Japanese Wrestling

[HHJ]

How did you get into it, what did you watch, and when?

Who was your favorite guys from that part of the world?

I remember seeing Jushin Thunder Liger on WCW tv in like early 90s and thought he was amazing

I got into Japan through tape trading in the mid 90's.

I got into ALL Japan by watching the Misawa/Kawada tape compilations. If you read the dirtsheets, Meltzer absolutely glazed everyone in AJPW, and when you got this tape, you could say ok maybe this guy knows what he's talkin about after all. It was hard to understand how this could be fake when they were beating the fuck out each other this bad.

I also got into FMW, where Hakushi (wrestling under his real name Jinsei Shinzaki) would feud or tag with Hayabusa (RIP) who looked like a million bucks.

The thing though that kinda sucked with they way Hayabusa was booked was he lost alot of matches. I was like come on man wtf.

Anyway... I got into NJPW but mostly the junior LW IWGP tourneys, which were great and really had the best high flyers in the business like Jyushin Liger, Sasuke and Ultimo Dragon. ECW and WCW would occasionally bring some of these guys in to wrestle on US Soil too which was always cool to see.

There was also the comical garbage "Death" matches that could take place anywhere. A supermarket, a bath house, an apartment building lol

 

[HHJ]

 

[Hellowhosthat]

First Japanese tape I got was probably around 2000ish. I picked up Super J Cup 94 which was the general starting point for most people at the time, I was already very familiar with Benoit and Eddie so it was quite easy to get into. I'd also seen a bit of Liger and Sasuke from watching WCW/WWF so it was cool to see them in their natural environment.

Ordered a bunch of Super J Cup/BOSJ stuff after that.

Then I ended up ordering Dreamslam, Dreamslam 2 and Big Egg Universe as a joshi introduction and immediately fell in love with Akira Hokuto, Manami Toyota, Mayumi Ozaki, Aja Kong, Kyoko Inoue etc and I was joshi obsessed for a while working my way through classic shit like Dreamrush, Thunder Queen etc.

All Japan after that as I had to check out Kobashi/Misawa/Kawada and obviously I wasn't dissapointed there.

After that more heavyweight New Japan G1 climax 90s stuff with Muta, Hashimoto, Chono, Choshu, Fujimani etc

Then got into more shoot style stuff like UWFi and became a Takada stan for a while.

At some point during all this I was regularly getting tapes of current stuff too. My favourites at the time were probably NOAH and Toryumon but I also followed All Japan, New Japan, GAEA and a few smaller promotions.

I dread to think how much money I sent to my boy Jeff Lynch through all that. It's good that most things are on youtube and dailymotion now, but I dunno if it'll have the same feeling as reading through that massive catalogue of Jeff's and then ordering something and waiting for the tapes to come in the mail.

Kind of fell out of love with wrestling probably around the time of the Benoit incident. Starting to get back into it now though.

 

[Danespina]

^ Yeah tape trading with Super J Cup 94 being the main feature was my first thought as well. Great Sasuke had 3 great matches in it.