Astronauts vs. Strong BJ, BJW Bloody Musou Tournament Opening Round (6/27/2022)

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This was for Nomura and Abe’s BJW Tag Team Titles.

It is one of what feels like a million matches between the teams, and the four as a whole at the top of BJW when you count all of the Strong World Heavyweight Title matches, spanning from the late 2010s to the present day.

Like all of them — and truly, a tag rivalry in Big Japan hasn’t been this great since the style-defining Strong BJ vs. Twin Towers series — it is really really great.

As with most great Big Japan matches, it works on two levels.

Firstly, it just whips a ton of ass.

Being a thirty minute match in this style, it is not the most efficient match ever, and it does not feel like the best they can do. For reasons having to do with the other part of this, it also does not feel like the most bombastic version of this that exists, with some stuff very clearly being held out of this match. All the same, these are four of the idk like fifty or so best wrestlers alive and them hurling stuff out for half an hour rocked. Hard shots, nasty holds, huge suplexes, and in classic (good matches at least) Big Japan fashion, it’s organized exactly well enough to succeed. Control periods long enough to feel genuinely oppressive, slow and steady escalation, exhaustion selling (mostly out of Abe, but not entirely, and also great enough that it is really all this requires), and all the little things in between the hits that make them matter more and land with a greater force than usual.

Classical Big Japan fashion as well, behind the sparser sort of pure physicality, there is also some real pro wrestling ass pro wrestling narrative work.

BJW is what it is and things move slower there, as has been often maligned on this very site, but in the story between these four, you have yet another example of why I give them a lot more rope than other promotions. Because — at least as of December 2023 as this is written — they not only tend to eventually do the right thing, but in the slow steps they take to get there, it almost always feels even better for it.

The ultimate example of this, of course, is the Sekimoto/Y. Sasaki match over a decade before this, but this works in the same way. After the Astronauts got Sekimoto and a non-Okabayashi partner in 2020 to first get there, these teams finally had their first match in 2021. Strong BJ ran through them in ten minutes, and then fifteen in February 2022.

Going half an hour to a time limit draw is, very much, a step forward.

For the first time between them, they feel like near equals. There is still that tension there, a combination of the natural physical difference between the teams as two boulder-humans face smaller guys, but Abe and Nomura get more than before and last twice as long as before. Sekimoto and Okabayashi are not exactly saved by the bell in this match, but Okabayashi has Abe for something like the last five minutes of it, and he simply cannot close out. Sekimoto and Nomura never come close to beating each other. It is not the narrative achievement of the Strong BJ/Twin Towers half hour draw, but I think undeniably, Nomura and Abe leave the match stronger than they came in.

It is not all it can be. There is clearly something held back, both in terms of an actual resolution on paper and one in the story between all of these guys. It is more part of a great series than a major standout special match itself, but given (a) how great it still was & (b) how great what it led to eventually was, it is the easiest thing to forgive in the entire world.

Great pro wrestling, runtime and all.

***1/4

 

 

Astronauts vs. Kazuki Hashimoto/Yuya Aoki, BJW Death Vegas 2018 (9/16/2018)

(photo credit to @monmon2299 on Twitter.)

This was a Strong Block match in the 2018 Saikyo Tag League tournament.

Shit rocks, and it does so in the way it always rocks, and in the way that the year’s other big Aoki vs. Nomura match rocked as well.

Poor little Yuya Aoki gets bullied by two younger wrestlers who have that rare combination of being a perfect stylistic and offensive fit for the position, and who (as is often the case) are also positively elated to finally get to do this stuff to somebody else. Aoki is game for all of it one more, being deeply sympathetic, but also having the hands to throw on the other end against both the space boys. Add in all the cool little Astronauts double team set ups and combos, the hostility that comes in when K-Hash tries to get in there and bang like its still 2012-2013 and he is still the future, and it is the classic classic classic BJW tag formula that has, does, and will continue to work forever. Bullying, anger, hard hitting, all in your standard tight and efficient package. The original recipe never stopped working so long as the ingredients were up to par, and with these three, they finally are again.

