プロレス Primer
A weekly guide to Japanese pro wrestling.

Puroresu Primer is a weekly newsletter covering the world of Japanese pro wrestling, written for western fans watching through streams and VODs.

My philosophy is simple: Japanese pro wrestling is fantastic, and video of that wrestling is more accessible to western audiences than ever before. But it can still be challenging to actually keep up with different promotions and find the wrestling that’s out there. My goal is not to be a source of breaking news, but instead act as a viewer’s guide for what’s out there, focusing on recently-aired and upcoming shows.

I don’t claim to be an expert, just a guy who’s watched a lot of wrestling. If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions, please shoot me an email at thomas@puroresuprimer.com.

Newsletter: March 12, 2025

Lots on New Japan this week, going over what’s been going on over the Anniversary and New Japan Cup shows. AJPW had a big Korakuen, and NOAH has some young foreigners over on a quick tour. Stardom and Dragon Gate both started releasing more tournament matches than I could actually keep up with. Oh, and we had two of the best matches of the year happen on different indie PPVs (though I only had time to watch one so far).

Match Recommendations

Sendai Girls (3/1, Wrestle Universe, Cagematch)

Marigold Spring Victory Series Night 2 (3/2, Wrestle Universe, Cagematch)

Dragon Gate Rey de Parejas Night 2 (3/4, DG Network, Cagematch)

NJPW 53rd Anniversary (3/6, NJPW World, Cagematch)

NJPW New Japan Cup Night 1 (3/8, NJPW World, Cagematch)

AJPW Dream Power Series Night 1 (3/9, AJPW TV, Cagematch)

NJPW New Japan Cup Night 2 (3/9, NJPW World, Cagematch)

Barb Sasaki Produce CRAZY FEST (3/10, NJPW World PPV, Cagematch)

NJPW New Japan Cup Night 3 (3/11, NJPW World, Cagematch)

NJPW New Japan Cup Night 4 (3/12, NJPW World, Cagematch)

NJPW: Anniversary, New Japan Cup, Goto vs Nagata

Anniversary & Goto notes

Anniversary was a pretty good show, if an underwhelming one. The big surprise opponent in El Phantasmo’s opening IWGP TV Title match was… Master Wato. This feels like something fell through at the last minute, unless the office is just having fun pranking Wato. Still, This was actually a pretty decent match; I still personally really like Wato. He’s just one of those mediocre special little guys like YOSHI-HASHI-circa-2019.

Then there were four undercard matches that were just… lots of brawling, lots of interference, lots of “this is a weird way to celebrate New Japan’s anniversary.” I did like Gabe & Drilla vs Ren & Kanemaru as a big “tour of Ota Ward Gymnasium” brawl - I can’t think of many venues besides Korakuen where you see guys brawl up into the actual stands, that was neat. The rest - well, they did their job to set up the first round of the New Japan Cup, but the less said about them the better. Some people are real negative on the midcard of this show; I think it was fine because the crowd was very alive for the semimain and main and didn’t seem to mind watching all the heat segments.

I thought El Desperado’s defense against Francesco Akira was fantastic, and I have seen Akira wrestle maybe like twice before and had never really rated him. This was just a nasty match from Despy where he kept working over Akira’s knee and trying to get him into his big submission finisher and the crowd was absolutely eating it up. Despy’s big submission move (I think it’s called the Numero Dos) requires him grabbing both of his opponent’s wrists, so the big spot they kept going back to was Despy getting one of Akira’s hands but not the other, with Akira using the strong defensive tactic of… wiggling his arm a lot so Despy couldn’t grab it? But hey, again, over as hell. The crowd wanted to see Akira escape every time.

Goto vs Tanahashi was just real solid wrestling. Tana didn’t have any of the slip-ups that characterized his Makabe match on The New Beginning. Weirdly, I think he’s better served as a main eventer these days than an undercard singles wrestler, because the pace and stakes benefit him so much.

