that, as a result of the context built up over years between them, wind up meaning a great deal in the end.

For ninety-nine percent of the match, once again, HARASHIMA has him.

Higuchi comes to play, he doesn’t feel mentally defeated from the bell like Irie occasionally did, but HARASHIMA is almost never troubled. Higuchi avoids the matwork transition to attack and tries to force HARASHIMA into a stand up and trade style slugfest instead, but it doesn’t matter. HARASHIMA still finds a way through it into the match he was always going to be able to force Higuchi into, double stomping him on the apron to find his transition instead. Even when Higuchi gets going again, there’s very little trouble, and the match tends to go as it does when HARASHIMA thinks he has a guy mentally.

The change comes, very suddenly, when he realizes he doesn’t, and it’s too late to do anything about it.

After unloading with the usual pieces of offense, even unable to hit the Somato, HARASHIMA unloads with the sort of gross punt to the face that tends to come about thirty seconds before a win, only for Higuchi to get right up and begin slapping and headbutting the shit out of him in a new flurry. HARASHIMA kicks out of the Doctor Bomb that follows, but unlike just about every time in the past as well as a whole lot of matches that look like this, the classic Ace strategy of a big finisher kickout to destroy an opponent mentally doesn’t work.

Like his former tag team partner, Higuchi struggled so often against HARASHIMA before because the trick was never flashy. It wasn’t about aggression or a new strategy or even some big new move like Higuchi used back in March, because in a similar all-star tag setting back in August, HARASHIMA snatched that win right back. More than his body attacks or the versatility of the Somato or his expert opening strategy, HARASHIMA has succeeded for so long because of consistency. When other people lost their heads or their confidence after what they were sure was a guarantee of success failed to pin him, HARASHIMA was always there mentally when someone would slip. The key to beating him is not a bigger move or some special strategy, it was simply remaining there, and being the one who, finally, could be as consistent as the Ace when it mattered most.

Higuchi does what nobody else does, keeps his head, and hits a second Doctor Bomb for the win.

Finally, with no tag team caveats attached to it that make it mean anything less than the total accomplishment of what he’s been hunting for the last three plus years, Kazusada Higuchi finally gets his man.

I am of two minds about this.

Firstly, it’s incredible.

Speaking strictly of what HARASHIMA and Higuchi are in control of in this match, it is the perfect match for what they were going for. Higuchi’s win feels important because of the match they wrestle, and how each man treats the victory after the match. HARASHIMA is stunned and a little upset, while Higuchi looks overjoyed, in a break from his usual stoicism. Like the match itself and the work put in for years to get to this result, it means something, and it means something because two great wrestlers consistently treat it like it does.

The other part of me thinks this is an absolute God damned waste, and as much a sign of DDT’s creative decline as one match can ever offer.

HARASHIMA and Kazusada Higuchi, over the last three years, have put together a classic kind of pro wrestling passing of the torch story, and one that’s been done far more carefully and executed with far greater natural ease than the passing of the torch DDT actually tried to sell a year and change earlier. The fact that Higuchi’s big breakthrough singles win came here is a crime. Not only on a show in the middle of a tournament — as opposed to the final, or ideally, a big title match — but in Shin-Kiba. This belongs in Korakuen Hall. It belongs in the main event of Peter Pan. It belongs in the best settings and it belongs in the most important spots, but as DDT shows signs of being less a great promotion and more so a promotion where great wrestlers work (one completed in the 2020s), that’s no longer for them. That’s for somebody else.

After all that, and considering everything else brought to the table by these two and their natural chemistry and what they built against each other, this is not only a match up that deserves better, but a result that deserved far more pomp and circumstance than Shin-Kiba can offer at any point, let alone in the middle of a tournament.

Put in a larger venue with larger stakes, and this is not only one of the best matches of the year, but could have been even more than that.

Still, it is what it is, and that’s an exceptional match, yet another wonderful entry into what could be the greatest rivalry in company history (HARASHIMA and KUDO were allowed to hit highs these two weren’t, and if you want to say HARASHIMA/Irie or HARASHIMA/Ishikawa, I won’t fight it either), along with being the best DDT moment of the year, this side of Higuchi having a bottle rocket shot out of his asshole.

(This company contains multitudes.)

Difficulties with questionable placement and timing and the priorities of the promotion aside, HARASHIMA and Higuchi are not the types to disappoint. What they can control is beautiful, and like both in the past and in the future, for the time they share together, they practically bend reality to their will, and transport the viewer to a world where this matters as much as they believe it does.

