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     Cosmo Soldier & Tadahiro Fujisaki vs. Takeshi Sato & Yuji Kito, WYF 1998/3/15

Wrestle Yume Factory is one of my favourite promotions ever. WYF undercard matches like this are like pro wrestling in a lawless wasteland. There is a hearty dose of BattlARTS/WARish violence, general anarchy and an infusion of raw spirit that you don’t find like this often. It’s chaotic and glorious. This goes 15 minutes so they have some time. The first half of this was a lot of tight headlocks and groundwork, guys trying to ground each other but explosions did happen. Takeshi Sato who is IWA Japan scum is the first to really start the shenanigans as he lays with kicks hard as a brick into people. He goes for something like a dropkick or a high knee that lands awkwardly and his first instinct is to kick the other guy really hard again. Pro wrestling is a struggle against yourself as much as your opponent. Cosmo Soldier is likely here to just kick someone in the ear to get out of a hold, or dropkick them flush in the face. His dropkicks looked amazing and he is spirited trying to grapple it out with a kickpadded adversary. There’s hardly any rope running here and it makes the whole thing resemble a more serious wrestling match in the vein of BattlARTS. What these guys lack in polish they make up tenfold for by sheer willingness to bring the fight. Takeshi Sato continued to be a fiend here, randomly hitting one of the hardest enzuigiris I’ve ever seen to Fujisakis skull. Later Cosmos leg randomly gives out on him (element of chaos) and Sato would swiftly punish him by just landing this immensely beautiful and cruel high kick to his head. Fujisaki was pretty surely and great here too, working really solid early on, cinching headlocks, grabbing half crabs and leaning back hard, later uncorking his trademark hard headbutts, uncontained open hand strikes and lariating Sato straight in the face for all his sins. His turnbuckle headbutt spot looks so brutal, literally every member in the front row had their mouths open from amazement with how he drove into his skull into another persons face. Cosmo also had one of his finer days besides his leg giving out. I loved how he just absolutely spiked Sato with a uranage. Sato, of course, rolled out the ring to clutch his aching neck, and Soldier immediately followed up with a big dive. Nice and spontaneous, everyone here was living in the moment. Kito was sticking to fairly basic stuff at this point and he’s solid, his big spot was a double knee drop off the top that looked pretty hurty, and took a back-hitting headbutt from Fujisaki and got spiked on his neck by his big suplexes like a champ. Second half of this match is just a frenzy with guys trying to knock the soul out of each other, everything having maximum force and violence. Random spin kick from Takeshi Sato? Yeah, looked like it made the other guy reconsider his life choices immediately after taking it. Soldier going for his big cancun tornado? Yeah, this might as well kill the guy. At one point Fujisaki, when breaking up a submission made sure to really dig his foot into the other guys face before stomping like he was trying to crack a particularily tough walnut. Nothing held back, just for this small gym audience and a lone camera filming this to end up in storage and somehow on YouTube 28 years later. Comparing a match like this to something like Flair/Steamboat would be like comparing Cannibal Corpses A Skull Full of Maggots to the Moonlight Sonata. But sometimes I wanna listen to Cannibal Corpse. I love my Wrestle Yume Factory and this delivered hard.

Kishimen vs. Kuraudo Kondo, KAGEKI 2009/2/15

Who is this mysterious Kishimen? Perhaps Cosmo Soldiers cousin from another dimension. Online sources tell me Kuraudo Kondo is a student of Masashi Aoyagi. That might mean that he took a karate class of Aoyagi once when he was a teenager, or it might be the truth. Kondo looks like a UWF fighter, and he actually fights like a student of Aoyagi, e.g. he kicks a lot and he kicks really really hard. This is also in a kickboxing ring so you know any fall in that ring hurts like hell. Kishimen takes him down to hit a really hard elbow to his face. A not-clean break later Kishimen waffles Kondo some more with open hand hits and then absolutely spikes him with a shootstyle-DDT on his head in that unforgiving kickboxing ring. This causes Kondo to have enough of Kishimen and just starts kicking the absolute shit out of him, absolutely not holding back on any of his kicks, and slamming him right in the middle of that unforgiving ring. Kishimen takes back over with a damn abdominal stretch and it’s all awkward violence from here on. Kondo continues to hold absolutely nothing back on his kicks and I’d like to see more of his short career. Kishimen flies ass-first into Kondos face twice in this match, at first it seemed like an accident, but the second time you fully understand this man was trying to break his opponents face with his ass. Kishimen ends up cranking the nastiest chickenwing crossface I’ve ever seen for the tap. If the previous match was A Skull Full of Maggots then this is like Last Days of Humanity or Rompeprop, or your little brothers band sloppily covering Carcass or Autopsy where the singer loses his voice halfway into the song and just starts screeching… eitherways, still pretty enjoyable violent chaos.