Goto won and we got big teary promos, and the reveal that CHAOS and Hontai will be uniting. CHAOS has made zero sense after Okada left (and arguably didn’t make much sense before) so this is a much-needed change. I do think a few of the younger guys in this orbit should go off and form a new faction at some point, though.

Goto’s next defense will be in the middle of the New Japan Cup on the 3/15 show, which is a pretty stacked card already with all four quarter-final matches. He will be facing Yuji Nagata, as was teased back when he won the title. I’m a little surprised they’re doing that match so quickly. I had thought it might be the Chicago match - Nagata has reasonable name value among the western audience, after all. Then Tokyo Sports reported on Naito being mad that Goto is defending in the middle of the tour instead of waiting for the Cup winner, and now I’m thinking Naito vs Goto could be the match. It’d be kind of weird to do another Naito title match on Windy City Riot this year, given that he won the title off Mox there last year.

It’s also entirely possible the New Japan Cup winner just… beats Goto. I’ve been thinking about this a bit because it’s a little weird to me that they’d cram this defense against Nagata in this tour, before Goto’s next defense against the Cup winner at Sakura Genesis in April. I think it’s pretty unlikely, but it’s possible.

New Japan Cup

On that note, the first five nights of the New Japan Cup are in the books. Well, the first four, depending on how you count it: night one actually got canceled due to a busted ring post. There was an interesting issue here where they didn’t have a backup ring because this was the backup ring; the normal ring was en route to one of the shows outside of Tokyo. NJPW made this up to the fans with a goofy little talk show/photo-op in Korakuen (with refunds available as well).

This didn’t really affect the Cup, since the opening double-shot at Korakuen only had two Cup matches on each night originally; they just rolled all four matches into what would have been night 2 (and what is now labeled as “night 1” by Cagematch, giving me a bit of headache keeping track of cards).

I did catch one very funny side effect from these being rolled into one show - in the first match, Yuya Uemera vs SANADA, Taiji Ishimori does a heel run-in for SANADA and gets roundly booed. In the fourth match, Gabe Kidd vs Ren Narita, Taiji Ishimori does a face run-in to save Gabe from House of Torture and gets a big pop. Now, this already would have been a little silly across two nights, but seeing that on the same night did make it very clear how weird the Bullet Club War Dogs are right now. This is, of course, intentional, more on that in a few paragraphs.

The first-round cup matches were not exciting on paper and were, in fact, not very exciting in practice. with a couple exceptions. Gabe vs Ren overdelivered quite a bit; I’m probably more up on it than some other fans but if it’s not clear by now I am a big mark for a Gabe Kidd brawl and him and Ren had a ton of fun here. Yuya vs SANADA was the real surprise though; it’s not a great match but they bookended the match with some real solid wrestling on either side of the usual interference BS.

The other first-round match that overdelivered? Boltin Oleg vs Bad Luck Fale. Seriously! They just had a 7-minute “can Oleg suplex Fale” match and then he, indeed, was able to suplex him.

One match that seriously underdelivered was Naito vs Callum Newman. Newman’s back from knee surgery and so this whole match was built around Naito working over his knee. Newman comically oversold his knee damage and acted like he had severely hurt it again for 70% of the match, which just… is incredibly ironic in a match with Tetsuya Naito, a man who actively needs knee surgery. I don’t really like the “back from injury so let’s work the injured body part” spot that much - like, do it a little for heel heat, but don’t build a match around it. Especially with Naito, who is a face! It just made Newman look kinda stupid for being so worried, especially since it didn’t come into play in the finishing stretch at all.