Hashimoto gets the pin here, Big Japan is still Big Japan and anything good will take half a decade to happen, but with the power of simply allowing your brain to forget low-level bad stuff like it naturally wants to (or telling it to do this, even, idk, it’s your brain, it should listen to you), it’s basically like that never happened, and this is simply a lovely little scrap with no flaws to speak of.

Abe and Nomura are a year or two away from being, on talent alone, the clear best tag team in the country and maybe the world, but a match like this makes it real clear in retrospect that it was always a matter of when and never of if.

***

Hideki Suzuki vs. Takuya Nomura, BJW (6/20/2018)

This was for Suzuki’s BJW Strong World Heavyweight Title.

It is incredibly good and one of the most watchable matches of the year to me, but again, you have to temper your expectations just a little bit with this god damned company being what it is.

Despite what Nomura has clearly shown himself capable of at this point, arguably already being the best non-deathmatch wrestler on the Big Japan roster up through this point in 2018, he is still young and new, and this company insists on taking as much time as possible. Like the tag match involving these two a month ago, it is not the Stronger In Defeat epic that a promising young wrestler’s first title match could be, and in Nomura’s case, maybe ought to be. You will not get that so soon, and unless you are new here, you ought to have already known that.

What you get instead is something closer to that tag team match.

An extended squash, more or less, featuring a dominant champion eating a young challenger alive. Moments of hope snuffed out in so casual a manner that if feels meaner than outright anger ever could have. Moments of aggression popping up here and there, our young hero refusing to learn a single god damned thing or be humble for even half a second, leading to the big expressions of violence finally being earned at the end. They go about this more in the Hideki Suzuki way — expressed through grappling, slowly building up literally from the ground into a few stand up exchanges — moreso than the classical Strong Big Japan way, but the idea is very much the same.

Luckily, few pairings in all of wrestling are better suited to make better use of the framework of a dominant champion mauling a fiery young challenger than Hideki Suzuki and Takuya Nomura.

The most impressive thing about this is how well it extends these themes and ideas to a style that is not always so easy to express stuff like this in, especially in a ten minute window. It isn’t to say shoot-style never does things like this, it has, does, and probably always will, but so often, it works better if you know what you’re going into beforehand (not everything is Suzuki/Nakano, you know?). Nomura and Hideki are so great here at immediately translating this story and attitude into this quieter style, but still having it fly off the page.

In particular, Nomura is able to make every counter, attempted counter, takeover, and shot feel disrespectful, like any window of offense he gets in feels like a moonshot, a rock hurled directly at the throne with as much force, velocity, and spite as little Nomura can muster up. What Hideki does is less flashy, going from confident to upset over the course of ten or eleven minutes, but he nails all the beats perfectly too, more through body language than facials or anything he does before the last thirty seconds. He’s better than most at expressing himself through matwork alone, and it’s on display here. Nomura gradually gets more and more openings on the mat, escapes some big holds, and grabs his own. Hideki carries himself like someone slowly losing confidence but hanging onto a veneer, up until the moment Nomura is able to turn the match into a striking battle.

Beautifully, there is no big run of offense the kid gets, as Hideki simply has enough and decides to throw the big shots of his own, hurling those rocks back down at the kid, aided by the power gained from striking down.

Hideki rocks him with a kick, throws one punt when Nomura is on all fours, and then forces a referee stop when he knocks him out with a second.

It’s a bold one, offering up zero hallmarks of the big epic title match in favor of a more compact story, but I think it works. Both in the larger moment, because this isn’t the main event of the show, but also within the confines of the match itself. Nomura is good enough to hang, great enough to be a threat, but not yet smart enough to know when he ought to charge in and when it might be a little more prudent to give a killer like Hideki a little room when he’s got him flustered. Experience wins for Hideki more than raw talent or power itself. It’s not the step you want for Nomura, but it’s still a real interesting one.

