Thursday, January 4, 2024. WRESTLE KINGDOM 18

• Today was another big event we’d been looking forward to for quite a while, New Japan Pro Wrestling’s (NJPW) biggest showcase event of the year, the annual January 4th show – Wrestle Kingdom!
• It was going to be our first live pro-wrestling event (we’d done one day of a sumo baashi on a previous trip), and we’d decided to shoot for the moon – fifth-row seats for NJPW’s biggest show of the year.

• But first, we had a morning to have. We woke up after a great sleep and headed out to the Funabashi area to visit a giga-Daiso.
  • Daiso is a chain of discount stores all across Japan, selling lots of everything, and this was one of the biggest!
• For sustenance on the way, we stopped in at Tully’s Coffee for a brew and a chicken, avocado and potato salad toastie. It was surprisingly good!
• MBW was in bliss walking around the enormous giga-Daiso, and I found quite a few things I’d never seen before, including some NJPW-themed deco bags. These seemed like a good omen to find.

• However, my feet always seem to struggle in large Japanese stores (Daiso, Hands, even Sekaido to an extent), so I was soon feeling pretty average. Luckily, found a seating bench on the fourth floor (near the bathrooms) and was able to treat it as a home base to periodically rest my feet and recharge.
• Finally, we ran out of time and had to start moving towards the main event for the day – a trip to Suidobashi and the Tokyo Dome.
• Found a little ticket ramen shop for lunch (one of the places where you order your food and pay at a vending machine at the front, then hand your ticket to the staff to prepare); was good, but not outstanding. The craving for truly great ramen continued.
• When we arrived at Tokyo Dome, the crowd was immense, stretching in every direction. Finding where to pick up our tickets was a little trial and error; the email sent prior to the event gave us a gate number to look around, but it also happened to be where the merchandise was being sold, so there were queues everywhere leading to busy ticket booths and no clear signage for what we were looking for.
• We eventually found it quite a way away from the gate number we’d been sent, but once we were there, the process of picking up the tickets couldn’t have been smoother.
• By this time, it was 20 minutes before gates were due to open, so we made the call to skip the merchandise area. While a shame, we just couldn’t have gotten to the front of that line and made it inside without missing a decent chunk of the show itself.
• Found our gate and joined the line, had to keep rocking side to side to alternate pressure on my sore feet. I was able to keep my mind off it by checking out the ratio of shirts, hats and towels being worn by people in the crowd as they filtered past us to find their gate. Roughly speaking:
  • By far, LIJ had the most merch, both in volume and variety. Naito and Hiromu were both heavily represented, Tsuji, Shingo and Bushi less so.
  • Also a LOT of El Desperado merch. That guy is much more popular than I would have thought, but I can totally see it.
  • Next most were NJPW-general merch; lion’s mark shirts, NJ Dojo shirts, and so on.
  • Every single piece of Bullet Club merch I saw was on a Western fan.
  • Not as much Tanahashi gear as I would have thought, though I wonder if that will have changed after this night…
• Finally, we were in! We found where our seats were (obviously, right down on the baseball field itself, five rows back from the ring). MBW’s knees were still giving her grief and the steep stairs down looked like a disaster waiting to happen, so we found one of the event staff to see if there was an alternative way to get there.
• Incredibly, after she talked to a few other staff, she led us backstage into the service corridors of the building and down in an elevator, then through more corridors back out into the public area. Even more incredibly, the second set of corridors led us right past the wrestler’s dressing rooms…
• … This led to seeing Clark Conners and Dan Moloney in full ring gear getting ready to rock. Dan had headphones on and looked very focused, while Clark gave us a cheeky wink as we went past. Absolute legends!
• Our seats were great, close enough we could see everything. We were with the other Western fans who got tickets through the fan club release, almost entirely Canadians it turns out.
• As for the show:
  • NO TIME LIMIT KOPW 2024 RAMBO – I actually missed almost all of this match, as I was fetching our first round of beers and some early eats (so we wouldn’t miss anything later in the show)

• IWGP Jr. HEAVYWEIGHT TAG TEAM CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH – Catch 2/2 upsetting the Bullet Club War Dogs team of Clark and Dan. After seeing the BC WD backstage earlier, was firmly in their camp. Really great, fast-paced and impactful match, TJP’s Aswang change was great for a one-off big show, everyone involved looked like a million bucks.