The 3/11 and 3/12 shows started the second round matches. On the undercard tags on the 3/11 show, Shota Umino returned for the first time since getting his head shaved by Great O Khan a month ago. He mostly just… was Shota Umino but with a shaved head. No further character changes. The commentary really tried to sell that this was a newly-hardened wrestler who no longer cared about the crowd, but he didn’t really wrestle any differently. Appropriately underwhelming for one of the most underwhelming wrestlers in wrestling. He faced Great O Khan in the tag and they showed Umino being angry at GOK but didn’t like… have him rush him and kill him or anything cool like I imagined. Also I would get Umino some new gear, the frilly white pants look so stupid at this point. The 3/12 singles match between the two was no better, just a real drawn-out match that only had the crowd for a few bits and parts. I really do not understand relaunching this guy who was not over as an underdog babyface as the same underdog babyface but with less hair and a new finisher.

The other big plot development on the 3/11 show was SANADA continuing to tease some kind of turn on the War Dogs/David Finlay. He came out halfway through EVIL vs David Finlay and proceeded to offer Finlay zero help against EVIL and the House of Torture, then stared down Finlay after Finlay barely got the win. David cut a promo about Bullet Club and the War Dogs being “his” after. I kinda think they should just do some kind of three-way split where Kidd/Connors/Drilla/maybe Jake Lee goes one way, Finlay goes another, and SANADA goes another. Who knows, though. On the 3/12 show, House of Torture’s Ren Narita cost Gabe Kidd a victory over Taichi (in what was, up until that point, a fantastic match; why Gabe and Taichi decided to go so hard for a match they knew would have an awful finish is a mystery but bless them for it).

So, the bracket as stands: the 3/15 quarter-finals will have David Finlay vs Yuya Uemera, ZSJ vs Taichi, Shota Umino vs the winner of Naito vs Jeff Cobb (3/14), and the winners of Drilla Moloney vs TJP and Boltin Oleg vs Shingo Takagi (both also 3/14). I had Finlay picked to win this tournament, as most people did given he was expected to win last year’s New Japan Cup before having to pull out due to injury. I’m now less certain given this BC/HoT feud - we could definitely see someone screwing over Finlay like they did Gabe here. I’d really, really like Drilla to go over TJP as well; a rematch versus Takagi or a new match versus Oleg sound good, while TJP versus either of those guys sounds awful.

New Japan has now labeled their 4/4 Korakuen show as “Jr. Genesis,” since it’s the day before Sakura Genesis and will feature both sets of Junior belts being defended. Desperado will defend against Clark Connors in a hardcore match, while Kosei Fujita & Robbie Eagles will defend against Robbie X & Taiji Ishimori. I’m excited about that first match and not so much about that second one. The Junior Heavyweight matchup and stipulation date back to last year’s Best of the Super Juniors, where they basically tried to have a hardcore match but the ref ended up calling it a DQ win for Desperado; that’s a neat callback to make almost a year later to justify a big fun hardcore match.

AJPW: 3/9 Korakuen, Champion Carnival cards

Kento Miyahara & Yuma Aoyagi defeated Jun & Rei Saito and won the AJPW World Tag Team Championship in a great main event. Like has become standard for the Saitos in singles and tag matches, this had a very slow start, but the crowd was in a frenzy by the time they reached the finishing stretch. This was a much, much stronger match than the Aoyagis vs Saitos wound up being. Definitely give it a watch if you’re on the AJPW train at all, or even if you’re not (as I always like to remind people, their service is six bucks a month).

I suppose, looking ahead on the calendar to the next big show, this means Kento is probably not winning his Triple Crown Challenge against Jun at the end of the month. I was a little surprised to see Jun take the pin and not Rei here - might mean big things for Rei in the Champion Carnival; a big brother vs brother championship match could be great business for AJPW.

We did get full cards for the Champion Carnival. Those are all up on the AJPW site if you’re curious (the 4/9 through 5/11 shows).

One interesting quirk here is we’re going to get a semifinals: the winner of block A will face the runner up in block B, and the winner of block B will face the runner up in block A, and the winner of those will go to the finals. Both semifinals and the finals will be on the 5/18 show.