Not all it can be, but provided you’re not some kind of deeply boring freak who can’t appreciate this sort of wrestling, one of the tightest matches of its ilk all year.

***+

Daisuke Sekimoto/Hideki Suzuki vs. Astronauts, BJW (5/13/2018)

Not a highly acclaimed Strong Big Japan epic tag, but just as spiritually correct as the last match.

On paper, you look at this in 2018 and how Fuminori Abe and Takuya Nomura have progressed in 2018, including having one of the year’s best matches to date, and you probably have some idea of how this should go. They take it to Big Japan’s top two non-deathmatch heavyweights, whip ass, but don’t have experience or raw power just yet to beat them. The classical pro wrestling ass pro wrestling thing, a stock story that is a stock story for a reason.

Too bad.

Of course, if you’ve been watching Big Japan long enough to get an idea of how this should go, you also probably know that that will never be how it actually unfolds.

Big Japan being Big Japan, everything takes four hundred years, and even if the Astronauts are clearly ready (or at least close enough to ready to count) for a stronger-in-defeat tag against the top dogs, it’s not what you get here. The timing is never right. When they get that, the correct thing to do will be to just have them win. When they finally win, it will be long overdue, and as a result, the few times when they do get it one hundred percent right are going to feel that much more triumphant. It’s frustrating, but it is sort of just the way things are, laws of nature and so on. It feels a little like being mad about the NFL Draft, like what the fuck was I ever going to do about it, you know?

Anyways, what you get instead is a totally different kind of pro wrestling stock story.

The one in which two talented young wrestlers step up against the kings and get absolutely obliterated.

In its own way, it is also wonderful.

Hideki Suzuki and Dice-K are totally fine in this match. They hit hard, they’re great stumbling blocks for the kids, all of that. They’re these gigantic mountains for them to throw themselves at and try to either climb or bring crumbling down to sea level, but this match is about Abe and Nomura, and they were so great here. Mechanically spectacular, of course, but so much more impressively, astonishingly full of piss and vinegar and any other liquid you might conjure up in the old brain sphere when thinking about them here. They are so God damned stubborn and petulant. Everything they do feels like it comes with a curse word, and then shouting “OLD MAN!” at their opponents. 

They have positively zero chance once Hideki and Sekimoto realize this is actually a real match and that they have to put some effort in to shut them down, but the beautiful thing about this match and about all other great matches like it is that these kids, Our Heroes, these wonderful little ill-tempered cretins, never ever seem to know the window has closed. Even when they lose, you get the sense they believe they’re still in the fight.

Reality unfortunately does not agree with their assessment of the situation. Nomura gets handled summarily with Sekimoto’s Deadlift German, followed up by Hideki’s Butterfly Suplex and that is that.

Short and incredibly sweet, for whatever else it isn’t.

A Ditch match, to be sure.

***

Takuya Nomura vs. Yuya Aoki, BJW Ikkitousen Strong Climb 2018 Day Four (3/21/2018)

This was an A Block match in the 2018 Strong Climb tournament.

My newest son at this point (he would later be supplanted in this role by DDT’s Yuki Iino, and recently by Dragon Gate’s Kaito Nagano, a man can never have enough sons) Yuya Aoki, bursts on the scene with an efficient little scorcher against young Nomura.

It’s a doomed effort for the younger wrestler, this being Big Japan and all, but that never feels like it matters. That’s not to say there is ever a moment here where a door or window feels like it opens and a well maybe never once appears in the back of my mind before Aoki gives up to the cross armbreaker, but they wrestle the sort of match in which that does not matter at all. It simply whips too much ass for me to ever care about things like that.

