Hijikata has some potential and Hirai is a serviceable undercarder hanging on more due to his longtime association with Tenryu than anything else. His job should be to help get guys like Hijikata over, having a decent match in the process. Instead, Hirai controlled most of the match. Hijikata had one nice run after countering Hirai's corner charge with a high kick, but Hirai brushed it off too quickly and beat him with two moves. The big difference between the two is their gears. Hirai's stuff is well executed, but he was never that great of an athlete and he's rather slow and deliberate at this point. Hijikata is much more explosive, though still limited offensively. Hijikata benefits from Hirai not asking that much of him, but Hirai needs to be more giving. Hirai won with the rock bottom.

9:32

Rating:

Triple Threat Match: Yasu Urano vs. Gran Naniwa vs. Hi69

Lots of backfires and double-crosses, but the rest of the time one guy would loaf around while the other two wrestled. It started out as a comedy match with the vicious submission circle where one guy would be released when the free guy applied a submission to the guy that was in control, so he would apply a submission to the guy that just caused him to be freed. This portion was mildly amusing, but got old quick. After 5 minutes they went to the spots. As a whole everyone was okay. Naniwa was imitation crab meat once they started wrestling, but he was the leader during the comedy portion. Urano was probably the best because he's the most solid and diverse, but there wasn't much differentiation here. Hi69 has more spectacular spots and was pushed a little more today, pinning stablemate Urano with his super dance, a swandive moonsault press.

6:56

Rating:

Masato Tanaka & Hideki Hosaka vs. Double Iron Sheik #1 & #2

Much like Kojima & Tenzan, Tanaka has become one of those guys that can make anyone look good. He is good whether the offense is complicated or simplistic, can work stiff but doesn't have to, and is an excellent bump taker. All of that is nice, but what makes his stuff stand out is he moves so fluidly. He can almost do smooth sequences by himself. He'll start running and wind up giving his opponent an elbow, but before that they'll swing an arm at him so he can duck. It might not sound that great, but it's a lot more effective than having to rely on guys that are inept. The Iron Sheiks certainly fall into that category. They move so stiffly, as if they are totally uncomfortable and can't get out of the way of their own muscles. Sean Hernandez is actually a pretty good athlete, but he seemed limited to moves where you jump but don't really bend.

This match was passable because Tanaka went almost the entire way. Hosaka made the hot tag after Tanaka worked the first 6:30, and to his credit the match didn't fall apart like I expected, though it was only for 1:30 then he was done. The Sheiks made some mistakes, but nothing major. Hernandez is easily the better of the two, but largely because of Tanaka they were both at least passable. Tanaka pinned #2 after his roaring elbow.

10:33

Rating:

Shigeo Okumura & Tomoaki Honma vs. Steve Williams & Mike Rotundo

A pleasant surprise. With the possible exception of Rotundo, everyone wrestled like the match was important and Williams gave me a lot more than I expected. Doc was more energetic here. He still didn't want to sell, but at least his offense was sharp. Williams & Rotundo were extra rough with Honma. The match built pretty well and the fans got into Honma trying to hang with nasty Steve. Honma & Williams did have a few problems working with each other because their speeds are so disparate, but both looked good and were in most of the time. Williams pinned Honma following his dangerous backdrop.

10:05

Rating:

Kendo Kashin vs. Kazushi Miyamoto

This was a rematch from Kashin's AJ debut on 2/9, where he arm barred young Miyamoto almost immediately. Miyamoto got to start strong to make up for that embarrassment, with the first minute containing some fairly explosive action. Unfortunately, Kashin then reverted to his unimpressive forearms and usual assortment of dated submissions. Miyamoto started taking Kashin's best shots and firing back, so Kashin kicked him low and once again took him out with the dobitski udehishigigyakujujigatame. Kashin wouldn't release this hold, so Fuchi had to save his student. Fuchi was so pissed he kept backdropping Kashin until Kaz Hayashi debuted saving Kashin. Hayashi tried to join up with Kashin, but Kashin pushed him down and left. The post match angle was good, especially the way Fuchi played it, but I would have had Miyamoto fair better in the match. He's going to have to play a big part in the junior tags because he's one of the only guys that qualifies. Those aren't going to be ending as soon as they begin, so why not try to show improvement than have a guy magically lasting for the obvious sole reason of time needing to be filled.

2:47

Yoji Anjo & Arashi & Nobutaka Araya vs. Mike Barton & Jim Steele & George Hines

Basic no skill brawling. They either stood and hit each other or one guy ran/jumped at the other with a move. It was slightly tolerable because they kept a fast pace with a lot of quick tags. I don't know what they expected here when they had the brilliant idea to give these guys 17+ minutes, but they had no chemistry and never developed any flow. They did build the match up pretty well, but they could have scrapped much of the early portion because it took you out of the match to the point it was hard to care once they made it interesting. There was one cool spot where Anjo & Arashi held Steele in the air so Araya could moonsault him. Barton pinned Araya with his last ride, an extremely high angle powerbomb.