Given how rarely actual main event title matches from DDT in recent years have been able to attain the same feeling this one casually attained with none of the same advantages, I’d call it a miracle, except that HARASHIMA and Higuchi do it every single time that they wrestle.

Again, consistency.

***1/4

 

Go Shiozaki vs. Kazusada Higuchi, NOAH Global League 2018 Day Two (11/8/2018)

This was a B Block match in the 2018 Global League tournament.

As part of a wonderful deal that will also send Go Shiozaki over to DDT for a month or so for the second D-Oh Grand Prix of 2018 (they will call it the D-Oh 2019, but I will not be doing this on here, I do not care, the current year is the current year, these are not TV tapings), Kazusada Higuchi aka the Gooch gets to come to the 2018 Global League and do his best to liven up the proceedings.

He will ultimately not be all that successful, both as a result of NOAH’s unconscionably boring roster and their booking mindset that adheres to the same superlatives, but here individually in their first meeting in the two tournaments, Higuchi finds his perfect match.

It may stun you to learn that, in the process of having this match, Go Shiozaki and Kazusada Higuchi chopped each other a whole lot.

They do so at many different moments, in many different ways, in many different parts of Korakuen Hall, and it’s always a real delight. Not just in a Fun Match About Hitting sort of a way, where it is nice to hear some real cracks and smacks as flesh bounces off flesh, but in a way where between the volume on the chops thrown, the red and eventually purple coloring on the chests of both men, and the amount of repetition shown (this is the hardest thing to get right, I think, and it’s absolutely to their credit that they managed enough to be impressive and stand out as A Lot, but without it ever becoming boring), it becomes genuinely gruesome by the match’s final third.

Of course, as with any successful match, the little things matter a whole lot too.

Higuchi and Shiozaki are not exactly Ishii and Shibata, or whoever you’d like to sub in, in terms of getting an astronomical amount of drama out of a simple sub fifteen minute slugfest, but they get enough right to count. Shiozaki in particular, has a few surprisingly great delayed sells after Higuchi chops early on, trying to walk through or shrug them off like he might against almost anyone else but then pausing suddenly when the pain hits, that I think do a whole lot for the guy in a newer environment, if only because Go Shiozaki just doesn’t do that. Higuchi is not quite a gifted at the moments in between like Shiozaki’s somehow become, but the match never asks him to do that, instead being about Shiozaki dealing with something like this for the first time in a long time. All he’s asked to bring is his energy, and once again, there are few people in wrestling easier to cheer for, for me, on an instinctive gut level than Kazusada Higuchi.

The other main strength of the match, beyond how cool it is to witness dudes blasting cannonballs at each other’s chests for thirteen or fourteen minutes, is how it handles the chops and the fight at the heart of them. They’re not only near equal, but while Higuchi can muster enough enough power to knock Shiozaki down with a chop and win one of those hyperspecific struggles, Shiozaki never quite can. He’s either ducked or his arm gets caught, and despite what the match sets up as a wall for him to get past, it’s a challenge he never quite answers, and I find that far more interesting.

Shiozaki fails in the more personal goal he clearly set out to achieve, never proving his chopping superiority over Higuchi, but it’s everything else that leads to his larger scale success. Higuchi might finally be the man with hands of stone to match Go’s own, but he’s worse at everything else than Go. He lacks his experience, isn’t as fast, and most of all, lacks his big move arsenal. Go stops trying the fight he can’t win, and when he instead aims to remove poor Gooch’s head from the rest of his body with a real motherfucker of a Lariat, Go gets the win.

Wonderful dumb guy wrestling, tight and efficient and mean, a beautiful match about the joys of hitting, and also a wonderful teaser for their second match a few weeks later.

***+

Suwama/Ryota Hama/Kazusada Higuchi vs. Shuji Ishikawa/HARASHIMA/Yuji Hino, TAKAYAMANIA Empire (8/31/2018)

(photo credit to @anne_de_arc on Twitter.)

While the TAKAYAMANIA Empire show, a benefit for the man himself, feels especially good and is the heartwarming show of the year, it was not especially a haven for great wrestling matches.

This match is the exception.