Cosmo Soldier & Raging Bull vs. Tadahiro Fujisaki & Shigeo Kato, WYF 1/23/1998

The WYF streak continues. This starts with all these guys working holds and hitting the mat, and it has the vibe of something like a MUGA match but with that rugged WYF charm. Looking at this match is like looking at a wrestling fractal, you see deeper and deeper flourishes and details even in usually mundane things as all these guys have a unique way of doing things, and sometimes will bust out things that no one else would think of doing such as the slick entry into a stepover armbar Cosmo does here to get out of a sleeper hold. There’s some genuinely slick stuff going on between Fujisaki and Cosmo, but a big part of the fascination is that these guys might just pop each other in the mouth in totally uncalled for ways or suddenly kick someone in the face to get out of a hold. Really exploring how you can break submissions in painful ways, either by driving our own foot in someones face or having your partner come in and dropkick them right in the skull. Kato is all about ratty old school ways to hurt opponents, and doing things like randomly squeezing a cravate really hard. Raging Bull is this odd guy from Texas who somehow ended up getting trained at the WYF dojo, he’s unspectacular in the sense that he will tag in and just hit some elbow drops, but he’s kind of likable as he realizes he needs to make this stuff look urgent, so he doesn’t dull things. As always with these matches the first half is ground-based and solid peppered with guys potatoeing each other in uncalled and unpredictable ways. There are some hard Fujisaki headbutts, but things really start kicking when Cosmo breaks out of a hold by kicking Kato in the head, following with a sick enzuigiri also to the head and then absolutely spiking him with sick uranage before stubbornly trying to snap his arm. Things really get cooking in the last 7 minutes or so with all kinds of awesome scrappy action and details. You get chaotic and wild, such as Cosmo eating some reckless face stomps from Fujisaki only to grab onto his wrist and slingshot him across the ring, really making the absolute most of ‘I need to get this guy to my corner’ in an unconventional way. There are more violent submission breaks, Kato wincing in pain after taking a basic double axe handle to his bad shoulder and deciding to absolutely spike Cosmo with some mean piledrivers. The finishing run ends up being Cosmo vs. Fujisaki and it’s pretty much 3 minutes of gold. Loved how Fujisaki would stop a charging Soldier by just grabbing on to his face then headbutting him right between the eyes, then almost knock his head off with one of the hardest lariats I’ve ever seen. There’s also this amazing moment where Cosmo tried to reverse into a Fujiwara armbar, Fujisaki would stomp on his ankle really hard and Kato came in at the same time just obliterating him with superkick to the face, then Fujisaki would dump him with these awesome Otsuka-esque deadlift suplexes. Just a multitude of awesome things happening at once, and it made for a really exciting finishing run built on the solid build up of this match. Also gotta love Cosmo for being able to pull off something genuinely impressive like a big leaping rana or cool jumping kick despite all his flaws. He ended up pulling off something chaotic for the finish too and that rules. Another chapter in the book called Why Wrestle Yume Factory Was Awesome And I might Name My Three Children Cosmo Soldier, Tadahiro Fujisaki and Raging Bull

Cosmo Soldier vs. Koji Niizumi, KAGEKI 7/22/2017

I am always interested in Koji Niizumi. From what I’ve seen, he’s just this crazy hard hitter who makes people cry for their momma. To my surprise though, Cosmo Soldier was the unhinged one here. He was laying into Niizumi full force constantly, smacking him in the face, bending his legs at nasty angles with cool and unusual submissions and landing some of the hardest stomps you’ll ever see. Cosmo Soldier was so hellbent on trying every evil idea he could come up with here it made me long to see Niizumi tee off a bit more, so when he does it’s really satisfying. When it was time to give the beating back Niizumi was hitting Soldier with elbows and lariats that looked like they would take years off someones life. It built to some fine fine moments of really violent and fun pro wrestling. It seems Cosmo had overreached at the end and gassed himself out leaving him open for Niizumi to kill him off with an elbow that looked harder than the one Misawa knocked out Hansen with. A well earned victory in this title match that deserved that name. I really wish I could see more of Niizumi but until then these rare appearances of him are gems.