17:22

Rating:

Taiyo Kea vs. Mitsuya Nagai

A battle of the promotions latest would be stars. Kea is much closer to attaining that moniker, having had two high profile singles matches against Genichiru Tenryu, a title match and last years' Carnival final. Nagai, on the other hand, is more thrust into the spotlight now and then because they have no one else. The promotion thinks of him not as the guy who was once the #2 native (granted that was when RINGS had no other respected natives and the gap between him and Maeda was the size of the Grand Canyon) in the large "shoot" promotion RINGS, but as the guy who was merely one of the top guys in the now defunct little pro wrestling promotion Battlarts because he was learning on the job. He definitely isn't as good as Kea, but he tries hard and once again proved he's capable of a good match.

Effort was the key here. They worked this like a main event match with both men giving their all. It was a solid, stiff, hard fought match that in fact well exceeded the main event. It started slow, of course, but this portion was worthwhile and meaningful because Nagai was applying his shoot background to a pro style knee attack. Nagai went away from the left knee for quite a while, but the attack didn't turn out to be the usual waste due to a key spot where Nagai countered Kea's German suplex by rolling into a knee bar.

They traded big moves in the last few minutes, but you never knew if they were going to work. For instance, Kea pulled out a dropkick for Nagai's hyper knee. I never believed Nagai was a serious threat, but at least he was in it all the way. I would have liked to see a little more adversity for Kea, but I got what I expected. Kea is wrestling with a great deal of confidence, and gave an excellent performance. Nagai's selling can be too goofy and comical, usually when he's trying to show that the move did extra damage, but otherwise he held his own and was quite good.

17:22

Rating:

These two always worked well together in their New Japan days, highlighted by a 4/14/98 tag match where Tenryu & Shiro Koshinaka decided to break Kojima's nose, but NJ wasn't using Tenryu for key singles matches with the new/near stars in those days. Tenryu is a true oddity. He has been excellent against the guys that are on the verge with his early matches against Shinya Hashimoto during the NJ vs. WAR program and his 2001 matches with Taiyo Kea being a few examples, yet throughout his career he's been carried by virtually every established very good or better wrestler he's faced. Tenryu can play the role of veteran fending off the new punks extremely well, but he'd rather let his opponent dictate. Either way, his opponent usually does most of the work, but Tenryu knows how to play it so the audience is totally into it and it seems like he's bringing a lot more than he really is because he's extremely effective and efficient with what he does do (even if the execution sometimes leaves a lot to be desired). This is the best match he had in 14 months going back to the great 10/28/00 match against Kawada.

This wasn't a match where they rolled out a lot of spots like Tenryu's vastly overrated 6/8/01 match with Muto. It was measured, but it was interesting from the get go. The spots were well ordered and implemented. They knew when to take it up as well as when they could get away with some waste, for instance after Tenryu gave Kojima the Mongolian chop to remind everyone of Kojima's suddenly ex-partner Tenzan or after Kojima's early dive. The match had a number of big spots, of course, it just that they had some meaning so you didn't think they are just doing big spots. A key spot was Kojima taking Tenryu's knee out with a lariat. To set this up they used the Koji-cutter off the apron and Tenryu avoiding a pescado only to get hammered when he'd nearly been able to reenter and Kojima was still standing on the floor.

Kojima obviously brought a lot to this match. He made many of Tenryu's moves look better and he executed his own superior offense to perfection in spite of Tenryu being an old man that's far past his days of making the opponents moves look better or sometimes even decent. Even against Kojima, Tenryu still had his senior moments, for instance trying to now do a spider German before his diving elbow didn't work at all because it took him way too long to go from one to the other and he didn't throw Kojima far enough for the later to be any good.

The final minutes were very dramatic, although both became near dead rather suddenly to set them up. It was a very even back and forth war that either could have won. Kojima's fearless and confident attitude goes an even longer way in this type of match because you don't honestly believe he can win, yet he makes you forget that. Tenryu nearly won with his powerbomb then Kojima fired up, but collapsed so Tenryu pulled him up for the suichoku rakka shiki no brainbuster finish. Both men wrestle very stiff. The match was more Kojima's style when it came to pacing, but more Tenryu's style for the All Japan build. Both men deserve a lot of credit for the end result because Tenryu knows how to do these matches and performed as well as you could expect, while Kojima was able to pull it off flawlessly which made them both look better.