Of all of the matches and all the thrills they offered, this is the one that feels the most true to how Yoshihiro Takayama spent a large swath of his career. Beyond the wonderful bombastic main events before, during, and after his prime, Takayama spent so much time in All Japan, New Japan. and NOAH in many different eras making matches like these — thrown together and/or pure build up tags or six-mans in the middle of the card or second or third from the top — so much more interesting and dynamic than they may have been on paper, simply through force of effort. Narrative or not, stakes or not, he simply refused to not be interesting, and applied his knees, feet, and especially his hands, occasionally balled up and thrown with even more force than usual, whenever possible so as to avoid such a fate.

More or less, that‘s what happens here. 

Now, that‘s not to say there is zero narrative for anyone to latch on here or that it is simply a bunch of offense, as six great wrestlers hurl themselves at each other. As with any Ryota Hama match, you get that Spiritually Correct Professional Wrestling as everything becomes about trying to knock him down, beat him back, or lift him. His sheer size forces a match into a certain narrative framework, and because of the clear physical stakes of that framework, it always works. Suwama and the Big Dog going at each other as partners is a delight, and of course, DDT’s greatest pairing has a way of taking center stage as well, both in small bursts and then later on, when the ending stretch of the match allows them a more prolonged run at each other. 

For the most part though, yeah, it really kind of is just the best FORTUNE DREAM ass NOAH second from the top ass bullshit fireworks six man tag of the year.

Every match up that this match offers up is a joy, ranging from new to old. The least of all the pairings (Suwama/Hino) is still perfectly perfectly fine, and the best among them (every Hama pairing, HARASHIMA/Higuchi) is some of the best and most enjoyable stuff anywhere in wrestling. When it‘s this good, when they change up the pairings as much as they do, when it’s put in a package as tight and and as efficient as this, and when it ends as well as this does, you don’t need a whole lot else. 

Higuchi and HARASHIMA take control of the stage in the closing moments, and it is as good and as interesting as always. Hama tries for the assist, but Hino and Ishikawa keep him at bay long enough for HARASHIMA to recover. One on one, what happened in March does not happen now, and Higuchi does not have the weaponry nor the pure confidence at his disposal to do it. Another HARASHIMA flurry leads he and Higuchi to the same place they always seem to wind up, as the Somato beats Higuchi for the ten millionth time.

One of the most fun pro wrestling matches of the year, and of every match on this show, the best tribute to the man himself. Weird, efficient, violent, and deeply charming.

***1/3

Konosuke Takeshita vs. Kazusada Higuchi vs. MAO vs. Masashi Takeda, DDT Maji Manji #10 (7/3/2018)

This was a Falls Count Anywhere match.

Usually, the big DDT gimmick weapons stuff is not so much the stuff covered here. Part of that is a long-term frustration that this is always the stuff people associate with DDT and not a decade plus of HARASHIMA being one of the best Ace figures in all of wrestling, or a bunch of sick Higuchi or Peak Irie or Yukio slugfests, but that’s not all of it either. It is not to say it cannot be incredibly entertaining, but usually only in the moment watching on a live stream. It rarely ever is so fun after the fact, or so perfect at what it seeks to be that it crosses over and becomes actually great.

However, this is a special match.

The easy thing to say is that it is a bunch of good (two great) wrestlers thrown together with a ton of shortcuts, little supervision, and allowed to just throw some wild type of nonsense out there for over twenty minutes, and while that’s not incorrect, it is also wildly simplistic.

In this match, several fascinating threads intersect, as many of this blog’s favorite stories of this time, or of 2018 at large, find a way to intersect.

Firstly, it is a flame tights Konosuke Takeshita match, so you know this shit rocks.

He is on his best behavior in a match just about Doin’ Shit, without any impetus to have a classically great heavyweight/main event title match. He can just throw offense out there, play around, and be positioned into stuff by people with stronger and/or firmer ideas about what this is. You can chalk a lot of this — maybe his best match of the year — up to that, the idea that he is better when he is not the one responsible for how a match looks. That’s fair.

I will still opt to credit it entirely to the gear.

We all have our superstitions.

Second, it is simply a match that lets Higuchi and Takeda — two of 2018’s more prolific and great wrestlers — loose, and allows them both to do the things they do best, as well as letting them try some other stuff out too.

