NJPW
WORDS: MAT LINDSAY | PHOTO COPYRIGHT NJPW
ALPHA TO OMEGA: THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA FOR NJPW hris Jericho has a habit of showing up in unexpected places, and I should know, as he just so happened to walk into a pub in the middle of my hometown one random Saturday night, right into the middle of the annual Christmas party held by our local, small-time wrestling company. I honestly don’t know who was more surprised, the local workers at the fact a genuine superstar of their industry had materialised out of the ether (he hadn’t, obviously, as Fozzy had been playing the rock club just down the road that same night), or Jericho himself to have been thinking he was stepping into a quiet backstreet pub and instead being confronted by forty plus awestruck fans.
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The feeling was similar upon first seeing the announcement that Jericho would be facing Kenny Omega at NJPW’s annual showcase event, more so that their no disqualification match for the IWGP US Championship would share main event status at Wrestle Kingdom 12 with the confrontation between Tetsuya Naito and Kazuchika Okada for the far more venerable and storied IWGP World Heavyweight Championship. New Japan certainly wanted to create controversy with this move, even going so far as to stage physical confrontations between Jericho and Omega in the run up
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to the event, and having Naito (for whom this would be his first Wrestle Kingdom main event) kayfabe state that he was disappointed with the equal billing for the two matches, feeling NJPW was “pandering” to the foreigners. But while Naito was speaking in character at the time, his words go against one of the most constant and successful elements of professional wrestling in the that part of the world, namely the creative and extremely lucrative booking of foreign talent against native workers and even against each other in front of a native audience. If you want a concise history of the relationship between US and Japanese wrestling, then you’ll find one in my article on the subject a few months back, and there’s no need to recount the entire story here, save for reminding yourself that professional wrestling was imported from the United States to Japan, finding its driving force in the person of Rikidozan, who’s JWA had a close relationship with the NWA, which continued with his protégé Giant Baba and AJPW. Baba based his own booking model on that prevalent in the US territories for most of the twentieth century, strong babyfaces involved in long-term feuds with equally formidable heels, the top talent on the roster rarely losing by pinfall
and usually ending their matches with a count-out or draw, so that being pinned was a significant and decisive conclusion to a match. Into this mix he added US talent that were available to him thanks to All Japan’s membership of the NWA, and the likes of Bruno Sammartino, Gerald Briscoe, Harley Race and many others soon discovered that the tours of Japanese venues on which Baba wanted to book them were sure to result in performing before eager crowds and for a very lucrative payoff as well. A shrewd businessman and a legendary performer in his own right, Baba demanded the very best from his talent, and so the gaijin he hired soon learned to give their very best in order to keep being brought back again, which of course meant that the matches they were involved in tended to be compulsive viewing for fans who appreciated the art of professional wrestling and knew the true quality of what they were seeing. Another factor that worked in Baba’s favour was that up to the mid-eighties, US territories did not regard television as being central to their booking strategy and saw ticket sales for live events as central to their profits, so they would televise house shows and squash matches, but keep encounters between major stars and the blow-