This is not quite a Certified Face Melter, but give me a match between two kids with that aim and the success rate like this had, and it’s good enough. Yuya Aoki doesn’t hit perfectly on every elbow, but he hits enough of them right to count, and when he does, the sound is beautiful. Takuya Nomura is a better wrestler than him, starting to really come into his own as one of the thirty or so best wrestlers alive and a perennial casual WOTY list lock, but he’s not perfect either. Not every shot is as nasty as they’ll become, but like his opposition, enough land with a beautiful sort of destructive force that it doesn’t bother me all that much.

Beyond the hard shots and the tightness of the match, it is also an especially mean spirited affair.

Yuya Aoki gives Nomura the middle finger off of the first rope break, and they never look back. The shots may not always be perfectly thrown and they may not always connect with an airtight precision, but there is a real spirit behind them. At all times, this feels like a genuine struggle, a fight between two people who do not like each other, and few things in wrestling fill the gaps quite like that. Show me violence that anyone can understand, all with a palpable feeling of contempt that pours out of almost every moment, and you would be stunned at just how many minor issues I can overlook.

Not all ambition is good, especially in professional wrestling, but few things are quite as endearing as a thing like this, when their hearts and minds are in such a correct place that it makes up for what’s still lacking.

***

Dick Togo vs. Takuya Nomura, BJW BJ-Style #16 (2/18/2018)

Hell yeah, dude.

Big Japan’s classical slow-role hypercautionary sort of booking means that this is maybe not what it could be. It certainly isn’t as wild as Nomura/Abe was a month before or anything like that, but it’s still Dick Togo against maybe the best young wrestler in the entire world (in a post Takehiro Yamamura world), and it’s nearly impossible to go too wrong with that.

It’s not perfect. Togo switches his focus from the arm to the leg, unfortunately, and even then, it’s not the best he’s capable of there. Togo goes for the right leg off a missed kick into the post spot, and while Nomura does a better job of selling his kicking leg and still getting offense in than people with like quadruple his experience have in recent memory, it’s almost never going to be something that doesn’t annoy me. At the same time, this is also a single camera shot where all the outside-the-ring stuff comes on the worst possible side of the ring, meaning we see like one-third of it at all times.

For the most part though, yeah, it’s Togo and Nomura, even if he’s still a little bit of a baby. The grappling rocks, the striking all rules, the more focused aspects of the thing whip ass. Don’t let the shadow of what this could have been get in the way of the phenomenally tight little thing that it is.

Togo taps him out with the Crossface, after banking real successfully on Nomura being too hobbled on the bum leg to do much of anything about it.

Always a treat to see a match like this, especially when there’s not too many of them left in Dick, or rather, when Dick’s nearly done being put in situations like this.

***

Takuya Nomura vs. Fuminori Abe, BJW Was To Gat Early (1/17/2018)

Five years later, a sneaky little important match. It’s not the first ever meeting between the future Astronauts, nor even their first singles match together (fall 2017, seemingly untaped, naturally), but it’s after this match that they actually form their team, and things start to really feel correct.

Beyond that, it also just whips ass. Like, a whole ton. An actual ton of ass.

Completely and totally fucking rocks.

Firstly, and less interestingly, it is a mechanical marvel and surprisingly well constructed as well. The match is twelve or thirteen minutes at most, and not a moment feels either out of place or unnecessary. They’re not rookies exactly, but they are kids, and it’s astounding that they get it this right this soon, having a kind of spectacle that not only rules this much in a kind of lizard-brained way, but that also makes a ton of sense and is always always moving forward in an alarmingly sure footed way.

The match is a kind of shoot-style adjacent stream of consciousness display of violence and cool shit, but they also take the time to sell every hold for a while after on top of just showing the damage of all the heavy shots, and it adds so much. We’re not talking one legged bridges or dramatic collapses, this isn’t the match for that and both of these wrestlers are better than such corny displays, but just a second here or there to express that these things have value longer term, and it’s not just this furious display of energy and ambition.

Secondly, it is spirited and hostile in a way that the usual terms I use here don’t quite feel appropriate for.

Everything about this match is so god damned mean.

