Indy World 7/22/1998

 Perseus vs. Hidetomo Egawa

We join this 6 minute match 90 seconds in progress. Perseus is a scummy indy junior with a cool look, and Egawa is Masao Oriharas boy, although he was a flavourless rookie here. This goes straight to both guys uncorking their big moves, which look good. Egawa kicks out of Perseus triple powerbomb, but takes the pin after a superplex, which rules.

Mach Junji vs. Ryuji Hijikata

This was similiar to the previous match, JIP to them hitting their big moves, but had the extra level of BattlARTS stiffness. Hijikata clocks Junji in the back of the head with a lariat and works him over with kicks, Junji fires back with massive open hand strikes. Really nice shoulder-popping armbar sequence here. This goes to a time limit draw and I wouldn't mind if a handheld showed up to give us the whole thing.

Chihiro Nakano & Miyuki Fujii vs. Kyoko Ichiki & Chiharu

We only get about 5 minutes of a 16 minute match, but what was shown was full of swank moves and counters. Rolling armbars and legbars were hot shit in 1998 so everyone here was doing them, inbetween Chihiro Nakano clocking people with high kicks. Chiharu is an SPWF girl who looked pretty bad in SPWF matches I've seen but was fine here, she had a cool reversal from a samoan drop lift into a rolling armbar and a nice suplex. Ichiki also looked good here, hitting a Sabu chair dive, cool victory roll into legbar move, cool flying knee attacks and a nasty finish where she crushed Nakano with a rolling senton.

Yumiko Hotta & Kumiko Maekawa vs. Manami Toyota & Takako Inoue

We get 8 of 17 minutes. I didn't like this as much as the previous joshi match, I don't care much for what Toyota and Inoue bring to the table, although the match was savaged somewhat by Hottas and Maekawas cool kick variations.

TAKA Michinoku & Asian Cougar vs. Masao Orihara & Palomino

What do you think happens here? They nuke eachother with highspots nonstop, fuck all rhyme or reason, but the match stays short enough to not piss you off. The first 2 minutes of the match have 5 Michinoku Drivers – with TAKA eating 3 of them in a row and laughing about it a minute later. If you can get over that kind of idiocy, there was some fun to be had here. Cougar and Palomino bring the highspots, Cougar hits about half a dozen guillotine legdrop variations, and Palomino has nice height on a standing huracanrana and a great tope. TAKA and Orihara add some character work – meaning middle fingers and low blows. Taka also flops his dive and ricochets into a bunch of teenage girls. The most important thing is that this didn't overstay it's welcome and didn't do a bloated, tryhard finishing run.

Tarzan Goto & Masashi Aoyagi & Azteca vs. Dick Togo & Shoichi Funaki & MENs Teioh

Big badass brawl pitting Goto against Kaientai (who are all in WWF gear and have Yamaguchi-San with them), but mainly Goto against Togo. I loved the opening, which has Goto attacking Yamaguchi only to be hit by big Togo diving senton. Then chaos ensues and Togo is recklessly flying into chairs. Easily one of the better „opening brawling“ segments I can remember from a match in Korakuen Hall. Togo ends up busted open and has his cut worked over. Togo gives a really great performance here, and Goto and Aoyagi are great working the cut (Azteca is decent too).Goto uses foreign objects, while Aoyagi throws punches and kicks at Togo's face. Goto is so great here as a grotesque lumbering psycho destroying the little dudes, and Aoyagi working exchanges with Kaientai and laying into them with kicks is all kinds of fun too. It gets to the point where Goto gets ready to carve people up with a broken beer bottle and you wonder how Kaientai are gonna get out of this alive. I actually loved the sports entertainment twist right before the finish too as it resulted in a badass character moment from Aoyagi. Match probably needed a big dive train or something, but as it was it was a spectacular fight.

Ryuma Go & Yoshiaki Fujiwara & Tatsuo Nakano vs. Hiroshi Itakura & Yoshiaki Yatsu & Shigeo Okumura

This was a really fun trios where guys mostly run in to do fun shit. Itakura likes to throw stiff kicks, but ends up taking a big beating and ends up suplexed into a bunch of chairs. Fujiwara was mostly slapping the taste out of people's mouths and Nakano, for a UWF guy, mostly focussed on bringing hurty looking strikes, at one point raining punches to the back of Itakura's head from back mount. Go was off the chain here and acted like a crazy motherfucker you wouldn't want to confront, ramming into people with headbutts like a madman. Yatsu and Okamura were decent enough but mostly this was a showcase for the fun stuff the Fujiwara/Nakano/Go dream team could do.