For Higuchi, that mainly just means hitting. He gets twenty plus minutes here to hit everyone incredibly hard. He abuses MAO and again has a stunning amount of chemistry with Takeshita (given that Takeshita does not have natural chemistry with too many other wrestlers). For Takeda, that means doing weird and lovable DDT versions of big deathmatch spots. The most actually violent he gets is the skewer spot being done to him, but he adapts to DDT’s silliness better than any other deathmatch wrestler ever too. He plays around with trying to crush a single beer can with a body slam on MAO, does his big move off of a van, having a brick dropped onto a chair lying on his chest, and all of this other stuff. When Takeda and Higuchi venture into each other’s world — Takeda again being deceptively good at normal wrestling, and Higuchi having a blast slamming skewers deeper into Takeda’s skull — that’s also a real natural feeling and ultra fun thing too.

MAO is sort of the odd man out in this regard, there is not a lot of 2018 MAO work that I love, unlike Fire Pants Soup, The Gooch, or Takeda, but it’s through him that this match goes from great to the sort of thing I have remembered ever since I first saw it.

In this match, MAO does the following:

• hits Sanshiro Takagi with a company fan
• uses a sparkler as his penis and holds it over Higuchi’s face on the ground outside the building so he is ejaculating sparks on his face
• puts a bottle rocket in Higuchi’s asshole and lights it off, accidentally also hitting Isami Kodaka nearby with it
• inspires Higuchi to wrestle the rest of the match in his thong underpants as a result of having his trunks pulled down
• dives off a vending machine
• takes the U-Crash Kai from Takeda off the van onto a pile of chairs as the match’s finish

Nobody is interested in move-for-move recaps of matches disguised as reviews, but when going over a list of things involving MAO in this match, a list of the things that happened simply reads as praise, and explains why this ruled just as much as a more thorough analysis of the three good to great wrestlers might, if not more so.

A generational piece of nonsense.

One of the most fun matches of 2018, and among the year’s preeminent hoots.

***1/4

 

Daisuke Sekimoto/Kazusada Higuchi vs. Kota Umeda/MAO, DDT Maji Manji #3 (5/1/2018)

This was for Sekimoto and Higuchi’s KO-D Tag Team Titles.

Strong DDT faces a pair of younger twerps in Umeda and MAO, each frustrating in totally unique ways (cocky ambitious shitkicker and annoying stunt show maniac respectively), and spend most of the match clobbering the hell out of them in a bunch of delightful way before the ultra obvious title retention.

It’s a real easy thing to like.

Not quite a great match, as MAO throws a lot of shots for a guy who isn’t very good at striking at this point, Umeda lacks connective tissue, Higuchi gives up too much offense, and Sekimoto clearly does not care all that much about this smaller venue show against a couple of kids, but there are moments here. There are moments here where MAO is being hurled into a table on the stage that won’t break or where Umeda is teeing off and being a shockingly great hot tag, where there is this glimmer or shadow of a great match there. They come exactly close enough without really getting there, and had this had maybe one or two less weak points to its detriment, it is exactly the match I would have really really really loved.

Still, it is genuinely really really good, super fun, and the sort of match I mean when I say things like “DDT is the most purely watchable promotion in the world“.

In the nicest possible way, it’s the sort of borderline-but-not-quite-great match that, had it happened ten or fifteen or twenty years before it did, would have had a permanent home on one of the Ditch sites for the amount of cool power moves, sick bumps, and nasty strikes they crammed into a tight fifteen.

Konosuke Takeshita vs. Kazusada Higuchi, DDT Maji Manji #1 (4/10/2018)

On the debut episode of DDT’s unfortunately short lived television show, the company’s second greatest wrestler gets a hold of its would-be Ace for twenty minutes and gifts him his best match in some time.

Gooch and Soup beat each other’s asses for exactly twenty minutes.

If you insist, maybe, there is a little more to this.

Higuchi, never the Golden Boy, takes it to Soup in a way that really calls everything to question in a deeply satisfying way. Takeshita has overcome a lot of higher ranking people in a way that he never comes close to overcoming Higuchi in here. The entire twenty minutes this lasts before time runs out is entirely riffing around, and it is absolutely a benefit to both. Neither seems close to ending the match or being able to apply any of their finishing techniques, despite both feeling very in control at different points. It is all chopping and elbowing and any other form of hitting, and it totally rules.

The Gooch has Soup in something close to a Gory Special, and time runs out.

Yeah, it is not all that they can do.

Naturally.

DDT being DDT, they save it until it means the absolute most to run this in the biggest way possible and they save the real big stuff for that match as well, not coming for another four and a half years or so.