Had you not known going in, it would be inconceivable that this is a match that led to these two joining forces and developing a real long lasting tag team. They feel like mortal enemies at all times in this match. Every motion that happens between Nomura and Abe, big or small, feels not only vicious and cruel, but weirdly and deeply personal. You get your big slugfests, Matches About Hitting, certified face-melters and all of that, but there’s almost always a kind of professionalism to that that simply does not exist in this match. It is unbelievably petty and mean-spirited. Gross little punches to the kidneys, ribs, stomach, any part of the body within distance. Hell, Abe even tries to stop a Nomura legbar takedown by punching him repeatedly in the ass, and for once, there’s no joke to be made, he’s just full force punching this guy in the ass, because it’s there.

Nomura and Abe spend the entire match sort of blindly and frantically reaching out and swinging wildly, and it’s one of the most beautiful things in wrestling all year. On the rare occasions they manage to catch one of those frantically thrown heaters, they also grab these holds that have that same level of hostility and desperation to them, and like the rest of the match, always seems to be moving forward, such as the end, when Abe can’t get it done on the regular Octopus, so he bends Nomura’s arm back into a chickenwing to get it done, turning the routine into something far nastier and cooler.

Ultimately, this is the exact sort of really great match that feels impossible to write about. I can’t really do this one full and total credit. I don’t know that any one writer really can. It usually sucks when someone says to just go watch it for yourself or that something was an ~experience~, but that’s the conclusion I’m coming to here. You gotta just dive in there and feel the water for yourself. Words are bullshit when it comes to a thing like this, and probably in general also.

One of the year’s most delightful little scraps.

***1/2

 

Hideki Suzuki/Takuya Nomura vs. Kohei Sato/Kazuki Hashimoto, BJW (12/30/2017)

Beautiful popcorn ass undercard wrestling.

This is only an eight minute match. You can not watch it if you’d like to. You can also watch it if you’d like to. I don’t think it’s the sort of match that is going to open a lot of eyes unless you’re seeing anyone here for the first time.

Nomura, K-Hash, and Sato all kick remarkably hard. Sato does everything remarkably hard. Hideki Suzuki is a tremendous measuring stick for all of the these guys, yet again being marvelous and natural as the casual leader of the entire thing, dominating without ever feeling like he’s stressing himself to do so, in a way that makes it all the more impressive whenever anyone is able to go on a run against him. The real beauty comes, yet again, when Kohei Sato and Takuya Nomura get some time to themselves at the end, and get to light the house on fire, if not entirely burn it down.

Big Japan is what it is, it’s not the run they clearly already are capable of, but Nomura is yet again sensational, and Kohei Sato once again looks like one of the best wrestlers in the entire world any time he gets a real chance to show off like this. There’s something special here, and even if they only ever get to tease it out for a few moments here, there’s enough in those moments and overall to get this over the line.

Sato beats the kid with a Piledriver.

Everyone in this match deserves more, but given all that is, a delightful thing.

***

Go Shiozaki/Takuya Nomura vs. Yuji Okabayashi/Kaito Kiyomiya, FORTUNE DREAM 4 (6/14/2017)

Hell yes.

One of your standard issue FORTUNE DREAM bulletproof tags.

Give three of the best wrestlers in the world and a promising rookie eighteen minutes in Korakuen Hall and things tend to work out pretty well. One of those situations where it takes more effort to do wrong than to do right, and with a match that is the sort of casually great thing you get on produce shows like these, that effort isn’t going to be applied like that. The result of this inertia is a fun match about hitting, utilizing cross-promotional match ups we don’t get to see that frequently (Shiozaki vs. Okabayashi) or newer ones within the same promotion (Nomura vs. Okabayashi), while playing around with one of the surest stories there is, two different young wrestlers getting abused by the veterans on opposing teams and GLEEFULLY trying to redirect that abuse towards the opposing rookies.

Formula becomes formula for a reason, and all that.