 THE LIBRARY

Wrestle Yume Factory 1/28/1996

This was very much a  mid 90s high school gym scum indy show.

Madness vs. The Wolf 

 THE MADNESS emanates the kind of terrible fascination typical of sleaze indy wrestling. He's just a big guy with a skull mask and a green flanel shirt. His entrance theme is just gurgling swamp sounds. The match was better than you'd expect. It was pretty basic, but The Wolf will kick you really hard and THE MADNESS has a nice powerslam. Being able to do 1 or 2 moves well will get you far enough in my book and this was decent like an approximation of a  good WWF Superstars match in a japanese high school gym.

Cosmo*Soldier vs. Azteca

Azteca is the most mediocre junior in all of Japanese wrestling history, but I'd say he was decent in WYF as opposed to KAGEKI where he just got really into being the poorest mans Liger. Cosmo*Soldier  had yet to reach his peak as a botchtastic wannabe hybrid shooter junior that he would become in 1997, but he flies way into my heart in this match by hitting hilariously miscalculated dive into nothing. This really wasn't good or anything but it made me laugh.

Hiroyoshi Kotsubo vs. Hirofumi Miura

This was Hiroyoshi Kotsubo actually being pretty good. Lord knows that guy sucks working BattlARTS and Futen, but will have a good performance on the most niche shows. This was like a scrappy BattlARTS match with Kotsubo being aggressive and working takedowns on suplexes. Miura is some karate gi wearing scum who tries kicking hard but Kotsubo just eats him. This ended up just a squash, although the finish with the GI choke was badass.
  

Onryo vs. Shinichi Shino

 Shinichi Shino is a W*ING guy who it seems was struggling to find his identity at this point. He looked like a mix of several different wrestlers. Onryo at this stage is really pretty useless outside of dives and taking nasty bumps. This was mostly Shino in control and only allowing Onryo to hit his spots which is how you carry Onryo. I wouldn't say Shino was particularily good here, but he kept things moving and the match ended up short enough to be alright.

Masayoshi Motegi vs. Shinigami

Bless our lord and saviour Motegi. He tries so, so hard to get a watchable match out of Shinigami. On the other hand, he is likely responsible for letting guys as shitty as Shinigami into the business. I will respect him for shouldering the burden, though. Shinigami is terrible, but there was one nifty moment where Motegi was working over his leg and put a Figure 4 on him. Shinigami then got up, seemingly no-selling the leg work but then his leg gave right out. It was a pretty cool bit of convincing zombie-like selling. Motegi ends the match with a cool submission that was like an STF without the face lock and Motegi leaning all the way on the zombies injured leg. Also Onryo hit a dive off the balconies during this, setting the Onryo dive count on this show to 4. The match still blew, though.

Arashi & Osamu Tachihikari vs. Shinichi Nakano & Kamikaze

Shinichi Nakano has to be like the japanese Black Terry, putting in subtle great performances in the most grimy unexpected places. Problem was that he barely was in the match. He is in a great opening section - where he gets his bandaged shoulder torn up - and a great end section though. Between that, there are way too many segments involving Kamikaze. The parts were Kamikaze was controlling were terrible as he was constantly calling spots in a really obvious manner. Arashi & Tachihikari may be the least of the WAR heavyweights but they are still OK delivering a beatdown. The end was great as Tachihikari ended up bloody. Nakano delivered some nasty as fuck stomps to the cut and a running punch that was Daisuke Ikeda levels of wild. There was also a great spot where Nakano, seemingly beaten, pulled Tachihikari in position for Kamikaze to hit a surprise flying move. Nakano smashing Tachihikari in the face with a chair repeatedly for the 10 count was also way more violent than I expected  for a high school gym main event.