• NJPW WORLD TV CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH – President Ace of the Universe dethroning ZSJ in a decent match. The format and time limit suited Tanahashi, as he was able to give it everything in a short-paced match. Super happy to have seen Tanahashi in action at least once before presumably slowly moving into the back office, and I suspect we’ll be seeing ZSJ in the World Heavyweight Title picture on January 4th next year…

• Yota Tsuji v Yuya Uemera – actually missed this one too, as I went back for our last round of drinks. These two are the future of the company, but had seen them wrestle with each other enough recently.
• Special tag – House of Torture (Evil and Ren Narita) v Kaito Kiyamiya and Shota Umino – short match, usual HoT nonsense, good to see Ren and Shota on the big stage and Kaito was a nice surprise, although I wonder if people would have done some things differently knowing what bombshell news would be coming out shortly thereafter…
• NEVER Openweight Champion Shingo Takagi v Tama Tonga – best match since the Jnr Tag. Always rated Shingo’s ability to put on a great match, but really enjoyed Tama’s performance here, he way outperformed my expectations. The crowd got into it in a way that HoT couldn’t manage. Really surprising finish with another belt changing hands (spoilers – every title changed hands this show), but in hindsight, giving Tama a big moment at WK makes a lot of sense given everything he’s done for NJPW over the years.

• IWGP TAG TEAM & STRONG OPENWEIGHT TAG TEAM CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH – I don’t really like Bishamon, so was behind ElP and Hikuleo all the way. This was made a little easier by the huge contingent of Canadians around us, El P was very popular for some reason. Despite only running 10 minutes, this one felt a lot longer than the last one, although the closing sequence with GoD securing both belts was glorious.

• IWGP Jr. HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH – An out-and-out banger. The crowd seemed equally split between the two, which really highlights how much ground Despe has been making lately. Great start with Despe jumping the gun (and smothering an octopus in the process); great ending with Despe finally getting the big win on the biggest stage over his biggest rival. Excellent storytelling and match.

• IWGP GLOBAL HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP/INAUGURAL CHAMPION 3-WAY MATCH – The match we were most excited for; Will Ospreay has firmly become the best pro wrestler on the planet. Although his Assassain’s Creed entrance was a bit flat for us, as we couldn’t really see what was happening (and it looked like a giant advertisement), the match itself was excellent. Great simple story of Ospreay and Mox putting away Finlay as a team before wrestling the one-on-one match they both clearly wanted. While the ending was pretty predictable (if anyone but Finlay wins, Bullet Club goes extinct), how they got there was fantastic. While topped by the steel cage match later on, at least this match didn’t cause any retirements, so there’s that!

• Okada v Danielson – I’ve never really seen much of Danielson, as I wasn’t following WWE/RoH/AEW at the time he’s been active, but it’s clear that this dude is a big deal. Okada is the biggest deal in Japanese wrestling. Putting these two together was an instant classic. It’s only lost a little of the shine in hindsight, as Okada has since (shockingly) left NJPW to wrestle in AEW. Given that, and that Okada v Danielson is something that’s much easier now to do, and how weird it was that Okada left without ever paying off the year-long storyline with Kiyamiya, I wonder if Gedo might have tried to do things differently? In any case, we saw Okada’s last Wrestle Kingdom match in person.

• IWGP WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH – Sanada defending against G1 Climax winner Naito. An emotional high, but not the cleanest match of the night. My new camera finally ran out of battery (and I didn’t have a spare yet) early on, so I missed capturing most of the action. Really came to appreciate who Sanada is and where he’s heading by the end of this, but Naito was always going to win this bout. The only genuine shame was Evil coming out to attack Naito after (although Sanada making the save was a great character moment for him) – it should have been Tsuji or Narita. They missed the chance to create a new generation’s rainmaker shock here.

• Overall, a great night, better than I was expecting! The crowd was great, the seats were great, some truly great wrestling moments and a lot of really enjoyable work, with only a few points that stuck out as stinkers.
• Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the same pseudo-VIP treatment to go backstage and get the elevator back up, but fortunately, our legs were well-rested and managed the stairs.
• Made it back to the hotel with our two souvenirs – the seats we’d sat on for the event were included with our tickets. Tired and sore, but happy.

• Got back late, and couldn’t find anywhere open for dinner, so kombini to the rescue, then into bed for a nice recuperating sleep.