It helps that everyone here is on the best behavior possible, of course. Okabayashi vs. Go is everything you’d want, meaty men slapping meat, all of that. Takuya Nomura doesn’t get to do a whole lot here, kind of the odd man out in a match that’s about the other three, but everything he does has an innate quality to it. Go is the star of the match, which isn’t a surprise in and of itself, so much as it’s surprising that it comes the way it does, as he spends the match abusing little Kaito. Go feels genuinely mean a few times here, and for such a likeable wrestler, it’s a real accomplishment. Kaito’s the only one of the four who really fails to show up like this, not possessing the striking chops to hang in a match like this, resulting in all his energy (he has a ton of energy, you do have to give this to him) always going towards softer and quieter offense, and in a match about hard and loud shots, it means this can only work so well when the focal point is him in the classical role of a rookie trying to step up.

Mostly though, it’s great, and it’s great in the way a match like this always will be.

Shiozaki nukes Kaito with a shotgun Lariat for the win. Probably a minute too long, given that Kaito failed to really bring it like you want someone to do in this spot (had this match gone with Okabayashi vs. Nomura in this bit instead, it might be the sort of match that makes smaller stakes year end lists), but it’s still one that comes to the exact it end that it ought to find.

Not the best of these that there’s ever been, of course, but some lovely popcorn violence like you’d expect out of at least three of the world’s most reliable wrestlers, especially in the exact sort of match that’s allowed them to build that reputation in the first place.

***

Twin Towers vs. Hideki Suzuki/Takuya Nomura, BJW Death Vegas 2016 (12/18/2016)

A lovely companion piece to one of Big Japan’s most fun matches of the year.

There’s no new ground here that wasn’t discovered there. It’s another match where Takuya Nomura tests his wares against two heavy hitter BJW main eventers as part of a superteam, and in which Hideki Suzuki tries his best to bail him out only to be cut off by the brick wall of opposition in the end. That being said, that is a pretty tremendous concept for a match and variations of that match have been great for decades and decades and decades.

Nomura, Hideki, and the Twin Towers are not so arrogant as to go and fuck up the program after all that hard work, and so this is another easy hit.

In particular, the Nomura stuff is out of this world.

That’s not to say Hideki isn’t good here. The magic isn’t quite here with him and the Towers in the way it was in September against Sekimoto and Okabayashi, largely because Hideki, Sato, and Ishikawa are all natural antagonists, but on a force of talent level, it works. Pure lizard brain shit, people elbowing and slapping each other really hard is always going to offer some sort of visceral thrill.

Mostly though, this is about Big Japan’s super rookie, and he delivers. No rookie has more fire than Takuya Nomura and no rookie has the snap and precision of the boy either. He not only hangs with the big boys in strike exchanges late in the match, but he’s great enough at it to the point that he could easily go five minutes further, even win the thing, and it wouldn’t be that out of place. He has it in a way few other rookies throughout all of wrestling history have ever had it. It’s to the point where, even though he loses at the end, it feels less natural than other rookie losses and more of a case of “oh, we have to play this game for a year or two to preserve the order” in a way that I haven’t felt since early 2000s KENTA or 1992-1994 Jun Akiyama. He is that naturally gifted.

At the same time, Big Japan being Big Japan, every kickout he gets manages to feel big, as a result of these long established systems and routines. Despite all of the very enjoyable jokes I and others have made about how NOBODY kicks out of the Falcon Arrow, and how they’ve really Done The Deal now, Takuya Nomura kicking out of Sato’s Falcon Arrow following a God Damner of a running elbow does feel like a really big deal. Beyond that, given that Strong BJ didn’t have to go to the #1 or #2 hits to really beat him even three months prior, Kohei Sato breaking out his leaping Piledriver to do the job against Nomura feels like a little bit of a victory in and of itself.

Once more, a  tremendous piece of slow advancement from Big Japan, and a great little match on top of that too.

Not one for the lists, so it’s easy to forget about so late in the year, but a little pocket God Damner here to delight your many senses.

***