However, what we have here still whips so much ass. It is crunchy and it is mean, and it one hundred percent does its job, not only calling Soup into question in his position, but perfectly setting up Takeshita and whichever sidekick he chooses for a KO-D Tag Team Title shot in the nicest possible way,

One of these wrestlers is the champion and Ace of the company, and another is only half of the Tag Team Champions, but if you watched this match and this match alone, you’d never be able to figure out which is which. Maybe that feels like an insult to Takeshita, and admittedly, it sort of is, but like seventy percent of that is a large complement to Higuchi, and this is a match that makes it very clear that he deserves it.

***

HARASHIMA/Naomichi Marufuji vs. Daisuke Sekimoto/Kazusada Higuchi, DDT Judgment 2018 (3/25/2018)

This was for HARASHIMA and Marufuji’s KO-D Tag Team Titles.

Seven months after the dream team took the titles off of Higuchi and Shigehiro Irie, the Gooch returns with a dream partner of his own, hoping once again to finally beat HARASHIMA. The last two months have seen a series of wonderful build up matches, that in typical DDT fashion, did so much more than simply further the anticipation for the match. Instead, they told a series of stories about Higuchi maybe being ready, needing a better tag team partner, before ending up with a one on one HARASHIMA/Higuchi match that suggested that, perhaps. Higuchi may go the way of his former partner in Shigehiro Irie, and never actually beat HARASHIMA at all.

An easy thing one might say about this match is that it’s the best Marufuji match in over eight years.

The reality is that, actually, it could be even better if he wasn’t here. It’s not to say Marufuji ruins the match, but aside from the few moments in which he follows HARASHIMA’s lead and attacks the body of Kazusada Higuchi, he is comfortably the worst part of this. There is a moment or two in which he faces Sekimoto and goes through like 100 motions before landing a knee lift. He is one of the more frustrating wrestlers alive, and holds this match back from being one of the outright best matches of the year.

However, it is still a really great match.

As opposed to Marufuji, Daisuke Sekimoto seems to come into this match one hundred percent understanding his role and his value to this match. He hits hard, provides a great hot tag, and matches up really well again against HARASHIMA. However, he is an accompaniment, and never seems to try and fight against this to take any glory or protect himself, simply existing on the periphery of the match and being casually great in the process.

The two outsiders are nice, but this is about HARASHIMA and Higuchi.

Kazusada Higuchi finally beats HARASHIMA in this match.

Now, yes, I wish his first pin on HARASHIMA came in a KO-D Openweight Title match. I wish it came at the end of the King of DDT or the D-Oh Grand Prix. A first pin over a longtime rival coming in a tag before a singles is, historically speaking, hardly the end of the world, but I think that maybe the best regular match up in the entire country deserved better than second from the top here.

All of that being said, they really do make it feel like it matters by the end.

The way HARASHIMA casually dominates Higuchi throughout the match, the way he kind of shows Marufuji how to do it, the way he is no longer even a little troubled by longtime rival (first meeting over a decade ago, winning a Peter Pan main event over him in 2010, etc.) Daisuke Sekimoto, it all paints a certain picture. One is never totally certain of the result, but the way wrestling politics sometimes work, it never ever feels like a lock that Higuchi is going to do the thing tonight, until the exact moment in which it happens, at which point it not only feels like a big deal, but it feels like something genuinely earned, in so many different ways.

Most impressive of allis the way that this match plays on the month or two of build up matches. DDT not only finds a way to show that these things matter, but to really and genuinely reward the people watching along through all of the small shows, in a way that doesn’t confuse anyone dropping in casually or for the first time. It’s a very hard balancing act to pull off, but it’s pulled off perfectly here.

Higuchi plays his relatively perfect game in the closing and gets the Doctor Bomb, but like before, the partner saves. This time though, Higuchi doesn’t lose his head. This time, he has a partner in Sekimoto who can immediately cut off the other member of the opposing team before HARASHIMA can really come back. HARASHIMA’s head-based violence doesn’t get the chance this time, as Higuchi meets him with the heavy palms and head shots of his own.

Cut off from help and against a Higuchi who has finally learned every possible lesson (do not expect the same attack twice, don’t lose your head because one move failed), Higuchi breaks out the old Goten, and not only regains the KO-D Tag Team Titles, but finally beats HARASHIMA.