17:51

Rating:

It's bad enough one has to look to Japan to avoid bald pussies, but now we've got one ruining the last consistently good thing about All Japan, the big show main event. Muto certainly looked like a little girl, to the point I was half expecting Kawada to start punching his own hand. Kawada's offense is all about stiffness, but Muto made sure he was limp the entire 27 minutes. This was even worse than their last match because they did the same few moves over and over and over, with most of them looking far worse than they should.

If there's one thing Muto has been consistent at, it's making guys whose offense is based on believability look bad. He just thinks of himself first, second, and third, showing absolutely no respect for his opponent or what allows them to be successful. This might be tolerable if we were talking about gross mismatches, but the matches I'm referring to are some of the biggest and "most memorable" of his career, namely the two against Nobuhiko Takada and the two against Kawada. What's perhaps even more sickening is these opponents still gave their all to make the best of the situation and have an excellent match, but he wouldn't allow them to be good, thus all they got for their effort was that he looked far better than he deserved to.

I should have known better by now, but what made this match more disappointing is it was the only one of this group to start out well. Muto should be notorious for his stalling even in his better matches of recent times, but today he actually seemed motivated. I never though I'd write this about a major Muto match, but the early portion was actually the highlight of the match. It had some smart spots like Kawada backing away to avoid Muto's favorite move, the kneecap dropkick. Conversely, we saw Kawada succeed in his enzuigiri because he was able to block Muto's German suplex and land the kick before Muto could defend himself.

The more common way they got the big moves in early was by "surprising" the opposition. After taking a big move the guy would wobble, with Muto doing it in such a phony manner, and then fire back with a big move of their own. The reason this worked in the good old days was that they'd do it once a match, so it could actually be a surprise. Here, we saw it three times within the first nine minutes! That brings up another point, it used to be reserved for late in the match when the guy would, in game terms, use his power up as at least a near last ditch attempt to save himself by turning the tide.

After the nine minute mark they reverted to the tired Muto routine with the dullest, least inventive knee attack in circulation. To make things worse, Muto didn't have his usual spring and wasn't real accurate with his jumping moves, which is bad news since 2 of the 3 moves he still does are jumping. Still, these looked great compared to Kawada's embarrassing mount punches, where it seemed he feared Muto's face would crack if he touched it. These two looked old. They knew what they wanted to do, but for various reasons they weren't doing it with their usual precision.

The fans didn't get into this match much until around 23 minutes had gone by. They gave them plenty of big spots, but even if they looked good it would be hard to get excited considering the ridiculous amount of times we saw each of them. Usually you react to a move for one of three reasons, it looks good, it surprises you, or it's so powerful it might beat the opponent outright or at least bring on a quick demise. The first two were out because Kawada was playing patsy, Muto's shining whiffs just cool down the first couple of rows, and the vast majority of the offense in the entire lengthy match was the same handful of moves - jumping high kick, backdrop, powerbomb, kneecap dropkick, Dragon screw, and shining whiff. The crowd kicking in after they'd seen them so many times was mainly the later, an on cue reaction because the match was almost sure to end before 30 minutes. If the match was better this reaction would have come 5-8 minutes sooner because the Budokan main is down to 18-25 minute range. 15 minutes would have been a better length for this because you could get away with 6 minutes of the same few moves when you are as big a names as Muto & Kawada are, but 13 additional tedious minutes was really pushing it. Going back to the same big move after you've done more damage is usually smart wrestling, but this was basically just a pointless rotation.

What the match reminded me of was some of the earliest WWF video games where there were only a handful of things your guy was capable of doing (just like the roidsters and cartoon characters they pushed) but you'd just do the one or two specialties for 15 minutes because it made no sense to waste your opportunity on something that did a fraction of the damage. In those games there weren't many options and the only ones that could get bored by the suddenly commonplace specialties were you and your opponent (if it wasn't the computer, who tended to be a jobber). This not only bored me but turned me off to future matches involving The Great Repeater and made me not want to put up with these moves again, at least not in this form (Kawada is fine when he's hitting like Kawada). Granted I feel the same way about most of the songs that are out there and their incredible simplicity and obnoxious repetition doesn't prevent them from topping the charts, but since these two are capable of doing a number of things well and were out there for a long time putting out an effort (Muto was trying in his own twisted way) you'd think they might realize this wasn't working and try to change something up at some point. They had some ideas in the beginning, but most of the match seemed to be on autopilot. Kawada pinned Muto in his powerbomb to capture the three belts for the fourth time. The previous two matches succeeded in making me think Kawada vs. their winner would have been choice, but as always he failed to make a successful title defense with injury being the culprit for the second straight reign.

27:37

Rating:

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