One other big match was added to the 3/29 show - MUSASHI will defend the Junior title against Seiki Yoshioka. I’m still not into MUSASHI but did really like his title match with Seigo Tachibana, and I like what I’ve seen of Yoshioka, so cautiously optimistic for this.

NOAH: foreign rookies on tour, GHC National Championship tournament

NOAH debuted a couple new guys, Knull and Bryce Hansen. The origin of these dudes being in NOAH is carny as hell: Sonny Onoo, Perry Saturn, and Kahgahs ran a “tryout” to win a two-week Japan tour (as documented on Bryce’s Instagram). If this is anything like the tryout the same team is doing with Titan Championship Wrestling later this year, this would have had a $200 entrant fee. Gross. I don’t really know how that particular crew of dudes would have a connection with NOAH in 2025, going to be on the lookout to see if anyone comes up with an explanation for how this all happened. I kind of wonder if there’s now just a general market for foreign wrestlers to come over and work some shows in exchange for flights and board at a dojo. Maybe the guys in the next tryout will wind up working the AJPW Real World Tag League or something.

Bryce is Canadian and works primarily Ontario indies, while Knull is based in Texas, per his Twitter profile. Knull doesn’t actually have a Cagematch and I can’t find much other information about him. Bryce seems like an okay junior heavyweight while Knull is a giant and booked as such here (he’s 6'7" and steps over the top rope), both are having some okay matches so far but I’m not really sure if they’re gonna get much chance to improve on this tour. I did notice Bryce came out for his 3/8 debut match with an already-red chest - I wonder if he got off the plane and immediately started working on chops in the dojo. Bryce did manage to milk the crowd pretty well after his singles loss on 3/9. Meanwhile, Knull has beaten singles matches against both veteran midcarder Hajime Ohara and young rookie Daiki Odashima. The Daiki match on the 3/9 show got Daiki more over than Knull, but that’s kind of the point of booking an underdog against a giant. Knull even did the big “pull the poor guy’s head off the mat to break what would have been a 3-count so you can do the REAL finisher” spot at the end.

On the 3/20 show, Hansen will face Manabu Soya, while on the 3/22 show, Knull will be in a tag teaming with Ulka Sasaki & Daiki Odashima against Marufuji, Kenoh, and Hajime Ohara. The last match for these guys will be a preshow tag match where they team together versus Daiki Odashima & Kazuyuki Fujita on the 3/22 Korakuen. I wonder whether Ohara and Odashima will get their revenge on Knull before he heads home?

NOAH announced a quick tournament for the GHC National title, which has been vacant since OZAWA won it and immediately relinquished it last week. The first round matches of Tetsuya Endo vs Takashi Sugiura and Manabu Soya vs Galeno will be on the 3/22 Korakuen and 3/31 Shinjuku FACE shows respectively, with the finals being on the 4/11 show in Niigata. So you have the two guys who just held the belt in Sugiura and Soya, Sugiura who has held it twice before, and Galeno, who’s never even had a match for it. Personally, I think Galeno would look good with some gold.

Also added to the 3/22 show: KENTA vs Ulka Sasaki. I missed this getting set up in the post-match for the KENTA & Kenoh vs Sasaki & Fujita match on 3/2, but there you go. Sasaki hasn’t impressed me too much but I’ll give this match a go. I did think he held up his end of the Nakamura match on 1/1 well enough, at least.

Kaito & Galeno want to challenge Daga & Morris for the vacant GHC tag belts. Honestly, these are the vacant belts that could most use a tournament.

NOAH has a bunch of new shirts on their Pro Wrestling Tees shop. They’re probably fine, but I figure now is a good time to remind everyone that NOAH has reasonable prices on their official shop and you can order with a courier service and maybe even save money versus PWTs’s print-on-demand shirts. I love the new Monsters Graphics designs and the Team 2000X hoodie myself, and neither of those are available on the PWTs site (I’m pretty sure PWTs genuinely does not have the technology to print text on hoodie sleeves, among their other quality control issues).