This is the sort of thing DDT does so well, and that I think pro wrestling is best served being about. Likeable wrestlers overcoming long term obstacles in moments that feel genuinely important. Higuchi overcomes not only a large scale career stumbling block in HARASHIMA, but in the process, overcomes the smaller ones that HARASHIMA’s put in his way on the road there. The result is what feels like a major win for one of the most likeable wrestlers in the world, and the fact that it comes at the expense of another one of the most likeable wrestlers in the world and STILL feels as good as it does is all the more impressive.

One of the year’s great climaxes, and the match ain’t half bad either.

***1/3

 

HARASHIMA vs. Kazusada Higuchi, DDT Taisho Dramatic Romantic 2018 (3/11/2018)

The build up continues, this time with DDT’s greatest singles pairing, in a match hidden away to the point that I’m not sure a lot of people know about it.

It’s only a somewhat-restrained twelve minute version of the thing, shoved into a second from the top spot behind a lackluster ALL OUT/DAMNATION six man in front of a fairly quiet crowd in Osaka, but it never seems to affect them too much. It’s clearly the least of all their singles matches to date, I’m certainly not saying it’s up there with the 2016 title match or even 2017’s King of DDT tournament match in a similarly quiet venue, but it’s just so casually and undeniably great. With these two, every potential excuse just never seems to affect them in the way that it might affect other wrestlers, or even just other match ups.

Higuchi and HARASHIMA have their match, and once again, it simply rocks.

They’re so good at shoving every facet of the thing into a twelve minute package without it ever feeling necessarily shrunken down, or anything like that where you can sort of see the strings being pulled from above. You get the early matwork, HARASHIMA work on the body, and the big finishing run, each feeling like it has enough time to feel like a fully formed part of the match. Likewise, it’s all just really really naturally good. The strikes are hard, they execute all the big counters and cut offs perfectly, and there’s even a great little HARASHIMA detail to love, where instead of a usual body scissors in control or a hold that makes someone get to the ropes, he instead does a standing Abdominal Stretch, giving Higuchi the counter of fighting up inch by inch and throwing him off, making the big guy look as tough as possible to start the comeback.

Simply playing the hits wouldn’t be enough though, and as is often the case with these great repeat match ups, it’s the differences that make this one stand out.

Following his near-perfect game in a tag team match a month ago, Higuchi does everything he did then, banking on the same thing happening now that nobody can make the save. The thing he doesn’t bank on is the same thing that makes this pairing, and pairings like it in which someone is chasing HARASHIMA for years and years so interesting is that HARASHIMA changes up on him. Had this match happened in the place of that tag team match, Higuchi really might have finally gotten his man. However, HARASHIMA had a little fear put into him for once and as soon as Higuchi starts to get close, HARASHIMA just hauls off and punches him in the mouth.

Higuchi crumbles, through some combination of the force of the blow and his lack of anticipation for it, and never recovers. HARASHIMA gleefully stomps his head in Danielson-style, before landing a real nasty kick to the back of the head that forces the referee to stop the match. It’s somewhat of a shocker, in the best possible way, the sort of finish that’s as hard physically as it is narratively. Higuchi thought he finally had it, only to get beaten both more succinctly and more definitively than ever before.

It’s a nasty enough win that, for once after a big HARASHIMA singles win, I honestly feel a little bad for the guy on the other end.

Yet another gem between these two, making up for all it lacks compared to the bigger efforts with a truly remarkable finish.

Perhaps not the greatest piece of build-up work in the world, as the real money between these two is in the singles match and not a tag, leaving the whole thing feeling a bit backwards, but ultimately, I do not care. I want this match wherever I can get it, and I want it however I can get it. You give me twelve minutes of HARASHIMA vs. Kazusada Higuchi, and it is better than twelve minutes of anything else that DDT could offer up.

Given that DDT is, to me, the frontrunner for 2018 Promotion of the Year, praise doesn’t come too much higher than that.

***

HARASHIMA/Keisuke Ishii vs. Kazusada Higuchi/MAO, DDT Dramatic Age Age Ageo 2018 (2/18/2018)

Another great build up tag.

Given that these sorts of small show DDT tags are the worst drawing genre of reviews since I used to write about the 80s and early 90 lucha I was watching over the pandemic (you can always pay me to do more of this if you miss it), I am working under a fairly confident assumption that if you’re reading this, you also read about the HARASHIMA vs. Higuchi tag a few weeks prior.

Re-read that if you’d like, everything I wrote then is true about this match as well.