THE LIBRARY

Takeshi Ono Documentation #5

Takeshi Ono vs. Carl Greco, BattlARTS 11/5/1997 - GREAT

1997 was probably the period where you could take almost any random BattlARTS match and it would be the #1 best match to happen in 2020 for months. Carl Greco was a barefoot machine here, lord in heaven what a great grappler he was. This is all about Ono trying to out-slick the beast. Some absolutely fantastic grappling and holds here, and Ono throwing strikes feels like he's trying to equalize the situation in order to not get steamrolled. Great nearfalls here, including an absolutely awesome Octopus Stretch that Ono sunk in like he wanted the tap out more than anything else in his life. This was a second match on the card and went eleven minutes, you get the sense if they had gone for a slightly more grandiose finishing stretch with some big strike exchanges and near KO this would've moved into serious MOTYC territory, but for that type of second 11 minute match on the card this was damn great.

Takeshi Ono & Manabu Hara & White Moriyama vs. Daisuke Ikeda & Brahman Shu & Brahman Kei (FUTEN 4/24/2010) - EPIC

FUTEN baby. Ultra-stiff fast paced basically shootstyle brawl where everyone lays into each other with the stiffest punches, headbutts and lariats pro wrestling has ever seen. This is not even remembered as one of the greater matches from that brief but sweet run of FUTEN actually making tape in 2010, but it’s chock full of fantastic and violent exchanges. Just the opening exchange with Ikeda and Hara trying to pulverize each other was fantastic. I have seen some people object to the Brahmans in Futen before, but they are fine here, working stiff and their comedy spot was over quickly and didn’t derail the match. One of them also had this sick leaping headbutt. Hara looks great coming in for his hot tag crushing everyone, and Moriyama is really good in his fired up youngster role. Ono isn’t in the match a ton but he looks great lighting up dudes with punches and kicks and stretching them with nasty submissions. His exchange with Ikeda was insane and the highlight of the match by far. Ikeda was working this match like an injured but still super tough and dangerous beast. His chemistry with Ono is really no worse than his chemistry with Yuki Ishikawa, except Ono is in more of an aggressor role. The finish is between Ikeda and Moriyama and basically about Moriyama trying to slowly chop the boss down and getting met with brutal punts kicks and straight rights. Absolutely dope material, it’s too sad FUTEN only started regularily releasing DVDs in 2010.

 

Takeshi Ono & Junji.com vs. Azteca & Daiyu Kawauchi (BattlARTS 2/12/1999) - SKIPPABLE

I would’ve liked to see how the KAGEKI boys would mesh with the BattlARTS crew, but they only showed about 30 seconds of this. Seemed like a pro style match with the only Ono content being a nasty double stomp and him octopus stretching young nondescript Kawauchi for the finish.

 Takeshi Ono & Yuki Ishikawa vs. Daisuke Ikeda & Katsumi Usuda, BattlARTS 1/21/1997 - EPIC

This was some truely high end BattlARTS tag team action. The first thing you notice is how on point all 4 guys on the mat were. The opening exchanges felt slick like U-Style matwork and always highly competitive, with the violence upgraded to BattlARTS standards. The brutality was of the charts here. The "tag team partners running in to make the save from a submission" where some of the must vicious I've seen and felt like PRIDE ground stomping, Ikeda at one point started throwing mule kicks on the ground, and Usuda and Ono threw some kicks that looked like nobody would get up from them. Man I don't even care whether there was a story or anything this match because the work was so frantic, hard fought and believable and sold so, so well I was 100% engrossed the entire time. The match also felt like it could end at anytime: at one point, Ikeda got his leg worked over with a few kicks from Ono and nice holds by Ishikawa (note the teamwork there), then Ono landed a series of skull crushing kicks on him. Ikeda believably beat the count, but his entire body language was such that you could see he was moments away from being finished, so he did the only reasonable thing and quietly slipped to his corner to tag out before collapsing like a broken man. That may have been my favourite moment of the match and it made the finish feel even sweeter where it feels like Ishikawa and Ono have the match in the bag and Ikeda just comes in and turns Ono's lights out to set up the finish. All 4 guys had career highlight performances, Ono did some stuff on the mat only he could do, Usuda stepped up big time and Ishikawa and Ikeda had some incredible exchanges together. Great, great match and a really compelling fusion of top notch shootstyle matwork, brawling and top level stiffness.

TAKESHI ONO DOCUMENTATION PROJECT MASTER LIST