Kaito Kitomiya will be appearing on Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling’s 3/14 and 3/15 shows. He’ll face Sheldon Jean on the 3/14 show and be in a three-way match with Alex Zayne and Taiji Ishimori on the 3/15 one.

Dragon Gate: surprise video content, Rey de Parejas

Dragon Gate called my bluff: after all my complaining about the lack of taped Rey de Parejas shows, they just added a bunch to the DG Network schedule, along with adding the SSWQUEST IV show. They’re also uploading some tournament matches to Youtube. This is great news and also terrible news because I have not had time to focus on Dragon Gate!

I did try to make some room in my schedule to focus on one particular rookie in the Rey de Parejas: Akihiro Sahara, a former American football player who debuted a few months ago and doesn’t even have a Cagematch yet. He’s teaming with Masaaki Mochizuki, a veteran who’s the head of the Mochizuki Dojo stable in Dragon Gate, and they are incredibly fun to watch. Sahara does the exact thing you want from a former defensive end: shoulder tackles off the apron, Vader bombs, big power moves bouncing off the ropes. I’m immediately a fan of this dude.

Other than that, I enjoyed all of Night 1 of the Rey de Parejeas but wasn’t particularly impressed with the non-Sahara matches on Night 2. I started trying to watch Night 3 and Dragon Gate’s website kept giving me error popups and the stream would break. I promise this is not a dog-ate-my-homework excuse! I really did try! The Youtube uploads are that classic “single ringside cam” that can be hard to watch (example video here); I suspect there might be some good wrestling in there for free but I think I’ll probably end up just skipping those matches.

The other DG thing worth mentioning is that Dragon Gate is teasing the return of Dia Inferno, who was previously Yuki Yoshioka under a mask. There’s some mystery here where a guy in the Dia Inferno mask is just sorta menacingly hanging out ringside. I haven’t had a chance to listen to Open The Voice Gate yet, but I expect their most recent episode to have much more context on this for those curious.

Other notes

Deathmatch referee Barb Sasaki held one hell of a produce show at Korakuen Hall on 3/10, broadcast as a PPV on NJPW World. The price is a little steep at $23 but well worth it if you can afford it (I’m not sure if it will be made available on the NJPW World subscription at some point in the future). The main event was Jun Kasai vs. Masashi Takeda vs. El Desperado in an unbelievable deathmatch that makes the show worth the cost on its own, but Suzu Suzuki and Rina Yamashita also had an excellent deathmatch in the semi-main, and the midcard was good-to-great other than the couple of requisite old-dude multi-mans.

I already praised El Desperado earlier when talking about NJPW, but for him to go from that Akira match to this deathmatch only a few days later is seriously incredible. There aren’t many guys who can be both a submission-focused heel and a massively over babyface in a deathmatch in the same week. I think it has taken me a long time to really appreciate him as much as more hardcore NJPW fans have for the last few years, but he really is one of the best in the world right now.

I haven’t had a chance to catch up on Stardom’s Cinderella Tournament yet, so no big updates there. The results on Cagematch for the first two rounds seem, uh, underwhelming to say the least. I might actually skip night 1 entirely to save money on the PPV and watch night 2 on Stardom World instead.

I have also not had a chance to watch the other big PPV of the weekend, Sareee-ism Chapter VII. I’ve heard the main event is amazing. One big last minute substitution happened on that card - Saori Anou stepped in for an injured Natsupoi in the semi-main match against Miku Kanae. Not sure how serious Natsupoi’s injury is yet; Stardom reported it as a “knee injury in a post-match brawl.”