The key differences here that make this a better version of that are as follows:

(1) Keisuke Ishii is in it instead.

He is an infinitely better wrestler at this point than Soma Takao was, even if Takao was on his very best very best behavior in that match. He hits hard, does basic cool flying offense in a real sort of blue collar sports journeyman way that I find impossible to describe on a level beyond that and that I find super endearing, and is also just a thousand times more likeable. This match offers him less to do than the February 3rd match gave Soma Takao, he does not turn in one of his best performances in years in this match, and it absolutely does not matter.

Sub out the worst wrestler in a match and exchange him for a very good one, and things will improve.

(2) It is longer, now lasting nineteen minutes as a proper house show main event tag, rather than being a midcard match topped at eleven or twelve minutes.

Frequently on this blog, I will praise especially efficient short matches and say that the true greats don’t need all the time in the world. Less is more, and all of that, not just in terms of time, but the material itself. Few other wrestlers in the last five to ten years make that clearer than HARASHIMA and Kazusada Higuchi. However, in the hands of wrestlers like three of these four and especially when so much of that is devoted to one of the best match ups in all of wrestling, sometimes more is actually more.

The time is used here in part to flesh the thing out. A little more matwork early on, letting MAO stretch his legs back when that was a good quality for a match to have, Keisuke Ishii getting time in a main event spot and yet again wildly succeeding, all of that.

Mostly though, it goes to the best place possible, which is giving us even more HARASHIMA vs. Kazusada Higuchi.

It is still just so great, and yet again, they do so much with it both in terms of raw physicality and mechanics, but also the way the story is moved forward, inch by inch, but with even more confidence than I had previously recalled.

Following yet another extended run against each other, which rules in all the ways it always does (immaculate construction, perfect escalation, stellar execution, the way they audibly wince and gasp with every strike thrown at each other so these blows feel like they have actual weight and matter rather than simply being traded because that’s what you’re supposed to do), Higuchi goes on a real RUN against his measuring stick for the first time ever, and genuinely has him beaten, dead to rights, with the Doctor Bomb.

Problem is that Keisuke Ishii makes the save right before three.

Gooch had him exactly perfectly, only for a partner to make the save, and a far less accomplished one than HARASHIMA will have in a month with the titles on the line. You can’t even just chalk it up to him having a worse partner than he’ll have on March 25th (Sekimoto), because it’s Higuchi’s failure to immediately capitalize that loses them the match just as much as MAO’s inexperience. Even when he does everything right, he and his team lose in a way that suggests even when things change, Higuchi himself really may not be capable of the task after all.

Such great professional wrestling, as not only can HARASHIMA and Higuchi can do no wrong together, but with a story like DDT’s telling, each match adds more and more.

***1/8

HARASHIMA/Soma Takao vs. Kazusada Higuchi/MAO, DDT Dramatic Nerima The Fighter (2/3/2018)

With the HARASHIMA and Marufuji superteam being scheduled to go against Kazusada Higuchi again at March’s big JUDGMENT show, alongside his upgrade in partner from Irie to Daisuke Sekimoto, we get a string of great little build up tags and a singles between HARASHIMA and Higuchi over the next month and a half.

It’s all quite simple, but when you get a big old chuck of the best match up in the company and really possibly the entire country for a month and a half, it’s real hard to complain about it.

There’s a lot here, on paper, that might suggest this match as one of the lesser ones of that entire bunch. DDT only gives them a hair under twelve minutes in the middle of the card, they don’t get to really stretch their limbs out in the match as a result, and the partners are not the best that either man could ask for.

Doesn’t matter.

Soma Takao is on something close to his best behavior (not being a total ineffectual loser, at least living up to the responsibility of being a warm body in the ring, which is often a task that seems far beyond his capabilities), and at this point, MAO is still a pretty interesting young wrestler. This match does not ask a whole lot of them, it’s hard to really complement them too heavily, but they easily could have tanked the thing and simply did not. Really though, it is about our two heroes, and as always, it is lovely to see them unload upon each other. They save a whole lot for the big one coming up, but both HARASHIMA and Higuchi are among the best in the world at getting a lot of a little, and whether that means more basic offense or a match without all the time in the world, it’s on clear display here.

HARASHIMA beats MAO with the Somato, and even if he doesn’t beat Higuchi with it himself, the result is still the same, with Gooch being unable to do a single thing but watch HARASHIMA win again.

Another DDT house show gem.

***