Meiko Satomura had even more matches announced on her retirement tour: she’ll be facing Minoru Suzuki on the 4/3 Sendai Girls show! This will stream live on Wrestle Universe. She’ll also have an “exhibition match” with Kenoh on his 4/15 produce show. There was also a rumor that she’d show up at NXT Roadblock this week and maybe set up a final WWE match, but that didn’t happen on TV. Maybe she saw that the Wrestlemania weekend NXT show got moved to 9:30 am and said “that doesn’t work for me, brother.”

TJPW added Masha Slamovich vs Miu Watanabe to the Vegas show. Masha’s on an absolute tear right now, this should be very fun. Masha will also be facing DDT’s MAO on Pandemonium Pro’s show that weekend. Miyu Yamashita and Maki Itoh are now both announced for GCW’s 5/3 LA show as well. I will probably not keep up with every talent announcement as so many wrestlers will be working so many shows, but will try to point out anything particularly exciting.

GLEAT’s latest LIDET UWF show happened at Shinkiba 1st Ring, managing to draw only 173 fans to a show with Minoru Suzuki vs El Lindaman and Katsuhiko Nakajima vs Simon Gotch on it. I do not understand what the point of this subbrand is. Or what the point of GLEAT is. I watched this and it was depressing. The crowd reacted to nothing and almost everything was bad. They did try to actually work in the main event but shoot-style being what it is, this just means they laid in strikes that still looked bad because shoot-style wrestling generally looks worse. There was a match with a 59-year old veteran of the original UWF who was one of the most immobile wrestlers I’ve ever seen, and he of course beat a 29-year old dude from GLEAT. Grim!

Marigold and Marvelous are running a little cross promotional rivalry angle in the lead up to Marigold’s Nanae Takahashi facing off against Marvelous’s Takumi Iroha on Marigold’s 3/30 Korakuen show.

What to watch this week (3/12 - 3/19)

A little more breathing room this week than last. The New Japan Cup rolls on with tournament shows on 3/14, 3/15, 3/16, and 3/17. 3/15 is the big show here, featuring all four quarter final matches plus Goto vs Nagata for the IWGP Championship. 3/16 and 3/17 will have one semifinal match each.

It is a big week for joshi, though, with three big shows. First, the Stardom Cinderella Tournament wraps up with the finals on 3/15. This has a pretty stacked card: the semifinals are Sayaka Kurara vs Azusa Inaba and Hanan vs Rina, there’s a special singles match between Mina Shirakawa and Thekla, and a Wonder of Stardom Championship match between the defending Starlight Kid and Konami. That’ll be 4620 yen/$30ish on PPV.

Second is TJPW’s Grand Princess on 3/16, featuring all three titles being defended, plus big Meiko Satomura vs Yuki Arai and Willow Nightengale vs Miu Watanabe singles matches. This will be on Wrestle Universe with English commentary, and starts at a somewhat North America-friendly time of 12:45am Eastern.

Last but not least is Sendai Girls’s big show on 3/19, with a big Meiko Satomura vs Chihiro Hashimoto main event, the tag and junior belts being defended, and a hardcore match between Risa Sera and Dash CHISAKO to round out the card. That’ll be on Wrestle Universe as well.

Other than that, not too much going on: Kazuki Hirata has a produce show on 3/12 that’ll be on Wrestle Universe, Kushiro TOKYO Japan has a produce show on 3/18 that… I assume will be somewhere, and that’s kinda it.

Thanks for reading! This was a long, long week of wrestling - in addition to all this puro, I also watched AEW Revolution (a fantastic show) and some of the wXw 16 Carat Gold (which I’ll hopefully have a short bonus writeup on in the next issue). After Revolution and CRAZY FEST, I kinda hope everyone keeps all their blood in their bodies for the shows this week. At least I don’t have to worry about anyone going Muta Scale at, like, Grand Princess.

I am still dialing in lots of things: how much attention I give each promotion, how much detail to go into for every company, how much to focus on results vs news vs previews. Feel free to send an email to thomas@puroresuprimer.com with feedback or anything you think I missed.